Software

I used to work for Ingres (in London) who were a fantastic company to work for. Amazingly, they are the only company I have ever worked for to use newsgroups for internal technical discussions and knowledge sharing instead of email aliases. I once read that processing an individual email costs a company 10 cents. In the early 90’s, Ingres was under commercial pressure from another large relational database vendor, Oracle. Instead of responding to this challenge, Ingres tended to ‘fiddle while Rome burned’, discuss the API naming convention by committee and stoutly defend the technical purity of page level locking (Oracle supported row level locking and capitalised heavily) from a lofty ivory tower....

Jeff Moss' article about the commercial and free versions of Toad and the incredibly tenacious, persistent breed of salesperson bred by Quest Software got me thinking about the Oracle DBA tools I use. People SQL*Plus Statspack putty People are important because people have developed the application, people are using the application, people are managing the servers, people are managing the database and intelligent people have configured that very expensive storage array....

Dear Bill I live in London (near England) and would like to buy Microsoft Money and Microsoft Office. My preferred method of obtaining the goods would be to download these programs from your Web site and pay using a credit card. A small discount to reflect the reduced administration costs, packaging and margin taken by the retailer would be nice but not essential. However, when I attempt to buy these Microsoft products in the UK, I am redirected to third party Web sites (Amazon, Dabs, PC World etc) or I can delay the purchasing decision by downloading a 60 day trial version....

When I started this blog, I simply composed the posts in the Blogger editor which was adequate. Until one day, when I lost the complete text of a draft posting due to finger trouble. As I laboriously re-typed my masterpiece, I wished I had a blog editor with the infinite undo, auto-save and all the other features of Emacs. However, composing the drafts in the Blogger editor was useful as I could edit drafts from anywhere and then publish the blog very easily....

After briefly evaluating Furl, del.icio.us and Blinklist, I finally decided to ditch Furl and spurn the advances of del.ico.us in favour of Blinklist as my preferred one stop shop for all my social bookmarking needs. Furl was my first experience of ‘social bookmarking’ but, as I became more comfortable with the idea of tagging Web pages, I found the Furl interface is simply horrible. There are simply too many key clicks required to add a single tag let alone two !...

I used to use Yahoo Bookmarks which maintains a list of Web sites that I could access from any computer. This was a nice idea but I found I didn’t use (or maintain) the bookmarks regularly and the links gradually fell into a state of disrepair. For my most frequently accessed Web sites, I would simply type the start of the address into the browser and simply let auto-complete do its work which was quicker....

Well I was finally forced to join the masses and download Firefox and ditch Internet Explorer. Yes - my nickname is ‘Johnny Come Lately’. I had been aware of the Firefox browser for a while but my previous experience was with a very early version of Mozilla that had a few problems with a couple of the Web sites I was using at the time. The final straw came that pushed me over the edge was when my children downloaded some invasive spyware that commandeered the Web browser and implanted a ‘Web Search’ toolbar....