Urwerk make expensive watches. In fact, expensive is almost too cheap a word to describe the kind of tags this company slaps on its luxury timepieces.

Thankfully, Urwerk tend to rely on engineering for its exclusive status, unlike others that think if you throw enough Swarovski crystals at something it will pass for style. Still, would you pay up to £25,000 for this watch?

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The UNU edition is based on the logahead beta 1.0 code published under GNU/GPL license. While the original version sticks to the basic functions of a blog (mainly publishing posts and receiving comments), the UNU edition is more enchanted and offers a number of additional features.

WYSIWYG Support, Additional Plugins, Nice URLS, Trackback, Comment Moderation and much more

Demo + Download Enhanced UNU Edition: http://typo.i24.cc/logahead/
Standart Edition: http://www.logahead.com/

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4images is a powerful web-based image gallery management system. Features include comment system, user registration and mangagement, password protected administration area with browser-based upload and HTML templates for page layout and design.

More features are: RSS feeds, search engine, automatic thumbnail generation, extensive user administration, upload function for users, showing IPTC and EXIF data of images, rating of images, spam protection, protection against hotlinking, newsletter function, e-cards, integrated database backup function, etc. (more…)

Jesse Kuhnert, Tapestry/Dojo team member, spent time on caching and compression mechanisms in the effort to give the best experience “for free” with Tapestry.

The result was:

• Browser Caching: Previous versions of the framework weren’t aggressive enough in the way that all of the bundled assets (images/javascript/css/etc) were managed with http headers. Though the Expires and If-Modified-Since headers were being used it wasn’t really the complete solution. All of these resources now have realistic / appropriate headers set depending on the type of content and browser being delivered to. (Etag / Cache-Control / Expires / etc) Things will probably still be undergoing more and more change as this section is refined but anyone currently serving this content from the core Tapestry jars (or their own) – with no other configuration – should see a significant performance boost with the added caching support.
• Gzip Compression: The biggest (and scariest) change has been the addition of intelligently gzip’ing content where appropriate. Now all javascript/css/html content that is typically managed by Tapestry gets a good once over with some gzip compression to help make those responses as snappy as possible.
• Much Faster load time: The overall load time for pages should be much better now. The bundled version of dojo with tapestry is now served at a size of roughly 50k – down from the default size of 200k.

I would love to see some benchmarks on the gzip compression side. I used to read that for smallish file sizes, and certain machines, and certain networks, the overhead wasn’t worth it.

Have anyone in the community done good work on when to gzip versus when not too?

Joe Hewitt somehow managed to find the time to write an article on Ajax Debugging with Firebug, which he created.

The article will show you that Firebug is more than just a JavaScript console:

• The Firebug Workflow: modify the page in place
• Exploring Objects: An AJAX-ian web page never stands still. HTML nodes are constantly being created, modified, and removed by JavaScript. As changes occur, Firebug’s HTML view stays up to date in real-time and highlights the changes in yellow. When you see things moving and changing in a page, this gives you a quick way to learn how it was accomplished.
• Pixel Perfection: Firebug helps visualize the previously invisible. When your mouse moves over anything that represents an HTML element in Firebug, the element’s rectangle in the page is highlighted, and its margin, border, padding, and content are each shaded a different color.
• Experimenting and Tweaking: Firebug is not just an inspector, it’s also an editor. Virtually every object in Firebug can be edited inline just by clicking or double-clicking it. As you type, Firebug applies changes immediately, giving you constant feedback. All editors support autocomplete. The CSS editor autocompletes as you type, and the DOM editor autocompletes property names when you hit the Tab key.
• Network Activity: The core idea of AJAX is that small snippets of data will be fetched from the server using a channel called “XMLHttpRequest”, then used to update the page. Without Firebug, all that traffic is invisible. But with Firebug, you can observe the progress of each request and inspect the sent/received text.
• Log Debugging: Firebug is not just a way for you to examine a page from the outside; it is also a place for you to send messages from within the page itself. To facilitate this, Firebug provides every web page loaded in Firefox with the console object that contains a number of functions for logging. As your script executes, you can fill the console with an ongoing stream of data for you to analyze.
• Breakpoint Debugging: Firebug’s Script tab contains a powerful debugger that lets you pause JavaScript execution on any line. You can then step forward line-by-line to analyze how the state of the program changes in real time. Breakpoints need not be triggered indiscriminately; Firebug lets you specify the circumstances under which a breakpoint is triggered.
• Profiling: console.time(”loading”); loadWidgets(); console.timeEnd(”loading”);

Here are 20 things you can do to make your apache configuration more secure.

Disclaimer: The thing about security is that there are no guarantees or absolutes. These suggestions should make your server a bit tighter, but don’t think your server is necessarily secure after following these suggestions.

Additionally some of these suggestions may decrease performance, or cause problems due to your environment. It is up to you to determine if any of the changes I suggest are not compatible with your requirements. In other words proceed at your own risk.

First, make sure you’ve installed latest security patches

There is no sense in putting locks on the windows, if your door is wide open. As such, if you’re not patched up there isn’t really much point in continuing any longer on this list. Go ahead and bookmark this page so you can come back later, and patch your server. (more…)

It’s the time of year to be posting random predictions for 2007. Here are 2007 Ajax predictions from Dion and Michel from ajaxian, please post your own in the comments.

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Richard MacManus has posted on The State Of Web Development – Ajax set to surpass Flash in ‘07.

This is in reference to a report on the subject (free preview).

The current stats are good, but take a look at the future. Ajax is here to stay.

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The BBC (which could stand for anything, though common opinion is that it’s either Bottom Blasting Conspiracy or British Bullshit Company) is an association of Emo kids led by Jar Jar Binks, commonly known for his debut in the Star Wars movies, where he was voted Most Appealing Movie Character three years in a row. In a welcome twist of fate Binks’s life was cut short after a violent episode at the BBC studios in 2015. Anarchists led by blue collar stalwart Wicket the Ewok, long unhappy with Jar Jar’s tyrannical rule, convinced a team of out of work Wookies to prise one of the giant ‘B’s off from above the gate outside the BBC studio, the first step of a cruel and cunning plot to arrest control. After refusing to listen to the Union demands for the abolishment of full body hairnets and a meal between lunch and afternoon tea simply called ‘wuuu-wobba’, Bink’s was caught and tied down, then the deadly letter was dropped from the top of an AT-AT that someone had carelessly double parked outside, causing instant death and a pinkish stain that lingers still. (more…)

Richard Hammond is a British radio and television presenter and former resident of St. Leonard’s Mental Health Institution in Southwick, UK. Most famous for presenting television motoring show Top Gear.

Illness and Radio

Hammond began as many British people do, taking education from the government, while studying for an A Level Graphics qualification became interested in prehistoric animals and hoped to go into Palaeontology, but unfortunately at the age of 17 Hammond was diagnosed with the fatal Insyncontricity Disorder, a disease of the mind that caused his “eccentric” behaviour, he was spotted because of his unexplained violence towards vehicles and lamp posts, at the time he received treatment he learned how to turn his anger from violence into critique, and so decided to become a presenter and journalist on St. Leonard’s Mental Health Institution’s prime time radio show “The Crackers Show”.

When he was discharged from the institution he was immediately put into a Presenter roster for BBC Radio Southwick and was a hit with the local population before being moved to the much bigger BBC Radio 2. (more…)