Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 13th January 2009

Gearman protocol. Notes compiled by Eric Day, principle author of the C server implementation. # 4:44 pm

New Gearman Server & Library in C, MySQL UDFs. Gearman, the job queue written for LiveJournal and now used by Digg and Yahoo!, has been rewritten in C. Looks like a good candidate for an easily configured lightweight message queue. Also includes hooks for writing MySQL functions that can interact with queues. # 4:41 pm

Sloppy—the slow proxy. Java Web Start GUI application which runs a proxy to the site of your choice simulating lower connection speeds—great for testing how well your ajax holds up under poor network conditions. # 4:17 pm

What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.

Clay Shirky # 2:22 pm

Visualising Radio, pushing, not pulling. The BBC’s new radio player uses Comet over a Flash XMLsocket connection transport, with an ActiveMQ message queue behind the scenes. I’d like to know what server they’re using to broadcast out to the XMLsocket connections. # 12:59 am