CouchDB is a (relatively) new database option for development that focuses on documents, rather than generic relational systems like most databases do. I think the concept is appealing and support for things like automatic versioning and distributed processing and storage could mean a lot fewer headaches that trying to get a custom system going yourself. Also interesting is the JSON storage format, which would make this ideal to use in many asynchronous web applications as the data returned can be used straight away on the browser.

I haven’t had any cause to use this system yet but I’ll be sure to write a review when I do. Anyone else taken this for a spin?

OK, so I’ve made some comments about the Madman site in the past but lately I have been getting more and more upset by outages in the service. Right now that has really reached boiling point as I’ve been trying to get to the site for the last 7 hours. Read on for more ranting on the subject, along with some (hopefully) constructive criticism.

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Recently I’ve been doing some work on a desktop Java application and I decided to use Eclipse and my IDE. I hadn’t used it for a while (since I did my 4th year engineering project - almost 3 years ago now) and I’m loving all the features and how easy it makes some things.

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Well, I finally got off my arse and fixed the admin area for my blog. For the last couple weeks I haven’t been able to access it because of some interesting errors telling me that Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) … which I thought was odd seeing as I hadn’t changed anything recently and the fact that it failed to allocate 0.2% of the total available and complained of running out of memory. It turned out that my web host had (finally) upgraded to PHP 5.2 which doesn’t actually explain the errors but it makes me feel better than things randomly stopping working.

So I upped the memory limit for PHP to 16Mb and all is now well. I hope.

Recently Australia has started to see a kind of evolution of the way we are presented with television. By this I mean networks putting more effort (and money) into allowing us to see programs soon after they are aired in the US. Of course the marketing speak like “streamed direct from the US” sometimes makes you wonder how they can consider a week later to be “direct” but this is easy to forgive.

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Yes folks, my new PC is now up and running. Everything seems to have gone swimmingly hardware-wise. Today I got the final pieces of the system: a Winfast 8800GTS 640MB and a Ritmo “55-in-1″ card reader.

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