last week

General

Somehow I managed to end up spending three hours doing Windows desktop support!! This is something I thought I'd escaped from a long time ago. There's just one special SEOSS customer who Tim still provides this for and hence w hile he's on holiday I get to as well. It's fairly common for Tim and I to need to jump into projects that we're less familiar with to cover each others holidays but (thankfully) re-discovering Windows is a very rare holiday cover requirement.

Windows, and it's settings, do not seem to have become any clearer or more easily settable since my last recollection of them!

On a brighter note, that particular day was improved by some really good phone calls with people discussing PaTMa and how they might be able to help promote it.

Technology

I managed to miss a link that helped my work on PostgreSQL optimization last week: importing CSV to PostGIS.

Apart from Windows, my other technology adventures this week mostly involved Python multiprocessing (yes, in Python 2) and getting re-acquainted with SQL Alchemy.

Competitor analysis

One of my most important, and long overdue, tasks has been to put together a detailed analysis of PaTMa's competitors. I've been collecting a list of competitors, while staying generally more aware of the main ones, but this is the first time I've methodically worked through the list and built a big spreadsheet comparing key features and costs.

The full list of competitors I've collected and compared against is quite long, however I was pleased to find that only a few of them are really direct competitors. Most provide a niche product that just competes with a single feature or two within PaTMa rather than the whole product. I was even more pleased that PaTMa has unique benefits over every one of the competitors.

The new item on my to do list is to write-up some comparisons for easy reference when I'm talking to people and perhaps even publish them too.

Holiday

We finished up the week with a long weekend that included a two day visit to Bletchley Park. They suggest an average visit is 5-6 hours; we spent two full days there and had to skip some bits!

A brilliant place to visit with lots of different displays and things to discover. Our children are now obsessed with (Morse) code and Bombe machines!

(This is also why this article is being published a day later than normal.)