Listening to: BBC Radio 1

The missus forwarded this to
me:

Delightfully odd.

Listening to: not too sure… this was computer generated.

birthday
pressi

Originally uploaded by flash5.>

Oddly cute.

Thanks Mel.

Listening to: Office banter

I can only fess up to having read Red
Mars…
but one thing Robinson has going for him is that he thinks on a very large scale (one
of the things I found hard about Red Mars was that the scale was so large that I lost
track of the characters).

The Guardian has a very interesting interview with
Robinson about his new book Fifty
Degrees Below:

Set in an America of the almost-now, Fifty Degrees Below (and the first volume
of the trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain) tells the story of the efforts of a loosely-connected
group of scientists, campaigners and politicians to provoke a national response to
the crisis of global warming. Unfortunately for them, as environmental aide Charlie
Quibbler observes, it’s “easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even
one little bit”. It is not until the combination of two colliding storm systems and
an unprecedented tidal surge causes Washington’s Potomac river to bursts its banks
and overwhelm the country’s capital at the climax of book one that the world sits
up and takes notice. But, by this point, the polar ice caps have already begun to
melt in earnest, shutting down the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and creating environmental
conditions that could usher in a new ice age. The last ice age, 11,000 years ago,
took just three years to start.

Listening to: CNN

The changes made between IIS 5 and 6 were massive and improved the software significantly…
It’s great to see that the momentum
is still there:

“We’ve learned from Apache,” acknowledged Bill Staples, product unit manager for
IIS. Version 7.0 takes the IIS feature set and breaks it down into individual components,
or modules, that can be loaded on an as-needed basis. The result is a Web server with
much less overhead.

IIS 7.0 does away with complicated the “Metabase” and replaces it with XML configuration
files - an announcement that prompted cheers from the PDC audience.

Listening to: Some random Artic Monkeys track

Sparkle looks amazing (channel9
video)… must have!

Listening to: The Daily Show

I have noticed a rather amusing trend in the referrer logs for my site. About this
time (7-11 am NZST) for the last few days I have noticed that I get referrals
from a Google search that looks something like “Fat Freddy Drop torrent”. Evidently
attendees of the gig (today it was somewhere in Germany) are stumbling home wanting
a bit more of The Drop.

Listening to: Charly - Prodigy

BBC Radio 1 hosted the Prodigy as
part of Legends Week and they have a bunch of their tracks live. It will be available
for the next week. Also of note is Kanye
West live on the 21st of Sept.

UPDATE: The Kanye West gig….
and Oh My God it is good!

Listening to: Push Upstairs - Underworld

While I was ironing my shirt this morning (hey! looking this
good doesn’t happen by itself!) I pondered the concept of using current blog software
as a database engine. I guess one of the characteristics of traditional databases
is the ability to describe relationships between entities. I figure that if you’re
happy with a combination of unstructured data entities and loose relationships then
it’s currently feasible to use a blog as a database engine.

Let’s take something like the venerable old ‘pubs’ database that ships with SQL Server:

What you would do is set up six blogs:

• Stores

• Sales

• Titles

• Publishers

• Employees

• Authors

Each would have a list of postings, one posting per record. To link each of the entities
together you would simply link the appropriate records using the permalink for each
posting. The permalink is sufficient because it is something unique enough (GUID)
to prevent clashes on a world wide level so it should be pretty good for a small database. 

OK, an example!

If I were an author who had written 3 books there would be 4 postings (3 in the Titles
blog and 1 in the Authors blog). Each of the book postings would have an href
link to my author posting (to speed up queries my author posting might have links
to the book postings… but if I had Trackbacks turned on these linkages would emerge
over time anyway). Super simple.

Note that I didn’t add a TitleAuthor blog? It seems to be redundant in this environment.

Changing, adding and deleting records would be done using a custom interface (not
much more than a RSS posting tool that understood about relationships) that used something
like the Blogger API to write to the appropriate blog.

The benefits as I see them:

• It’s based on the nicely redundant web

• You can access all ‘tables’ using their URL (eg. some-domain.com/pubs/Titles)

• Tables will render themselves in a human readable manner

• It’s simple

• Non-technical users should ‘get it’

• It’s sloppy… but then all killer standards are … it makes it easy for real
  people to use them because the systems are more tolerant

Downside

• Not too sure how it would scale as the number of entries grew… there are blogs will
  1000s of posts, but I don’t know of any with millions

• Complex queries would need to occur in code *retch* (but that’s until there was a
  sufficiently useful query engine built that allowed the separation of data querying
  and data manipulation)

UPDATE: Got a good question from Doogie Howser about referential integrity. That is
one of the other downsides… that would need to be enforced at a code level.

Listening to: Rez/Cowgirl - Underworld

The MS PDC is on at present… lot’s of interesting stuff. The two things that really
grabbed my attention are:

• LINQ
  
  The LINQ Project is a codename for a set of extensions
  to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform
  operations.

• Max
  Max lets you make lists of your photos and turn them into beautiful slide
  shows to share with your family and friends.

LINQ is exciting because it is very powerful and Max is exciting because it hints
at a new way of thinking (and it’s a great example of the power of WinFX).

Listening to: Franz Ferdinand on Radio 1

Warning: This is a bit of a fragile demo (and it’s not terribly elegant
either)… and due to the very hacked nature it only appears to work on IE 6 and Firefox
(I haven’t constructed my RSS correctly so it will die in IE 7 and Safari). I will
tidy up in the next day or so.

I have been talking to a lot of people about RSS over the past few days. All these
conversations prompted me to realise (and it’s pretty obvious) that we’re sitting
on top of a world wide database already (via the RSS generated by blogs and other
applications)… All that was needed was a tiny bit of code to open the items to dynamic
queries (ok a tiny bit of code to demo the concept… probably a bit more than that
for a good query parser ). The key to it is tho think of blog as a set of tables
that look a little like:

Adam
Bosworth described this in some detail a few months ago… and that’s where the
most of the inspiration came from.

The direction that i have taken is that an RSS feed is a table of items that can have
“select” queries made against them. You already see this with categories and calendar
views, but these are pre-canned queries… my thinking was more along the lines of
being able to execute a:

select * from items where URL = www.dave5.com/blog and
category in (’eink’, ‘business’)

Like this for instance: http://www.dave5.com/rsswhere/RSSWhere.aspx?select=item&where=eink,business

Or:

select * from category

Like this for instance: http://www.dave5.com/rsswhere/RSSWhere.aspx?select=category

They are pretty meaningless queries because they are over my drivel and they are very
simple. But their importance is that I have been able to make my blog perform like
a database.

In reality these are just selects over a sub select because the source RSS is scoped
by what ever count limit I place on the items in my RSS feed. If you remove that limit
and treat a blog as a generic data store it becomes very exciting (say a product list).

UPDATE: The C# - RSSWhere.txt
(4.21 KB)

UPDATE 2: Numerous spelling corrections (*sigh*).

See also More
Blog As A Database Thoughts