I see why people get a bit upset about the privacy aspects of Google Streetview! On the other hand, it is rather amazing. To sit here in my office in Vienna and be able to walk around where I used to live at Southampton University.

• First house (where I lived Summer 1996 – Summer 1997)
• Second house (where I lived Summer 1997 – Summer 1998)

In comparison to my first house, even the flat I’m living in now doesn’t look too bad :)

I’m spending the day at home after 3 nights of bad sleep (no idea why).

Just now I heard a banging in my spare bedroom (= “ghost room”) and I saw that the window was open. Why did it suddenly become open? It’s a “double-glazed” window in the old style, i.e. there are simply two windows, one on the inside and one on the outside, and in between there are blinds, which are drawn. They’ve been drawn for a few months. There is no reason to open the inside window, open the blinds, open the outside window, and then redraw the blinds, and close the inside window. And given that it’s a windy day, had anyone done this (anyone є { me, Christina }, and neither of us go into the room much) then it would have started banging much earlier, not just suddenly now, in mid-afternoon!

Down the coffee house this morning, reading the newspaper Österreich (which makes the UK’s Daily Mail seem like a quality newspaper), I learnt the following facts about the ongoing case against Fritzl:

• There are a lot of foreign media in Austria for the case but apparently a disproportionate number of them are from the UK. Why?
• It’s speculated that hiding his face in court is a way to increase the value of photos & interviews he will give later.
• In jail, Fritzl is getting “fan letters” from women. Can that really be true!?

Today and tomorrow I am at an Ask Tom Live Seminar in Prague. Tom Kyte works for Oracle and has written many books on Oracle. For me he’s a bit of a “star”, so when I heard he was talking in Europe, I had to come. (But is that wrong? Normal people are in to stars like Robbie Williams surely, not Oracle experts.)

Wow there is so much I don’t know about Oracle evidently. I mean the solutions that he is presenting concerning Oracle 11g, are solutions to problems in features I’ve never used, such as partitioning, etc.

Some fun things I learnt:

• In Oracle 6 “sql plus” used to be offered as a for-cost extra, as it was considered so good! (Apparently there was a previous tool, and it was worse.) Sql Plus still doesn’t support e.g. the “up” arrow key to get the previous command.
• In Oracle 3 “insert into x select from x” would be an infinite statement as it would constantly re-select then insert the data from x that it had just inserted. This was fixed in Oracle 4. 
• Oracle 11 can create “virtual columns”, i.e. “create table x(a number, b as (a+1))”. You can then use these virtual columns for indexes (like functional indexes), foreign key constraints, etc. A statement like “select .. from x where a+1=?” will be rewritten as “where b=?” which will then use the index. Audience member asked “can I write an update statement to update b?”
• You can do “select …. as of <date>” and if the data is still available in the rollback segment, it will be returned.
• Adding a column is now always instantaneous, i.e. “alter table x add y number default 4″ will not alter the data in the table, but when a row is read which was created before the alter table statement happened, the column will be added with its default value. (But presumably altering the column’s default value then causes the long write?)
• Apparently Oracle was the first RDBMS. Well that’s what Tom Kyte claims anyway.

P.S. I should have brought my Oracle One on One with me for him to autograph… OK that would have been ridiculous.

I have a Mac Mini G4 512MB, bought Q1/2006 – it was slow when I bought it, and it’s slow now. (At least it hasn’t “degraded” in performance!)

At least 4 of my friends bought new Macs yesterday as they brought out new models. My Mini is in line for replacement (well, it was from the first day I bought it really, I mean it essentially “doesn’t work” due to its speed..)

So I was considering buying a new one but check out the comparison:

I mean the Mac Mini is a nice computer: it’s quiet, it’s small, but still, it’s difficult to justify really. I think the main point almost is the hard disk rotation speed, I’ve come to the conclusion.

It’s like Apple could easily make a much more powerful computer, but then there wouldn’t be as much difference between the Mini and the next level up. So to emphasise the difference, rather than making the next level up more powerful, they make the Mini less powerful. At least that’s the way it seems to me, I mean how else could one explain the Mini’s specs.

While we’re on the subject, let’s compare the Sony Vaio I’ve typing this on, which I’ve been using all day, on battery. Apple are proud of their policy of “less is more” but surely when it comes to ports, “more is more”!?

I haven’t compared processors or price as there are years between the release of the two computers.

Today I sold my car to a guy from France.

He took a plane to Vienna yesterday, this morning we met, he looked at the car, we took the contract to a notary office, we paid in his cash into my bank, then took my number plates to a insurance company who canceled my insurance (even though it was with a different company), and gave us temporary number plates (precondition was the contract had to be notarized).

