I have been playing a CD in my car on Disc-Random-Shuffle mode for ten weeks. The CD contains close to 200 songs. I have heard all the songs once, some twice and a handful three times. This morning, I heard something that sent a shiver down my spine, chilled my bones and momentarily froze me to the spot. ‘Spectre versus Rector’ by The Fall. This ‘song’ is a 8 minute rant from Mark E. Smith accompanied by some noise, detailing a ghostly story from the ‘Dragnet’ LP. ‘Spectre versus Rector’ sounds as if it was recorded in a bleak, industrial warehouse somewhere up North with a hand-held tape recorder. ...

I am a very efficient lazy person. I don’t like to type seven characters when two will suffice. I think Unix is a fantastic development environment. However, the overly long, verbose commands irritate me slightly. So I use the following aliases and shell functions a = tail -f ${ORACLE\_HOME}/rdbms/log/alert\_PRD.log l = ls ll = ls -l up = cd .. x = rm -fr \* z = wall 'Anyone fancy a quickie after work ?' [disciplinary action pending] One of the happiest days of my life was when I discovered the tab completion feature in the GNU bash shell and the environment variable $OLDPWD. ...

Ladies and Gentlemen The Slashdot effect The Digg effect The lesser, spotted Kyte effect The incredibly secure Pete Finnigan effect Please welcome, the latest addition to the effect family, the Doug Burns effect, which has increased traffic to this blog to new, world record highs and, even as you are reading this, is relentlessly propelling this humble blog towards ‘Top WordPress.com blogs today’.

…to resist the lure of WordPress.com - an (experimental) import utility to ease your migration from Blogger. See you on the other side.

Joomla, Chumbawamba, Oompa Loompa I really like the presentation of Howard Rogers' site (and the integration of Forums, Blog and now an Oracle Wiki) and have followed, with interest, the evolution of the site in different formats, and enjoyed Howard’s thoughts on various content management technologies over recent months before he finally settled on Joomla. I am also very impressed by the new look of Niall Litchfield’s orawin.info site which also uses Joomla and is a marked contrast (and improvement) from its predecessor. In fact, I just find myself gazing at the desert landscape for minutes on end. ...