Posts

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. This is a novelty for 12 minutes but, ultimately a bit irrelevant because, as I remarked way back in 2006: ...

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. Oracle Scratchpad - Jonathan Lewis is still going strong. Eddie Awad …so is Eddie. Doug Burns - Our favourite Scotsman is still active and contemplating a migration away from Serendipity. Kevin Closson - occasional poster. David Aldridge - as above (when something annoys him). Tim Hall - still travelling the world, presenting, reading books and watching weird films. Jeff Hunter - resting (inactive since May 2012). Peter Scott - alive and well blogging under the Rittman Mead umbrella. Andrew Clarke - sporadic flurries of activity from Tooting. Chris Foot - not known at this address. William Robertson - still manages to exclaim ‘WTF?!’ once a year. Howard Rogers - still blogging from Down Under. Robert Vollman - resting (since August 2012). Andy Campbell - hijacked by spammers. Either that or he really is pimping satellite TV systems and payday loans. Moans Norgaard - pining for the fjords (since July 2010). Laurent Schneider - actively blogging about Oracle. Lisa Dobson - went to the trouble of getting her own domain and then neglected it (since Sept 2011). No longer a ’newbie’. Jeff Moss - pimping vacations in Florida. Beth - Data Geek Gal has been quiet on data quality (since Oct 2012). Steve Karam - the alchemist is busy mixing up strange concoctions involving Hadoop, Hue, Oozie and occasionally Oracle. Eric Emrick - nothing since March 2009. Alex Gorbachev - busy growing Pythian Corp. Robert Baillie - blogging about Agile, Extreme and project management after a 3 year lull. Gary Myers - moved house (still in Oz) but helpfully remembered the redirect. Nuno Souto - still blogging from Sydney. Daniel Fink - The Optimal DBA blog has been dropped with constraints cascaded - which is suboptimal. Ed Whalen - wrote a popular book in 2011, got rich on the proceeds and retired in the Caribbean.

Saturday 7 September was non-league day. There were no Premiership fixtures and Kingstonian FC had a number of offers to attract football supporters down to Kingsmeadow (half price admission for any season ticket holder). I had attended Kingstonian’s opening home league fixture and been pretty impressed by the new players recruited by Alan Dowse and the quality of the play in a 3-0 victory over Enfield Town so, on a sunny afternoon, I paid my second visit of the season to watch the K’s. ...

The Arundel House Hotel is a decent, clean, tidy and reasonably priced hotel in Cambridge. The hotel is ideally located adjacent to Jesus Green so you can easily walk into Cambridge for sight-seeing. In addition, it has a large car park which is free to residents. However, one unfortunate incident at breakfast means that I will probably never return there or honestly be able to unreservedly recommend it. I am grabbing some fruit and yoghurt and returning to our table in the light and airy conservatory. As I pass the ‘Please wait here to be seated’ sign, I am surprised to see Norma standing there, waiting to be seated as she already has a seat allocated. With me. In the conservatory. Was it something I said ? ...

Over the weekend, I was helping Norman Junior III with a C programming exercise (a wordsearch puzzle). I had rather hoped purchasing him the original and definitive text ‘Kernighan and Ritchie (Second Edition)’ would enable him to become a C wizard without any further intervention from me but no. In a flash of inspiration, I had introduced some symbolic constants for each of the eight possible directions. When I asked him - ‘Can you remember how to specify a constant in C ?’, he replied ‘Oh yeah - I know, I remember. Hashtag define’. ...

I am currently hosting this site on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). For the first 12 months I am eligible for the Free Usage Tier pricing. The Free Tier isn’t completely free but includes ‘5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests’. Initially, I had to test, review and deploy the entire site a few times before I got things right and Google’s crawler was busy re-indexing the site so I wasn’t wholly surprised when September’s bill was a measly 15 cents. ...

One of the main advantages of a statically generated blog (like Octopress) over a blogging platform that uses a database (WordPress, Drupal) is performance. My humble blog doesn’t get enough traffic for performance to be a consideration and I thought I wouldn’t be able to discern any improvement. This graph is from Google Webmaster Tools. Can you guess when the blog migration from Drupal to Octopress was done ? Yes - that’s right - the middle of September (17th to be precise). ...

Diamond Geezer recently posted his annual analysis of how many blogrolls he appears in. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the number is steadily declining and he finds it harder to find new blogs to add to his list. I thought it might be interesting to look at the blogging platforms used by the 98 blogs listed. Here are the results: Blogger 60 WordPress.com 11 WordPress.org 11 Typepad 4 MovableType 3 Livejournal 2 Canalblog 1 Drupal 1 ExpressionEngine 1 Nucleus CMS 1 Serendipity 1 Guardian (journo) 1 Custom 1 The dominance of Blogger/Blogspot didn’t surprise me that much. I have noticed before that it’s very popular amongst UK bloggers; particularly veteran bloggers who maybe had less choice available that the plethora of options available today. ...

Frustrated at the inability of Google to provide a simple sync process that works for disparate versions of Chrome and Chromium browsers, I decided to adopt a pragmatic approach, return to Victorian values and go back to using a Web based bookmarks service. Way back, in 2005, I evaluated three different bookmarking services and dismissed Delicious, mainly on the grounds of the user interface design of the home page which, according to me, ’looks like an undergraduate knocked it up during a lunch hour’. This was a little rich from someone with no design experience whatsoever but still. ...

My site has 966 posts and 70 categories. By default, Octopress re-generates the entire site - every single post, all the category pages, the archive pages On my Acer Aspire One (Intel Atom 1.66GHz) netbook, the regeneration takes around 10 minutes. There are a couple of options that can significantly reduce this time and make the write/preview/edit iterative process more tolerable. Firstly, you can use ‘rake isolate’ to move all other posts into a ‘stash’ directory and simply process the newly created post. ...