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Crochet Love-Knot Wrap
04 September 2006
Read moreYou might think that I’ve been a bit quiet on the crochet front recently … and you’d be right. What’s actually happening is that I have been working on a surprise project for my sister’s birthday and didn’t want to post about it until I had …
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Diet Oracle - working with Oracle eXpress Edition
03 September 2006
Read moreI’m a big oracle fan, which might seem a bit strange in a world dominated with the LAMP stack and its exclusive use of MySQL or, at a push, Postgresql. That’s not the entire world obviously, that’s my world and it is definitely MySQL-orientated. In the world …
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My Brush With RSI
02 September 2006
Read moreRSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) is the bogeyman of software developers’ worst nightmares. I think everyone knows someone, or of someone, who was once a great programmer and is now a primary teacher, porter or some such, and all because of this RSI thing. So here’s my experience, because it …
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A Tale of Two Jobs
01 September 2006
Read moreWell, not an actual tale, exactly, but some general anecdotes.
Since moving “oop north” (to Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK), my partner and I have job-hunted once each. Once for me when I relocated up here, and once for him just at the moment as the fixed-term contract that brought him …
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Recursive Queries in Oracle
29 August 2006
Read moreI’ve come across a very neat trick in Oracle that I thought I’d share. Its useful for situations where you can have circular references in the data diagram, for example when the table includes a column which is a reference for another entry in the same table. Usually …
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The Alt-Tab-while-you're-waiting Trap
29 August 2006
Read moreToday I’m working on a complicated database driven web page. I edit the source using vim on the main file server. In order to get the file onto the webserver, I then quit out of the file and a script checks my syntax and ftps the file into the …
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Compulsive Multitasker
22 August 2006
Read moreDo you know someone who seems innately unable to focus on one thing? They can only complete a task when there are twenty others vying for attention and even then they’re flitting between them like a lizard.
You know the person I mean, you call them to ask if …
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Regular Expressions in Oracle
22 August 2006
Read moreI need to operate on a big table with lots of records, but only on rows where the primary key starts with a number. Because obviously its a good idea to differentiate types of records in this way …. only joking! Its just one of those little tasks that crops up …
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Good Advice for Life at the Office
09 August 2006
Read moreI came across this when reading an article on Mike’s site yesterday:
_“The best advice I ever received from a manager is that it is easier to get forgiveness than permission.”
The article is at Top 3 Ways to Fight Bureaucratic Inertia in IT and it makes for …
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How Has Netball Changed Your Life?
02 August 2006
Read moreRecently, an email went around the netballing fraternity asking for stories of how netball has changed your life. I put together something to send back to them and thought I'd share it here too.
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About Blogging About Work
01 August 2006
Read moreUntil now, I’ve avoided blogging about work in pretty much any way. I’ve written about technical stuff that have come up at work but I haven’t written about much beyond that sphere, and even that is only so that I don’t have to hunt for the …
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the trouble with being tall
01 August 2006
Read moreI’m tall. Not landmark-sized but well above the average for a woman (5’11’). My role model is Allison Janney who is taller than me again and interviews wonderfully on the subject of tall women. I’d like to outline the main points of having this personal feature.
Good …