Posts from 2007

You are supposed to be unobtrusive software.

On two computers, you have spontaneously stopped working.

No changes to Windows Media player.

Plonk.

I have been a little quiet recently because I have spent the last two weeks in Florida during which time I didnt see a computer, pick up a newspaper and thankfully, didnt speak on a phone.

• Fly to Orlando
• Stubbornly refuse the persistent Alamo sales pitch offering an upgrade to a oversized vehicle, pre-paid petrol and a host of other unwanted 'options'.
• Visit Magic Kingdom on the busiest day of the year. Queue to board a ferry boat. Queue to buy tickets. Queue to get bag checked. Queue to enter park. Queue for restrooms. Queue for food. Board every ride almost immediately.
• Tie a Vielda cloth to car aerial to keep 3 car convoy together. Tell the parking valet, this ripped blue and white rag is the flag of the European Union.
• Trip to Discovery Cove. Much more civilised (free pints of Pepsi). Experience queue withdrawal syndrome.
• Return to Magic Kingdom for nighttime parade and fireworks. Thirst for queuing quenched.
• Stagger and amaze multiple Disney staff by correctly guessing their town and state of origin purely from their accents.
• Meet an American gentleman who accuses me of 'being Dutch', 'not speaking proper English' and proudly announces that his brother-in-law is 'mayor of Packney'. All in a 28 second ride in a lift.
• Car park attendant at Sea World finally rumbles the state of origin trick - 'hey - did you just read my name badge ?'
• Kennedy Space Center - 'Awesome' is a much overused word in America but on this occasion, completely justified.
• Early start for Universal Islands of Adventure. Splash out on Fast Pass tickets and gloat as we march to the front of the lines.
• Forcibly ejected from Dixie Stampede after answering 'Stand up if you are proud to be in America' by placing hand on heart, waving a star spangled banner and bellowing 'We applaud your war of terror'.
• Don ski-suit, hats and gloves for Blizzard Beach. Shocked to discover it is a Water Park with massive queues and no space to sit down.
• Drive to Miami Beach. Beautiful people driving flash cars past beggars lying on the sidewalk. Can't determine whether people here are unhelpful or merely of limited intelligence. Massively overrated.
• Attempt to bludgeon way into adjoining hotel room at 03:47 to kill noisy neighbours. Hammer on connecting door, screaming 'TURN IT DOWN' which, surprisingly, has desired effect. Wife still unable to sleep as she fears drug mafia will enter room to exact dreadful revenge.
• Airboat ride at Everglades Alligator Farm. Too scared to hold a cuddly alligator or a large yellow snake.
• Meet a lady who 'loves my accent'. She spent time in England last summer. In the famous English town of Newport (near Wales).
• Hotel safe jams containing passports and valuables (United scarf). Duty Manager helpfully asks 'You using the right code ?'. Maintenance department fail to open safe. Divine intervention (Clear - 9-2-1-1) miraculously unlocks safe as I am about to buy high explosives.
• Welcome drink at Sloppy Joes in Key West. Heard some decent music (Killers) and nearly died of shock.
• Call home for United score in European Cup Quarter Final. Father claims score is MUFC 5 Roma 0. Hang up as time is short and I am convinced he is joking.
• Gain 3 stone as result of outsize American portions. Started to share meals, only eat starters, request childrens menu and finally skip meals completely. Weight gain limited to 5 stone as a result.
• Key Largo. Superb snorkelling on Banana Reef in John Pennekamp Park.
• Put petrol in car. Advanced computer system for automated self-service payment means I only have to enter garage three times to complete transaction.
• Listen to John Mellencamp, Belinda Carlisle and Foreigner and an interminable stream of inexorable dross on an array of dreary ('Light Rock') radio stations. No wonder the US doesn't produce any decent bands.
• Return hire car. Failed to tip shuttle driver who gave me a stream of abuse.
• Fly back from Miami airport. Sophisticated on-demand video and entertainment system functional after a 'master-master reset'. Play Tetris continuously for 6 hours with attractive girl seated in 32B.

Just 10 weeks after closing, Performancing Metrics has risen again, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

I didn't use the previous incarnation of this statistics package as I had a hosted WordPress blog which didn't support Javascript. When I migrated to my own WordPress blog, I used Google Analytics which is perfect for my purposes (and free) but I couldn't resist installing the new version of the new statistics package from Performancing Metrics.

The software was really easy to install (two lines of Javascript) in the footer template. I really liked the real-time updates (better than Google Analytics which has a 3 hour lag) which are pretty addictive.

The reporting interface is really smooth and polished (the icons look similar to Netvibes but I presume these are in the public domain).

I was expecting high demand as people rushed to download the new software on day one and sluggish performance. All the reports were very quick and the system was responsive although with my data volumes maybe that isn't so surprising.

