Welcome
This is the entry point for the Oracle Scratchpad – a static page that indexes all the ‘non-blog’ pages on this and other sites.
If you want to use the more traditional blog entry point you can bookmark this URL for ordinary postings. This is also the URL for the page referenced to the right called All Postings.
In the panel to the right, there is a link to “How to Comment”. Some of the usual html tags do not work as expected in the comment editor. This is a side effect of the theme I chose, which seems to be the only one that makes code extracts look nice. If you remember to use these guidelines (which are especially important for code extracts) it will make your points more readable for other users.
Contact Details:
Email: jonathan@jlcomp.demon.co.uk
Homepage: www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk
Office Phone: +44 (0)7973 188785
A few Inspirational Thoughts:
Mark Twain: It ain’t what you don’t know what that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
Granny Weatherwax (auth: Terry Pratchett): Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn’t mean they’re true.
Bertrand Russell: What the world needs is not dogma, but an attitude of scientific enquiry.
Niels Bohr: An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes that can be made, but in a very narrow field
Michael Shermer: We have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool.
Stephen Hawking: The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Richard Dawkins: Science has no methods for deciding what is ethical. That is a matter for individuals and for societies. But science can clarify the questions being asked, and can clear up obfuscating misunderstandings. This usually amounts to the useful: “you cannot have it both ways” style of arguing.
Albert Einstein: Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Carl Sagan: You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.
Charles Darwin: Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Richard Feynman: It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
Stephen Jay Gould: The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.
Menu of separately published pages.
Testing Autotrace - a demonstration of a special case in autotrace.
Statspack Examples – a list of pointers to Web articles about interpreting statspack.
Statspack Distractions – an example of the “obvious” problem not being the right problem.
Join Ordering – a discussion about tuning a particular class of SQL statement
