I have never heard customers complaining about the abysmal performance of the Oracle pseudo-table DUAL. Nor have I ever encountered a real-life performance issue that was attributed to slow access to DUAL. Rarely have I been asked to tune an SQL statement that was sub-second and took a massive 3 consistent gets. Another reason I won’t be using this tip is that, a few years ago, I did encounter some unexpected, weird, obtuse behaviour in an Oracle system that completely baffled everyone. This was eventually tracked to the presence of not one, but two rows in the DUAL table. ...

Just add ‘http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2' to your blog configuration. Let’s see if it works. Update: Posted at 17:56. Pinged by GoogleBot at 18:00. Referrer (to this article) from Google Blog Search at 20:58.

Forget Box.Net. Forget Mozy. Forget memory sticks. Forget USB hard drives. DreamHost have upgraded the ‘basic’ $7.95 per month hosting package from 20GB to a staggering 200GB disk storage. As this humble blog currently occupies 0.01%, I have plenty of capacity for my photos, documents, CV (in txt, doc, PDF, LaTeX formats) and all my homework. In fact, as my hard disk is a paltry 40GB, I have room for absolutely everything. And if that wasn’t enough, Dreamhost are giving me a further 1GB every week. ...

The Council House will host the Uefa Cup Final in 2008. Unfortunately, City won’t be appearing but at least the revenue might relieve some of the MASSIVE (£60m) debt.

The migration from andyc.wordpress.com is now complete. All articles have been migrated. All comments have been lovingly preserved. All the internal links have been fixed (by hand) in a long and painstaking process. Robots and spiders are crawling all over the new site. The only omission was a handful of WordPress images. I realised that I was a little hasty in deleting my old WordPress blog otherwise I could have easily retrieved these files too. Or a simple ‘wget’ of the complete site would have done the job. ...

Manchester City - Theatre of Comedy Pearce uses a cuddly horse Barton bares his mouth to Everton fans. A marriage made in heaven.

I have been pretty impressed with Dreamhost so far: Configured putty for SSH access. Installed Joomla (one-click) Upgraded to PHP5 (one-click) Installed MediaWiki (one-click) Installed Gregarius (all by myself) The only minor issues I have encountered is that I can’t disable telnet (insecure) and my analog stats didn’t get refreshed today. Dreamhost have a blog, a Wiki, support forums and any idiotic questions (after ignoring all of those) have all been answered promptly and courteously.

Well, you could at least sign the petition if you feel that strongly

I had a blind date this morning at 06.55. An early start admittedly but this lady would surely be worth it. The lady’s name was Iris. I was supposed to meet her in Terminal 1 at London Heathrow. Iris was flying in from Russia after a short courtship (19 hours) on the Internet. I even had an letter (IM) from Iris. Iris said she’d be waiting on the right before you reach the shops (which was worrying enough in itself). ...

I recently read some homework (Religious Education) about the life and times of Jesus Christ that included the following gems: Jesus came to earth through the Virgin Mary There was another incident where Jesus was crucified