Caplin Systems Blog Post - What is the real-time web?

About a week ago I wrote a blog article at work entitled "What is the real-time web?". I'm seeing even more tweets and posts about the real-time web and I'd love to hear if other people agree with my opinion on what the real-time web is. View the What is the real-time web? article here.

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What is the “real-time web”?

Are we really seeing the real-time web? The phrase “real-time web” has been streaming its way around the Internet for a while now. It’s presently being used to describe information being available in search results as soon as it has been published by its author. Examples of this are Twitter...

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Snow in Hertford

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="220" caption="Me in the snow in Hertford"][/caption] Jo took some great photos and a couple of videos of Hertford in the snow today. See more photos in Jo's Snow in Hertford Album

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My reply to: Which is the worst Transformer?

I follow Chris Garrett on Twitter and he posted a link to a blog post about Which is the worst Transformer?. As a kid I really liked The Transformers and felt compelled to defend some of them. I posted what is about to follow as a partly tongue-in-cheek comment but it's been "awaiting moderation" for hours so I just thought I'd dump it in my blog. I'm pretty sure that Chris will agree with me about Soundwave as he's got the toy on his desk. The original blog post: Which is the worst Transformer? Blog post

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Drag Drop bug in JQuery UI 1.5.3

JQuery UI Update - 31/01/2009 @ 17:15 Richard Worth just got in touch with me via twitter to let me know that JQuery UI 1.5.3 is only compatible with JQuery 1.2.6. The bug is not in jQuery UI 1.5.3, but just that 1.5.3 is only compatible with 1.2.6. Only 1.6rc5+ is compatible with jQuery 1.3 Therefore to use JQuery with JQuery UI from the Google Ajax Libraries hosted service you need to do one of the following: Script includes <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js"> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.5.3/jquery-ui.jss"> </script> Google Library loading google.load("jquery", "1.2.6"); google.load("jqueryui", "1.5.3"); --- JQuery seems to be the most active of the JavaScript libraries at the moment so I decided to use it for a little project. I've also decided to use the Google AJAX Libraries APIs hosted service to serve up the JavaScript files. At present Google is hosting JQuery UI version 1.5.3. After a bit of investigation I've determined that there is a bug in the Drag and Drop functionality in this version. It would appear that the "drop" function is not fired when you try to drop a draggable element on a droppable zone. I verified this by changing the JQuery UI version to the 1.6 RC that the JQuery UI droppable demo is using at the moment. When I did this the drag and drop functionality worked as expected. This may be a know issue but I thought a small post on the matter might save other people a bit of time. I did have a look at raising a bug but there appears to be a bug in the bug tracking system.

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Problem solving lessons relearnt

I've had one of those days. I set out early this morning aware that I had a tough task ahead of me at work. By the end of the day I've made very little progress.    The silly thing is that I know exactly what mistakes I've made today that have hindered my progress and what's worse, I've made the same mistakes before.

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Live Mesh - my experience

I think that Live Mesh will be really useful. I think it provides great benefit to individual users, such as myself, and has great potential to be used by software solution developers. I'm presently using it to synchronise some files that I want to backup and be available wherever I am. I originally had a lot of web files being synchronised, around 700MB, but the synchronisation was taking ages and killing my CPU. CPU was sitting at 100% and there was no sign of things completing. I think it was having a problem with the volume of small files. To summarise: it's a great product with bags of potential but something needs to be done to reduce the CPU usage when dealing with the synchronisation of a large volume of small files.

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