On our sequence systems there's a significant increase on logging used throughout the system and it's saved my butt quite a few times. The more logging the better. Having read 

 http://highscalability.com/log-everything-all-time

I am now planning on reviewing the OJBase logging stuff which makes it trivial to do logging both to text files (the infamous oj.log) and to an event table on a database. Need to handle log rotation, separation and maybe look at increasing the efficiency rather than hammering the hard disk all the time.

The Laptop Herring

A bunch of people sitting in a meeting, staring at their laptops, is a fat meeting. The people sitting at their laptops have no incentive to change a thing because they’re lost in whatever has captured their interest on their laptops. This is a lazy meeting full of people who are ignoring the most important question: “How do we figure out how to never have this meeting again?” Even worse, an organization that lets this meeting exist is a rotting organization. It’s a company where it’s slowly becoming acceptable to sit there and do nothing.

http://tinyurl.com/2fe2ya

Time to look at Haskell

This article's primary point is that MS SQL Server is more secure than Oracle. However, of interest is the following comment:

Litchfield ranked Microsoft SQL Server 2000 service pack 4 as the most secure database in the market, together with the PostgreSQL open source project. He ranked Oracle's 10g database at the bottom.

I confess I've not read the report but it's encouraging to see PostgreSQL apparently coming out well in the security stakes.

Amusing quote from the rails wiki:

This article is part of the confusing world of Authentication in Rails. Feel free to get lost in a gazillion of nearly useless and/or outdated Wikipages.

yes - the future is here - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6570871.stm

It's been a long time, we missed you.

Next time somebody asks you what Web 2.0 is all about ...