Latest Entries »

A small medical tip – Leg weakness without pain

Filed Under: Uncategorized by Clint Turner — Leave a comment
February 7, 2015

I’m writing this in the hope that someone googling symptoms will get a hit and my experience will be useful.

If you find one of your legs is dragging a bit and seems weak but you aren’t in pain you should consider getting an MRI or see a good physio. I just had 3 months of various issues with my left leg without any pain before consulting with a doctor. He suggested I suspend cardio because he suspected muscle damage in the leg and subsequently  I did a double gym session hitting my back. The result was that I ended up with classic Sciatic pain:  sharp, shooting pains in my leg that left me unable to stand at all for around 24 hours and substantial pain and problems sitting more than half an hour in the following weeks.

Fortunately the next Doctor I saw was on the ball and quickly ordered an MRI. The upshot is that within one month of seeing the second doctor I went from no diagnosis at all to having just had surgery because I had a herniated disc. The surgery went very smoothly and the recovery has been relatively pain free.

The moral of story, however, is to get yourself seen to as quickly as possible if  your case matches mine as the weakness can be permanent after more than a few weeks of nerve compression. Only time will tell what the situation is for me and what functionality I will have in the long term.

If you can’t get an MRI try visiting a physio as mine diagnosed the problem correctly prior to seeing the MRI results. He did the one test which the doctor who suspected muscle damage didn’t try: he got me to lift myself on each foot. I could lift myself tens of times on my right foot but couldn’t lift myself even a single time on my left foot. He also determined I couldn’t feel anything on parts of my left foot. Your case might be different so see somebody with appropriate medical training ASAP.

Comment

When is a Title not a Title?

Filed Under: Sharepoint, Technology by Clint Turner — Leave a comment
October 10, 2013

Sharepoint or, as a previous boss would have called it, “bloody Sharepoint” has a powerful search service that can index not only Sharepoint documents and sites but also external content. Unfortunately the flexibility of the service breeds considerable complexity and the out-of-the-box behaviour leaves a little to be desired.

Our most recent issue was that we had the standard definition of the ‘Title’ managed property which has the crawled property ‘ows_Title’ as the highest priority. This, you would think, would mean that the the Title entered on the List Item for the a document via the Edit Properties form would be the title for each document in search results. You would be wrong.

It turns out that there is a feature called ‘Optimistic Title Override’ that tries to guess a better title based on the content of the first page of the document (such as a bold, large line of text on page 1). Similar features override the Author (CreatedBy) and LastModifiedTime.

In Sharepoint 2010 these features can be disabled via the registry. In 2013 they can’t be disabled – thankfully we are running 2010 at the moment!

Comment

Top heavy will topple over

Filed Under: Sharepoint, Technology by Clint Turner — Leave a comment
April 24, 2013

We’ve learnt a lot of lessons during the implementation of our Sharepoint project. The number one lesson to take home is this: Sharepoint can’t handle a large number of lists (Document Libraries) in a single site.

We tried a structure with 20000+ libraries in site and, while accessing each of the libaries was fine, it was impossible to enumerate the lists in Sharepoint designer and deploying content type changes took an eternity. Our new structure has 20 libraries each containing 1000 folders (Document sets). None of the previous problems exist.

The sharepoint limitations documentation talks about number of items in a list and various other limitations but never mentions any practical limitation on the number of lists per site… so let this be a warning: a top heavy design will topple over.

Comment

Symbols matter

Filed Under: Gay, Politics by Clint Turner — Leave a comment
January 24, 2013

Do symbols matter? According to the West Wing they do:

“Are we gonna stand for something, or just hang around, change the sheets for the President’s hospital bed?” asks Toby. “Should we make our stand fighting a symbol?” ponders C.J. “Yes, we should fight it! Fight the symbol, yes. Symbols matter. If they didn’t, why would you care what they say about you on the internet?” Toby replies.

This week President Obama became the first president to argue for marriage equality and, I believe, to mention gay rights in an inauguration speech. His speech is largely symbolic, for I understand that he has no real power to implement a change himself. Some would say his speech is therefore irrelevant but I’m with Toby: the symbols matter. Millions of men and women have heard their leader tell them that they are created equal.

