This month in review

It’s been one heck of a month and I haven’t found the time to blog regularly, so here’s a round-up of 2007 so far.

Work

IP.Dynamic and IP.Nexus are in extremely heavy development. We’re entering a new phase of development that will see some nice tweaks to both applications. Although we’ve not mentioned these applications publicly since mid-December I can promise that both Josh and I have been working daily on these products. An ‘official’ update will be made soon enough.

Remco (W1lz0r or Wizzy to his friends) is leading the way with some nice SQL engine changes to reduce the number of ‘cache’ files for each SQL driver and adding in transaction support for engines that support it. He’s also been working hard on a PostGreSQL driver. This is in limited testing at the moment but it seems to be performing well.

Personal

We have a brand new nephew! Callum was born on 18th January at 4:07am weighing in at 7lb 5oz. He’s absolutely gorgeous and very tiny. I must admit that I’m getting a little broody and at 30, I’m not getting any younger.

Other

If you live in the UK then you can’t fail to have heard about the Jade Goody / Celebrity Big Brother rumpus.

If you don’t live in the UK then allow me to explain in under 200 words.

Celebrity Big Brother is an annual event where several so-called “z-list” celebrities are invited to share the ignominy of desperately clutching onto fame by living out their boring existences in-front of an indifferent nation.
This year ex-Big Brother ’star’ Jade Goody (who has made a multi-million pound fortune from her appearance five years ago) was put back into the house. She’s a bit of a thick-o and made a right old pigs ear of it by picking fights with a female Indian Bollywood star (who the UK had never heard of). The UK has now been swept up in a storm of controversy with racist overtones while Channel 4 continues to cash in on the increasing viewing figures.

Frankly I fail to be moved. It’s supposed to be reality television and this nation should not be shocked to learn that the reality is that there are idiotic bigots who allow their lack of education to colour their views on different cultures.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Jade was being racist. She was just being a bitch. Unfortunately, her vocabulary doesn’t extend to witty one-liners and amusing repartee so she fell back to the trusty cliches and put downs of in-bred stereotyping.

I do find it ironic that her perfume range ‘Shh…’ seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy.