Posts

Day 3

2020-04-28

Monday 27 April

I don’t normally write much about my job. I guess that’s because I am wary of revealing company confidential information but I work for Oracle Corporation and have done so since 2006. I am a Technical Consultant (‘Jack of all Trades, Master of None’).

I find ‘Dear Diary’ blog posts quite tedious but anyway, during these strange times, it’s something to write about.

I have been a remote worker since I returned to work following a ‘minor health issue’ in 2011 so this remote working thing isn’t novel, strange, challenging or depressing for me. I don’t need endless quizzes, fancy dress meetings or ‘Best Zoom background’ competitions to motivate me or raise my spirits.

Day 2

2020-04-27

Sunday 26 April

Wife cut my hair. Probably not as good as the lady who visits us at home but my sideburns no longer resemble those of a 1970’s George Best. Fringe is sub-optimal but who cares. Not me.

Another walk in Richmond Park. Entered at Kingston Gate, walked up to Isabella Plantation car park and back again.

Don’t know how many steps or distance but it takes us about an hour.

Day 1

2020-04-26

Saturday 25 April

Went for a walk in Richmond Park. Still swerving people, mainly on the roads approaching the park and at the entrance gates.

Great to see families out on bikes, dog walkers, people jogging and folk enjoying the open spaces with no cars and no cyclists on the roads.

Thankfully, didn’t see any cyclists flouting the massive ‘NO CYCLING’ signs on every gate as that was getting irritating and rather stressful.

Coronavirus playlist

2020-03-24

Safe European Home - The Clash
My Corona - The Knack
Germ Free Adolescence - X-Ray Spex
Don’t Stand So Close To Me - The Police
Soul In Isolation - The Chameleons
Ghost Town - The Specials
Clampdown - The Clash
You’re A Germ - Wolf Alice
Eat Yourself Fitter - The Fall
All By Myself - Eric Carmen
Waiting For The Man (with a vaccine) - Velvet Underground
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
Panic - The Smiths
I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs
Anarchy In The UK - Sex Pistols
It’s The End of The World (as we know it) - R.E.M.

Watch Your User

2019-10-25

Connor McDonald posts an excellent series of articles about tuning a database application.

This analysis from a end user perspective reminded me of my own experiences when I was a technical consultant helping customers running a large CRM application, typically in call centres scattered across Europe.

I was often summoned onsite and told to solve the problem that ‘The application is slow’. Usually, different people were eager to give me their view on the issue:-

why I dislike the popular TV quiz show - Tipping Point

2019-02-27

We all love pub quizzes and like TV quiz shows. I think it’s partly because we are curious to see whether we can answer the questions and sometimes, to occasionally, laugh at some of the bizarre answers offered by contestants under time pressure.

One of my favourites recently was a lady who was asked:-

‘Hydrocarbons are made up of carbon and which other element ?’

‘Carbon dioxide’

I loved this answer because she replied, in part, with ‘Carbon’ which would have meant that hydrocarbons comprised of carbon, and well, more carbon. Then she added two atoms of oxygen for good measure.

the curious case of the filling station incident

2018-12-31

7:54am on a quiet Monday morning. Quiet because it’s New Year’s Eve. I have just put £15 into a hire car prior to returning the vehicle.

There’s just one gentleman is in front of me paying. He has a fuel card so he’s asked for his registration. He can’t remember this so looks out to the forecourt to check. Maybe this is a hire car too although that seems unlikely as it’s an ancient, brown, battered Volvo estate. No problem. Then he’s asked for his mileage which he doesn’t know. This is optional so no problem.

fixing Dovecot stats writer permissions

2018-11-29

I tend to switch Linux distributions quite often. Consequently, I tend to have this process down to a fine art and it doesn’t take me that long. The most time consuming element is ensuring the necessary backups are in place.

However, you normally find some package or configuration option you forgot about and my recent switch from Arch Linux to Fedora 29 and back again unearthed a strange problem with the Dovecot IMAP server I hadn’t encountered before.

in praise of Silver Searcher

2018-11-15

Occasionally, I have to search lots of files for a pattern. It was only recently I discovered the wonderful silver searcher utility which saves me a lot of time.

To install ‘ag’ on Fedora, use the following (which isn’t entirely obvious or intuitive if you’re used to typing ‘ag’).

# sudo dnf install the_silver_searcher

I believe there is an Emacs interface which would save me even more time.

$ time ag 'sql statement execute time' ~

real    0m0.125s
user    0m0.128s
sys     0m0.257s

$ time find ~ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i 'sql statement execute time'

real    0m23.725s
user    0m7.965s
sys     0m1.618s

Another blog migration

2018-11-14

It all started innocuously enough with this post from Alex Shroeder

https://octodon.social/@kensanata/101052266709264418

Writing tools.
Emacs
Wiki What about you?

I spontaneously replied.

Emacs Orgmode Nikola

This reminded me that since, I had recently migrated my desktop from Arch Linux to Fedora 29, I needed to reinstall Nikola and check that the blog I never use still could be built successfully.

Oh - how exciting. Nikola has recently released version [8.0.1] Nikola-8 and I was on the previous version - 7.8.15. I quickly created a Python 3 virtual environment and installed Nikola.