"I've spoken with enterprises in the Fortune 100 who find themselves sitting on top of 6 years' worth of Web content trapped in static HTML files. They know they need to get this stuff into database and redesign their site into a template-driven system. But their first question is inevitably, "So, uh, where do we start?"[IA/]
June 19th, 2002
Effective from June 14, 2002, the new Numbering Plan will ensure the implementation of the emergency numbers and the short numbers, harmonized at the European level.
As a summary:
Instead of +4 0AA XXX XXXX now will be +4 0ZAA XXX XXXX, for instance for an old Bucharest number +4 01 1234567 now you will have to dial +4 021 1234567 and for a number from Satu Mare, let's say +4 061 770073 now you will have to dial +4 0261 770073.
The mobile phone numbering changes as follows:
Orange: ( the first nine get's replaced with 74 )
+4 090 xxx xxx -> +4 0740 xxx xxx
+4 094 xxx xxx -> +4 0744 xxx xxx
+4 095 xxx xxx -> +4 0745 xxx xxx
Connex: ( the first nine get's replaced with 72 )
+4 091 xxx xxx -> +4 0721 xxx xxx
+4 092 xxx xxx -> +4 0722 xxx xxx
+4 093 xxx xxx -> +4 0723 xxx xxx
Cosmorom: ( the first nine get's replaced with 76 )
+4 096 xxx xxx -> +4 0766 xxx xxx
Telemobil: ( the first nine get's replaced with 78 )
+4 098 xxx xxx -> +4 0788 xxx xxx
Conform to their document after September 14, 2002 you will not be able to use the old numbers, but better get used to the new ones since AFAIK since June 14 there where already problems with the old ones, beside that the telecom chick which announces the changes has very very bad English.
This is especially important for those who plan to attend the ICAN meeting from June, which will be held in Bucharest, Romania.
June 15th, 2002
After I managed to install last week Postgresql under Windows and tested DataStore with disappointing results, today I installed SAPDB and tested again.
Fantastic! I used the RFC reference XML documents from xml.resource.org, 3124 XML documents, small ones around 4M at all, DataStore over SAPDB, and an MN8 script to load all this documents and store them using SEP (the Simple Exchange Profile) over XML-RPC.
The procedure lasted less than an hour, that means over 60 documents per minute, this is the same as Postgresql, but what is different is that by the time the storing of the documents was completed the indexing was to. With Postgesql this requested around 30 hours.
Now, DataStore stores the document as it receives it (it does not alter it), but to allow very fast structured searches (get me the documents which have this element containing this value and this attribute with this value) it breaks the documents in little entities (prety much as Google does) entities which can be used efficiently (actually use their indexes in their queries) by relational databases along with keeping information about the structure of that entity (part of that element ...). That way you can actually query toons of well or not so well formatted documents using complex structure information and get the results instantly.
After the 3124 documents, DataStore extracted 27000 entities (most of the time words).
And in all this time I worked as usually on the same computer.
I can't explain the poor performances of Postgresql, it does not perform much better on the Linux server either and we tried many versions, must be something related to their JDBC drivers, in comparation to IBM DB2 or MySQL is way slower.
However SAPDB rocks and it's free (GPL/LGPL) with versions for Linux and Windows (and many other), so if you are looking for an free, industrial strength relation database look no further. Should I mention that it comes (the Windows version) with excellent GUI management tools.
June 14th, 2002
"Web developers have all sorts of browsing tricks that they have gained from years of experience, to the point where they can't even imagine not knowing them -- right-clicking to open a new browser window, for instance, or using the arrow keys to navigate a list. To Web veterans, these things are so familiar that they seem obvious. The fact that many people don't know these tricks -- and can get completely stuck as a result -- comes as a shock. This article describes seven Web site features that typical non-technical users aren't familiar with, based on data collected from the author's own usability studies." Carolyn Snyder
This is something you will always have to remind yourself, so, worth reading it.
June 13th, 2002
Your e-mail appeared to have a virus. Please e-mail without attaching the batch file.
That's how an email I've got today started. The ugly thing, as you can figure out, is that I never sent that email. Klez did. And not even our Klez (as we mostly run Linux) and the only Win station is clean but somebody else's.
It's very ugly, and I don't see how can we protect ourselves. It's of no use to tell the receiving party to look at the mail source to identify the receive path, our mails always will have the millennium.nolimits.ro and not some French or Chinese server.
The possible solution would be to always use signed emails. But even in this case there are two solutions, PGP or S/MIME. S/MIME is nice and clean (you can get a certificate for free from Thawte, but then again some email clients will crash when receiving such an email. PGP is cool but it is not integrated in all email programs plus that retrieving a public key is not always straight forward.
So, what you do when you know that somebody is sending viruses in your name ?
June 12th, 2002
European law enforcement agencies were given sweeping powers to monitor telephone, Internet and email traffic in a move denounced by critics as the biggest threat to data privacy in a generation.
The measure, which will be approved by the 15 EU member states,
will allow governments to force phone and Internet companies to retain
detailed logs of their customers' communications for an unspecified
period. Currently, records are kept only for a couple of months for
billing purposes before being destroyed.
...
From mobile
phone records, police will also be able to map people's movements
because the phones communicate with the nearest base station every few
seconds. In urban areas, the information is accurate to within a few
hundred meters, but when the next generation of mobiles comes on stream
it will pinpoint users' locations to within a few metros.
While the American and North Europeans democracies will try to defend the the right to privacy by limiting the access to these records, the Adevarul newspaper asks what will happen with Eastern Europe democracies where abuses will certanly exists.
Will 2002 be known as the year when privacy ended ?
June 4th, 2002
I was looking at the nice KDE desktop and saying "Ok, now what do I do?" I don't have Office (don't tell me to use Star Office or whatever they're calling it this week). [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]
I've got my Office with the laptop, nothing to do there, but even when I'm in Windows I'm more happy with Open Office.
I have hree reasons for that. First, I'm the 20% type of user (as probably many of you) and Open Office fully satisfies my needs.
The second reason. It uses nice XML as document type. If you save a Star Office or Open Office document and then open it with some unzip utility (WinZip?) then you will find a couple of beautifully architect-ed XML documents. Data, metadata and styles are completely separated. Why it is this so important to me ? Because in some near future I may make a quick and dirty script to import all my Open Office / Star Office documents in an XML storage system and do whatever I want with them, including publishing them on the net with my own skins or generate PDF documents or whatever.
Now, I'm sure that you can do that with Word to but you will have to get dirty for that.
The last reason is the Drawing application, you can save your drawings as SVG and again, because SVG is XML you can do quite some interesting things with it.