Last night as I waited for the baggage carousel to leap into action at Terminal 1, I heard a familiar voice speaking on his phone. I looked round and there was a very familiar face - the face of Michael Aspel. Then I started thinking about all the celebrities and superstars I have seen over the years Walked past Martin Buchan with mouth open (mine not his) on Deansgate. Tommy Docherty signed a pack of MUFC matches for me in a Chinese restaurant in Wilmslow. ...

The mySql database for this WordPress blog was unavailable at 18:45. Service was restored at 19:15.

I have never heard customers complaining about the abysmal performance of the Oracle pseudo-table DUAL. Nor have I ever encountered a real-life performance issue that was attributed to slow access to DUAL. Rarely have I been asked to tune an SQL statement that was sub-second and took a massive 3 consistent gets. Another reason I won’t be using this tip is that, a few years ago, I did encounter some unexpected, weird, obtuse behaviour in an Oracle system that completely baffled everyone. This was eventually tracked to the presence of not one, but two rows in the DUAL table. ...

Just add ‘http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2' to your blog configuration. Let’s see if it works. Update: Posted at 17:56. Pinged by GoogleBot at 18:00. Referrer (to this article) from Google Blog Search at 20:58.

Forget Box.Net. Forget Mozy. Forget memory sticks. Forget USB hard drives. DreamHost have upgraded the ‘basic’ $7.95 per month hosting package from 20GB to a staggering 200GB disk storage. As this humble blog currently occupies 0.01%, I have plenty of capacity for my photos, documents, CV (in txt, doc, PDF, LaTeX formats) and all my homework. In fact, as my hard disk is a paltry 40GB, I have room for absolutely everything. And if that wasn’t enough, Dreamhost are giving me a further 1GB every week.