I was woken in the small hours of Sunday by my youngest. She'd had a Doctor Who inspired nightmare. Some things never change. If only there was room behind my sofa to hide behind.

We are delaying a software upgrade this evening 'cos Andy Murray is playing at Wimbledon. Bizarre.

I was well aware that Adrian Holovaty is a very big name in the Python world. He's one of the two original developers of Django (my personal favorite web-app development framework) about which he's written the book. He's since used it to power some very cool mashups; chicagocrime.org and everyblock.com, amongst others.

What I didn't know is that he's also well known and regarded by forward-looking journalists. Emily Bell's introduction to his talk at the Guardian set me straight.

Adrian's talk was inspiring, both to the few techies in attendance and to most of the journalists, who made up the bulk of the audience. His central idea is that we should ensure that the information that the journalists have collected is stored in a structured way wherever possible. It's hard, skilled work gathering that valuable information, but full use is not being made of it. If it were stored in a structured fashion (rather than just in the text of a story; in a "blob" as Adrian put it) it could be made use of in many different ways.

A great example of this is Faces of the Fallen. The information here is gathered by the journalists, but it can be explored in many different ways; by age, birthplace, all sorts of things.

Another interesting strand to Adrian's talk was the automated collection of data. The Washington Post runs a congressional voting record site, almost all the data for which is collected automatically. everyblock.com is another example of this kind of thing.

Explorability is crucial. Think how often you get stuck in the Wikipedia, 'cos there are just so many interesting links to follow. You go in to read one article, and find yourself with half a dozen tabs open all containing apparently unrelated corners of the 'pedia that you've stumbled upon, all of which you want to read. Don't you want your site to be like that?

Jemima Kiss has written up Adrian's talk better than I ever could here: Future of Journalism: Adrian Holovaty's vision for data-friendly journalists. Well, she is a pro.

Then, after work, Adrian, Julia and I headed off to Le QuecumBar for some disappointingly inauthentic Gypsy Jazz.

Last week was mayhem. I don't think I've ever been so busy, and I've not really caught up on my sleep even now. I was far to busy to blog about it at the time, and now my boss Julia has beaten me to it: Better late than never.

Her own blog at the Guardian; I'm so envious. ;-)

A couple of interesting things came up. The third party supplier of our comments system uses a non-relational data store, so I now have first hand experience of the problems that can be encountered. I'm not impressed. To my original list of capability gaps that going non-relational gives you I'd now add one more point; ad-hoc data fixing. We were able to update our side of the data as and when needed, which proved vital.

For example, one new but crucial date field had been missed out of the migration process, and so hadn't been populated properly. We were able to populate it with a new value calculated from a couple of other date fields in a matter of minutes, on tens of thousands of articles. I love the smell of SQL in the morning.

On the other hand, where a date value had been populated incorrectly on the non-relation data store, we had no choice but to do a complete new import, which took 24 hours. Sigh. Hence the delay.

Another problem we discovered on the night was a bug that was causing IE to die. Really die. It turned out that the bug had already been fixed, but that the fix hadn't been back-ported to the release that we were launching on. We needed a very last minute merge and deploy, so I got to demonstrate the speed and usability advantage of the Subversion command line interface in the hands of someone who has the hang of it. Marvelous.

Which is the best band in the world? What a stupid question. Naturally it's Radiohead.

This is of course a matter of opinion; you can share my opinion and be right, or disagree with it and be wrong.