I don’t agree with Alex Ferguson about everything (Stam, Beckham, RvN) but to make positive, bullish noises on Friday then quietly release the statement that Rooney’s injury ‘involves the joint’ was an absolute master stroke.

Football Shirts Hall Of Shame. Top Left. Coventry City. A true classic.

Imagine trying to hold a conversation with someone who never completed their sentences. Irritating, eh ? I used to smile when people like Robert Scoble (and other well respected bloggers) used to get all heated and uptight in a raging controversy about a subject as innocuous as the thorny issue of partial versus full RSS feeds. I used to think ‘Crikey. Aren’t there more serious things in life to worry about ?’ (football and music to name just two). ...

A Gartner/IDC report summarising the state of the database market in 2005 contains some interesting nuggets of information. The database market is still growing at 9.4% (which surprised me a little). OpenSource databases account for less than 1% of the market but are growing fast (47%). The Linux platform (thanks mainly to Oracle) is showing the strongest growth (84%). Despite these two statements of fact, Oracle are not perturbed by the threat of OpenSource (pass the salt cellar). ...

WordPress recently bought a ton of resilient hardware and have undoubtedly improved the quality of service for the 200,000 WordPress users. Matt Mullenweg gave an interesting interview to Om Malik and Niall Kennedy about how startups can plan for future capacity, provide resilience and maintain performance & scalability. The IT architects at the UK ISP, Blueyonder, should really listen to this podcast.