Dog clocks are not automatically updated for Daylight Savings time.

The upgrade to WordPress 2.6.3 was really pretty much a non event.  Just copy the two files and refresh.  Done.  The changes have no impact on any themes or plugins.

Plugin Compatibility
Random One Cat Widget is fully compatible with the version 2.6.3 and does not need to be upgraded.

Theme Compatibility
Mad Meg is fully compatible with the version 2.6.3 and does not need to be upgraded.

Enjoy.

You’ve hired a consultant Oracle DBA , either because you decided that Oracle isn’t that different to Microsoft Access and so your secretary could manage the new APPS installation as well as anyone yet it all went Pete Tong very fast, or because the consultant that sold you “a complete business re-engineering solution that maximised his bonus and your hair loss” told you you should, or (hopefully and rarely) you knew your company didn’t have skills.

Fine, he had a CV, a rate that made your head hurt and could start Monday.  The 5 minute telephone interview went well (they said they would come).  The trouble is you aren’t sure if they are any good and your technical skills started and ended on the Z80 processor.  Well, rest easy, you can tell if your new consultant DBA is really any good without the need for complex technical questions (and answers that you don’t understand).

Just check your Oracle DBA against the following list and their worthiness will be obvious.

• Dress Code.  Like every job, Oracle DBA’s have a strict and unwritten dress code - for consultants this will be what you wear to relax in.  What once was smart casual but now is a bit scruffy.  Beige or brown chinos, loafers, a polo shirt (or maybe a checked shirt) and a jacket.  A tie is OK, but if he doesn’t have one it’s a very good sign.  Laces or polished leather are bad.  If he looks like a salesman you’re in trouble.  If he’s smelly and has cord holding his trousers up, it’s just a tramp that wandered in to get warm (but check first they might be very good indeed - ha ha, just kidding they won’t smell).  Scruffy is good.  You aren’t dating them.  They will be happily married to an absolute stunner.
• PC.  If they didn’t bring their own PC, show them the door.  If it’s one of those tiny portables with a half sized screen and keyboard, things aren’t looking good.  DBA laptops will be large, robust and most likely more powerful than your server.  The quicker that they ask for a 10/100 cable the better (don’t give them 10).  The more hardcore consultant will have already fixed your issue in the lobby by hacking your wireless network.
• Tardiness.  A good DBA is never late.  They arrive early, take a piss and sit in reception with 5 minutes to go.  They charge you by the hour (or part thereof) so at 09h00 it’s your money.  A decent consultant will wait an hour before asking for you again.  A newbee will be frantic by 09h15.  Pick them up at 09h30 and you’ll know everything.
• Lunch.  Good consultant DBA’s will never run for president because they can’t afford the pay cut.  They make more a year than anyone else in the building.  They don’t take the bus or stay in cheap hotels,   and so, they don’t make their own sandwiches.  Anyone eating home-made cheese on mighty white, an apple and a Wagon Wheel isn’t any good.
• Privacy.  DBA’s aren’t into sharing.  They don’t come in pairs, don’t like to sit with developers and don’t talk much about their work.  They are blunt and will shout about how ridiculous your code / security / disk layout / information is all day long.  But it’s all Vegas to them.  They don’t talk about how crap it was at their last gig, or the stupidity of Mr X at Company Y.  Examples will be from your crappy systems not your neighbours.  This may seem a bit anti-social, but just like in the security services, people who talk about their work don’t last long in the DBA world.  Silence is golden.
• Certification.  Oracle’s certification programme is a con.  It exists to sell expensive “lowest common denominator” instructor led training.  Decent consultants will always be working and will know the training is crap.  Anyone with a valid certificate for a recent version hasn’t been a consultant very long.  Someone with a certificate (probably) won’t loose your data, but at the rate you’re paying you’ll want a little more than the basic minimum standard.  A good consultant Oracle DBA will not be certified.
• Books.  If you see them reading a DBA book, things are very grim.  A copy of “Oracle Database Administration for Dummies” is bad indeed, but any DBA book is a terrible sign.  Anyone decent will have read them and have working, tested scripts and useful PDFs on their laptop.  The only acceptable items for reading are :  the Internet, a sushi menu, investor documents for your company, and perhaps a very hardcore web programming or design book.
• Trash.  A DBA is logically tidy.  Their files and installs will be tidy.  They take a dim view of cluttered disorganised file systems.  Their physical workspace will look like it’s vacant.  They will shred anything they print or write and will love recycling.  Anyone putting paper in the trash is not a DBA.

