The BBC don't like parody

I must be missing something, because something pretty minor happened that points to something fairly fundamental. And I just don't understand it.

The BBC shut down IsAGaylord.com .

Now forgive me if I'm going mad here, but a week ago this site was getting 20,000 hits a day from people who got a surprise, had an immature snigger, then noticed that it wasn't really a BBC news site after all. Maybe they forwarded it on, maybe they didn't, but they went away not even considering that it was in any way linked to the BBC and definitely not thinking any the worse of the BBC if they did. Then a couple of people didn't get it, and complained... to the BBC.

And so the lawyers got involved, put some pressure onto the host and the site got pulled. So now, for the next week that site will get its usual 20,000 hits a day, and 140,000 people will read a tirade from a guy who's had to pull a very successful site because the BBC got petty.

So, in order to keep the BBC's reputation with a handful of people, they've managed to tell 140,000 how petty they are.

It takes a lawyer to be THAT clever!

Blog stats made easy

Thanks to Andy Beacock's post here I've put some more logging onto the site. At the risk of looking like a right newbie, I've even left the counter on for the world to see... watch that number creep up to 10 over a matter of mere months!

Statcounter will very nicely put together some pretty comprehensive stats on page visits, unique visitors, re-visitors and the like. Split down by day, shown in a nice graph. It's basically got all the little facts about your visitors that let you know if people are actually reading what you've got to say.

As with Andy, I'm hoping that seeing the numbers will push me to get more useful text out there...

The same has, of course, been put onto BobaPhotoBlog

Technorati Tags: StatCounter, Andrew+Beacock, Robert+Baillie, BobaBlog, BobaPhotoBlog

Anyone got a pencil?

I'm not normally one for posting web sites on here, but I like this...

Pencil Carvings
(especially this one, very mechanical. I likey)

A fine example of what you can do with a bit of talent, an idea and a lot of patience!

BobaPhotoBlog

Picasa and Hello are now well and truly installed on my machine, increasing the amount of free software yet again. Picasa is pretty cool and I reckon I'm going to get used to having that installed pretty quickly. But more importantly, Hello means that I can pretty easily put photos onto a blog. So bring on BobaPhotoBlog... it'll get the odd photo put up every now and again as I see fit. I may get round to putting some text on camera settings up, but more likely I'll just forget!

I'll be testing out its integration with Gmail soon enough...

Technorati Tags: picasa, hello, photography, blog, gmail

DBA or not DBA

For some reason this industry seems to be confused about the role of the DBA.
It has always been my opinion, and the opinion of every Oracle based software house I've worked at that the DBA's roles are simple to define.

The DBA is responsible for:

• Ensuring the continued running of all databases under their supervision.


• Minimising the impact / time of any maintenance induced downtime of those databases.


• Minimising the risk of databases becoming unavailable for unplanned reasons.


• Minimising the impact / time of any unplanned downtime.

You may notice that I don't include in that list anything to do with development.

The DBA is not, and should not be regarded as a developer. That's not to say that any given DBA would not make a great developer. Many DBAs I've met would make great developers. Rather it's that the two roles are intrinsically different. You'll notice that my definition of the DBA roles are very similar to those of a second or third-line support team member. Most organisations involved in software that are large enough to have a dedicated support team would split the roles of support and development for everything other than the database. So why should the DBA and development roles be treated any differently?

Make a DBA a developer and you'll cost yourself development time whilst that DBA fixes issues on live systems that simply can't wait...

Technorati Tags: Oracle, DBA, software+development