The RSS cloud and the pubsubhubbub (PuSH) way of notifying RSS feeds has gained some interest of late, thanks to wordpress supporting the former format. If you have never heard of these protocols, heres the low down. The RSS feed works by having a client ‘pull’ data from a feed. That is, clients keep nagging at the server every X minutes saying ‘Hey do you have something new for me ?’. The server responds with a no about 99% of the time. This leads to a lot of inefficiencies. Instead if the clients were to use a push model, the data is actually ‘pushed’ to a client automatically without the client asking for it. This is great since the client no longer makes unnecessary calls to the server. The diagrams below illustrate this.
Classic update:
Rss Cloud update:
I have been researching captchas recently . The goal being, to understand how to make captchas better. I spent some time trying to determine the various forms of catcha available out there. There were quite a few and some were innovative (innovative does not necessarily mean easy to use 
). Here are some that will interest you
Recaptcha:
The most common form of captcha is recaptcha. Recaptcha does a good job of displaying some sort of cryptic letters and numbers to its users. But it is far from the captcha solution that an end user might want. An image based approach promoted by captcha.net is also available, but some images are thoroughly confusing. I am currently researching better ways to categorize and display images. There are more problems to be discussed in image based captchas, which I would rather cover in a seprate post with an implementation.
Eclipse can be used to debug your java applications. Here are a few tips that can help you debug better
Remote debugging:
The eclipse IDE can remote debug your web application. Imagine being able to debug your development server from your local machine. Eclipse can help you do this. First you need to instruct your application / server to listen on a port for debug messages. That can be done using the -Xdebug flag
java -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,address=8787,suspend=n
This tells the JVM to listen for specific debug messages on port 8787. In eclipse open Bug Icon -> Debug configurations and select “Remote java application”. Mention the port and server address and you should now be able to remote debug the application. Make sure that the classes and source sync with each other. On a network where the bandwidth is poor, this technique will not work.
Remote java application:
I was browsing the internet today and an interesting website caught my eye. Creately offers the ability to draw diagrams online and save them. You can also collaborate and comment on diagrams. There are a range of diagrams to choose from. Flow charts, UML diagrams, Wireframes etc. You can check out the complete list here. I managed to create a small diagram in a few clicks.
Flowchart:
So the next obvious question that came to mind was, how much does a tool like this cost. Its a pretty nice tool. You can edit diagrams online, no installation, no platform dependencies etc etc. So I traversed to their pricing page which asked me to upgrade, which lead me to the payment page. And this is where it got real confusing.
Pay what you want:
Blogger, which google acquired a while back is now ten years old. Google is celebrating the 10th anniversary by distributing presents. Its been quite a journey for blogger since its acquisition and the last ten years have seen tons and tons of blogs being added to blogger.
So as I surfed the web today, like any other good internet citizen I faithfully typed google.com into the browser address bar. Here is what I saw
Google promotes reader:
