Having been with a new company long enough to have completed architecting a few projects I've started to look around to see where I have a lack of knowledge of a domain or a technology base.

Rather than sticking to a single technology base or domain its important to stretch your knowledge into a wider arena.

Sticking to a single type of technology breeds complacency and over familiarity, also how interesting is it day to day just going over the same information?

With that in mind I've been looking for a suitable tool to enable me to map my current skills to technology domains. In this way I'll have a bit of a better view of where any skills gaps lay. Previously I've used tools like Excel and Word, I've even put together relational databases to catalogue this kind of data. What I am after is something a bit more visual, that will show a view of a domain or technology spectrum (for example networks, comms, VOIP, etc) alongside a grade of knowledge. This could be represented as a colour scale or something else.

My initial thoughts are to use a Mind Map to try and do this, as I can create a tree style diagram that branches out into different domains easily, and I know I can colour each branch differently. If it works for me I plan on trying to roll it out to the team, then we can create a collaborative map as well.

Is this something you've ever done? If so what tools did you use? Did you end out with something that highlighted potential directions for you to explore?

Nobody likes spam communications, especially spam SMS messages. One of the things I was unaware of until recently was that there is a short code that you can forward spam texts on to.

I've had this info through from Vodafone but I've been lead to believe that it is in industry wide use.

Just forward your spam messages to 7726 (this spells out SPAM on your keypad) and your network will deal with them. Forwarding to this number is free, so it won't cost you anything. Everyone complains about spam, now we can collaboratively help reduce it, after all if we don't tell the mobile operators about it how do they know its spam?

I've spent a bit of time recently working on a flash based reporting website. The project is all pretty standard architecture for a flash website, but there has been a persistent issue about loading times and poor user experience.

After having a bit of digging around behind the scenes it appeared as though the flash SWF file was streaming a configuration XML file in the background. This isn't a great idea at the best of times but in this case the file was 147k lines long and weighed in at 22.5mb. So this accounted for a stack of loading time when the flash app loads up.

After downloading the XML file and browsing through it in Eclipse my first impression is that there was a ton of whitespace in it. After running a quick 'find and replace' on any double space characters (to avoid removing spaces in legitimate text strings) and re-saving the file was down to 3.2mb.

So let this be a warning to anyone loading up machine-to-machine text files. Squeeze them down, don't include whitespace, your Apps don't care about it, the file doesn't need to be human readable, all you are doing is using up network bandwidth.

I won't even get into the risks involved in allowing your config files to be downloaded by people here, that's a whole different issue!