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In April 2002, I got off my barstool and actually went to see a Manchester United game. The fixture was at Upton Park and I was in the Bobby Moore stand as I was the guest of a West Ham member.

United won an very entertaining game 5-3 and Beckham scored a fantastic goal (lob from outside the box). All of this made it very hard to keep my mouth shut.

Ironically, I was stood (sorry - sitting) just 10 yards from the away support and enjoyed all the chants and banter between the two sets of supporters.

Depending on the score and the mood, the West Ham fans usually replied to the United chants with some witty retort, hurled some abuse or just stood in silence.

Interestingly, the chant that provoked by far the biggest reaction was when United chanted 'Argentina, Argentina' at the England (sorry - West Ham) supporters.

I dont agree with Alex Ferguson about everything (Stam, Beckham, RvN) but to make positive, bullish noises on Friday then quietly release the statement that Rooneys injury involves the joint was an absolute master stroke.

Football Shirts Hall Of Shame. Top Left. Coventry City. A true classic.

Imagine trying to hold a conversation with someone who never completed their sentences. Irritating, eh ?

I used to smile when people like Robert Scoble (and other well respected bloggers) used to get all heated and uptight in a raging controversy about a subject as innocuous as the thorny issue of partial versus full RSS feeds.

I used to think 'Crikey. Aren't there more serious things in life to worry about ?' (football and music to name just two).

But now I agree that partial feeds are indeed the work of the devil. Partial feeds seem to defeat the whole point of RSS and I am growing to hate that tantalising '...'

I have configured Netvibes which looks excellent and is rapidly becoming my one stop home page, RSS reader, search engine, portal, email, calendar, calculator, everything.

Everything that is apart from being able to read blogs by people who insist on using partial RSS feeds.

People who insist on publishing partial feeds (step forward all you Oracle bloggers) are now forcing me to click another button in order to read their articles in all their glory.

Another click isn't the end of the world but please remember that I am very lazy. It is also a context switch into another application (browser) when Netvibes is perfectly able of displaying the content.

I can understand commercial sites using partial feeds as they rely on advertising revenue so they have an interest in pulling people to the actual site. However for personal bloggers just writing for fun, I don't see the point.

Well, actually, of course, I do see the point. Some personal bloggers are not just doing it purely for fun. They are doing it to see if what they are writing is actually of interest to anybody and whether anyone is watching.

That's why they publish partial feeds, forcing the interested reader along to the site and incrementing the precious stat counter by one.

When I recently plugged this blog into a statistics counter, I toyed with killing my Feedburner feed (WordPress has a perfectly good feed) and converting to a partial RSS feed. Both of these changes would force people to my site, increase my traffic and boost my ego.

However, I decided against because some people may prefer Feedburner (for whatever reason) and other readers may prefer to read my words from within their favoured RSS reader without that extra click.

So I decided not to risk antagonising my audience (of two) and to leave well alone.

A Gartner/IDC report summarising the state of the database market in 2005 contains some interesting nuggets of information.

The database market is still growing at 9.4% (which surprised me a little).

OpenSource databases account for less than 1% of the market but are growing fast (47%).

The Linux platform (thanks mainly to Oracle) is showing the strongest growth (84%).

Despite these two statements of fact, Oracle are not perturbed by the threat of OpenSource (pass the salt cellar).

Market share:

1. Oracle - 44.6%
2. IBM - 21.4%
3. Microsoft - 16.8%
4. OpenSource (MySQL, Ingres) - 1%

WordPress recently bought a ton of resilient hardware and have undoubtedly improved the quality of service for the 200,000 WordPress users.

Matt Mullenweg gave an interesting interview to Om Malik and Niall Kennedy about how startups can plan for future capacity, provide resilience and maintain performance & scalability.

The IT architects at the UK ISP, Blueyonder, should really listen to this podcast.

I currently use MyYahoo! as my home page. I have looked at MyYahoos next incarnation, played with Googles personalised home page and Windows Live! but none are as flexible as I would like.

So, prompted by the only other Oracle gentleman with enough taste to choose WordPress, Rahul, I decided to experiment a little with Netvibes.

Out of the box, the default Netvibes screen doesn't look too remarkable. A widget for Gmail, a search box, example RSS feeds and the obligatory Flickr feed to display other peoples lovely cats on your home page.

However, the real power of Netvibes lies in the power and flexibility to configure the page(s) to be exactly what you want, where you want and how you want.

Thankfully, the signup page is blissfully simple so you get an account immediately and painlessly.

