I should caveat this post with the often used phrase, ‘don’t try this at home kids’. When tinkering with the guts of any system and modifying the information being sent to and from a service by ‘hacking’ into the request pipeline of a message your opening up a whole can of performance and stability worms that need a great deal of testing under load to understand the direct effect on the scalability of any site. A Simple Question This post is based upon a question I had with a customer at our recent DeveloperHub conference in Birmingham. He asked how it would be possible to watermark an image...

As we all know the pace of change in technology shows no sign of abating for good or ill. In software terms it’s a continual moving walkway of new patches, version and features, usually for the better sometime not so. I’m both lucky and cursed to be able to install a wide variety of new software where I work and at this moment installing a beta of ArcGIS 9.4 (or 10 as it will soon be) onto a new copy of Windows Server 2008 R2. I’ll soon be downloading and installing a copy of Visual Studio 2010 onto that virtual machine as well. Lucky eh? Well yes and no, lucky because I get to try out new...

It might come as a shock to many of you, but often on the internet the world is flat. Yes I know that you thought this whole debate had gone out with the ark (or actually a little later), but after years coming to terms of the world being a sphere, cartographers everywhere needed a method of putting that world  down onto paper. Now this was fine for many years until 2nd May 2000 the US decided to turn off Selective Availability and whole world seemingly brought into WGS84. The difficulty here though is the fact that WGS84 and Longitude and Latitude coordinates are an approximate representation of...

Before you read on this isn’t a post devoted to image caching. This is a post about data caching in general with image caching being an extreme form of data caching. It comes from a bit of work I did recently caching data from a tracking feed. It’s based around why you want to cache, what data you might need to cache and how you might cache (I used .NET but you can do it in all major web development languages). Caching has often been the premise of web sites that want to be, and I’m using a technical terms here, ‘screamingly fast’ and not ‘snail slow’. Caching before caching was...

As you can see I had this idea of hosting my own blog. In case you wondered your here reading it. Now I thought that would be a simple thing to do just put a site onto the internet and eventually the magic that is the Google-bot or the Bing-bot (do we call it that?) would one day swoop down and make me part of the internet (I firmly believe, albeit slightly misguided that if your on a public site and not in the index then your not actually on the internet). Now I suppose before I go into my failings as a web developer I feel  that I need to justify myself. An explanation. I’m a fairly seasoned web...