December 2004 - Posts
If you are looking for Irish people missing in Thailand, let me know I will forward your request to the right person here
Even if a lot of shops or hotels are seriously damaged, life is back again in Kata, Phuket island.
My father in law, like many Irish men, is not a great swimmer, and the recent events have now stop him to approach any pool or sea.
My mother in law, Anita Whooley, who follow the events here for Ireland, was with the Irish ambassador in Krabi yesterday. The situation there is very serious and she had to see a lot of body bags.
I helped yesterday cleaning around a resort, and we had to stop quickly after one of the guy on my left discovered a body, under some debris. Hard and shocking, when you are not used to that.
Anyway as I said in this post title, life is back again, I was today enjoying my first swim with my wife in the Hilton pool since the events, and as many here, we will be at the beach tomorrow.
My thoughts are also for Leo, still looking for his wife, and for Barry Murphy, having his girlfriend missing, and there to help other tracing their relatives.
First thanks to everybody for your warming comments. Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to help people in hospitals.
It's a difficult job to comfort people who are such in shock, surely when you are not a professional on the matter. Lot of stories to account for, some with happy endings, but most of the time unhappy news.
I think it's a terrible thing to have no knowledge about a missing relative. I spent some hours with Leo, from Belgium. He is absolutly sure his wife is still alive, he swear he saw her in an hotel room close to him. But today we still have no news from her. An Irish family has also been reunited after being separated fro hours, fearing the worst for each other. A Dutch old man living in Australia, escaped from his flooded room, but sadly has to let his wife drowned in the room. They were married for 33 years.
It seems also this morning that a lot of Europeans are missing, and probably more than you can hear on television. A lot of news have to come from the remote island around Phuket and this doesn't seems to be good news.
The life here anyway continue, and only the beaches showed the magnitude of the destruction.
My wife is actually at the City hall in Phuket, to keep a desk information for the missing Irish people, and I will join her later on. Hundreds of Irish are still missing.
I heard also that in north west of Phuket island, close to a national park, a lot of bodies are still there on th ground, eventually hanging in the trees.
Of course, I also give my sympathy for the locals, most of the dead being fishermen.
Just a hello from Phuket in Thailand, exactly in Kata at the south of the Island. I am sure you heard about the disaster in Indonesia.
I am here on holidays with my wife enjoying the Christmas festivities in a very hot weather, and this now to spoil a very good vacations. :-(
We were all lucky to not be there on the beach at the moment of the tsunami. Usually we like to go early on the beach enjoying a cooler sea. Strangely my wife and I woke up late yesterday and where we live, when we get up around 9:30, we saw a lot of Thai people coming running from the beach. This is how we knew something wrong was happening.
Later on we went down to the beach and believe me, the paradise has been changed to hell. We know also for sure that the official figures underestimate the number of casualtiesa, if you think about all the fishermen.
If you think that Phuket live and breathe from the tourism, this is really a bad thing for Thailand.
Anyway today life is going on, we are trying to help locals, especially the shopkeepers we knows. My condoleances to all the families who suffer from this event.
Kata Club Med The beach
Click on each image to see the real size
I attended yesterday a webcast about Full Text Search in SQL 2005. Lord, things are moving pretty well for FTS.
View as a poor child in SQL 2000, now finally Microsoft has realized that it could be a great tool for the next SQL generation.
Some stats : Indexing 20 Million rows in Sql 2000 14 days, the same with FTS 2005 -- > 10 hours !
Well I still have to find a database of this dimension to check by myself, but pretty impressive. The secret behind is a better batch indexing process.
What I like is the new Thesaurus feature. You can now search for 'car' and get the results you have with 'automobile'. The question I have is at the moment I don't see any fully populated Thesaurus by default installed. Maybe a third-party can create one ready to use.
Backup and restore are possible now. Same for deployment detaching-attaching a database.
What I dislike is still the Rank. The speaker yesterday was not really convincing on the meaning of the Rank. What many want is a clear score value we can transform as a percentage for example. Any ideas on how to do this with the current FTS 2000?
Finally I expect some cool book about FTS 2005. It will be natural now that FTS is back as a full SQL entity.
Codus is a comprehensive code generation tool for object-relational mapping. It takes an existing database and automatically generates all of the code for updating, deleting, inserting and selecting records. In addition, it creates web services for distributed programming, strongly-typed collections, and a full set of unit tests.
The tool is available as a Beta version for the moment here
Matthew Cosier has working on an API to stream and interpret ATOM 3 and RSS 2 feeds.
You can easily build an aggregator from this becuase you can read multiple feeds in one time before analysing them.
Should be released soon but I also recommend Marcus's tool B.ag, used on Developers.ie for the blogs.
Interesting to see that web aggregators are back in force, instead of using a proprietary application.
Clare and Rob were again the stars yesterday for the MSDN party event in the Hilton. 50 attendees, and I hope 50 new INDA members :-)
Robert Burke is an excellent speaker and I am going to ask him to speak at a session for our user group Ireland .Net Developers Alliance.
And he kept a very nice surprise at the end when one of his slides about communities was with a big mention to Developers.ie and a screen grab of the site. Thanks again for that :-)
I should have the slides today and they will be on the site
It's funny to see through the blogs if people are still recovering from the night before. 10AM now and no sign of blogging from the two Microsoft chaps :-)
The Barge was the place to be yesterday and we share an excellent night with some really mad Slovenians developers. I don't know if it's because they're coming from a cold country but they really like Jameson !
I am also pleased to have them also as a team for the next CodeParty in January.
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