This blog uses Hugo and was previously hosted on Amazon S3 storage. The traffic and hence the costs were minimal (zero). After recently having to completely re-install Arch Linux after an idiotic mistake, I realised that Hugo was out of date, my Hugo theme was out of date and I’d forgotten precisely how the deployment to S3 actually worked. I was toying with taking my ball home in a mindless fit of pique, migrating 1,000 posts to Eleventy and I also looked at the Publii static site CMS with interest. ...

Tim Hall recently made a wonderful suggestion that the Oracle community remember the much missed Joel Kallman on 11 October 2021. My contribution doesn’t demonstrate APEX technical wizardry. Instead it’s a short story from a real-life customer project implemented using APEX. Just to avoid any potential law suits, this post isn’t about Agile development either - more how APEX can be used to quickly respond to changing customer requirements. One particular post from Joel stuck with me about his attitude to customer service which can be encapsulated in a single line: ...

I’m not really a betting man. Mainly because I’m a scientist. On Grand National day, we normally nominate two or three horses each and someone wanders to place our bets at the bookies round the corner. My daughter normally wins. Also, we might cut up the runners from the Daily Mail supplement and do a lucky dip sweepstake. I also used to routinely bet on the final score and first scorer in the FA Cup Final to add some interest (if United weren’t involved). ...

Saturday 18 July A beautiful, sunny Saturday morning but instead of sitting in a field in Hook Norton, drinking real ale, laughing, chatting rubbish and analysing the football season with my mates, instead we enjoyed a long overdue visit from my wife’s hairdresser. She is self-employed and a mobile hairdresser. We opened up the garage door and prepared chairs, black bin liners (to avoid using her capes) and an extension cable for her hairdryer and clippers. ...

I am not sure I like this increasing but irritating use of the ‘More’ or ‘Sensitive Content’ tag on Mastodon. From a cursory glance, I can’t even see how to add it from the Web interface. I’m not sure whether it’s enforced by the Mastodon instance or actively selected by the user. I presume it’s the latter. Microblogging to supposed to be short, snappy and spontaneous. I understand why sensitive media content might merit another key click (to protect the children) but if you’re posting about politics, I’d really rather see all the content in one fell swoop and then I would feel free to choose to ignore it. ...