In addition to the standard tracking metrics (country, browser, platform, referrer, search terms), Performancing Metrics also allows you to analyse the page views, outbound links and path of an individual visitor which is a nice feature.

The geographic distribution report is integrated with Google Maps which is a nice feature.

Google Analytics is a completely free service (loss leader) but as Performancing Metrics only charges for over 1,000 page views per day, this equates to the same thing for my humble blog.

The WordPress plugin for Google Analytics automatically filters all accesses from WordPress Administration screens. This is better than IP filtering as I might use 3 different computers to manage my blog. This would be a neat feature for a future release of Performancing Metrics.

I was staggered to read on TechCrunch that Yahoo! Mail has 250 million users while the much younger and rapidly growing Google Mail (beta) service currently has a paltry 51 million users in comparison.

I wonder what proportion of these users, in these impressive headline (marketing) numbers, actively use the respective services on a daily basis.

However, I was not surprised at Yahoo's offer of 'unlimited' email storage which gets a cheap headline and was pretty inevitable. A tiny minority will gleefully claim they really need infinite storage and think of inventive ways to upload the entire contents of their PC to a server. Yahoo! will then ban them for uploading copyrighted material.

While I have a longstanding but rarely used Yahoo! Mail account (which I was scanning tonight funnily enough searching for my Flickr credentials), this announcement won't be tempting me back to Yahoo! just yet. I await with interest Google's response though.

I think the Yahoo! Mail screen is incredibly cluttered and the adverts on the right hand side are incredibly intrusive and consume valuable screen estate. As you scroll through Yahoo! emails, the banner ads actually change which is slow and very distracting !

I know this type of thing is very subjective and, in many cases, ones preference simply reflects what you are used to and familiar with but I honestly don't know how Doug tolerates it. Also, Google's spam filter is far more effective which is important.

Also, Yahoo! have a irritating tendency to overuse the exclamation mark as part of the corporate branding. Look at any personalised Yahoo! page and shriek as you count the shrieks. I suspect you will be unpleasantly surprised.

Unfortunately, I appear to have mislaid (or Yahoo have inactivated) my Yahoo! credentials for my world famous Flickr stream so let's try some inline thumbnails. Apologies for the quality.

Note the MASSIVE banner ad on RHS (no I didn't photoshop the red border) and the more subtle ads bottom left.

I continue to use my ISP email account for personal stuff but am starting a gradual migration to Gmail which started around a year ago. Apart from spam, I hardly ever delete a Google email. Consequently, I am barely scratching the surface of my 3GB allocation (35 MB - 1% - of the allocated 2833 MB).

I also like the security of having messages and email address stored on a server (and not my PC).

The ads on Google Mail seem much less noticeable and intrusive to me (yeah I know I'm a Google whore). I can honestly say that I barely notice them. I think this is because of the text (not banner) ads coupled with the white background although I am not sure what advertising men in new media glasses would make of this.

Many years ago, I managed a set of Oracle databases for various clients.

However, I was not an Oracle DBA. I was an Unix/C developer who happened to progress to Pro*C, PL/SQL and some ETL projects for data warehouses.

I was an mediocre development DBA because I was a mediocre developer and I had a keen interest in performance tuning i.e. I was (am remain) a 'glory hunter'.

I was not a production DBA because I didn't have the training, experience and discipline required for change controls and saying 'No'.

One day, the CEO of our 18 man Internet startup asked me to deliver a short presentation to the rest of the company what my team (me and my junior) did all day.

I put up a slide that said:

• Data Availability

I think a clever new media colleague helped me to add 'transitions' to add two more bullets.

• Data Availability
• Data Availability

Ironically, this wasn't what we did which was covered on the next 34 slides. We did absolutely everything: fixing code, reloading data, backups, analysis, ETL, extracts, PL/SQL, performance tuning, long hours, recovery, testing, code reviews, cloning, documentation, nervous breakdowns, monitoring, upgrades, configuration management, severed relationships, recruitment, management and coffee.

However, data availability is precisely the only thing we should have been doing.

Data availability is the sole responsibility of an Oracle production DBA.

It is to ensure that data is available at all times to all users.

It is not to tune queries from 37 seconds to sub-second.

It is not to experiment with parallel query and parallel DML to tune a third party application.

It is not to ensure that you can clone 'ALL_OBJECTS' in less than 17 seconds.

It is not to ensure you can load 184 million records in 72 hours.

It is to ensure that you can restore data from a catastrophic failure.

It is to ensure you can restore service following an expected failure.

It is to ensure you can restore from the backups deposited in secure off-site storage.

It is to ensure that the file system holding the archive logs never fills up.

It is to ensure that you can have a coherent plan to restore service after any unexpected event.

It is to ensure that you take responsibility and say 'Yes. That is down to me'.