It’s a sad day, I did like my Renault Spider, I had a lot of fun with it; but I look forward to the furniture etc. I can buy for a new flat with the money.

It was a huge amount of effort to get it registered in Austria (I bought it from Germany). I’m sure the guy who I’ve sold it to will have a lot of effort getting it registered in France as well…

I bought the car in 2003 for € 22,800 and sold it today for € 20,000. That’s a decrease of 12% in total, or 2.6% per year, which I think is not bad going. (Obviously it could still hardly be said that this was a wise investment, given the amount of money I spent on insuring and maintaining it over the years!)

On the 19th July Christina and I married at the Tudor Barn in England. It took a lot of organization but I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I hope so did our guests.

Then we went on to our honeymoon on the Maldives. We went to the Veligandu Island Resort, and I have to say it was quite simply the most amazing holiday I’ve ever had. Everything there is incredibly beautiful, but in addition to that, everything at the resort is incredibly well organized. It really does look as much like paradise as the marketing pictures!

Here are some pictures:

• Robin S & Donald’s snaps of the wedding
• Robin K’s snaps of the wedding
• Christina + friends pictures from the wedding
• Honeymoon

We’re now back in Vienna.

I’ve been feeling fairly ill recently. I don’t know what it is, and I’ve been to see various doctors about it. The effects are being constantly so tired that I’m pretty much unable to concentrate on anything. As a consequence I’ve not done much work, and not done much of anything else either.

Plan for the next few months:

• 8th May – 12th May: break in Thailand
• 13th May – 20th May: back to Macau: Christina and I are packing her belongings to move to Europe
• 20th May – approx 1st June: in London with my parents. Various visa things have still to be organized.
• Whole of June: in Vienna
• Approx 1st July – 19th July: more preparations for the wedding
• 20th July – 28th July: honeymoon Maldives
• Start of August onwards: Vienna

On Monday we went over to Hong Kong to make the application for the Fiancee Visa, for Christina to enter the UK to get married. She is allowed to enter the UK anyway for tourism, but to get married the visa is required. The visa lasts 6 months, does not entitle Christina to work in the UK, and after marriage the next visa (Spouse Visa) has to be applied for (although we will do this for Austria instead of the UK).

I had prepared lots of documents for the application process; however by the time we went over there this set of documents had grown to at least twice or three-times this amount.

Ironically there was some repeating-DVD on the TV screens in the waiting room, where some applicant actress says “wow, I didn’t know it would be that fast and easy!”. I thought this was extremely ironic.

But in fact, contrary to our expectations, it was indeed both fast and easy (not including preparation of the documents). They called us 45 minutes after we left the building to tell us Christina’s passport containing the visa could be picked up.

We had prepared all the documents with the originals and copies collated (as they said they needed to take both away, and would give us the copies back). I had thus prepared a large spreadsheet listing all the documents that I wanted back (e.g. original bank statements). I thought merely sorting all this stuff out to give back to us would take half a day! But when we got the documents back they were all collated just as we’d given them to them, i.e. they hadn’t even taken the copies out. I suppose they didn’t look at the documents that much, or even at all?

The only things they took out were the copy of the passports (incl. stamps of our entry/exit to/from Macau/Europe) and my covering letter explaining my financial and employment situation, our plan to live with my parents initially when in the UK etc.

So maybe we could have spared most of the effort of the preparation of the documents? (Or maybe not, maybe a precondition of granting the visa was a certain mandatory documentary weight?)

Anyway, it’s good news. We have to make an application in the UK to “give notice”. But I’ve had chats with the office that do that, they imply it’s easy, and that the Fiancée Visa is the difficult one. So let’s hope that’s true.

You want to get married in the UK to a non-EU citizen? Then you’re going to need a lot of documents.

My fiancée and I have gone through the application form, and created a spreadsheet listing all the supporting documentation required. I think I have about 25 documents to prepare, and Christina a similar number—whereby some documents are not in fact single documents, but tasks such as “all tax documents for the last year”, or “all invoices”!

I’ve now prepared about 1cm of documentation.

(P.S. Thankfully we can both see and even edit the spreadsheet at the same time due to the great collaboration features in Google Spreadsheets!)

My future wife and I have decided to start our lives together in Austria instead of the UK.

Nevertheless I’m leaving Vienna tomorrow for about 5 months, but from August onwards I’ll be back permanently. I’ll be available for software architecture and development work, as before.

Currently I’m working for easyname.eu and uboot.com, and also working on a private project (website allowing collaborative diagram creation); if I ever really make any progress on that I’ll write a blog post describing it in more detail!

Plan for the next few months: