Don’t Lose Your Thread
Comments (0) Here are some great tips from Darren Prose on keeping your blog running. A few lessons in here that I could certainly take note of…
Comments (0) Relaxing On the Couch
By David Hollingworth, 26/09/2009 9:01 pm
For the last few weeks I’ve been spending some time relaxing on the couch. Well that’s actually working with the Apache Couch DB database.
Most of my career in IT has been spent working with relational databases, principally Oracle and Informix and more recently MySQL. Couch DB represents a bit of a departure from this area in that Couch DB is a document database. Instead of being stored in normalised tables or rows and columns all related data in Couch DB is stored together in JSON format documents. Instead of writing SQL queries to access data you use view constructs written in JavaScript and stored is special design documents. Creating a view creates a btree index in the database and allows very fast access to the relevant documents.
Couch DB utilizes a RESTful interface and so is unsuitable for things like banking applications that need transaction concurrency. However it’s great for things like blogs and other text based applications. Instead of row level locking present in relational databases Couch DB employs Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC). What this means in practise is that users each get a consistent snapshot of a document without having to wait for other users to release locks on a document.
The database itself is still fairly young and the API is open to change as it matures. There’s a variety of language libraries also available; but some of these are also a bit immature and some lack some basic functionality or are difficult to implement. To avoid reliance on third parties and to be able to react quickly to changes in the database API I’ve been using the Couch DB JavaScript class library and have found this perfectly adequate for the prototype and proof of concept work I’ve been doing to date.
So far I haven’t written anything earth shattering to be worth sharing any code. So instead I thought I’d just list some of the excellent resources and tutorials I’ve referenced over the last couple of weeks:
- The Couch DB Wiki
- A free Couch DB book
- Programming Couch DB with Javascript tutorial
- Creating joins between documents
There’s probably been others, I’ll add them in as I come across them; but for now… relax!
Review: Personal Brain from TheBrain.com
In the past I’ve reviewed Mind Manager – an excellent piece of software for producing mind maps – a tool I that forms part of my daily work flow for information gathering and organizing. However I’ve recently discovered something called "Personal Brain" from TheBrain.com that really takes mind mapping to a whole new level.
The problem I’ve always had with a mind map is that it’s essentially only two dimensional. You start at the ‘root’ node and work outwards in a hierarchy. You can create any number of hierarchy from the centre; but problems start to occur when you want to link from one hierarchy to another. Things start to get complicated and a complex map can be difficult to navigate and locate the information you need.
The Personal Brain takes a more 3 dimensional approach to organizing data. You can link nodes to multiple parents and to multiple children allowing for a network of cross links between information nodes. In addition to linking parents and children you can ‘jump’ create links to other topics. These are links to topics that are related but don’t form part of the current parent / child hierarchy. I guess an example might help:
Here we see my TulligWeather server is a child of Servers; but because it is weather related there’s a jump link to Met Eireann. In practice this makes it simple to create complex relationships between topics and yet make them easy to navigate.
As well as creating the topics you can add notes and attachments to them as well as giving them a type and adding tags. The latter allows you to view the tags as a virtual topic showing you all the topics with that tag. Here’s a shot showing a PHP tag and it’s associated topics.
Full search capabilities and and trail of recently accessed items make locating items in unrelated parts of a map easy. Additionally you can pin major topics to the top of the work area to help facilitate moving around different parts of your ‘brain’.
Personal Brain is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. That last one is a big bonus for me as I’m using Linux most of the time at present. The Linux version does have some features that don’t work like dragging files onto a topic to create an attachment; but for most things there’s a valid work around and I haven’t found anything that I really couldn’t do. There’s 3 versions available; free, Core and Pro. The free version has quite a few restrictions; but should still be usable. The Pro version includes integration with Microsoft Office, integrated calendar and a number of other useful features; but is very expensive at $249. I’ve been trialing the Pro version which is die to expire in a few days. Due to current financial constraints I’ll be switching to the free version at that time and I’ll let you know how that works out.
Rated /5 on Sep 26 2009
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Onwards
After the wind up of Computer Troubleshooters – West Cork I’ve been looking around for some full time employment again. However there seems to be very little in the way of IT development work in Cork unless you have either Java or C# or .Net skills and unfortunately these aren’t part of my current portfolio.
So on Monday I’m starting a 3 month stint working for Amazon customer services up at the Cork airport business park. This may seem a bit of a departure from my usual role in IT; but it’s not something I’m completely unfamiliar with. I worked for the customer services division of Bull Information Systems in the UK between 1989 and 1999 and the customer service ethic is something I’ve tried to embody in the work I’ve done since then. My ex-customers might comment on how effective that was 
Either way Monday marks a new start. I hoping it’ll open some new doors and I’m sure it’ll present plenty of opportunities along the way.
Onward and upward…
The Demise Of The Photo Blog
By David Hollingworth, 19/09/2009 1:07 pm
I’ve finally decided to tear down my photo blog. Not from a lack of interest in photography; but because the comments section was a complete spam magnet. I was getting hundreds of spam comments every day and while Akismet was picking up most of these it wasn’t catching all of them, which meant more administration overhead than I was prepared to put up with.
So from now on anything I consider to be worth posting will have to go into a post here. Or I might even open a Flickr account…