Category: Random

It strikes me that IT companies are getting away with murder as far as usability and support are concerned.

As soon as my friends or family get a new bit of hardware or software, I get a phone call. I actively encourage people to use firewalls and antivirus software to reduce the amount of time I spend ridding their machines of nasties. Sometimes I feel like sending an invoice to Dell/Microsoft/Norton for the time I’ve wasted because their products are not fit for use by “normal” home users.

It would be interesting to see the state of home computing if all the “IT friends” turned round and refused to help their friends! I’m guessing it would be a serious mess…

Cheers

Tim…

I’ve made some minor changes to my blogger template so it’s now full width. As always there are some issues. The allignment looks fine in Firefox, but it’s a little off in IE. I use Firefox so that’s the way it will stay 🙂

If anyone has any problems I would be interested to know.

Cheers

Tim…

I’ve added some more games to the forum. If you’re a registered member of the forum you’ll see them at the top of the list.

Cheers

Tim…

After reading this article (Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed) I decided to have a little dabble with WordPress and I’m very impressed. WordPress was first brought to my attention when I started to read Andy C‘s blog. My interest was rekindled when I read this post of his (a short history of Oracle blogging).

The installation was simple, there are loads of themes and pluggins and the administration side of it is very straight forward. Within 15 minutes I had downloaded it, installed it, picked a new theme and imported all my Blogger posts. It was that simple.

For the moment, I’m not going to jump ship from Blogger, but if I do, I think it will be to WordPress.

Cheers

Tim…

I just spotted the statement, “Hygienically Clean”, on the side of a Carex liquid soap dispenser. I suppose that’s alot better than “Unhygienically Clean”, or “Hygienically Dirty”.

I’ll sleep safer tonight… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

My hosting provider has given me £30 of free Google Adwords advertising, so I’ve started a “Campaign” on adwords. It costs £5 to activate the account and I’ve told it to stop advertising as soon as I’ve spent £25. I would be interested to know if anyone sees an advert on their travels.

Fun, fun, fun…

Cheers

Tim…

It seems VMware are releasing yet another free product. This times it’s VMware server:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/03/vmware_goes_free/

VMware is a cool product. I was first introduced to it approximately 5 years ago. We had a big (for the time) server running Red Hat 7.1 as the guest operating system, which was subsequently split into 5 Windows NT virtual servers. These were used as development servers for a number of projects, including Oracle projects. I’ve been a fan of it ever since.

This free release should open the door for many more people. It’s really cool not having to mess with your main OS when you want to try out a new Oracle installation, or a new upgrade process.

The article also mentions Xen, which I’d not heard about before. Looks like it will be included in the next release of RHEL and SUSE. Sounds well worth a try.

Cheers

Tim…

Whilst checking out the forum on DBASupport.com, an advert jumped out at me because it included the text, “Bug Free”. It seems like a pretty bold claim for any software company. I guess they could have gone the whole hog and proclaimed it unbreakable 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

A few choice pieces of advice for all managers who don’t have a clue:

• If you don’t understand the technology, ask someone who does before you make a dumb-ass decision that the whole company will live to regret many times over!
• Don’t believe everything you see in a sales pitch.
• Don’t outsource work to people who are using your project as a learning experience.

Management types… You can’t live with them! You go to jail for hacking them to bits and burying them in your back garden!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Does any know any companies that will cover my back garden in two feet of concrete? 🙂

Like Andy C, I’ve been following Howard Rogers’ CMS journey with interest.

I’m always hopeful I’ll find tools that make my life easier, but as yet I’ve been unable to find a CMS tool that suits me. The biggest problem with all the CMS tools I’ve trialed is the way they use the database. Invariably, each page is generated at runtime from the contents of the database, making the database access speed a major limiting factor for sites with high number of hits. So why serve static and semi-static data from the database?

By far, the majority of my site is static content. If I want to alter the format of the site I alter either the Cascading Style Sheet or 4 simple template files. I don’t revisit each page on the site. That would be lunacy. My homegrown CMS system stores the contents of all my pages in the database, but rather than generating a page for each request, I generate the whole site once, including templates and include files, to flat files and only regenerate individual pages when things change. Dynamic and semi-static content, such as article ratings and RSS feeds, are located in small include files, which are automatically regenerated when necessary.

My difficulty in finding a CMS I like comes from that fact that I have most of the advantages of these CMS systems, like web editing and backup/recovery, but I also get speed thrown into the mix as a bonus.

I guess the hunt continues 🙂

Cheers

Tim…