Friday 21 May 2010

The farm and data center

This is a beautiful story, on combining a farm with a data centre. The approach uses clean energy from converting agricultural waste to power the computer in the data centre.


Its also funny because the many of the websites run on these data centres are already powered by bullshit.

Thursday 20 May 2010

Tapestry and Aspect oriented Webpages

I spent two days this week, at allfiled.com, a website/company designed to help you, file all household documents, it an interesting company, for the boring tasks, that nobody whats to do, but are essential do everyone. Governments, Utility, Companies, etc, can really stick it to you, if you forget to pay, fortunately this is normally direct debit, maybe if you lazy you just throw all those bills away, or perphaps you where like my father, who had big filing cabinets, where they we all recorded.

Since I'm a programmer, I have to remark most on its software they where using for the webdesign,
most websites if they need interaction today are based on LAMP, free commonly used software for web to database work. Allfiled.com use Oracle, Java, lots of Jakarta, Javascript and a system called Tapestry you might not have heard of. And I think when you want solid website engineering that exactly the place to go.

Tapestry makes a huge difference to the programming of a website, in most websites, one page, has one programmer file on the server, and any ammount javascript code on the clients side, (that may or may not work, depending on which web browser a user has. Tapestry means that each components of a web page, maybe a border, or a form box you fill in, has its own fragment of code. This either a lots easier to change the look and fill of every single form on your website in one go, or it means for 'changing one line or text, you going to have to search for program fragments in a absolute enormous filesystem of scattered one liners. Its a completely different style of web programming, and takes a lot of getting used to.