Posts

How to publicise your blog

Don’t. Build it and they will come (probably). Try and focus on the style and content of the blog. Try to keep updating the blog on a regular basis. Make it easy for people to subscribe to the blog by creating an RSS feed - Feedburner is a popular, free choice. If you have succeeded in getting people to visit the blog and, better, maybe even subscribe to it, try to keep new material coming otherwise the blog will surely wither and die together with the interest of the your audience.

Tom Kyte makes mistake shock

London, near England - Wednesday 2 November 2005

The Oracle community was reeling yesterday from the revelation that the universally respected, internationally renown technical expert and long standing Oracle employee, Thomas Kyte, had made a mistake.

The error was discovered by a Senior Oracle DBA based in Solihull in the UK, Mr. N. Brightside who explained:

“I was dearly looking forward to attending the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham and hoped to get my copy of Tom Kyte’s latest book, (Expert Oracle - Database Architecture) signed by Tom personally. However, at the last minute, my manager told me that the end of Q3 was imminent and there was no budget available for the daily 4.50GBP return rail fare. So, I decided to ‘work from home’ and sit down to savour Tom’s excellent book. Imagine my surprise when I found what appeared, at first sight, to be a typographical error on page 38. In a paragraph discussing other relational database systems, Tom incorrectly refers to ‘Ingress’ instead of ‘Ingres’. Then to my horror, a quick search on AskTom revealed that Tom makes this identical misspelling elsewhere. It was not a typo, it was a genuine mistake.”

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Emacs as a Web 2.0 application

When I started this blog, I simply composed the posts in the Blogger editor which was adequate. Until one day, when I lost the complete text of a draft posting due to finger trouble. As I laboriously re-typed my masterpiece, I wished I had a blog editor with the infinite undo, auto-save and all the other features of Emacs.

However, composing the drafts in the Blogger editor was useful as I could edit drafts from anywhere and then publish the blog very easily.

comparison of Blinklist, del.icio.us and Furl

After briefly evaluating Furl, del.icio.us and Blinklist, I finally decided to ditch Furl and spurn the advances of del.ico.us in favour of Blinklist as my preferred one stop shop for all my social bookmarking needs.

Furl was my first experience of ‘social bookmarking’ but, as I became more comfortable with the idea of tagging Web pages, I found the Furl interface is simply horrible. There are simply too many key clicks required to add a single tag let alone two ! And if you want to add a brand new category, it takes so long that you have almost lost the will to tag the page and forgotten why it was of interest in the first place. It looks like the tagging functionality was added on as an afterthought.

Oracle newbies, wizards and gurus

I recently stumbled upon Lisa Dobson’s Oracle Newbies blog. Although I have never met Lisa, I admire her for two reasons. Firstly, she is about to give a presentation at the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham. I am a good deal older than Lisa and the prospect of presenting to a large number of ‘grumpy old men’ would fill me with absolute dread.

Secondly, I really like Lisa’s rather self deprecating, modest statement on her profile

Beware of shopping at Dell computers

Imagine walking into a department store to buy a TV. You weigh up all the possible options and decide which model you want. The price of this TV is £457. The assistant says ‘That will be 457 pounds, Sir’ as she takes the credit card payment and arranges delivery for next week.

You then happen to go up to the second floor and see the identical TV for £422. That’s £35 cheaper than what you’ve just paid. You go back to the assistant who sold you the goods to query this difference in the price. Unfortunately, the assistant is now on her lunch break but you are promised that she will call you back. She doesn’t.

probably the best gadget in the world

Watches are useful. My main requirements for a watch are:

1. Display the precise time at all times.
2. Do not need any maintenance like winding or changing the batteries.
3. Automatically adjust for GMT/BST.
4. Automatically adjust for current timezone anywhere in the world.
5. Light. I don’t want or need a micro-computer on my wrist that also tells me the weather, my resting heartbeat and the altitude.

So I bought this Casio Waveceptor watch.

Beware of Dixons Tax Free shopping

Airports are pretty dull places. Last Wednesday, I found myself at Heathrow T2, at some unearthly hour in the morning. I wandered round Dixons to have a quick look at the latest gadgets and kill some time. I happened to see a couple of items I was interested in. The first was Microsoft Office 2003 for Student Edition (3 user license). I had already seen this on Amazon at 91GBP and Dixon’s tax free price was 110GBP which was, err, twenty pounds more expensive. So, not exactly a brilliant saving at Dixons Tax Free shopping there.

death of a Web site

I was just looking at my Web site and spontaneously decided to end its sad, sorry life. Static content unchanged in years with dead links with little of interest to anyone. Part blog, part bookmarks, part experiment in HTML. Now consigned to the Internet archives.

British mentality

I was flying back from Dusseldorf to London on Lufthansa yesterday. For some reason, the kind lady at the check-in desk, upgraded me to business class so I got a nice bread roll and cloth napkin. The gentleman next to me was very disappointed that there were no English language newspapers available on board. When the steward asked why he didn’t pick one up at the gate, he became even more irritated, telling him in no uncertain terms that there were no ‘English’ newspapers at the gate and worse, not a single ‘English’ newspaper in the business lounge.