snelson.org.uk/john

Seems a long time since I wrote anything on here. I have a good excuse...

We are expecting another baby! Hurray! I have been feeling pretty awful though, so have just been doing the jobs that really need doing. Hence no blogging.

Anyway, we are expecting this new arrival in May, just after my birthday. I'm now 18 weeks pregnant, (4 1/2 months). We've heard the heart beat and I'm starting to feel a few flutters in my belly! We are off for our scan next week, so hope to post up some nice picture then.

Emy's still being fantastic. She is just recovering from about a month of illness, all started by a tummy bug. She's walking and very chatty. You can now see her beautiful red hair too as it's grown longer. She continues to love playing with cardboard boxes and beer bottles! (for the recycling) I love being her mum!

DB XML has been posted to Cafe con Leche.

Elliotte, please be my guest and try out the project. One of the great things about being a developer on the Berkeley DB projects is being able to work closely with our users, so it would be great to find out what you think.

The program I'm working on at Oracle has just had another release.

The new version includes a SAX and StAX like (push and pull) streaming XML events API, and significantly faster performance with node indexing.

Along with this release, we've also released a new library called XQilla. This is a combination of our previous XQuery library and Decisionsoft's Pathan library, which removes duplicate code and significantly moves the project forward.

Both projects implement the latest W3C Proposed Recommendation for XQuery and XPath 2.0.

While reading Jeremy Smith's blog, I found an interesting study on the link between people who prefer evening time and creativity. That explains a lot ;-).

I think that Jeremy has an interesting point about "alone time", but I don't think that can be all there is to it.

Also interesting is that the article talks about genetic factors in determining which end of the day you prefer. I've always wondered why any attempts I make to adjust my waking hours is short lived at best.