Although the Jacquard Loom does not compute, is does feature stored programs in the form of external punched cards. These programs are not tied to a specific machine, and a machine can be supplied with numerous different punched cards, and therefore can weave many different patterns.

Priocept has recently been working with Apache Solr, a kind of "Lucene on steriods", which fast approaches a NoSQL database when used for applications such as geodata and automatic data categorisation (as used on eBay).

According to Gartner's latest report, the User is now more important than the Content when selecting WCM systems. Multi-channel user engagement requires fully-integrated products spanning content delivery, tracking, analytics and personalisation.

Part Two of our article on using SharePoint effectively in the Enterprise.

Given the scope of what Microsoft attempted to achieve with SharePoint, it’s not surprising that SharePoint does better in some areas than others. In this article we discuss how to use it effectively in your organisation.

Raoul Millais, one of our .Net lead developers, reports back from JSConf 2009: I finally got round to spending some time this week watching the videos from last year’s jsconf in Berlin. There are some really good talks up there and I highly recommend taking some time to watch them. It’s absolutely incredible what there is going on in the JavaScript world at the moment. Almost all the talks fell into one of three categories, which mirror the most exciting areas of development in the JavaScript world today.

CAPTCHA is broken, so relying on a working telephone number with voice prompts makes it much harder for spam-bots/machines to interact with the system like this.

Windows Server AppFabric is Microsoft's implementation of a distributed cache, the most well-known example of which is memcached, as used on LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Twitter, etc.

A quick summary of the key new features in ASP.NET 4.

Apache Lucene Connector today entered "incubation" at Apache. This is great news for those working with content repositories such as Microsoft Sharepoint, EMC Documentum, and open source technologies such as Apache Jackrabbit (based on the JCR standard).