Well, as the title says, you should only be able to see this message if I've switched hosts ok.

Not sure what format this website is going to take in the future, I have some plans, and I think they will probably involve changing this site rather a lot. I guess you'll just haver to wait and see.

I'm in the process of changing hosting provider, so there may be a little down time while I get my house in order.

Please check back in a day or two to see me at my new home.

Email should still get to me ok, but there may be a little delay during the actual change over.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

This is a momentous occasion, I've actually found out that someone has linked to my site, not only that, but I found that someone else has translated my CityDesk Magic Names CSS post into french! Wow, considering I thought that no one ever read this pitiful site (not even my family), I'm unashamedly impressed! Mind you, both the links are from 2002, it's just that I've only now found them because of a referral in my webstats, I bet no one has linked to me in the last year or so!

However, it did show that my update to this site many moons ago caused a few problems, as the CityDesk Magic Names CSS post was not showing the correct information, the magic name was actually being translated into its relative path, rather than staying in its original form. I can only think this is because I went through a phase of opening up every article and viewing it in "Normal View" to set all the tags to xhtml once I upgraded to CityDesk 2.0. Since then, I've pretty much stuck to only using HTML View when editing to make sure everything is correct, I'm not a very trusting fellow with these things, and I like to see the raw code in everything I do anyway. Just as well really as it turns out.

I've found a little problem with refreshdb when used on some platforms, so a bug fix was required. It was just a silly little typo that meant when the MAXPROC_UNLOAD or MAXPROC_LOAD limits were reached, the script would exit. This was because I used == instead of = in a test statement, me thinks I must have being too much Ab Initio work at the time!

Sorry for any inconvenience, please download version 2.1 from the usual place.

First of all (and a little belated) Happy New Year! Hope you've all had a great Christmas and New Year, and here's wishing you all the best for the forthcoming 12 months, and beyond.

Now that I've got Apple's GarageBand I'm suddenly a big time musician ! ;-) This app is seriously good fun, I've spent only a handfull of hours playing with it and must say I'm extremely impressed. Go buy a Mac and have some fun!

I've added a Music section to my site where I intend to thoroughly embarrass myself by uploading my incompetent musical creations, that I'll still be very proud of! Please head on over there and check out my first two tracks.

A new version of refreshdb is now available from my software index page.

refreshdb 2.0 has (quite aptly) only two changes:

• Implemented MAXPROC_UNLOAD and MAXPROC_LOAD as replacement of MAXPROC parameter to allow a differing number of parallel processes for the unload and load stages. This was implemented because it was found that in most cases there are less issues with multiple unloads than loads, more could be done at once. Splitting MAXPROC into two parameters allowed for this tuning.
• Only show one "MAXPROC* level (num) hit..." message per wait, instead of wasting log space by repeating the same message unnecessarily.

Hope these little changes are useful to someone (they are to me)!

I have released another version of my Informix database refresh script called refreshdb after discovering a serious flaw, the below describes what's changed:

Fixed daft "feature" that enabled triggers, indexes and constraints after each chunk of data was loaded. Now enables after all chunks loaded. Seriously improves the speed of the script!

Various small updates to supporting files and added contact details.

You can get the latest version of refreshdb from the refreshdb software page.

Oops, I've found a little bug whereby one more process was run than requested. Not a big bug, but annoying, so I've fixed it.

Also, I seem to have let the -a option creep back in for the split of the unload file, now banished!

You can get version 1.5 of refreshdb from this page.

Fog Creek Software have just officially released version 2.0 of their excellent CityDesk Content Management System.

This site is now using v2.0 (and has been for a while now), the changes they've made have greatly improved the usability of the software, especially in the scripting ability.

If you're looking for a simple but powerful CMS that will satisfy Web Professionals and Web Newbies alike, you owe it to yourself to have a look at CityDesk.

Now that v2.0 has been released, I'll be updating my CityDesk Templates section very soon, to take advantage of the extra functionality now available.

A new version of refreshdb has been released!

This version has a few small bug fixes and updates to comments, as well a major change in the position of the process flow for splitting the unload files ready for load into the target database tables.

The split of the unload file now happens as soon as the data has been unloaded from the source table. This enables the refreshdb script to be used to load data into more than one database at the same time, as long as the -u option is used to suppress any further unloads. For normal operation you will not see any real difference in how refreshdb works.

Hope you find this change and the little fixes useful.

Please scoot over to therefreshdb page for more information about refreshdb and to download it.