Posts in category "software"

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.

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.

Am I a fully fledged Google whore yet ? If not, what else do I need to do ?

'Oh no - you've discovered I am not using Blogger. No Sergey. Please. I beg you. Please, Brin. Show some mercy. Not the pliers and electrical cord. Please stop. Aaaarrgghhh. I give in. Please stop now.'

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.

Interestingly, Darren Rowse notes that subscribers from Google Reader/Desktop/IG already heavily outnumber the established and popular Bloglines reader.

Looking forward, one feature I would really like to see in Google Reader is feed discovery and recommendations based on readers with common interests and similar reading lists.

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

1. Blank - just like your mind.
2. SourceForge
3. Personalised Google home page.
4. Multiple Firefox tabs that take 4 mins to initialise.

Browser

1. Lynx on an amber VT220.
2. Emacs and W3
3. IE 6.0
4. IE 7.0 - feverishly hunting for the File menu.
5. Firefox 3.0 (alpha)

O/S

1. Ubuntu Linux with self-modified device drivers for wireless support on an old 386.
2. Emacs.
3. Windows XP - to provide technical support to all your relatives.
4. OS X because all your trendy Mac friends can't be wrong.
5. Vista because you really do need to manage all those photos of your cat.

Social networking tools

1. Five-a-side followed by the pub.
2. Emacs mailing lists.
3. You are a fan of Ajax but only to clean the sink.
4. You have gold membership on Flickr.
5. You spend more on Skype than your landline.
6. A 'mash-up' is when you play with your food.
7. You finally book an appointment with your GP about your 'long tail'.
8. You think TechCrunch is a breakfast cereal.
9. You think 'First Tuesday' is an investigative TV program hosted by Trevor McDonald.

Blogging platform

1. Large text file in Emacs.
2. Embryonic, unused corporate Wiki.
3. Blogger Beta (101 Oracle bloggers can't be wrong).
4. Hosted WordPress with Snap plugin.
5. Self-hosted WordPress with custom theme and 347 useless plugins.
6. Irritating tendency to send humourous 3MB attachments on a Friday afternoon to colleagues, friends and family.
7. Wooden crate in corner of Hyde Park.

Employment

1. You have 10 years service for a large IT company and a silver pen to prove it.
2. You are a successful, highly paid company director, err, well a mercenary Oracle contractor.
3. You demand money to mind visiting fans' cars at the City of Manchester Stadium.
4. You have founded four failed startups but, undeterred, are contemplating the next.

Answers:

• Mainly 1 - you are stuck in an 80's timewarp.
• Mainly 2 - you probably have a beard and may well be Richard Stallman.
• Mainly 3 - you are a technology Luddite.
• Mainly 4 - you are a Web 2.0 aficionado.
• Mainly 5 - you count Matt Mullenweg and Robert Scoble as close friends.

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.

With the increasing adoption of VOIP within Oracle and the recent delivery of my deluxe headset, I am typing this while listening to a team meeting using Cisco Communicator. This is really neat technology, the sound quality surprisingly good and even better, the telephone call is free, completely free. So please tell the CFO.

As for cool or nerdy, let's just say I will only be doing this from the privacy of my own home or possibly my office.

My kids think my adoption of this technology is absolutely hilarious. They keep smirking whenever they come into the kitchen for a snack and if I happen to be actually speaking on the device, they simply can't contain their hysterics and have to leave the room.

In addition, my wife keeps smiling and repeatedly asking me whether she can get a motor insurance quote.

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...

1. Why, oh why, does Siebel stubbornly refuse to synchronise any of my appointments and ToDo's to Outlook ?
2. How do you print lines x to y of a file too large for notepad ?
3. Why, oh why, don't multiple SSSE engines on different servers work ?
4. Where is London City Airport exactly ?
5. Where do you get the version of OHS (with Apache 2.x) needed for Siebel 8.0 ?
6. How do you switch from full screen mode back to console in VMware ?

I am probably most proud of number 6. If only all my answers were as succinct and technically correct.

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.

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 ?'

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

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.