Wednesday 29 April I use a Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 desktop computer that runs Arch Linux for work. This PC is a few years old now and has i7-6700@3.40GHz CPU (4 cores) and 16GB of memory which is adequate for my purposes. I used to distro hop (Fedora, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Solus) quite regularly but haven’t done so for a while as Arch meets all my needs (rolling distribution) with almost modern, up-to-date versions of every software package I would ever need. ...

Tuesday 28 April Over the years, I have maintained a variety of blogs and migrated my content between most popular blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, Ghost, Joomla, Habari, Typepad, Tumblr, Posterous, Jekyll, Django, Octopress, Nikola, Hugo, Pelican). For this #100DaysToOffload exercise, I am using write.as. I currently have a neglected but perfectly functional blog which uses a static site generator (Hugo) and publishes the content on Amazon S3. However, it’s five months since I posted on that blog and I can guarantee that if I were to use that platform, the workflow would be: ...

Monday 27 April I don’t normally write much about my job. I guess that’s because I am wary of revealing company confidential information but I work for Oracle Corporation and have done so since 2006. I am a Technical Consultant (‘Jack of all Trades, Master of None’). I find ‘Dear Diary’ blog posts quite tedious but anyway, during these strange times, it’s something to write about. I have been a remote worker since I returned to work following a ‘minor health issue’ in 2011 so this remote working thing isn’t novel, strange, challenging or depressing for me. I don’t need endless quizzes, fancy dress meetings or ‘Best Zoom background’ competitions to motivate me or raise my spirits. ...

Sunday 26 April Wife cut my hair. Probably not as good as the lady who visits us at home but my sideburns no longer resemble those of a 1970’s George Best. Fringe is sub-optimal but who cares. Not me. Another walk in Richmond Park. Entered at Kingston Gate, walked up to Isabella Plantation car park and back again. Don’t know how many steps or distance but it takes us about an hour. ...

Saturday 25 April Went for a walk in Richmond Park. Still swerving people, mainly on the roads approaching the park and at the entrance gates. Great to see families out on bikes, dog walkers, people jogging and folk enjoying the open spaces with no cars and no cyclists on the roads. Thankfully, didn’t see any cyclists flouting the massive ‘NO CYCLING’ signs on every gate as that was getting irritating and rather stressful. ...

Safe European Home - The Clash My Corona - The Knack Germ Free Adolescence - X-Ray Spex Don’t Stand So Close To Me - The Police Soul In Isolation - The Chameleons Ghost Town - The Specials Clampdown - The Clash You’re A Germ - Wolf Alice Eat Yourself Fitter - The Fall All By Myself - Eric Carmen Waiting For The Man (with a vaccine) - Velvet Underground Paranoid - Black Sabbath Panic - The Smiths I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs Anarchy In The UK - Sex Pistols It’s The End of The World (as we know it) - R.E.M.

Connor McDonald posts an excellent series of articles about tuning a database application. This analysis from a end user perspective reminded me of my own experiences when I was a technical consultant helping customers running a large CRM application, typically in call centres scattered across Europe. I was often summoned onsite and told to solve the problem that ‘The application is slow’. Usually, different people were eager to give me their view on the issue:- ...

We all love pub quizzes and like TV quiz shows. I think it’s partly because we are curious to see whether we can answer the questions and sometimes, to occasionally, laugh at some of the bizarre answers offered by contestants under time pressure. One of my favourites recently was a lady who was asked:- ‘Hydrocarbons are made up of carbon and which other element ?’ ‘Carbon dioxide’ I loved this answer because she replied, in part, with ‘Carbon’ which would have meant that hydrocarbons comprised of carbon, and well, more carbon. Then she added two atoms of oxygen for good measure. ...

7:54am on a quiet Monday morning. Quiet because it’s New Year’s Eve. I have just put £15 into a hire car prior to returning the vehicle. There’s just one gentleman is in front of me paying. He has a fuel card so he’s asked for his registration. He can’t remember this so looks out to the forecourt to check. Maybe this is a hire car too although that seems unlikely as it’s an ancient, brown, battered Volvo estate. No problem. Then he’s asked for his mileage which he doesn’t know. This is optional so no problem. ...

I tend to switch Linux distributions quite often. Consequently, I tend to have this process down to a fine art and it doesn’t take me that long. The most time consuming element is ensuring the necessary backups are in place. However, you normally find some package or configuration option you forgot about and my recent switch from Arch Linux to Fedora 29 and back again unearthed a strange problem with the Dovecot IMAP server I hadn’t encountered before. ...