Friday, November 11, 2005

Firefox past 10 percent

According to this week's New Scientist, Firefox has managed to get more than 10% of the web browser market.

When I read that I was surprised.

It seems that readers of this blog are much more discerning than your average internet user. For some time now Firefox has been the browser used in more than HALF the requests to this site!







 New Scientist reportBobablog readers
MSIE85.45%44.42%
Firefox / Mozilla11.51%51.44%
Safari1.75%1.56%
Netscape0.77%0.32%
Opera0.26%1.56%


I'm sure that says more about bloggers and their readers than it does about this site in-particular...

Non-techie Tip of the Month

Sorry to still be way off topic, but I was given a beautiful gem of a tip today.

Have you ever accidentally written on a whiteboard with a permanent marker?

If so, you'll know how painful it is trying to remove it again with solvents. Far too much elbow grease required for my liking.

Well, we had one of those moments today and someone piped up with a glorious bit of help.

Simply write over the existing text with a proper whiteboard marker, then rub it off with a normal whiteboard rubber.

Zero effort and a clean whiteboard!

I promise that normal Oracle and PHP based services will be resumed soon...

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Subversion de-perversion

Mr Mason has done it again.

For those that use Subversion for their version control, Mike Mason's blog is a must subscribe. He doesn't post often, but when he does it's invariably useful. His latest post covers splitting and merging Subversion repositories. As usual, reading it leads to an "Of course that's how you it!" moment.

If you haven't already picked it up, his book, "Pragmatic Version Control with Subversion" is a great introduction to Subversion.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Monday, November 07, 2005

Questionable Search...

I know I've been quiet for a while, but I'm still here. There's things I'm going to get round to saying sooner or later, but a recent move has meant a distinct lack of internet access at home.

For now though... my referrer tracking uncovered a hit to the site from an unexpected search, one that I'm not sure how to deal with...

What does smug mean?

Friday, October 14, 2005

Things I have learned this week

A couple of friends and I were joking over the weekend that if we all learned one thing each, every day for a year, then at the end of the year we'd be able to release the book 'Over 1001 things that 3 people learned in a year'

Here's what I learned this week:

  • 08/10/2005: Cannon Street London Underground station used to have an ornate glass roof that was removed at the start of WW2. It was moved to the countryside to avoid bomb damage. The barn it was kept in was bombed a week later, completely destroying the glass roof. Cannon Street station remained virtually untouched throughout the whole of the war.

  • 09/10/2005: Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo.

  • 10/10/2005: The ship the Queen Elizabeth 2 is always written down with the number 2 rather than the roman numerals II. This is done in order to differentiate it from the Queen with the same name.

  • 11/10/2005: The most abundant metal in the human body is calcium

  • 12/10/2005: The most abundant bird in the world is the domesticated chicken. In 2003 the US ate 8.2 billion chickens, and if a chicken is grown for 7 weeks before being killed for meat, then in order for the 65 million people in the UK to be able to eat their average of 0.75 chickens a week then a total of 341.5 million chicken must exist at any given time in order to support the market.

  • 13/10/2005: It's not enough to learn from your mistakes, you have to actually remember that you learnt from them and put those lessons into action.

  • 14/10/2005: Whenever you find a gap in a test and you think "No, I won't put that test in, it'll never happen", it will happen, and it'll probably happen on the live system and give you a big headache.


I cannot make any guarantee as to the accuracy or relevancy of any of the facts, nor will I compensate anyone for the loss of time spent reading them.