Friday, July 16, 2004

Blogger Bugs
So what happened at Blogger yesterday? When I tried clicking "Preview" I was shown a heap of Javascript. Then when I tried to publish, or save as a draft, a new entry was created, but it was empty. So if anyone out there was wondering why I was posting empty entries, now you know.

Fortunately it's all going again today.

Masters
This morning I was thinking about the research I'm about to start, and it occurred to me that I really ought to be writing down everything I come across that may seem relevant to my future thesis. This includes my work, as well as documents I may read.

Then it occurred to me that I'm already doing that here in this blog! I'm not writing a lot about what I'm reading yet, but at least I'm putting down everything at work that may be of relevance.

I always intended this to be a record of my work, so I can go back and review what I've written in the past, but also so other people (particularly at Tucana) can keep up with how I'm going and what I'm doing. I never thought about study, so it's serendipity that it will be valuable there as well.

Speaking of study, I still don't have a response from the university, but my (prospective) supervisor says that he thinks it will be fine. He's associate professor in ITEE, so the odds are good that he knows what he's talking about. So I decided that I'd better start reading more again, as I've been getting slack in the last couple of weeks.

Clustering
Of course, the first thing I decided to read had nothing to do with RDF or OWL, but I thought it was better than nothing. :-) It's that reasonably well known paper on the Google File System. It does actually have some relevance to the design of TKS, and ultimately Kowari, as we need to start considering scaling the database transparently over large clusters. DM and I have talked about this on several occasions over the last couple of years, so I found it really interesting reading about Google's approach.

I suppose we'll need to start making more money on TKS before we get the go-ahead to implement clustering. After all, we already scale really well, and we need to make sure the company is around in a couple of years time. I worked in IT at 6 different places before coming to Plugged In/Tucana, and this is by far my favourite. It's a cross between the interesting work, and the fact that I'm working with the most intelligent team I've ever encountered. With the exception of a few months of leave so I could go programming at Saab (when Plugged In were short on contracts and money) I've been here for 4 and a half years. Not bad for the IT industry, and especially not bad for a company that is in "startup" mode.

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