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Working On Quick Changing Tasks
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Loading ...Lately the amount of post has dropped a bit, as you may have noticed. Part of that is due to the hectics at work. Nothing bad just a lot of meetings and late nights. So today just a quickie about how flexibility is good in programming, but can also cause increase stress.
In a normal week I try to work on a few tasks, prioritized by day and then further as the day begins. This way I sorta know what’s going to happen in the week. Unfortunately business live is never that simple! At the start of the week our payment provider had downtime. So I was kindly asked (instructed) by the management to calculate our loses during that time. No problem, except it took me about half a day. There goes the planning for that day!
On Tuesday I had made plans to do some bug fixing in one of my projects, needs to happen on occasion. But as usual I got a question related to my database responsibilities on modifying a table. To keep a long story short it added another high priority task to my list, which needed immediate investigation! Another day down the drain in my scheduled tasks.
For Wednesday and Thursday I had meetings with a guest from one of the other branches of our company. Which was a good change from the hectic of the week up to that point. Just like the first few days of the week, even more problems. One of the tests we had started began returning impossible results which had to be explained. Another half day gone. And on top of that today our payment provider experienced even more down time. So my Friday is probably gone as well.
Ah well at least we’re going to celebrate carnaval tomorrow, that will bring some relief.
XML, The Future For Standardization or The Problem
As developers of software you have a few chooses to store information. In database format, be it in a actual database like MySQL or MS SQL or an own created text format. This is all fine and will work, as it has for ages. But when you have to share information with other applications it starts to form problems. That’s were many people say XML comes in to play.
But does it really. I mean sure it can help you to share information between the various programs. That’s cool and exactly what it was made for. But when you read the papers surrounding XML you also find there are no rules that help you define how the content should look.
Sure you have rules stating you must close tags (those things starting with <). And the words are case sensitive. But who is to know what the tags stand for. If I were to email you the XML output of a program, would you then now what it’s content meant? Would you be able to track down an application that understands it?
I think XML is a great step in making information more readable and accessible, but there should be some standard notations for the various applications. Like one standard for text editors and one fixed standard for financial programs. Otherwise XML isn’t going to help us at all. (Note that the first steps are taken with the OpenDocumen Format)
