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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


OpenSesame: How fast is fast enough?
Fri 4 May 2007, 12:40 PM
In my quest to provide true integration between Notes and ODF (a.k.a. tilting at windmills), I have put together code that builds and modifies spreadsheets, presentations and word processing documents, but I have also put in a fair amount of time converting rich text to ODF and back.  While it is certainly not finished, I have enough done to test performance a bit.  As many regular readers here know, I am a bit of a fanatic about performance, believing that it is better to build scalability in from the beginning.

But what is the milestone or goal at which I should aim?  Right now, I can export about twenty reasonably diverse documents a second to ODF files (albeit with weird memory leaks and all the other fun factors of early development).  The fidelity is good, but is the speed reasonable?  If I convert rich text to HTML, I can do over 400 a second, but that is not saving anything to disk, and I haven't tested that way with ODF yet, since it is a less likely scenario.  Obviously, if this is a once at a time export to get into a productivity editor, the speed is fine.  But is there a scenario where companies will export hundreds of thousands of documents?  Or, is there a scenario where on-the-fly conversion will make sense, as in CoexEdit?

I don't know.  I don't even know how to know.  Sigh!  I guess I'll just keep making it faster until I run out of patience with that process.  Anybody have an opinion?

Copyright © 2007 Genii Software Ltd.

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The downside of ego-surfing
Fri 4 May 2007, 07:40 AM
My 11 year old son was at school yesterday, and the father of another student came in to speak to the class.  He was a scientist, and the kids were enthralled.  Later, after he left, his daughter was proudly talking about how famous her dad was, and went to show my son by searching on Google for her dad's name.  There were 241 hits, which is a quite respectable number, but my son, without thinking too hard, said, "Let's search for my dad".

Let's just say that the number was a whole lot higher, a whole heck of a lot higher.  My son didn't realize the numbers you rack up when you have an on-line blog and people link to it, and then every post of theirs gets linked to it, etc. etc.  He really didn't mean to make this girl feel bad, but it reminded me of the downside of acting like Google says anything about your importance or fame, or anything else.  It is just a search engine, folks.

Copyright © 2007 Genii Software Ltd.

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