Watch for these signs and you can’t go wrong.  Basically, a really good consultant Oracle DBA doesn’t need your job.  They will be belligerent, vaguely anti-social, dress like your daughters boyfriends, and will make you faintly uncomfortable at all times.  If they were an employee you’d be talking to HR about a swift adios and you want to moan at their agent because they act like they own the place and think you’re an idiot.  It’s the glad handing, well dressed, happy ones that are suspicious.  They might not be bad, but they aren’t normal.

There are so many, it seemed a shame not to devote another post to some of them. Like this old classic, that should be taught to every linguistic student:

A panda bear walks into a pub and asks the landlord for some bamboo. The landlord, although a little stunned, cuts some stalks from a bamboo plant he happens to have in this conservatory and gives them to the bear - which the bear eats. After which he pulls a gun and kills a few customers, then he just walks out. The landlord jumps over the bar and rushes out after the bear. He quickly catches up to him. “Why the hell did you do that?” he shouts, to which the bear answers calmly “It’s just in my nature.” and hands the landlord a dictionary before walking into the woods. The landlord flips to the entry for panda which says “Large bear that eats bamboo, shoots and leaves.”

OK, this is more of a groaner than a side splitter, but it does help to show the importance of context and grammar.

Here is another golden oldie; but still a funny one liner

The other day I went to the local bookshop to buy a dictionary. The assistant showed me a really cheap one. I couldn’t find the words to thank him.

Now for a few that Groucho himself might be proud of

Mary had a little lamb… and then she had some dessert.

Ice Water? Get some Onions - that’ll make your eyes water!

Well, I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech.

Why don’t you bore a hole in yourself and let the sap run out?

Groucho was a master of wordplay, and few people have matched the hilarity of the Marx brother’s movies, still watchable and funny after almost 80 years.  After that long most people would be corpsing.

Rather than just adding a link to the download file I decided that I wanted something a bit better - something that would allow me to manage and monitor the downloads a bit and get some numbers for each download.  The first one I tried was complex and in fact didn’t work, then after searching about a bit I found Download Monitor.  This allows the simple management and categorisation of downloads, an easy way to plug in permalinks for each download into my posts and also a clear dashboard panel to see what’s being downloaded.  This is just what I wanted.

I run a number of sites.  Some (like this one) only I write the content but on some others the content is also written by other people.  This doesn’t mean that they can write what they like nor does it mean that they must write only what I like.  I issue them with guidelines which I expect them to follow.  For articles on a family rated site this is vital.  The writers are free inside the guidelines and I almost never have to edit anything.  So for me, these work.

Bad Language
No swearing. Think The Times circa 1900. “Shit” is not OK but “Crap” is. I’ve never understood why, but that the way it is.   If Terry Wogan wouldn’t say in live on Radio 2 then you probably shouldn’t write it in your articles. Using the C-word will get you fired.

Sex Talk
No overt sexual language. Mild innuendo is OK. Think the BBC circa 1970 before 9 PM. Tits can be either blue or great but not wobbly. Bums live cardboard boxes. Using the F-word will get you fired.

Discrimination
No discriminatory language.   I personally, am not a great fan of political correctness so you have some leeway here, but be inclusive and avoid the pejorative. Using the N-word will get you fired.

Illegal Activities
No inciting people to riot or not pay their taxes. I don’t want PC Plod and chums at my door at 05h00 any more than you do, and most likely less because I’m not a morning person.

Copyrighted Material
Do not use material in your article that isn’t either public domain or where the copyright is owned by you and you are happy that this site can use it, for free, forever.

Anything that you post in an article you retain the copyright for, but you also grant a perpetual license for us to publish it in any way we like.  You should understand this fully if you intend to use this material in the future in any way yourself (i.e. in a book).

Word Count
The guide is 500-1000 words an article.    But it is a guide.   100 words isn’t enough and 2500 words is definitely too much.

Advertising
Do not use your articles to promote products or businesses whether or not they belong to you.   Yes, mention your book if it is relevant or a good source of some building materials or a good plumber but no selling.

Off-site Links
These are not banned, but please use them sparingly, linking directly to the page in a site that is relevant rather than to the top level of a site.   These will not be followed by Search Engines and will not increase the sites Page Rank or placement.

