I currently use MyYahoo! as my home page. I have looked at MyYahoo’s next incarnation, played with Google’s personalised home page and Windows Live! but none are as flexible as I would like. So, prompted by the only other Oracle gentleman with enough taste to choose WordPress, Rahul, I decided to experiment a little with Netvibes. Out of the box, the default Netvibes screen doesn’t look too remarkable. A widget for Gmail, a search box, example RSS feeds and the obligatory Flickr feed to display other peoples lovely cats on your home page. ...

I went to see the Da Vinci Code last night. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually get to see the film as there was a massive protest organised by the Catholic Church outside the cinema.

Back in 1995, I was a software engineer for Ingres, working on the OS/2 port. A merchant bank had a serious, intermittent, non-reproducible problem and Computer Associates kindly bought me a ticket to New York to go and help them. The ticket was an open return. I thought ‘That’s nice. That’s so I can extend my stay for a lovely weekend city break with my wife’. The truth was that it was an open return as I was staying onsite until the problem was resolved [ PH was right. I am naive ] ...

The more observant among you will have noticed the addition of a StatCounter button to the sidebar. The available StatCounter metrics are quite basic as the hosted Wordpress blog is limited to the HTML (not the Javascript) version of the tracking code. So advanced features like path analysis and keywords are not available but the reports do include domain information, breakdown of unique and returning visitors, visit length, pages per visit and browser metrics. ...

Been using Emacs for years but still learning M-x sort-lines M-x delete-trailing-whitespace I knew about the first command but not the second. Very handy to tidy up an ugly SQL*Plus spool file.