Posts from 2007

Last night, I happened to catch my wife composing an email. I noticed that when she sent a personal email to her friends, she invariably typed From Norma as the subject line. This just seemed really weird to me.

I asked her what she thought of the 'semantic web' and whether she had given any thought to adding tags to her personal emails such as 'Norma' and 'From' to help build a valuable taxonomy for her friends.

She looked at me blankly and said 'Just because you work with computers, you think you're so clever, don't you ?'

I always smile whenever I receive an email that opens I heard that Stephen Hawksworth Smithers-Jones in ABC division gets...

Over the years I have heard the following myths about the delights of working in the completely fictional division ABC.

• Unlimited broadband paid for by the company.
• Mandatory business class flights on short-haul.
• Complimentary chauffeur service from your house to LHR/LGW.
• Expenses automatically paid via psychic medium with no need for receipts.
• No need for approvals for anything from anyone.
• Prawn volavons with a garlic and tomato sauce brought to their desks at 12 noon precisely (even when onsite).
• First shout on the airplane toilet when the seat-belts sign is extinguished.
• Free laundry and ironing service when onsite for more than one night
• New laptops every quarter (subject to stringent personal, divisional and corporate performance goals). Every month otherwise.
• Complimentary invites to the client's Christmas bash and summer BBQ (free bar and partners included).
• Secret inclusion in the company car ('Gold - Level 3') scheme with access to a brand new model every 3 months.
• A massive incentive payment to not to desert to main rival during any (rumoured) takeover.
• 2.6 million shares, 1.2 million stock options and 876,542 FlexPoints. Index linked.
• Contributory pension scheme; Company contributes 24 times salary. Employee contributes nothing.

It always reminds me of the advert: 'Carlsberg don't run an IT consultancy, but if they did, it would be like this...'

Thankfully, Scoble has finally found the Disable Snap button on his WP dashboard. Only another 641,000 WordPress blogs to go.

If you don't know what I am talking about, just explore Jonathan Lewis' excellent Wordpress blog and see how long you last before exploding. [Hint: hover over a hyperlink]

If you can't be bothered, look here although a screenshot can't do justice to the mind numbing effect and irritation factor.

Tom Raftery also notes the presence of the dreaded Snap preview and asks for opinions. In fact, this post started out as a comment on Tom's blog but I think this now merits a full-blown rant.

Hi Tom I dislike those Snap previews immensely.

In fact, I absolutely hate, despise and loathe them with a vengeance.

WordPress.com added Snap functionality for all users (default=TRUE). To be fair, following lots of user feedback (surprisingly not all of it positive), WordPress made Snap a configurable option so users could disable the damned distracting Adware popups.

Judging by the number of WP blogs still displaying them, it appears the default is still enabled.

I think WordPress and Snap are great friends in the Web 2.0 sense but no disclosure about money changing hands was ever made.

I would pay WordPress good money to disable Snap. Permanently. Maybe a new business model presents itself.

Andy

Next week, I am bound for the wonderful city of Copenhagen, near Denmark. I normally aim to stay in a hotel close to the client offices. If my commute can be done on foot, I am absolutely delighted.

However, on this one occasion, I have elected to stay on the other side of town which, unfortunately, will mean a very long taxi ride over a congested bridge, to cross the city in rush-hour. Once in the morning and again in the afternoon.

Despite occasionally enjoying this site and subscribing to this Oracle focused offshoot, I always laid awake at night, endlessly tossing and turning, wondering what this curious and cryptic acronym WTF stood for.

I need wonder no more. Technorati have finally put me out of my misery.

WTF actually stands for 'Where's The Fire ?' My immediate reaction was 'WTF ?'

No wonder Technorati killed that product at birth.

I was vaguely aware that NTL merged with Telewest last year but a glossy black/red envelope, announcing the brave new world of Virgin Media, took me a little off guard this morning.

I sincerely hope that my existing Telewest service is not affected by NTL's recent acquisition of Virgin Mobile.

My Telewest broadband service works fine (apart from the occasional self-inflicted glitch with my wireless router).

My Telewest email works fine (apart from a recent problem where the POP3 server times out on the first connection and works perfectly thereafter).

My Telewest Digital TV service works fine (apart from that outage on Millennium Eve that my mother-in-law keeps reminding me about).

And now, thousands of pounds will be spent on an expensive rebranding exercise, a public launch party, personal communications from Richard Branson to all customers and a spiffy new Web ~~site~~ media portal with quotes like

'Watch it, surf it, talk it, walk it. We're there with you every step of the way. Love The Virgin Media Team x'

Worse, they are are promising me a brand new email address. Please prepare to update your address books to 'norman@virginmedia.net'. Another example is the jokey, friendly marketing flyer I am now reading 'Small print that you can actually see' with a pledge for plain English speaking.

The T&C's is titled 'Boring (but important) stuff for you to read' and contains 10, yes 10, pages of very small print that I can't be bothered to read.

Another source of unease is that, many years ago in the days of 28.8 dial-up modems, bulletin boards and extension cables trailing across the bedroom, I was a customer of Virgin.net where I received some appalling service and was eventually forced to go elsewhere.

After my recent brush with disaster, I realised that my, err, backup strategy relied on me remembering to perform a manual, occasional Wordpress export or a database backup.

This was acceptable while I was messing around with this blogging lark but now I realise that it would be a little disappointing to lose the entire contents of my blog.

While Bluehost run backups (which have saved my skin once), it would be foolish to completely rely on my hosting provider and the height of stupidity to rely on me !

As I said to a lovely hotel receptionist in Brussels recently, struggling to find the reservation made on my behalf for Monday night, 'We have a saying in England - if you want something doing, then do it yourself.' She nodded sagely as she eventually unearthed my booking for Tuesday night by which time I would have left the country.

Unlike Mark Rittman, I can't really count on the goodwill of both my readers to manually type in more than 500 articles, so I looked around for a fully automated backup that would backup all of my MySQL databases (not just WordPress) using cron.

AutoMySQLBackup does exactly what it says on the tin and works like a dream.

I even tested it on a local installation because we all know backups are worthless unless you prove that you can actually restore them.

Excellent article by Seth Godin about the perils of PowerPoint.

Just look what it did to the poor pigeon.

Meet Dan Morrison. His main aim in life is :-

Currently dedicated to linking all IT professionals together in one network so they can find each other and communicate.

Don't scoff. Dan already has 93,822 connections (including me) on ITtoolbox so he's very nearly half way there.

Dan - Let me know when you've finished and I'll have that list of email addresses in exchange for a box of vintage 1980's records.

Another thing on my todo list was to learn PHP and write a WordPress plugin to randomly select quotes stored in the database to rotate the tagline.

An admin interface to create, modify and delete quotes was planned for Version 2.1 (beta) due Q4 2008.

Fortunately for me though, a helpful person called Zombie Robot (pseudonym ?) has already produced wp-quotes (and another kind person tweaked it to work properly for taglines).

All that remains is the interesting part - performance tuning. No - wait. Existing users have already identified this modification as efficiently fetching a single, random record. Horribly database specific of course but worth having when you have 2.4 million quotes.

    36c36
    < $sql = "select * from " . WP_QUOTES_TABLE . " where visible='yes'
    < order by rand() limit 1";
    ---
    > $sql = "select * from " . WP_QUOTES_TABLE . " where visible='yes'";