Bashing
Please no person bashing.   If someone is giving you a hard time, tell me and I’ll deal with it - do not bash them directly in your article.  If your roof fell in due to cowboy builders, tell us about it and maybe mention the name but no libellous comments please.

Anonymity
I highly recommend that you are careful.   If you want to put your real name in your profile or on your articles then please do, but I highly recommend that you never put your address, telephone, primary email or any other private information in your articles or profile.   It’s a wacky world and you don’t want it dancing on your doorstep.

Religion and Politics
These are an important part of some people’s lives.  They are also sure fire, flame war starters. Discuss with caution and sensitivity.  Do not belittle others or their views and do not attempt to indoctrinate anyone to your chosen path (epically me - cults and the party are so twentieth century).

Feedback and the Right to Reply
You will get a mixture of good and bad comments (and worse - no comments at all).  Welcome it all.  If it is inappropriate I will remove it.  Sometimes people will feel that they have a “right” to reply because your article is about them or something that they feel close to.  Don’t get into a war of words and don’t expect comments to be removed just because they don’t like what you’ve written.

The upgrade to WordPress 2.6.2 was as normal a complete breeze, taking less than 5 minutes to do two sites.

Plugin Compatibility
Random One Cat Widget is fully compatible with the version 2.6.2 and does not need to be upgraded.

Theme Compatibility
Mad Meg is fully compatible with the version 2.6.2 and does not need to be upgraded.

Enjoy.

Don’t you stupid comment spmmers know that I (like all sane WP admins) have Akismet?

Today I’m thinking about jokes.  Mostly I’m thinking that I don’t remember them very well.  I suppose I prefer a visual gag (Harold Lloyd especially), but I also enjoy spoken gags that play on words.  My favourite being the Two Ronnies sketch in a hardware store where Ronnie Barker as a yokel asking for a bunch of different things that Ronnie Corbert as the shopkeeper then gets but it turns out to be something different that sounds the same.  It starts with him asking for “4 candles” which the shopkeeper then puts on the counter only to hear “no: fork handles”.  It goes on like this with the poor shopkeeper getting more and more irate and double checking each thing and trying to list all alternatives only to find himself bringing the wrong item anyway.  That’s fabulous stuff, but it doesn’t work as well written down.  Bringing me onto possibly the only joke I can remember easily:

Two nuns are in the bath.  One says “Where’s the soap” and the other replies “Yes, it does, doesn’t it”.

English smut at it’s best.  Nuns, naked, bathing together, with an oblique reference to something sexual, although on the face of it this joke is not at all rude.  It’s just a play on the word “wear”, but as people search for the joke they find the lewdness first and that helps them get it.  But of course washing your legs (or whatever) also wears out the soap.

This double meaning  is a staple of the Marx brothers humour, although often without the sexual overtones, thus

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog it is too dark to read”.

which works pretty well on the page, but much better as a one liner.

Of course the written word also allows the odd joke that doesn’t work when spoken out loud, for example, the funny techy joke you often see in peoples signatures on forums:

There are only 10 types of people in the world - those that understand binary and those that do not.

Not perhaps, side-splitting stuff, but funny on the page.

Maybe it is something to do with Moveable Type being only a pale imitation of WordPress that therefore attracts a certain type of person to it.  People with no real imagination of their own or even the basic ability to replicate another’s work satisfactorily. These people used to be called copyists, and although they aren’t seen in the same light as those able to be original, they at least demonstrated enough skill in their task to produce a facsimile that, whilst not perhaps perfect, was something to be proud of or at the very least did not detract from the original work.  Now they are just code-chav’s.

My themes are GPL, so I can’t stop people copying them without asking, nor can I insist that they at least make a reasonable job at it.  Nevertheless it still makes me mad when someone takes my work and mashes it into another product in a ham-fisted way without even asking if I mind.  Then they sticker it up and link back to the original like they’ve some real association with me.  They don’t.

MT is, IHMO, second-rate crap.  I would never make a theme for it and, for the record, I hope that the dull and unimaginative MT themers who steal my themes (take without asking anyway) would do me a big favour and stop.  I suppose this will mean that I won’t be able to produce GPL themes in the future, which limits my options for free themes.  Anywho I guess that some people will copy anything they want regardless of license or morals.  If they fancy it - they take it.  I should be thankful that I get a link back even.

Any Movable Type users who do click the link and visit here and like the original work better than the half-arsed copy, well, do yourselves a favour and get the genuine article and run your site on WordPress.