Posts

Getting email No mail. In three whole days. Weird. I wonder if it’s Thanksgiving over in the States. Not even any football related banter. Is this thing even on ? Then I realised precisely why I was sitting alone in an island of blissful isolation, devoid of all email communications and staring at an Inbox in a perpetual state of ‘Zero’. I had forgotten to configure inbound email. When I was testing, I used mbsync to synchronise emails from my ISP which worked well (fast, reliable, well documented) with bi-directional sync between IMAP and my local Maildir....

Aka ‘DARK WEB HACKER COST ME $1600 SHOCK HORROR !’ After I set up my Jekyll site and uploaded the content to Amazon S3 using ‘s3website’, I remember thinking ‘I must re-read that section about securing the configuration file with AWS credentials in plain text’. If the source code of your website is publicly available, ensure that the s3website.yml file is in the list of ignored files. For git users this means that the file ....

I have used CVS and then SVN for version control. As I now use GIT for a couple of projects, I found this set of GIT tutorials very useful as they are well-written, use plenty of examples and outline where and how GIT differs from Subversion.

Although hosting on GitHub pages is an excellent option, I decided to move this blog to Amazon S3, mainly because I have used S3 before. Also GitHub pages only supports a limited set of Jekyll plugins and I wanted more flexibility to add any plugin and (potentially) run a different version of Jekyll. I also took the opportunity to switch the theme to the rather minimalistic but stylish Poole and installed the useful s3website utility to automatically synchronise the static site to Amazon S3....

Welcome…to the atrocity exhibition. Fittingly, this site is powered by Jekyll and Github pages, but the precise details will probably take a series of 1,739 posts.

‘Is she a werewolf ? ‘No’. ‘Does she have the ability to spontaneously transform into a fierce animal ?’ ‘No’. ‘Is she a robot ?’ ‘No’. ‘Is she a very early version of a robot that is running version 1.0.1 (alpha) of the software that meant she lost to that human-robot hybrid ?’ ‘No’ ‘Is she a normal human but just set 200 years in a post-apocalyptic world where water, fuel and sunlight are at a premium ?...

A lot of people write in and ask ‘Norman - whatever happened to that SIPP you started 10 years ago ? Has it produced enough to retire on ? Was it a lot of work ? Did it outperform the FTSE100 ?’ I took the ’long term buy and hold forever and ‘strategic ignorance’ ethos to its logical extreme and forgot about the SIPP completely. Once all the pension funds were transferred and a collection of high yielding UK shares purchased, I forgot about it....

‘Is this Grimm ?’ ‘No’ ‘Adventures of New Grimm ?’ ‘No’ ‘New adventures of Grimm ?’ ‘No’ ‘New: Adventures of New Grimm ?’ ‘Yes’ ‘Is this a repeat ?’ ‘No’

People often write in and ask ‘Norman - just what is this mysterious “Music For Sheep” playlist of which you speak ?’ ‘Music For Sheep’ is my favourite music playlist of all time. It has provided solace and hope during some pretty bleak times. The playlist is ironically named as a tribute to all the social music sharing services like Spotify and last.fm which encourage sharing of your favourite bands, music and playlists....

People often write in and ask ‘Is Oracle blogging dead ?’ Well, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the list of Oracle blogs I posted way back in 2007 and see what they’re up to. Life After Coffee - dead (last post May 2011). The pressure of the No. 1 slot proved too much. The Tom Kyte Blog - frequency much reduced but Tom’s a busy man. Rittman Mead - now a multi-user, shiny, corporate blog....