editting Flickr photos

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

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.

writing style

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.

Margrave of the Marshes

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.

unfiltered and featured

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.

30 second guide to tuning Siebel

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.

so farewell then

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

a short history of digital photography

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.

Paula Radcliffe

Congratulations to Paula Radcliffe who is pregnant.

Let’s just hope she doesn’t give birth squatting down on the roadside.

my head hurts

Tough week. Lots of driving to and from the bleak, industrial North. Lots of head scratching, pouring over computers and log files, talking to different people, all working together to try to fix a difficult, long standing, non-reproducible, high-profile problem.

Arrive home. After the emotional reunions, hugs and tears, I am immediately asked to fix a difficult problem that is (thankfully) reproducible. Son took advantage of my absence to buy another PC game. Game launches splash screen and immediately crashes.