Posts from October 2006

The perfect job for Aishah Azmi.

Maybe this time, she should go dressed for the interview as she intends to carry out the job.

Apologies for the brief radio silence.

I was shocked and alarmed by this news on Wednesday so I have been busy purging my blog of all contentious, provocative, controversial articles and erasing every last trace of my true identity (which is Norman Brightside, 23 Baker Street, London) to an amusing pseudonym that can never, ever be traced (even by clever people from Essex). I have also taken the sensible precaution of moving house and going X-directory.

I was living in fear of a madman or worse, a Manchester City fan, arriving on my doorstep brandishing a machete after taking offence to this blog. I must admit the teenager selling dusters looked a little startled when I opened the door armed with a shotgun.

Now my identity is once again safe, normal service will now be resumed.

The best bit about the whole story - the culprit bragged about the attack back in the original chat room. The stupidity of some people never ceases to amaze me.

Arsene Wenger is bleating about a referee who doesnt see things that exist. This is the ultimate irony from a man who, after 10 years, still constantly fails to see things that do exist on a football pitch.

Thierry Henry is a superb footballer but should similarly be discouraged from giving post-match interviews after a defeat. His moaning, whinging performance almost rivalled his self-pitying rant following his dismal showing in the European Cup Final.

Both men remind me of the junior football league my son plays in every Saturday. Apart from the fact, those lads accept defeat with a good deal more grace and dignity.

There is nothing worse than a blog entry titled Dear Diary - hence the title - but this is my humble submission for One Day in History so please forgive me. Of course, I could author this piece directly on the site but that would mean checking I am within the 650 word limit which is far too much work (unless I use Microsoft Word).

Get up at 7am and unload dishwasher. My one and only household chore but one I perform very well. Breakfast of cereal, tea and orange juice.

Quick scan of work email to see if anything needs my attention. Today I am going to be onsite with a customer and unlikely to have access to email.

Quick scan of Netvibes. The only thing to interest me is the recent update to TailRank. I have occasionally played with various meme trackers (TechMeme, Digg, Reddit, populicio.us) but usually my feeds contain the same stories of interest. I also like popurls as a quick dashboard of current and breaking news.

Today I am visiting a Siebel customer in Ascot. This location is convenient for me (no hotels, no flights, no lengthy drive) and is a shorter journey than to Oracle's offices in Thames Valley Park.

That's strange. For some reason, the traffic in Kingston upon Thames isn't completely gridlocked and I actually cross the bridge over the River Thames in less than 20 minutes. Then I remember why. This week is half-term for some local schools (my son is on holiday) but, much to his glee and her chagrin, my daughter is still at school.

Drive through Sunningdale and marvel at the size of some of the houses (mansions would be a better description) here. Although I keep hearing that Sandbanks in Dorset is the richest area in the UK, Sunningdale must run it a close second.

Arrive at client offices. I am slightly early which is better than slightly late so I make a quick call to an account manager with a ('political not technical') query from a customer about a review from last week.

This customer has a serious data issue in production. On July 22 2006, a 'consultant' advised the customer to configure Siebel to use Universal Time Co-ordinated (UTC). This proposal was a good idea (TM) but poorly executed.

Key elements of the UTC migration were omitted (migration of pre-existing non-UTC data, specification of timezones for each group of users who are located around the world, modification of the database timezone). Apart from that, the conversion to UTC went very well.

The net result was obtuse behaviour and incorrect appointment times observed by different users. The issue is compounded by the fact that this customer also has mobile Web clients who use Siebel on a disconnected laptop and then synchronise with the server. In addition, the Siebel administrator reports that server components (EIM, Workflow) function but now report incorrect submit/start times.

Fortunately, Siebel has a conversion utility (documented in the Global Deployment Guide) to address the issue so I spent some time configuring and testing to fix the data quality issue for the various scenarios.

Get home. Eat tea. Settle down to watch United versus Copenhagen. Discover that the wife is going out (how very inconsiderate) and I have pop out to collect my daughter from trampolining.

Count words using Google Docs - 560.

Today I have accepted a new and challenging position after a series of gruelling, demanding interviews and in depth technical tests. My new role is working for Dreamhost as a BMC Patrol Monitor Agent.

My key responsibilities are as follows:

• Write a blog article offline using Performancing.
• Post draft.
• Preview article in WYSIWG format on the blog.
• Blog is slow and unresponsive.
• ssh to Dreamhost server which is slow and unresponsive.
• Run 'w' to determine load average which is slow and unresponsive.
• Raise ticket with Dreamhost technical support.
• Wait for a period of time.

The performance problem is 'resolved'. Perm any one from:

1. 'Denial of Service attack' - now resolved by firewall configuration
2. 'Users in breach of Terms of Service - accounts now cancelled
3. 'Users producing abnormal heavy load' - now migrated to another server
4. Machine was recently rebooted that should solve problem

Repeat whole pointless exercise the next time. Repeat ad-infinitum.

So anyone with any recommendations for a reliable hosting provider capable of hosting a low bandwidth personal WordPress blog, please make themselves known.

I'm really starting to regret leaving the warm, cozy, uncomplicated world of hosted WordPress.com.

Feedburner - WordPress.com provides users with statistics about feed subscriptions. At best, these metrics were questionable and I used to provide two RSS feeds (WordPress and Feedburner) so the metrics didn't capture all feed activity anyway. As there is no equivalent functionality in WordPress 2.0.4 out of the box, I resurrected my Feedburner account and installed this WordPress plugin which automatically routes any subscribers to the WordPress RSS feed through Feedburner.

Sitemap - I started from zero when I created this site so I could try my hand at organic gardening. The only search engine I submitted to was Google. When I was trying to encourage Google to index the new site, I discovered that a sitemap could accelerate the process. This WordPress plugin generates a sitemap which tells the Google crawler about the site structure and recently updated pages. The sitemap automatically gets updated after each post and helps to reduce network traffic.

Just downloaded Firefox 2.0 RC3 and it worked a lot better then my previous experience.

My lengthy list of extensions (or add-ons as they are now called) also worked fine.

• Google Browser Sync
• CoComment
• Performancing

My thoughts now turn to the day when Microsoft unleash IE7 on the world through automatic updates to universal acclaim apart from my wife who will comment 'Why did they have to go and change everything ?'

I support England but I simply can not help laughing uncontrollably at this goal. I wonder what Steve Maclaren was jotting down:

• 'Give David James a call when I get home'
• 'More backpassing practice tomorrow'
• 'Get lawn cut at weekend'
• 'Wonder if Gareth will have me back as assistant ?'

Almost as amusing is the media backlash against Maclaren. Inevitably, the honeymoon is over before it even started. Pity there is no-one better to replace him.

Maybe, just maybe, England aren't as good as we seem to think we are.

I might have been dreaming but I swear that the load average on this DreamHost server was over 400.

Now I realise DreamHost is offering inexpensive, shared hosting but this is a little excessive.

I just wish they'd told me I would be co-hosted with Amazon, Yahoo and eBay.

Google have announced Docs & Spreadsheets which is an overhaul of the original Writely interface and integration with Google Spreadsheets. I must admit I prefer the Google Docs interface and was interested to see that Docs can still publish to a blog (just like Writely).

The documentation suggests that tagging the article with keywords will be mapped to matching blog categories and that the document title will indeed be preserved in the blog entry. However, a simple test confirms that neither of these two features work as advertised (on WordPress at least). Sigh.