London, near England - Wednesday 2 November 2005 The Oracle community was reeling yesterday from the revelation that the universally respected, internationally renown technical expert and long standing Oracle employee, Thomas Kyte, had made a mistake. The error was discovered by a Senior Oracle DBA based in Solihull in the UK, Mr. N. Brightside who explained: “I was dearly looking forward to attending the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham and hoped to get my copy of Tom Kyte’s latest book, (Expert Oracle - Database Architecture) signed by Tom personally. However, at the last minute, my manager told me that the end of Q3 was imminent and there was no budget available for the daily 4.50GBP return rail fare. So, I decided to ‘work from home’ and sit down to savour Tom’s excellent book. Imagine my surprise when I found what appeared, at first sight, to be a typographical error on page 38. In a paragraph discussing other relational database systems, Tom incorrectly refers to ‘Ingress’ instead of ‘Ingres’. Then to my horror, a quick search on AskTom revealed that Tom makes this identical misspelling elsewhere. It was not a typo, it was a genuine mistake.” ...

When I started this blog, I simply composed the posts in the Blogger editor which was adequate. Until one day, when I lost the complete text of a draft posting due to finger trouble. As I laboriously re-typed my masterpiece, I wished I had a blog editor with the infinite undo, auto-save and all the other features of Emacs. However, composing the drafts in the Blogger editor was useful as I could edit drafts from anywhere and then publish the blog very easily. ...

After briefly evaluating Furl, del.icio.us and Blinklist, I finally decided to ditch Furl and spurn the advances of del.ico.us in favour of Blinklist as my preferred one stop shop for all my social bookmarking needs. Furl was my first experience of ‘social bookmarking’ but, as I became more comfortable with the idea of tagging Web pages, I found the Furl interface is simply horrible. There are simply too many key clicks required to add a single tag let alone two ! And if you want to add a brand new category, it takes so long that you have almost lost the will to tag the page and forgotten why it was of interest in the first place. It looks like the tagging functionality was added on as an afterthought. ...

I recently stumbled upon Lisa Dobson’s Oracle Newbies blog. Although I have never met Lisa, I admire her for two reasons. Firstly, she is about to give a presentation at the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham. I am a good deal older than Lisa and the prospect of presenting to a large number of ‘grumpy old men’ would fill me with absolute dread. Secondly, I really like Lisa’s rather self deprecating, modest statement on her profile ...

Imagine walking into a department store to buy a TV. You weigh up all the possible options and decide which model you want. The price of this TV is £457. The assistant says ‘That will be 457 pounds, Sir’ as she takes the credit card payment and arranges delivery for next week. You then happen to go up to the second floor and see the identical TV for £422. That’s £35 cheaper than what you’ve just paid. You go back to the assistant who sold you the goods to query this difference in the price. Unfortunately, the assistant is now on her lunch break but you are promised that she will call you back. She doesn’t. ...