Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 118 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Snippet: Microsoft Word Maximum File Size

September 6, 2003

*snippet* I’ve just tried loading a 2Gb file into Microsoft Office 2000 Word (thinking that as Word supports “Virtual Memory” at al, it’ll be able to cope with the fact I’ve only got half a gig of RAM). It chugs along for a number of minutes loading the file and then pops up:

Word cannot open this file because it is larger than 32 Megabytes in size.

I never even knew Word had a maximum file size!. But what really peeved me was the fact the Microsoft programmers didn’t implement a very small routine to check the file size before even attempting to open a file – it’s not like it’s a difficult thing to do…

Snippet: Groan… Lots of Data :(

September 5, 2003

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*snippet* I’m currently in the process of rebuilding large sections of my website(s) and need to import a substantial amount of data into the new content management system. By “substantial amount” we’re talking around 2Gb of data(!). However, the data seems very very slightly corrupted (around a quarter of a record every 1million entries) so I have to run another script to correct the corruption and then rerun the parser utility. And I’ll tell you this, even on a 2.4Ghz machine, parsing 2Gb of data takes a looong time. Especially when it fails and you’ve got to restart from scratch.

Of course, once it’s parsed, I’ve then got to import it all into a MySQL database (I’m having it write the SQL statements instead of directly importing it for speed reasons), and then index it (which will take ages: believe me, once you start hitting the half-a-million row point onwards on MySQL it begins to crawl) and then link all the data together and then export it into a suitable format: no way am I going to bog down my server by having it make around 50 database requests per page!

Fingers crossed that I’ll have it all parsed by Sunday…

(That’s why there haven’t been that many blog entries: my machine begins to crawl whilst parsing – and it’s just a command line parsing system anyway: no GUI to slow it down).

Fun: Gender Genie

September 2, 2003

Guess That Movie: LXX

September 1, 2003

11 Comments

Guess That Movie 70 Well, while I continue to clear my holiday email backlog (down to 350 emails now – the most are either spam, automatic notifications which just require a courtesy glance, or are emails I’ve now dealt with), I’ll let you concentrate on the Guess That Movie competition round 70!

We had quite a large number of entries for Guess That Movie 69 and I’ll just like to welcome new contestants “Jennifer Cunningham”, “Lanre”, “Fluffy“, and “Jurgen” who all guessed correctly at the film The Hollow Man – but were also beaten to the first place by another new contestant – “Kevin” (Kevin Bacon perchance? 😉 ) – let’s see how many return to try and get the prizes.

For those of you who are new, read on for the details of the competition and the prizes you could win – otherwise, just make your guess by leaving a comment with your name (or alias), email address (real one please: only I can see them anyway and I hate spam), web site address (totally optional) and the name of the movie you are guessing at.

Snippet: Back!

August 31, 2003

2 Comments

Well, I’m back from vacation/holiday and I’ll have a number of blog entries to make to reflect this (I’ve been keeping a ‘mini-diary’ which I’ll have to type up shortly), but first of all I’ve got 33,973 “personal” emails to deal with and 68 “work” emails…

34,000 emails a week? *sob* Of course, once MailWasher has worked it’s magic and hopefully cleared the spam, I should have less than a thousand left – but I think it’s going to take a while just to check them!