Graham Chastney

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of public debate. In the England we have Speakers Corner in Hyde Park where debate is encouraged. Other countries have similar things.

Today I cam across www.changethis.com where people propose a new manifesto, people vote on their proposal. If there is enough interest they get to write their manifesto. The thing about a manifesto, though, is that this is no short sound-bite about an idea. If you write a manifesto you have to think it through and provide your reasoning.

This is a great idea.

So much of our media is taken up with completely misleading sound-bites based on prejudice and assumption. We need to have these prejudices and assumptions challenged if we are going to change, and they aren’t challenged in 5 seconds on the news. It requires some effort on our behalf, but it has got to be worth it in the long-run.

I’ve noticed an increase in the number of hits on this site over the last few days. So I did a little investigation into where they were coming from.

It appears that I am now above Wikipedia on Yahoo UK for searches on Smashie and Nicey. I’m #7 with Wikipedia #8. All this from one post?

Google has it a little more accurate with me at #9 and Wikipedia at #4.

Are there really that many people still searching the Internet for Smashie and Nicey?

The things is – now I’ve commented on it, I’m bound to just get higher.

Apparently happenings is also a good match for ladies seeking house husbands #7 .

We still have a long way to go with making search relevant .

(Jimmy and Grandad went on a bit of an adventure last night – see flickr to find out more)

WinFS finally left the Windows stable (here, here) over the last few days for residence in a SQL Server existence. Being the insightful watcher of the industry that I am ,  I had just finished the preparation for a presentation I was going to deliver to some colleagues on the subject – now cancelled.

It’s not a surprise, but it is a disappointment.

Anyone who architects or manages a large scale file service knows that they are nearly always in complete anarchy and causing all sorts of problems at every tier in the business. There are compliance people all over the world who are losing hours of sleep every time they think about the file system because they have no idea what is stored there or how incriminating it could be. There are IT managers who would rather do anything other than be buying yet more disks. There are business continuity people who are praying that the feared fire in the computer room never happens, because they know that they have no chance of getting all that data back to where it should be. There are thousands and millions of end users who fear having to try to find a valuable needle among the haystack that is before them.

A number of people have proposed answers. These have normally required the syphoning of data off into another store or application. These additional stores have normally resulted in the data being available in more than one store, rather than the data moving into a the new store, if it got their at all. This hasn’t resolved the problem, it’s just made it worse.

WinFS, had the chance, however slim, of changing this for good. It had the chance to put the business back in control of the data while, at the same time, giving extra functionality to the end user. But alas it was not to be.

The move of the WinFS development work into SQL Server means that it will always be separate from the file service and will be met with the same level of adoption as Oracle iFS. As a Windows function the level of adoption might have been something significantly different, but I can’t see it having anything like the same impact as a SQL Server function.

I don’t think the Web has yet answered this question either.

Tags: WinFS,File System

There are some things you don’t think about until you work from home.

I will, again, be embarrassed today. Today the Window Cleaner will come and clean the windows on our house. Every time he comes he embarrass me twice.

The first time he will embarrass me is when he is cleaning the window behind me as I write this blog. I won’t hear him until he is there, he will make me jump and then I’ll be embarrassed .

The second time he will embarrass me will be approximately 10 minutes after the first when he knocks on the door demanding payment. I will be very embarrassed to tell him, again, that I have no money and that’s he’ll have to come back later .

I’m a man of the modern age and never have any cash. It has never been necessary for me to have cash. I have got up in a morning and gone into an office and not needed any cash. All of those years of conditioning make it a near certainty that I won’t have any money.

The things you have to deal with when you work from home .

Perhaps I’ll just have to put the days he comes into my diary and plan to be in the office on those days .

Stop, wait a minute, I remember now, let me check, I do have a £10 note in my wallet today. Perhaps I’ll only be embarrassed once today.

The consensus on the del.icio.us links seems to be that they were noise, so I’ve turned them off. Stuart W’s comments weren’t the only ones, even though his are the only ones on this blog.

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