I used to work for Ingres (in London) who were a fantastic company to work for. Amazingly, they are the only company I have ever worked for to use newsgroups for internal technical discussions and knowledge sharing instead of email aliases. I once read that processing an individual email costs a company 10 cents. In the early 90’s, Ingres was under commercial pressure from another large relational database vendor, Oracle. Instead of responding to this challenge, Ingres tended to ‘fiddle while Rome burned’, discuss the API naming convention by committee and stoutly defend the technical purity of page level locking (Oracle supported row level locking and capitalised heavily) from a lofty ivory tower. ...

Dear Cathy & Claire ‘I have just started going out with a boy much older than me…’ No - sorry. I have just started blogging and find myself increasingly worrying about blogging etiquette. For example, I just read an interesting article about Oracle by Jeff Moss and wrote a followup on my blog. I felt my article was too long to be posted as a comment on Jeff’s blog. So what do I do ? I want to acknowledge Jeff’s original article. Do I post a comment on Jeff’s blog saying ‘Nice article Jeff. This inspired me to write my own followup here’ (with a link to my blog). ...

Jeff Moss' article about the commercial and free versions of Toad and the incredibly tenacious, persistent breed of salesperson bred by Quest Software got me thinking about the Oracle DBA tools I use. People SQL*Plus Statspack putty People are important because people have developed the application, people are using the application, people are managing the servers, people are managing the database and intelligent people have configured that very expensive storage array. ...

Dear Bill I live in London (near England) and would like to buy Microsoft Money and Microsoft Office. My preferred method of obtaining the goods would be to download these programs from your Web site and pay using a credit card. A small discount to reflect the reduced administration costs, packaging and margin taken by the retailer would be nice but not essential. However, when I attempt to buy these Microsoft products in the UK, I am redirected to third party Web sites (Amazon, Dabs, PC World etc) or I can delay the purchasing decision by downloading a 60 day trial version. ...

My post about Patrick Gibson reminded me of another Irish genius who, sadly, is currently critically ill in a London hospital. A bell-boy was summoned to George Best’s luxurious hotel room. He stared in amazement at the scene that greeted him. Empty, discarded bottles of champagne everywhere, a scantily clad Mary Stavin (Miss World) lying on the bed surrounded by ten pound notes. ‘Tell me, Mr Best, just where did it all go wrong ?’ ...

A kind lady called Sarah encountered my blog, was horrified by what she saw, and and proffered this suggestion for tweaking the standard blogger template to add the readability of long articles by adding the heading to the footer section. Eventually, I managed to successfully apply the changes (she left a spurious space character to ensure you have a little work to do) so I hope you enjoy the changes as much as I do. ...

What would you do with 1 million GBP ? Would you buy a mansion, a yacht and a Ferrari, give up your job, go on holiday, donate it all to charity, buy your parents a new house, take over your local football club or get U2 to play at your son’s birthday party ? Don’t worry - I haven’t succumbed to the lure of ‘1001 subjects to blog about’ for people with vacuous brains. ...

So, you have set up the blog, got loads of interesting ideas for articles, robots and spiders are crawling everywhere, Adsense is configured and has already produced a massive return of 0.27USD and you are all set to go. One last problem, what are you actually going to call this blog ? What’s in a name ? Well quite a lot actually. I usually like to read the title and extended description of any blogs I encounter. I think the title alone can tell you quite a lot about the author and the content. ...

Absolutely anything can be a suitable subject for a blog entry; a Website of interest, OpenSource software, breaking news, a personal anecdote, a witty comment from a colleague, politics, a joke, a holiday, Microsoft, music, gadgets, your teams latest victory, anything. Just because someone else (an esteemed blogger or maybe even a professional journalist) has written an article on the same subject, don’t necessarily let that put you off. Lots of people are searching blogs for a personal view and not that of a journalist. For example, if I am considering the purchase of a digital radio for my car, I would rather hear your views on the same make and model rather than read a two year old review in AutoExpress. ...

I used to have a Psion 5. This was a neat little personal organiser in a clam shell case with a mini QWERTY style keyboard. The Psion even had a port of the ‘vi’ editor available. However, after the novelty wore off, I didn’t use it much other than a few short-lived pointless games and as a glorified address book when sending out my Christmas cards. Years later, I worked with some young, trendy individuals who wore Diesel trousers who taunted me as they all gradually acquired new, shiny Palm PDA’s. Of course, I simply couldn’t face them with my aged Psion so I went out and bought a Palm Vx. ...