Halfway across the globe in Australia we are stuck with a government whose policy is a ‘conscience vote’ and an opposition whose policy is… well, opposition. Neither the Prime Minister or Opposition leader supports marriage equality. A vote to amend the marriage act failed last year.

Many suspect the the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has little genuine interest in preventing marriage equality and has instead chosen it as one of the areas to differentiate her government from the ‘radical’ left wing Greens. If that is the case, she is playing political positioning with peoples hearts, hopes and dreams.

Such as strategy is not only heartless, it is also useless. She will never out-right the right-wing opposition leader Tony Abbott and you only have to look at the so-called ‘Boat people’ policies to realise this is so.

So what should she do? Fight for the symbol: Marriage for same-sex couples may be barely any different to existing civil union arrangements – but symbols matter and equal means equal. As as aside, check out Campbell Newman’s Queensland to see how  Civil unions are working out for same-sex couples in that jurisdiction. Julia Gillard should make a symbolic stand even if it she has no power to directly change the law. It would make a difference to those young people who feel they have no hope to see their government standing with them.  She could also recongise that those who care about keeping the traditional definition of marriage aren’t likely to vote for her anyway.

What will she do? I suspect she will spend the dying days of her government changing the bed sheets.

 

Comment

The kitchen is for cooking

Filed Under: Sharepoint, Technology by Clint Turner — Leave a comment
January 10, 2013

In trying a “bring the kitchen sink” approach to market, Sharepoint ends up almost failing to recognise that the kitchen is for cooking. My workplace has been implementing a relatively complex solution that involves the creation of more than 20000 document libraries each containing up to 10000 documents. As such, we have constantly been challenged by the inherit limitations in the capabilities of Sharepoint to handle large lists and large numbers of list.

You might rightly ask “why not just change the solution design to nicely fit the Sharepoint limitations”? True, that would be a reasonable suggestion if not for part of the whole Sharepoint rationale being a flexible system. My issue is that many of these limitations seem to stem from the underlying schema and could easily be overcome if Microsoft dedicated resources to ‘fix’ (IMHO) the schema.

Sharepoint stores every list in the AllLists table of the content database and all ListItems (Documents etc) in the AllUserData table. The AllUserData table has a fixed number of varchar, integer, and other fields and jams each ListItem into one of more of these rows. It’s a highly inefficient design but highly flexible.

The downside of the design is that all our data for 20000+ lists and 650000+ documents are in two tables. One of the tables is littered with unrequired columns and our data is totally inaccessible using SQL due to the convoluted schema. So what could be done? Microsoft could take a CRM-like approach and instead create a new ‘ContentTypeData’ table for each content type with columns that actually match the content type schema.

Advantages: No more index tables (use SQL Server indexing), Tables/Views for use with SSRS that can be directly queried (instead of needing to create some XML service or a data warehouse to get data to SSRS)

Disadvantages: Changing the underlying data structure need not impact the Object model at all, so aside from requiring a large upgrade process when the schema changes, I can’t see any real disadvantages. Can you?

Tags:
Comment

Disgustation in New York

Filed Under: Travel by Clint Turner — Leave a comment
January 10, 2013

IMG_0540Forget the degustation sampler if you are traveling to New York and opt for the disgustation menu instead. We sample some fine meals in new york including Victor’s Cafe and Patsy’s but nothing compared to the fine dining at the Trailer Park lounge.

If you find yourself in the city that never sleeps are are over expensive meals heading down to the Trailer Park for some southern hospitality. The shop is adorned with Dolly Parton, Elvis and Tammy Fae Bakker memorabilia and the staff talk and dress exactly how you’d expect from the name.

The cuisine is genuine trailer trash: mac and cheese, tatter tots, moon pies and the like with a fine selection of diabolical cocktails.I recommend ‘Jim Bob’s IQ’ if you are sampling from the cocktail menu as it comes with a guarantee to leave you with less IQ points than Jim Bob and it doesn’t disappoint.

 

 

 

 

Comment