There are more signs, warnings, instructions and speed limits in Richmond Park than the nearby South Circular.

The Parks Police really are destroying the park for all those who simply want to enjoy it.

Preloadr is an interesting, free utility that allows seamless manipulation of Flickr photos.

The standard features (crop, resize, flip, rotate, sharpen, brightness) are there but red eye removal is absent which seems a curious, but important, omission.

The Killers are in the UK to promote Sams Town and their new facial hair. The band made an appearance on Jonathan Ross show playing the single 'When You Were Young' and 'All These Things I've Done'. Radio 1 also had a 2 hour feature including interviews and a concert from Blackpool Empress Ballroom recorded on Friday 8 September. Irritatingly, the BBC haven't grasped podcasts yet and the concert includes some of the following songs but not necessarily in this order. The concert starts at 1 hr 20 min.

• Sam's Town
• Enterlude
• When You Were Young
• Somebody Told Me
• Smile Like You Mean It
• Bones
• Bling
• Read My Mind
• Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine
• Midnight Show
• All These Things
• Uncle Johnny
• My List
• Mr. Brightside

Judy Rose has an interesting article on the importance of writing style and Paul Stamatiou also has some excellent tips on structuring blog articles.

My writing style has many flaws. At work, I have a irritating tendency to use 'padding' words that are completely worthless, superfluous and unnecessary. For example, 'It was noted that...'.

This trait was first brought to my attention by the ruthless peer QA review process which helped to reduce my deliverable documents from 78 pages to a more reasonable 12.

In my blog, I have also noticed that I tend to overuse the word 'So'.

So, I am working hard with my English teacher to eradicate these flaws but please remember that old habits die hard.

Last night the book club met again after the summer recess. Rosemary Barnstormworth suggested an interesting tome titled 'Margrave of the Marshes'.

This is John Peel's partly completed autobiography which was completed by his family after his untimely death. I really think I am going to enjoy this one. For example, in the foreword, his children describe a list of potential titles

• How's Your Flow ?
• Wet Echo
• Flying Cream Shoes
• Goatman Codds
• If He Ever Hits Puberty
• Buckskins and Buggery
• The Wotters Won The Race
• A History of the Iodine Trade 1847-1902
• An ABC of High-Jumping
• The Questing of Stempel Garamond: How He Overcame The Gelks and Punished The Dwellers with the Well
• Jesus Wasn't Made of Fish

I have already laughed out loud more then once although I find some of the sentences long and rambling. Then it struck me. This was exactly how John Peel was. You can almost hear him saying the words.

Sadly, though, this is one talking book that will never be made.

I just changed my Thunderbird setup to move all messages from the IMAP server to local folders and then apply the various filters locally as opposed to applying filters on the server. This means that all messages are visible even when disconnected so I will be able to do email housekeeping in airport lounges.

I tested each new message filter in turn and everything worked fine. Unfortunately I discovered that, contrary to the documentation, Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 does not appear to automatically apply all filters to new messages in 'Local Folders-Inbox'. Sigh.

Then I was cheered up to discover this humble blog is the 'Featured Blog' for Siebel on WordPress.com.

Well when I say 'Featured', maybe the only blog mentioning 'Siebel' on WordPress would be closer to the truth.

My life is complete. Almost.

Bottom up

Identify resource intensive SQL statements using Statspack (ADDM, custom scripts, Spotlight). Siebel is a black box that pumps out lengthy, complicated SQL statements with lots of (outer) joins. Level 7 snapshots are useful as 'sprepsql' may be used to reveal the full query text which is often tantalisingly truncated in the summary reports. In addition, the associated query plan for any statement can retrospectively dumped.

The DBA can determine which queries are executed and how many times. There is no point tuning a query that is only executed monthly whereas shaving fractions of a second from a fundamental query executed thousands of times may prove more worthwhile.

The disadvantages of this approach are that the bind variables and username who issued the query are not available which may be important. Secondly, it is not obvious which Siebel screen is associated with the problematic SQL statement(s).

Middle out

Increase Object Manager logging to dump the SQL statements together with timing information for prepare, fetch and execute. Search the log files for any SQL taking more than one second. The advantage here is that the username for the session. the sequence of screens visited and all bind variables are included so it is easier to reproduce in SQL*Plus.

Patterns of usage and resource intensive queries should start to appear. You may even identify groups of users (by job role or geographic location) who have different types of problems.

Top down

A little radical for most DBA's (developers, integrators and highly paid consultants for that matter). Seek out the users, sit down and talk with them.

Watch how they actually use the application for 30 minutes. This is often most enlightening. You witness first hand how users actually use the system. Sometimes it turns out that they are not always using the application efficiently (for various reasons).

