Monthly Archives: December 2011

Bridging message queues in STOMP and AMQP

A recent work project has been working with messaging queues and exploring how they work. One of the issues has been how to get systems running different systems to talk to each other. One system uses ActiveMQ and another runs RabbitMQ which has led to some interest in how to effectively bridge the systems into […]

An approach to creating groups and persistent URLs in Drupal 7

A major project has been exploring the creation of a collaborative space using Drupal 7. Somebody else has taken this over whilst I concentrate on other parts of our system and integration but I thought I would post about the Persistent URL (PURL) creation. Fortunately Drupal 7 comes with a fair few options which the […]

Creating a simple video gallery using Drupal 7

As a side project, I’ve been looking at Media Uploads in Drupal 7. I am interested in using Media as a sort of asset management system at a machine level with web services allowing for the ingestion and listing of files. Anyhow as a side experiment, I wanted to take the idea of a video […]

The book is dead, long live the book?

Forbes Magazine, via Hacker news, has an article by Trevor Butterworth, ‘As The Age Of The Physical Book Retreats, The Cult Of The Physical Book Advances‘, which perhaps re-states where we are with publishing and bookselling. The physical book is enjoying a bit of renaissance in the sense that it appers to be viewed as […]

New year, new directions?

We are in the middle of the dead days, as Marcus Sedgwick describes them in one of sequences. It seems like a time for soem reflection, partially based on an intepretation of Steve Poland’s What startup to Build? post on Techcrunch. This is not to say that I an necessarily thinking of building a startup […]

Minor musings on publishing

I’ve been reading some of Alistair Horne’s tweets marked #pubnow on Twitter, following some of Richard Charkin’s comments in his talk. One of his tweets is that financial publishers are transforming themselves into an information platform, following another that academic publishers are joining together to create platforms. It seems that there is some confusion, if […]