Doug Burns tells of an unusual company with an unusual interviewing technique that reminded me of some interviewing anecdotes. After one year in IT, I had money in my pocket, no more studies and I was keen, enthusiastic and motivated. Consequently, I was invited on the ‘milk round’ to interview prospective graduates in Scotland. Flying in an aeroplane, staying in a posh hotel, eating food, drinking beer and not having to pay for any of it motivated me even more. ...
A couple of messages to the kind person who accidentally took my Palm Vx from the safety of its docking cradle. Clearly, like me, you can resist everything but temptation. You can also have the mains charger, cradle, spare stylus and a screen protector. I may even have the original box and instructions somewhere. This will help to increase the resale value on eBay. Just look under Brightside, N and give me a call. You will find that I am a very understanding, forgiving type. ...
Just noticed that those nice people at Wordpress.com have added aggregated statistics over 7 and 30 days. A software company that actually listens to their users and ' eats their own dog food’. Interesting concept but I don’t think it will ever take off.
I was just reviewing the list of Oracle related blogs I subscribe to. Here they are in approximate chronological order with the blogging platform. Apologies for any inaccuracies. Mark Rittman - June 2003 - Movable Type 3.2 Niall Litchfield - March 2004 - Blogger - recent convert to Joomla. Howard Rogers - December 2004 - Originally Blogger, Opera, now Joomla. You name a blogging platform or CMS and Howard’s probably used it. Eddie Awad - Original creation date unknown. WordPress.org (migrated from blogger in June 2005) Doug Burns - March 2005 - Blogger (migrated from a Tripod blog which only lasted 3 months. Look at it and you can understand why) Lewis Cunningham - March 2005 - ITtoolbox Peter Scott - April 2005 - Blogger Tom Kyte - April 2005 - Blogger Andrew Clarke - May 2005 - Blogger Robert Vollman - May 2005 - Blogger Jeff Hunter - May 2005 - Blogger Tim Hall - June 2005 - Blogger Lisa Dobson - July 2005 - Blogger Jeff Moss - July 2005 - Blogger Gary Myers - August 2005 - Blogger Life After Coffee - August 2005 - WordPress 1.5 Mogens Norgaard - November 2005 - Blogger A couple of things struck me… ...
Tim Hall was right. I can resist everything except temptation. Install Apache 1.3.2 for Windows. Very quick and easy. Slight feeling of version envy. The latest version is 2.x. Will upgrade later. Install mySQL 5.0 for Windows. Very quick and easy. Install mySQL Administration Tools 1.1. Very quick and easy. Install mySQL QueryBrowser 1.1.9. Very quick and easy. Login to mySQL database. Create a table. Insert a record. Select the record. All seems fine. ...
Last night, I was standing at London Waterloo station, sincerely hoping that the engineer would be able to fix the carriages for my train home. Suddenly, there was a stampede of people rushing past me. What on earth was happening ? Was this some spontaneous act of flash mobbing ? Had a train arrived unexpectedly at platform 4 for those impatient people from Basingstoke ? Or was there some sort of inaudible terrorist alert mumbled by the station announcer that I had missed ? ...
Bit of a ghostly theme today. One great aspect of my job is that I write SQL scripts that are reviewed and executed by other people. This suits me just fine. The less work for me, the better. Obviously, I never add ‘spool off’ to the tail of a SQL*Plus script. This is a whole ten characters to type (including newline). Multiply this by all the SQL scripts you might produce in a lifetime and just think of how much time that would waste. In any case, everyone knows that ’exit’ implies a ‘spool off’ anyway. ...
‘Most Haunted’ is a fantastic TV program hosted by Yvette Fielding, where a Liverpudlian psychic medium, Derek Acorah, visits haunted properties resurrecting the spirits of dear, dead departed souls. The program is notable for absolutely superb acting by Acorah who can fulfil a variety of roles, effortlessly adopting the voice of tortured, Victorian ladies, in pitch darkness, without the aid of a script. The supporting actors (Fielding and the camera crew) are also superb. They are simply wasted on Living TV. A career in Hollywood surely beckons. ...
I have been playing a CD in my car on Disc-Random-Shuffle mode for ten weeks. The CD contains close to 200 songs. I have heard all the songs once, some twice and a handful three times. This morning, I heard something that sent a shiver down my spine, chilled my bones and momentarily froze me to the spot. ‘Spectre versus Rector’ by The Fall. This ‘song’ is a 8 minute rant from Mark E. Smith accompanied by some noise, detailing a ghostly story from the ‘Dragnet’ LP. ‘Spectre versus Rector’ sounds as if it was recorded in a bleak, industrial warehouse somewhere up North with a hand-held tape recorder. ...
I am a very efficient lazy person. I don’t like to type seven characters when two will suffice. I think Unix is a fantastic development environment. However, the overly long, verbose commands irritate me slightly. So I use the following aliases and shell functions a = tail -f ${ORACLE\_HOME}/rdbms/log/alert\_PRD.log l = ls ll = ls -l up = cd .. x = rm -fr \* z = wall 'Anyone fancy a quickie after work ?' [disciplinary action pending] One of the happiest days of my life was when I discovered the tab completion feature in the GNU bash shell and the environment variable $OLDPWD. ...