I like the High Scalability blog but a recent post on the death of middleware did leave me shaking my head. Although discussing the idea of Platform as a Service, the article argument argued that the traditional middleware layer is dead, replaced by items such as RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ. I can see the argument if […]
Having gone to Textcamp yesterday, I started playing with Wordle and IBM’s Many Eyes at the suggestion of Dave Flanders of the JISC. As James Harriman-Smith, the organiser and Open Literature co-ordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation, had suggested that this year is the anniversary of the manuscript of Alexander Pope‘s An Essay in Criticism, […]
I’ve been reading a little about DevOps. I’ve come across it before but never really tried to explore it in detail. Until now. Why? Well it is increasingly clear that it will be helpful to our team and in part is something that I’ve moved towards in my last couple of jobs. At the previous […]
Last week I began working on an auto-complete function using Redis behind Drupal 7 to do some auto-completing functions. I needed to get some county data, and possibly other sorts, put into some forms so that it can be standardised. One of the issues that I’ve been trying to do is to make sure that […]
I’ve been working on some functions for a forthcoming site at Janet and have been looking at the user functionality in some of our forms. In a reversal of roles, I’ve been trying to find ways of making it easier for users to complete the forms for various products and services which has taken me down […]
The main project this week (apart from hte onging one of moving and virtualising servers) is to begin work on our technical documents. I’m trying to move them onto the web and make the useful, not only in terms of reading about them but also to make them linkable. I’m trying to get them out […]
It has been an interesting week which I would rather forget. However I am not and it made me rethink quite a few assumptions. On the plus side, I’ve managed to write some of the documentation for the portal and map the processes which need to be coded next week. The major thing that I […]
I’ve been meaning to get into doing some work using Node.js for bits and pieces. Node offers some serious possibilities for server side programming without using cron jobs, creating event driven programmes that reduce load on the CPU (not using cron jobs) and for more agile and responsive backends to be created. After a conversation […]
I see from Twitter that JISCMail announced that they have funding for another year which is a good thing (in the Sellars and Yeats sense). It does mention that they are migrating onto a new platform (though it is inferred keeping the current mail system) but does not mention what this might be. The statement […]
This week has been soft launching a CRM system for the Janet project. Hopefully these would be just user bugs but it has highlighted some interesting data cleaning issues. These are going to be inherent in the exchange of data between two or more systems, especially when one is a long-term pre-existing one. This has […]