You can see the typical business scenarios, the frequently used views (tables), the type of searches users specify, what they like, what they hate, what is fast, what is slow. In fact, your visit may well end up lasting a lot more than 30 minutes.

Or you may need a combination of all three.

1. Steve Irwin - You had a passion for wildlife that truly brought it alive.
2. Andre Agassi - You sobbed uncontrollably on a tennis court.

Back in the old days, things were very simple. We had a camera. We took photographs. We sent the prints away to BonusPrint. We discarded mistakes. We filed the photos in albums. We ordered duplicates for grandparents. Best of all, my involvement in the whole process was negligible.

Then some idiot invented the digital camera. We still took photos but the whole issue of printing became more complicated. You could be adventurous and attempt to print on your inkjet printer at home. This would result in ludicrously sized and distorted A4 images, drenched in ink, that gave small children nightmares.

Alternatively, you could hoard all your photos on your PC and proudly drag dinner guests and relatives into your study to hunch over your computer for 3 hours to admire your holiday snaps from Corfu. You would forget to serve dinner (which was burnt in any case) or get drinks for anyone.

Any request from Grandma for an actual glossy print would be dismissively rejected with 'Oh no. What do you need that for ? It's so much easier to look at them on my PC.' Easier for you maybe but not for Grandma, particularly as she didn't have a PC.

Your marriage almost ends when the PC suffers a fatal hard disk drive error. Losing your CV is one thing but 1,387 photographs of the family is quite another. Telling the wife, you didn't burn a DVD containing all the photos is not a pleasant experience. Particularly as she repeatedly asked you to do so and, worse, you repeatedly assured her it was in hand. You are forced to get a job in technical consulting which means you travel a lot until she cools down. Three years and counting...

Then some idiot invented image editing software. This meant that every single digital image was now subject to a time-consuming, rigorous and thorough review by the 'Photographic approval and refinement committee' (my wife is CEO). Each photo is now subject to prolonged and detailed scrutiny. Every human effort is made to improve the end product. Like a surgeon, you will try to remove redeye, crop, sharpen, brighten and resize in an effort to salvage an image that previously would have been discarded instantly.

Digital cameras came bundled with cut down trial versions of expensive photo editing software packages. Typically, this software was bloated, slow, difficult to use for novices and horrendously complicated.

After an unfortunate experience with Ulead Photo Express and a short stay in The Priory, my counsellor suggested using Kodak EasyShare. This software was still slow and bloated but free. Eventually, I was able to modify images, save images and burn a CD. Then I would simply take the CD to BonusPrint and normal service was resumed.

I didn't use the 'Albums' in EasyShare. I simply stored all the photos in my own folders. A folder for each year. A sub-folder for each event. Because the left side of my tiny brain still thinks in hierarchies not tags.

I would download all photos from the camera into 'Staging' for approval by the committee. Then I would create another directory 'ForPrinting', burn the CD and forget the whole nightmare for another 3 months.

However, after a recent PC rebuild and watching the gigabytes of EasyShare software downloading and installing for 35 minutes, I finally capitulated. I decided to try Picasa out. Picasa was installed and running very quickly. Picasa scanned my folders and indexed all my photos - fast. As a bonus, Picasa fixed one of my biggest problems by identifying and skipping duplicate photos.

The Picasa software was fast and intuitive (like most Google products). There was a minimal feel to the interface which meant I could actually understand it. Some other photo software packages are so cluttered with menus, views and tabs, there is no room to actually display the photo. Also, Picasa has a useful 'Undo' operation for every change.

Picasa keeps a copy of the original image and maintains additional versions for any modified photos. Hence, it was not easy to make changes and simply overwrite the original image as I used to.

Now I can actually manage (search, delete, fix) my photos more easily. Some of the early photos have lost the original date and time thanks to other nameless software packages. Oddly, Picasa doesn't support modifying EXIF data directly so I used the 30 day trial of ACDSee (great name, eh ?) to update the timestamps in batch.

It's early days yet but Picasa looks promising. It has all the standard image editing features, email and blog capability, printing support, incremental backup, integration with 'BonusPrint' for glossy prints, a 'Create Gift CD' just for Grandma (who now owns a PC).

There are also some additional, esoteric features in Picasa 2.5 (Geotag, FTP publishing, integration with Google Video) and the inevitable shared Web albums.

PS. Just noticed that while Picasa can add a 'Caption' to a photo, there is no tagging (like Flickr). This is one area where the right side of my tiny brain definitely wants tags. A single photo could be tagged with the names of the people, the location, 'Holiday' etc etc.

Congratulations to Paula Radcliffe who is pregnant.

Lets just hope she doesnt give birth squatting down on the roadside.