random

I’m now rockin’ UltraEdit 3.3 on my MacBook Pro and Linux boxes at home. A previous announcement suggested by this version the Mac and Linux versions would have caught up with the Windows version from a functionality perspective. I’m not sure if that’s true, but they are close enough for me.

The latest Windows versions is 18.20, which I use at work, but home is where the real magic happens.

Cheers

Tim…

Tomorrow will be day 7 of Movember and so far my facial hair is not as noticeable as I would like. You can see my progress, or lack of, on my Movember page.

So tonight, I was cutting my hair and decided a bit of Movember fakery was in order. I took some of the hair that came off my head and arranged it on my face. It was pretty gross as it kept going up my nose as I was breathing.

One of the things that disappoints me about all my time in education is that nobody actually taught me how to learn. Instead I had to stumble along, gradually trying to pick up what works for me. I guess I finally discovered how to learn during my PhD. What did I discover? That I learn in pretty much the same way as everyone else. Pity someone didn’t save me a few years and give me the heads-up a bit earlier. I read this quote from Dune recently,

“… because his first training was in how to learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”

It’s actually pretty simple to push stuff from your short term to long term memory. All you have to do is,

Movember is coming to ORACLE-BASE.com…

You will be able to track my progress here: http://mobro.co/timseanhall

If you can afford to make a donation, no matter how small, it would be much appreciated!

I’ll try and post a photo each day for the whole month, so you can see how bad I am at growing facial hair.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I feel really nervous now. It’s suddenly become very real!

It’s 4:10 AM and I’m still wide away.

I got back to the UK on Saturday morning and I’m still messed up. I’ve been at work every day and I’ve been going to the gym but I just can’t seem to kick back into gear. I didn’t sleep at all Sunday night to Monday morning, so my first day back at work was preceded by zero sleep. I had a bit of broken sleep on the following two nights, but tonight I’ve got nothing, so it’s going to get real ugly tomorrow (today really I guess)…

I think maybe a visit to the doctors to get my flu jab and some sleeping pills may be in order…

Cheers

Tim…

Just because I’ve agreed to link to you on some other social platform, it does not mean I know you! It does not mean I can/will offer you a job! It does not mean I will automatically endorse or recommend you when I have no clue who you are!

This week alone I’ve had:

• Complete strangers asking me to endorse them on LinkedIn.
• Complete strangers asking me to recommend their Oracle-related work on several social platforms.
• Complete strangers asking me for jobs. Just so you know, I’m just a guy that does a website for fun in the evenings. I don’t employ anyone, and often choose not to be employed myself… I’m literally the last person you should talk to about getting work!
• Complete strangers asking me to take surveys to categorise their personal characteristics, with a view to allowing employers to evaluate them.

Just a couple of thoughts on this:

phpBB 3.0.11 has been released. You can find the downloads and changelog in the usual places.

Happy upgrading…

Cheers

Tim…

My forum is being hit pretty hard by spammers at the moment. If you are of a sensitive nature, you may want to be careful about venturing in there.

In addition to deleting anything that looks remotely dodgy, I’m doing a regular purge of users with zero posts, so if you create an account and don’t post anything, I won’t be there for very long. Sorry if this freaks anyone out, but there is not much I can do about it.

Typically these attacks last a couple of days until they realise the forum is being maintained and their efforts are wasted, then they move on until the next time…

Cheers

Tim…

Any tips are welcome. I’ve tried a number of security methods including Re-Capture and Question&Answer. It looks like human posting to me…

Thanks to Eddie Awad, I’ve been using 2-step verification on my Google account for a while. Now Jake from The Appslab has scared me into using a password manager and revamping all my passwords…

We use KeePass (on Windows) at work to hold all our passwords, so I figured I’d go with that and see how I get on. Unlike work, I want to use a single store for all my devices, so I finally found a use for my Dropbox account.

Dropbox Installations

If you don’t already have it, you need to install Dropbox on your device(s). For mobiles, that means their respective app stores. For computers (Linux, Mac and Windows), you can get it from the Dropbox website.

Shared KeePass Installation

Last night was a fantastic night for UK athletics. I have to admit I felt rather emotional during the medal ceremony for Jessica Ennis…

I really hope the message viewers (especially kids) take away from these events is that to get good at anything you’ve really got to work at it. In these days of instant fame on reality TV shows, it seems the world has forgotten that it takes time and effort to get good at stuff. It’s easy to brush this stuff off by saying, “they’ve got great genetics”, or, “they have natural ability”, but when Mo Farrah talks about doing 125 miles per week in training, you start to understand this isn’t just natural ability…

What’s this got to do with IT and Oracle?