One of the main things I am interested in is a personalised portal with access to all my RSS feeds. Simply click on 'Add Content' and you can either add individual feeds by URL or, in my case, import my OPML from Newsgator Online.

Wait a few seconds and all my RSS feeds are successfully imported and, even better, my hierarchy is preserved. Impressive.

You can simply select an individual RSS feeds from the available list. This presents a brief summary and the option to add the feed to the current page.

Clicking on an article of interest opens up the detailed RSS reader. This is a fairly standard two pane view and you can click through to the Web site.

Netvibes offers multiple tabbed pages. I created several pages including one for all the Oracle blogs I read. I then simply used 'Add to current page' for each Oracle blog to create my personalised Oracle blogs page.

This is pretty good but when you are actually reading the Oracle blogs, the blog hierarchy on the left of the screen is unused and a needless distraction. No problem - just close it which leaves you with this newspaper style screen.

Now to see whether there are any articles of interest. Simply click 'Expand all' to reveal what everyone is talking about.

One of my pet hates about most RSS readers I have used is that it wasn't easy to select which blog appears first in the list. With Netvibes, it is trivial. If you decide Doug Burns is more interesting than that clown, Andy C, simply drag'n'drop to put Doug first in the list. No need to rename your favourite authors as 001Doug, 002Tom, 999Andy. This is the year 2006 and Web 2.0 after all.

Each tabbed page can be assigned a pretty icon and Netvibes comes with a handy set of (growing) widgets (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, del.ici.ous, Box.net, Ical, ToDo, Weather) in addition to featured RSS feeds.

Overall, an excellent piece of well designed, fast software. Netvibes doesn't have a help page. You simply don't need one due to the intuitive interface.

I started out hoping to find a personalised home page and I discovered a very powerful, customisable RSS reader hidden under covers.

I went to see the Da Vinci Code last night.

Unfortunately, I didnt actually get to see the film as there was a massive protest organised by the Catholic Church outside the cinema.

Back in 1995, I was a software engineer for Ingres, working on the OS/2 port. A merchant bank had a serious, intermittent, non-reproducible problem and Computer Associates kindly bought me a ticket to New York to go and help them.

The ticket was an open return. I thought 'That's nice. That's so I can extend my stay for a lovely weekend city break with my wife'. The truth was that it was an open return as I was staying onsite until the problem was resolved [ PH was right. I am naive ]

I duly took a black briefcase with a magnetic tape with the complete source code, an umbrella and a bowler hat. The tape was slightly too big for the briefcase and it was a struggle to shut it. Halfway through the flight, I decided to read some of the background to the long standing issue. The briefcase wouldn't open. It was jammed. I was petrified that US Customs were going to ask me to open it. Thankfully, they didn't.

When I arrived at the plush offices of the prestigious merchant bank, I was greeted like royalty. The client was very impressed that an 'engineer all the way from London' had come to visit them. They offered me tea, coffee or water and looked perplexed when I said 'Err - have you got a Swiss Army Knife ?'. A suitable tool was produced and they looked on in amazement as I butchered the lock and held the mag tape aloft. Come to think of it, I didn't have a laptop so I must have compiled the Ingres product on their server.

My other memories of this trip are going to a cinema in Times Square to watch 'Pulp Fiction' in an effort to stay awake and beat jet lag. Somehow, this seemed to enhance the cinematic experience further.

Then I called home, trying to find out the United score against Crystal Palace. People kept telling me 'Oh you haven't heard about Cantona. God it was absolutely unbelievable. He was sent off, leapt into the crowd and attacked a Palace fan with a Kung Fu kick'. I didn't believe a word of it and never got to find out the actual score (1-1) until I returned home.

And the actual bug - it was a one liner. A race condition introduced by a misplaced #ifdef.

The more observant among you will have noticed the addition of a StatCounter button to the sidebar.

The available StatCounter metrics are quite basic as the hosted Wordpress blog is limited to the HTML (not the Javascript) version of the tracking code. So advanced features like path analysis and keywords are not available but the reports do include domain information, breakdown of unique and returning visitors, visit length, pages per visit and browser metrics.

Combined with the statistics on the WordPress dashboard which do include the referrer and search engine, you get a pretty complete picture of traffic. The StatCounter reports also go back indefinitely compared to the 30 days on WordPress.

It would be neat if WordPress could open up more of the Google Analytics functionality so all the reports were under one roof.

Guess what. Most people glance at one page and stay for less than a second.