Posts

MUFC > England #2

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.

MUFC > England

I don’t agree with Alex Ferguson about everything (Stam, Beckham, RvN) but to make positive, bullish noises on Friday then quietly release the statement that Rooney’s injury ‘involves the joint’ was an absolute master stroke.

brown is the new black

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

partial versus full fe…

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).

state of the database nation

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).

Matt Mullenweg on scalability

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.

good vibes from Netvibes

I currently use MyYahoo! as my home page. I have looked at MyYahoo’s next incarnation, played with Google’s 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.

Da Vinci Code review

I went to see the Da Vinci Code last night.

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually get to see the film as there was a massive protest organised by the Catholic Church outside the cinema.

New York nostalgia

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 ]

watching you watching me

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.