fendale

I think it blocks on write for 'the smallest possible time' (its does as much of the data change preparation as possible before locking the database).

If you are just using it as a single user for generating excel style reports then this doesn't really matter.

I have been thinking for a while that if I had to export a significant amount of data from an app for a tech savvy audience, I would probably send it out in an Sqlite DB instead of XML.

Aquamacs (emacs port to Mac) pretty much does just that (allows you to type and get your syntax highlighting right out of the box).

OK, good point.

But isn't writing a text editor one of those garden path problems - a near never ending amount of work to get to just what exists already? I guess I also wonder what inspires developers to start new text editor projects too! Perhaps its just dis-satisfaction with what is there already.

I don't get why people are building these fancy new editors - You can get both Emacs and Vim to behave Textmate like in many ways. They are both usable everywhere, including in a terminal.

No matter which editor you want to use, you have to learn it and it takes time. A few years back I decided between Emacs and Textmate and learned Emacs - the main reason was because I can still use it when I am forced into a terminal or Windows.

Just happened to us this week. Promise of 7-10% bonuses and now we are told we will get little or nothing, communicated by a faceless email.

Needless to say all my good will has gone along with my motivation!

Almost all major oracle operations can be done online ... Index rebuilds, table reorgs etc. Depends how much hardware you have how much it affects things ...

> I'd be furious if I found out that a site I trusted lost all my data because they hadn't even tested their backup system

Exactly - first rule of backups - test them. For a database, it can be as simple as using your nightly backup to create your dev or test database or whatever. I guess it isn't feasible with a half terrabyte database every day, but to not have at least a several week old backup set is somewhat unforgivable.

On the other hand, I bet he will never ever make the same mistake again, and it will make a lot of people on here think long and hard about their own backup strategies ...

well straight away I can think of

younar youner yuner

I guess it depends on how you say it and how people pick it up - ask 20 people you know to spell it for you after you say it just once to them and see what the results are like ...

It sure is mired in complexity. I am an Oracle programmer by day and once you put it under load there are some pile of bugs that start to show up! That said, Oracle can do so e amazing work, if you have people on hand who can make it do it!

I just have Aquamacs with all the default bindings. Then I installed ECB and all the rails goodies, of which I use very few actually! Flymake is the most useful as it highlights syntax errors without even compiling.

Then you can still lose a days data. Why not switch and ship the mysql binary log every x minutes? Last backup plus all the logs gives you much better recoverability

Yip, I am another one. The only think my xbox (not a 360) gets used for is watching DIVX's on!

Quality - I didn't know about that!

But what about all those in different time zones? Freezing the site for periods may make it tricky for people in some places to contribute at all.

> Just remember, your app will not be the final app that makes use of the data. Your app comes and goes, along with many other apps written by many others. But the data lives "forever."

Here here - that quote is so close to what Tom Kyte always says I reckon you are either Tom himself or an Oracle DB programmer :-)

BT offer an SMS SDK that allows you to send and receive texts on from your app. Their pricing is not what I would describe as really competitive, but there is (or was the last time I checked) a trial account that allowed you to do some small number of operations per day.

http://web21c.bt.com/services

You are correct - that was a typo. I edited above to correct it. If I ever get my side project moving toward completion, I intend to look into this side of things in the new year.

It doesn't sound ridiculous to me, but then I no little of the legalities behind it.

I am in the UK, and as I understand it, its only costs a few £100 to setup a PLC (private limited company) - the main overhead is that you have to post you accounts each year to companies house (which probably means you have to pay an accountant to help you).

It certainly is some hassle, but there are companies that will set it all up for you I believe. If you own a house or have significant savings I would certainly want them protected from some chancer who has decided you have infringed some patent or lost his data to hackers or stolen his idea etc. Defending something like this could be very expensive, so it may be easier to just close up shop and keep your day job!

I have been thinking about this very problem myself recently.

To add to this question, would it make sense to setup a limited liability company to release a side project under? If something really goes wrong, and some big company or rich individual decides to sue you (for whatever reason), you probably don't want your personal assets to be up for grabs. As I understand it, if you are operating as a limited liability company, someone can sue your company out of existence and basically shut you down, but at least they cannot have your house or personal savings!

I don't think it's fair to put a hard disk failure down as a failed mac ... It's one of those things you think are supposed to fail someday!

Open Emacs and type C-h t (ctrl and h together and then t) that will open the emacs built in tutorial. Start going through it, then download one of the many cheatsheets and print it out and stick it somewhere you can see it from your desk.

Its quite a long learning curve, and I am still no expert, but its my favorite editor now. I cannot say its any better or worse than any of its rivals, but I put the time into learning it better than the others!

I cannot give you a video, but the 4 part series of blog posts I wrote sometime ago explain how to get it up and running along with the Emacs Code Browser - I used it successfully in a terminal window via Putty to a Linux box and in Aquamacs on OS X - http://sodonnell.wordpress.com/the-emacs-newbie-guide-for-ra...

Many developers have no choice but to use windows thanks to corporate policy ... I am not saying that is a good thing, but its the way it is (at least where I work). I resorted to doing Rails dev using Emacs + Putty, which was easier than developing the app on windows!

I think a few of the recent ones were getting posted online elsewhere, so he just started putting them on his own site - cannot remember where I read or heard that though!

I like that tip about talking to the user in the language as the APP expects - hadn't though of that myself.

p.s. One possible future thing could be to make extensions for things like Thunderbird that actually gives a "Todo", "Remind" and "Follow-up" buttons alongside the "Reply" and "Forward" buttons ;-)

That would be very much in the future! I actually have a a prototype working at the moment, but its for my eyes only for a while yet until I can iron a few things out!

Good tip on the stemming - I will certainly give that a go.

I have seen a few places that do these things, but how is the question. Care to elaborate on how you go about it? What tools/libraries you use etc and how successful it has been?

Actually I started this before I heard about iwantsandy.com, which I only heard about last week when it was shutting down. At that point I simultaneously thought 'damit, there is a tool to do what I wanted and here is me wasting time writing one to scratch my own itch' and 'interesting, outrage at this shutting down and I am working on something similar'.

I have started taking a bit of a different approach to the problem though, in that I want to create a drop box per work area (in my day job, I tend to have many mini-projects to manage at once, each lasting only a month or two) to help me keep track of things without excel.

I guess Basecamp or Highrise may get me what I wanted too, but I wanted a small project that is achievable in a reasonable time working 10 hours a week on it, so I am giving it a go!

The use of the @ symbol may well be a good idea to split out the dates and separate remindable things from non-remindable.

There is some good advice coming up in this thread.

A few people are suggesting email is not the correct medium, so I need to explain more what it is I am trying to achieve. My app is sort of like 'I Want Sandy' (I started working on this before I even heard about I Want Sandy, as I only came to know of it now that its about to be shut down).

Basically, I want to be able to take an email sent to me, and forward it to a drop box. I can either just send the email in as is (received emails have certain information extracted from them and displayed on a dash board), or I can send it in with a command on it, or several commands.

So I can fire in an email saying followup in 2 days/on Dec 12th etc, and in two days time, the app will send me an email along with the original email attached.

If I add a command as TODO, then it will add it to the TODO list attached to that drop box etc.

There will of course be a non-ambiguous web front end to all this to manage all the items, and add followups, todo's etc without an email, but my goal is to be able to add items from your inbox.