Holy Father It is 23 years and 7 months since my last confession. Since then, I have downloaded Ethereal and started to sniff packets off the network. I know it was wrong but we had worked for a week on this problem. We had all exhaustively checked everything (twice) and we were tired, hungry and increasingly desperate. I fervently wished this was a conventional database problem or even an unconventional Siebel problem but the symptoms, the controlled tests and all the hard evidence increasingly pointed to ’the network'. ...

There are more signs, warnings, instructions and speed limits in Richmond Park than the nearby South Circular. The Parks Police really are destroying the park for all those who simply want to enjoy it.

Preloadr is an interesting, free utility that allows seamless manipulation of Flickr photos. The standard features (crop, resize, flip, rotate, sharpen, brightness) are there but red eye removal is absent which seems a curious, but important, omission.

The Killers are in the UK to promote ‘Sam’s Town’ and their new facial hair. The band made an appearance on Jonathan Ross’ show playing the single ‘When You Were Young’ and ‘All These Things I’ve Done’. Radio 1 also had a 2 hour feature including interviews and a concert from Blackpool Empress Ballroom recorded on Friday 8 September. Irritatingly, the BBC haven’t grasped podcasts yet and the concert includes some of the following songs but not necessarily in this order. The concert starts at 1 hr 20 min. ...

Judy Rose has an interesting article on the importance of writing style and Paul Stamatiou also has some excellent tips on structuring blog articles. My writing style has many flaws. At work, I have a irritating tendency to use ‘padding’ words that are completely worthless, superfluous and unnecessary. For example, ‘It was noted that…’. This trait was first brought to my attention by the ruthless peer QA review process which helped to reduce my deliverable documents from 78 pages to a more reasonable 12. ...

Last night the book club met again after the summer recess. Rosemary Barnstormworth suggested an interesting tome titled ‘Margrave of the Marshes’. This is John Peel’s partly completed autobiography which was completed by his family after his untimely death. I really think I am going to enjoy this one. For example, in the foreword, his children describe a list of potential titles How’s Your Flow ? Wet Echo Flying Cream Shoes Goatman Codds If He Ever Hits Puberty Buckskins and Buggery The Wotters Won The Race A History of the Iodine Trade 1847-1902 An ABC of High-Jumping The Questing of Stempel Garamond: How He Overcame The Gelks and Punished The Dwellers with the Well Jesus Wasn’t Made of Fish I have already laughed out loud more then once although I find some of the sentences long and rambling. Then it struck me. This was exactly how John Peel was. You can almost hear him saying the words. ...

I just changed my Thunderbird setup to move all messages from the IMAP server to local folders and then apply the various filters locally as opposed to applying filters on the server. This means that all messages are visible even when disconnected so I will be able to do email housekeeping in airport lounges. I tested each new message filter in turn and everything worked fine. Unfortunately I discovered that, contrary to the documentation, Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 does not appear to automatically apply all filters to new messages in ‘Local Folders-Inbox’. Sigh. ...

Bottom up Identify resource intensive SQL statements using Statspack (ADDM, custom scripts, Spotlight). Siebel is a black box that pumps out lengthy, complicated SQL statements with lots of (outer) joins. Level 7 snapshots are useful as ‘sprepsql’ may be used to reveal the full query text which is often tantalisingly truncated in the summary reports. In addition, the associated query plan for any statement can retrospectively dumped. The DBA can determine which queries are executed and how many times. There is no point tuning a query that is only executed monthly whereas shaving fractions of a second from a fundamental query executed thousands of times may prove more worthwhile. ...

Steve Irwin - You had a passion for wildlife that truly brought it alive. Andre Agassi - You sobbed uncontrollably on a tennis court.

Back in the old days, things were very simple. We had a camera. We took photographs. We sent the prints away to BonusPrint. We discarded mistakes. We filed the photos in albums. We ordered duplicates for grandparents. Best of all, my involvement in the whole process was negligible. Then some idiot invented the digital camera. We still took photos but the whole issue of printing became more complicated. You could be adventurous and attempt to print on your inkjet printer at home. This would result in ludicrously sized and distorted A4 images, drenched in ink, that gave small children nightmares. ...