Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

An interesting BBC news piece on ILM's new data centre.

I'm one of those people who find data centres fascinating. In the past I've run my own (at one point squeezing some of my kit into a couple of racks at UCL's Gower Street site), worked with client's hardware in a myriad of hosting centres around London and Leeds, and with my journalist hat on had tours of some rather complex sites. CERN's is the largest I've been in, while Azul's packed the most compute power into the smallest space. I suspect UCSD's CAL-IT2 system was the most advanced, with its Lambda grid connections. I didn't get to go into Weta's but I've talked to them about how they run their render farm. Google's remains on my list of places to go...

Nice to see ILM have a Roomba.

I'm in the middle of the final stages of coding a hefty AJAX-based mashup application, that works with multiple sites and services (five at the last count). I have to say, Yahoo! Pipes makes the job a lot easier, as it lets me take an RSS feed and render it as JSON - which means I can do a cross-domain mashup using the JSON callback hack.

It took me quite a while to realise that Pipes was the fix I needed. If I wasn't doing it all hosted on a Software as Service platform, I'd be using Flex or writing my own proxy code to deal with the cross domain issues. I toyed with a Dojo approach, but its cross domain hack requires more control of the originating service than I had - seeing as it's a weather feed that just takes a URL with latitude and longitude. The Flash proxy approach might have worked if the remote site had a crossdomain.xml file, but it didn't...

Still, I'm pleased that I have finally broken the back of a problem that's been bugging me for the last few days.

So that's Salesforce.com as a data source and host, Google Local for geocoding, Google maps for mapping and information display, Weatherbug for location-based weather RSS, and Pipes to convert RSS into JSON. An interesting combination, showing that Web 2.0 is as much a business tool as a consumer technology.