Software

the art of lazy programming

Throw away that Mavis Beacon touch typing CD.

This hilarious video shows that speech recognition is the key to (not so) rapid application development.

Reminds me of working in tech support and the torture of spelling out Unix commands over the phone to customers.

am I a Google whore yet ?

‘OK. OK. I give in. Please stop hurting me, Brin. I now realise that resistance is futile.’

‘Look I did what you asked. I have now converted to Google Reader. Please, no more. I will do anything you want. Please, Sergey - let my wife go.’

Even my son (newly hired Google enforcer) has now installed Google Desktop and is busy indexing the entire contents of the PC.

Just about the only remaining product in the Google portfolio I don’t use is Adsense.

resisting the lure of Google Reader

I am a big fan of Netvibes but also follow the ongoing development of Google Reader with interest. Increasingly, I find myself tempted to convert to Reader permanently.

• Speed - Google Reader has a set of keyboard shortcuts that make scanning a large number of feeds quick. Really quick. While Netvibes also offers keyboard shortcuts, out of habit, I tend to use mouse-clicks to navigate between tabs and articles.
• Flexibility - You can read related blogs that are grouped together (e.g. Oracle, Wordpress), read an individual blog or quickly skim over a river of news.
• Sharing - Occasionally, I want to save an article for future reference or potentially sharing with others. These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information quickly noted in passing which I wouldn’t necessarily blog about. The most obvious place to mark these items is right here in the RSS reader as opposed to a static bookmark. The list should (obviously) be visible as an RSS feed. Google’s shared and starred items make this easy (single keystroke).
• Flexible interface - I really like the full screen mode and the options for ’list view’ where articles are condensed apart from the current article and ’expanded view’ (all articles are expanded).
• Statistics - I can’t decide whether the trends page about your personal reading habits may actually be useful or just a gimmick.

Here’s a Flickr set of annotated screenshots to illustrate the functionality in Google Reader and the flexibility of the interface. I think the recent addition of subscriber counts to Google Reader will show that Reader has a substantial and rapidly growing share of the RSS reader market. Stowe Boyd and Tom Raftery are already noting a Feedburner spike as a result.

Web 2.0 - am I infected ?

Email

1. You use ELM on a VT220.
2. You use Emacs and Gnus.
3. Corporate standards force you to use Microsoft Outlook and you don’t even mind.
4. You use Gmail for all work and personal email.

Documents

1. Quill and parchment.
2. XEmacs.
3. Microsoft Word with 37 macros.
4. Microsoft Excel for all documents .
5. Google Documents for all correspondence.

Newsgroups

1. What are newsgroups ?
2. You use Emacs and Gnus.
3. Your company doesn’t run an NNTP server for security reasons.
4. Newsgroups are just another data source mashed into your aggregator.

Home Page

the unbearable coolness of VOIP

As part of my job, I often have the pleasure of walking around call centers where agents use headsets to enable them to interact with a computer while conducting a telephone call with a customer.

I have often wondered whether it would be cool or nerdy to use such a headset myself. To date, where possible, I tend to use my mobile phone on speakerphone so I am free to continue to type. For lengthy conference calls (abroad), this isn’t a particularly cost-effective option but please don’t tell the CFO.

questions and answers

Over the past couple of days, much to my surprise, I have actually managed to answer some questions.

1. The parameter ‘ExtractStartDate’ was set to ‘11/01/2007’. This means that Siebel will ignore all appointments and tasks prior to this date. The default value of ‘ExtractStartDateFormat’ is ‘MM/DD/YYYY’ which equates to ‘01 November 2007’.
2. Install Cygwin, sed -n -e ‘x,yp’ < bigfile.log
3. If the Exchange Connector and SSSE Engine component are run by accounts in different domains, trust must be established in order for RPC calls to work correctly. Alternatively, use two separate accounts (least privilege) in the same domain.
4. In the heart of London, surprisingly.
5. Install OHS from the OAS Companion CD
6. F11

And now for the questions…

porting Drupal to Oracle and DB2

A couple of interesting papers discussing the portability issues and challenges involved when trying to port Drupal to the freely available versions of Oracle and DB2.

bedroom antics with the wife

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.

Snap made me finally snap

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.

WTF

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.