Extracted the shiny new Dell PC from the tall cupboard yesterday. Pretended this PC was for homework only, would solely use Google Docs and wouldnt connect to the Interweb.

Lasted two minutes before yielding and plugged in Linksys USB wireless card. Briefly marvelled at the quality of the flat screen, then downloaded drivers for Windows Vista, followed the instructions on the Linksys technical support site and successfully connected to the burgeoning wireless network first time.

Finally, Norman Junior III has his own PC, so now I will actually be able to use my own computer whenever I please.

Expect a barrage of varied, humorous, exciting and detailed technical blog articles and, yes, the frequency will be doubled, Kenneth.

Or maybe not.

Inevitably, my new best friend, Michael, the Virgin Media engineer didnt return on Friday afternoon to complete the installation of V+ or to reinstate my original, functional set top box to provide me with a TV service over the weekend.

Instead, he hurriedly telephoned me to say he had transferred this issue to the 'networks team' who would call me later to resolve it. Surprise, surprise, the 'networks team' didn't call me to resolve it so I had to call them (on three separate occasions) to make another appointment.

I was trying to do the engineer a favour by suggesting he went off to his other jobs on Friday. I trusted him. With hindsight, I was probably naive, gullible and stupid.

A word of warning to the engineer who is scheduled to appear on Tuesday afternoon. My wife is taking time off work to accommodate your visit which she is already unhappy about. My wife doesn't know (or care) what V+ is.

She is also 'bitterly disappointed' (she actually used different words) that Virgin Media can only specify an four hour window for an afternoon visit. As she works locally, she would have preferred the engineer to call her directly with an hours notice.

My wife is not naive, gullible or stupid so don't be surprised if you don't get offered a cup of coffee. There is a possibility that she will not offer you a visitors parking permit for your van which consequently may get clamped.

If there are any further problems this time, don't just stand staring at a diagnostics screen saying 'I think the Hit will download in a few minutes' or swap one brand new functional box for another brand new functional box, do something to try to fix it.

Otherwise, there is a danger that you will be locked up in chains, thrown into the depths of the cellar and fed on a diet of crackers and water until the V+ service is actually working.

This afternoon, a Virgin Media engineer has arrived to upgrade my existing set top box to a V+ (TV drive).

This is a straightforward box swap. No additional wiring or drilling is required. However, the new box failed to initialise. We both stared expectantly at the following screen for an eternity:

Card Status: No T-Stream

IPPV Status: BLANK

He then called technical services who initiated the operation. He double checked the serial numbers of the V+ box and the card. He tried to bamboozle me with science 'Hits must be slow today'.

Eventually, he gave up and fetched a second V+ box from his van. I reciprocated with a visitor's parking permit. It now looks unlikely that this simple box upgrade will be finished within the original 5 minute period.

We made more polite smalltalk like a couple on their first date. We waited. And waited. The 'IPPV Status' stubbornly remained 'BLANK'. He showed me the User Guide - a booklet cunningly disguised in a DVD box.

We waited a little longer. We both pretended to admire the new black V+ remote control.

Suddenly, he exclaimed 'At last !'. He seemed very pleased the see the 'Credit Limit' field change to £105.00. 'Oh good - it's finally starting to come through. Shouldn't be much longer now.'

But it was. We waited. I offered him a cup of tea ('Ta. Milk, two sugars').

He called the service centre yet again to quadruple check the serial numbers had been entered correctly. He seemed a little frustrated and annoyed to discover the numbers were not 'paired off' (mismatch between STB and SmartCard) correctly.

This news seemed to disappoint him as he said quite forcefully 'I have been waiting around for 45 minutes for this TV Drive reset'. However, he now seemed supremely confident that this time, the box would be initialised properly in the next 5 minutes.

It wasn't. We talked. I showed him my holiday photos from Norway. We finished our tea. My wife asked if he 'would be stopping for tea.'

Eventually, I suggested that he went off to his other three jobs and return later this afternoon. He politely rejected this suggestion, saying 'No let's just give it another 5 minutes.'

15 minutes later, he gave up and went off to his remaining jobs, promising to call me later to confirm that the V+ box is finally ready.

However, another 45 minutes has passed and the 'Card Status' is still 'No T-Stream' so I have a feeling he will be returning but only to reinstate my original set top box.

Generally, the quality of cover versions on YouTube can vary to say the least.

However, covers that purely mime to the original soundtrack are excellent as you can simply minimise the video and listen to decent music, you were forced to remove to make way for another yet another virtual machine.

This cover version of 'Aneurysm' by Nirvana has a certain visual appeal though - the drums and cymbal, the bendy guitar and the socks.

Ladies and gentlemen. Please be upstanding and don your ear protectors for this unique version of God Save The Queen.