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Speeple Core - A collection of uninspired blog posts from the creator of Speeple.

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  1. Short Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Review

    This post is more of a sign of appreciation to Ubuntu rather than a comprehensive overview of Ubuntu’s latest features.

    Ubuntu Ubuntu is to many non-technical computer users the face of Linux. From my past use of Ubuntu 7.04 / 7.10 and more recently 8.04 (Hardy Heron) I’d agree with that it certainly is the distribution of choice among many Linux folk, both geeks and non-geeks.

    The latest iteration of Ubuntu brings some improved GUI tweaks with the inclusion of a recent version of GNOME and improves on many other features. One particular thing I like now is the NVIDIA drivers are provided by Canonical Ltd and when new updates are released the system is seamlessly updated. This is a great improvement over the tedious installation required in earlier versions of Ubuntu.

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  2. Resource: Speeple News Statistics Page

    I’ve put together a source for Speeple News Statistics. The page provides overall statistics of the Speeple News service, including health statistics such as crawl rate and top sources grouped by domain and individual feeds.

    The stats cover news item totals, feed count, feed types and type version and content languages. The page is updated every 30 minutes.

  3. Euro 2008 Final: Germany 0 – 1 Spain

    Spain has won Euro 2008 after beating Germany 1 – 0 in the final. The goal came from Fernando Torres and was undoubtedly a great goal.

    Germany, like on so many occasions in this tournament looked average. Spain dominated play as they have done so many times this tournament and their tactics of stylish passing football has earned them the European Cup after a wait of 44 years.

    My prediction for the final has proven once again to be wrong, like so many times in this tournament. Congratulations to the Spaniards, their victory is well deserved.

  4. Euro 2008 Final: Germany v Spain

    The Euro 2008 football tournament is finally wrapping up with the final to be played in Vienna this Sunday.

    Spain comfortably beat a disappointing Russia, a team which promised so much but just simply didn’t deliver. Russian team play and energy was non-existent in comparison to their previous two matches against the Netherlands and Sweden. One key reason I believe is because their man of the moment, Andrei Arshavin, wasn’t really involved in the game. On previous matches he was orchestrating the Russian play, this time he was silent.

    Spain hasn’t won a major football honour since 1964 when they won the European Cup. Amazingly, this is even further back than England’s victory in the 1966 World Cup.

    Continue Reading »

  5. Speeple NewsBot: ETag (If-None-Match) and Last-Modified (If-Modified-Since) Implemented

    To further improve the performance of the Speeple News “NewsBot” I have implemented support for ETag and Last-Modified HTTP headers. This basically means that only the HTTP headers will be retrieved rather than the full body content if the feed hasn’t changed since the last time NewsBot accessed the XML feed.

    This not only improves the efficiency fetching content for Speeple News, it also benefits webmasters and site owners because less bandwidth is used.

    Initial statistics shows that supporting HTTP ETag / Last-Modified headers along with handling gzip encoded content has reduced bandwidth costs by over 60%.