Pushing the envelope

Darren's take on Java, agile methods, cool open source stuff, interesting technologies and other random wanderings through the land of blog.
Updated: 26/01/2003; 11:48:58.
Places to go
Apache Jakarta Project
c2.com
ExtremeProgramming.org
OpenSymphony
XProgramming.com
XP Developer

People to see
Russell Beattie
Eugene Belyaev
Tony Bowden
Mike Cannon-Brookes
Jeff Duska
Paul Hammant
Scott Johnson
Brett Morgan
Rickard Öberg
James Strachan
Joe Walnes

Things to do

Subscribe to "Pushing the envelope" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


That was the day
October 2002
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    
Sep   Nov



Archives
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002

Listening To


Valid RSS

Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.

  10 October 2002

Backups

My hard-disk started emitting a highly irritating whine today. I panicked and decided to back up my stuff. Windows XP Professional? Hardly. It took me several minutes of disbelief and some googling before I could accept that this supposedly flagship OS can't back up to CD-R. Oh no, you have to back up to a file, then burn it onto the CD manually. Not great if the reason for the backup is because you're afraid that your HD is dodgy.

On a related note, there seems to be a dearth of affordable consumer backup products. Most tape drives appear to be aimed at the server market, and seem to cost as much as two hard disks. Might as well buy the second disk and a RAID controller card (in my case its built in to the motherboard already) and use RAID 1 mirroring instead it seems. That way you don't have to remember to do backups.


10:14:59 PM      comment []

Its all metadata

It seems there are many more readers of blogs than there are writers and everyone has email these days but relatively few people use RSS aggregators; so having a bridge to email so folks can keep in touch with RSS feeds makes lots of sense.

Then if we have an RSS to email gateway we can run ZOË off it to search & sort blogs.

I guess users might want different kinds of email feed;

  • 1 email for all Java blogs per day
  • 1 email per day per feed that they are interested in (so thats like each RSS feed being its own email list with daily digest
  • 1 email per hour of whats new
  • 1 email per change per RSS feed

Still from a basic RSS to email feed it should be pretty easy to do.

[James Strachan's Radio Weblog]
I have several email addresses, most of which end up in different folders of the same mail program. Something like ZOË should mean that I can forget about that sort of detail upfront, and simply slice my data dyamically. The same applies to all the other attributes. Read/Unread, From, To, Subject etc. They're all sources of metadata that I can use to organise my messages. Being able to index message bodies is very cool, as would being able to add my own keywords for easy retrieval later. Queries like 'find me all the emails from James about Jelly that I have tagged as interesting' should then be possible. Email folders would (hopefully) become redundant, or at least, dynamically generated on the fly in response to ad-hoc queries.

Its all about context. Data without a context is data without meaning.


3:34:48 PM      comment []

© Copyright 2003 Darren Hobbs