Four and half years on from my last blog entry its time to start again. I've been inspired by friends who are producing great contributions in the public domain. People like Pervez  and Andrew. I hope to document my experiences as I go through the gears of life, changing from one way of living to another.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Got this read out by Jazzy M on the O-Zone show this afternoon!!!!!! He asked for peoples opinions about the Matrix Reloaded film. Fame at last (not) but better than nothing. To: jazzym@ministryofsound.com cc: Subject: Matrix ReLoaded Dear M, Pastiche and half truths from all the world religions. I reluctantly went along expecting twaddle and getting drivel. Was it a spoof of Star Wars, Independence Day, Lord of the Rings and some kinda trance movie? Made by the deeply cynical for the feeble-minded. Oh dear, what wonderful marketing these people have to create the mass hysteria that herds gluttons into a place that smells of old farts to waste three hours. How has it come to this?
Read more
A fine day today allowed my friend Mark Goodall and I to do our regular bicycle circuit of the Trundle . Over the top of Goodwood horse racing course where we foundthe annual inter club hill climb on Knights Hill. A category 4 gradient was conquered in a remarkable three minutes and 12 seconds by a young lad on his lightweight bike. Meanwhile the sushi sunday  event down at the motor racing circuit reflected the priorities of the generations of guys who think the world of their Japanese cars. I wandered around both events and was struck by the contrast between these modes of transport and their interdependence. Apparently, a tankful of petrol (50 litres) could meet the energy needs of the average home for over 5 years. Similarly, driving from Lands End to John O'Groats would burn more Oxygen than a person would consume in a lifetime.
Read more

Extending the life of my Cocoon

As anyone who has worked with me will know, I value my sanity. So, I like to keep things simple. When it comes to building web-apps I nearly always start with the Apache Java framework Cocoon 2.12 . I use the 2.12 model as I have a build of it that allows me to merge in my development blocks without rebuilding the beast over and over. I can do the heavy lifting of an application with XSLT 2.0, so life is pretty sweet. By using Cocoon as the framework to 'glue' everything together I am able to re-use working pipelines that have served me for the last 10 years. However, with the advent of JSON as the data transfer format of choice and the simplicity of things like Cube for handling time-series data I knew it was time to find a more productive way of writing generators. After some experimentation it dawned on me that Node.js supports the piping of JSON streams. This has allowed me to still write my pipelines in Cocoon but to proxy off to a Node.js service which is r...
Read more