From the Orient

There was an interesting documentary last week on BBC2 called “The Day They Disappeared”. Featuring stories about people who go missing by choice who run away from their life, for whatever reason. One young man went to live at Heathrow to get away from his mother.

Another man left his wife to live on the streets after his accountancy business became too stressful for him to cope. He left all his customers in the lurch, not to mention his wife. He was found by his wife after the police ran to say he had been admitted to hospital, but did not wish to speak to her. Top tip for would be people searchers here. She ran round every hospital in London asking to speak to her husband. All but one said that they had no one of that name at the hospital. The other hospital said they could not give out any information. It wasn’t difficult to work out which hospital he was in.

After a few month he returned home, but refused to go into his shed turned office for a few more months, and wouldn’t turn his computer on as he couldn’t bear to think about the customer’s he’d let down, and the emails they might have sent him.

Eventually, he did check his email. Whilst the cameras were rolling he logged in (to AOL) and found new emails. Every single one was spam.

I just lost a great long post about all sorts of stuff when Firefox crashed on me.

To summarize :-

I have a current favourite new blog - Apothecary’s Drawer Weblog
Just read it. I loved the research into the “You are what you eat” program.

I like the way “Matthew Revell”:http://www.understated.co.uk/blog/ drew my attention to the weblog by having it featured as an “other site” rather than just list his blogroll.

I invented a new realitydocusoap called “Celebrity Big House Clean Laundry Swap Makeovers from Hell …. 4″ presented by Steve Penk, but I’m not going to type it all in a again.

Desk, originally uploaded by sarabian.

Testing Flickr. Visit the page for some silly playing around with the Notes feature.

“Note Studio”:http://www.dogmelon.com.au/ns/Home%20Page.shtml describes itself as “a simple, powerful way to manage notes” yet it is a form of “wiki”:http://c2.com/cgi/wiki that can be used on the desktop and Palm.

Wiki’s are getting increasingly used in “GTD”:http://www.davidco.com/ circles as a way of managing the system. As they are a very flexible format, you can manage your projects using a wiki, and Note Studio gives you a way to do this using your PDA. I like the idea of wiki as an organising system.

“This wiki by Jacques Turbé”:http://avm.free.fr/wiki/wiki.php?page=NoteStudio&historyindex=0 gives detailed instructions on the use of Note Studio as an organising system, and “note studio as GTD machine”:http://law4pda.org/chocolateGTD/ has step-by-step rules for getting started on your own system.

My own setup is currently working well enough, and I don’t want to do unnecessary tweaking so I won’t be moving to Note Studio yet. However, I have a system of storing project links in bookmarks (in Firefox) and I’m considering moving these to a “personal wiki”:http://dellah.demon.co.uk/venuto

XML.com: Decomposition, Process, Recomposition :-

So my first line of advice has always been: don’t go processing gigabyte files in XML formats. I have been working with XML for about 8 years. I have used XML in numerous ways with numerous tools for numerous purposes. I have never come across a natural need for an XML file more than a few megabytes. There may be terabytes of raw data in a system, but if you’re following XML (and classic data design) best practices, this should be structured into a number of files in some sensible way.

I’m saving this hear so I can remember where it is when one of my customers complains about poor performance or memory issues with the Oracle XDK.

It happens about once a month, and 9 times out of 10 they have huge XML files. The problem is that they don’t think they have a huge XML file and think 1Gb is a reasonable size, and give spurious arguments like “a powerful database like Oracle should be able to handle this much data”.

I have always told them that 1Mb is a more sensible limit, but have never been able to find a solid link to back myself up.