Curiouser and Curiouser!

Summary: A chance to scan weblogs that also deal with the same topic? Useful, helpful, even to the writer who in some real sense discovers the subject after having completed the effort. But useful, certainly, to the reader who found the blog entry through, say, Google, and then has some Waypath located blogs to follow.

Lilia got Waypath to work for her.

Waypath plug-in installed.

I wrote earlier about Waypath Radio plug-in, but didn't have time to install it. I did it today - check my homepage to see how it works (I'd like to play a bit more with styling, but this is for another time).

Let's see if it survives in my templates :)

[Mathemagenic]

If you see some links below... then it will have worked for me too. ;o]} [Connectivity: Spike Hall's RU Weblog]

Waypath looks interesting.  They claim to have over 8 million posts in their database which is a lot.  It'll be interesting to see how this develops and how often  they pick out the gems from among that lot :-)

On the politcal compass I score -6.00 (economic scale) and -5.69 (authoritarian/libertarian scale). This puts me a little to the left of Gandhi, a man who once said:

I'm happy with that. Which reminds me, I saw the movie again recently. It's sad to think of his vision and see where the world is today.

[Politcal compass via greenfairy.com]

If anyone has any contacts in their local lexicography department please drop me a line.  I'm really interested in talking to people who do text analysis because they love it! :-)

So, I don't have the patience to do a complete re-write but here is a recap of some of the highlights of my conversation with Phil.

Obviously, since we were using it, we talked about Skype (i'm pronouncing it 'sky'-'p'). I guess I'm both impressed and frustrated in equal measure. Most of the time (we were talking for hours, god knows what state Phil was in the next day) the quality was good, but it did crap out on us quite a bit. It definitely needs a cell-phone style signal meter. We even mused that, since Skype knows your address it could tap into the Internet Weather Report to tell you what sort of call to expect!

We talked about the possible applications for a good, free, VOIP client and there are many. One in particular appeals to me and that is seeing Skype support bundled with the software I buy. What I want is that when I need to contact a vendor I can press a Skype me button. This lets them know that a CSA or Techie should get in touch with me. It's convenient for me because it means that I will be at the computer when they call. The win for the vendor is that they only need to call when they see me online and the cost is significantly cheaper than how they do this today. (As an example, doing webcallback via Netcall means the vendor has to pay for 2 PSTN calls. One from the Netcall server to the CSA and one from the Netcall server to the customer. Then they have to pay Netcall to manage it all as well. Gets expensive).

Phil and I are both lefties so we rapped about the war, Bush and the Dean campaign. It's incredibly for a guy that seemed such an outside 12 months ago that if you search for Howard on Google, Dean for America is no. #2. What is particularly impressive is the way the Dean campaign have leveraged their digital savvy into on the ground support. Would that any UK politician had the same nouse. I can't imagine being so impressed with any MP I have come across that i'd actually go talk about them. I would love to feel differently though!

I gave Phil a quick head's up on the work we are doing with K-Collector/W4, he hadn't seen it since BlogTalk (it seems so long ago now...) and we've put a lot of effort in since then.  We also talked about what's needed to get corporates into blogging.

Oh he put me onto Ruled Brittania (by Harry Turtledove) which is an alternate reality novel set in an England conquered by Spain.  I'm a complete sucker for this stuff so that went straight onto my wishlist.  In return I suggested Fatherland (by Robert Harris) a detective thriller set in a victorious post WW II Germany and The Man in the High Castle (by Philip K. Dick and personal favourite of mine) set in an America split down the middle by Germany and Japan.

There was lots more but I'm running out of steam...

One of the projects I am involved with at the moment involves a large scale application of forms, XML and document management.  We're looking at using Adobe Forms as the front-end technology and hoping to have them produce XML (although it remains to be seen if this will be possible in the pilot timescale).

Today I started playing with XML Schema in anger.  Since I don't want to edit by hand I am testing tools for both schema and general document editing.  Currently I am evaluating Tibco's Turbo XML.  It seems quite capable if a little clunky.  Does anyone have any opinions?  Or recomendations of tools they like?

Even though the client has OpenText Livelink we're taking a good look at XML storage.  In particular Sleepy Cat's DB XML seems to have a lot going for it.  Native XML storage and query has a lot of attractive possibilities.

More later.

Why is it that within 10 minutes of starting Outlook (2002) I have 5 outlook.exe processes consuming a total of 124Mb of memory?