Better Logic for better solutions

I’m starting to think I’ve made a move into the PC support business, without wanting to or being paid for it…

Over the last couple of weeks my brothers laptop (one of my old ones) has been acting a bit strange. Nothing I could put my finder on, but something was not quite right. Yesterday my “Support Senses” started to tingle when I noticed some files and directories had become read-only for no apparent reason. A meer mortal might have considered trying to diagnose the problem, but this looked like a job for Captain Support. Quicker than a flash Captain Support did a fresh backup of all the photos and documents, then wasted that no good son of a… Dell.

Several hours and many Windows updates later there was a fresh copy of Windows Vista installed. Piece and harmony returned to the world. Captain Support even remembered to configure the VPN connection so his brother could connect to work.

Cheers

Tim…

Captain Support is the ongoing tale of a science nerd who was innocently sequencing sex-incompatibility genes in Brassica oleracea (wild cabbage) when he was spiked by the pins of a radioactive “i386 DX2/66″ chip, transforming him into a PC support superhero.

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I need to download a copy of CentOS 2.1 (x86), but I can’t find it anywhere. I’ve been down the list of mirrors and they all list 2.1, but then have an empty tree below it.

If anyone knows how I can get hold of it please drop me a line.

Cheers

Tim…

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Over the last few days life has been giving me a little reminder about the usefulness of Homeostasis…

On Wednesday afternoon I felt a little under the weather and by the evening I was throwing up in a big way. Eventually the effort of it all drained me to the point where I fell asleep. By the morning I was feeling much better, or so I thought. For the most part the vomiting had finished, but it seemed like my body had totally forgotten it had a homeostatic mechanism for regulating its temperature. I had the usual stuff you get when you are ill, like cold sweats one minute, then feeling really hot the next. The difference this time was I seemed to react really quickly to the temperature of food and drinks I consumed. If I ate some hot (temperature, not spicy) food I would quickly start sweating like a racehorse. Have a cold drink and it would be uncontrollable shivering. Kinda freaky.

For the last few days I’ve been cycling between bed, hot baths and the computer. I think I managed my body temperature pretty well if I do say so myself.

Today is the first day the whole temperature regulation thing seems back to normal, but my throat feels a little dodgy. The joys of secondary infections.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. This blog post is sponsored by Lemsip. The universal cure-all.

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I remember hearing someone talking about this years ago and I never actually took the time to check it out. It looks like the real answer is “it depends”. For the basic loop processing and maths the JVM does look a little faster. It was just a curiosity thing, but I thought I might as well write it up as an article on the website.

• PL/SQL Vs. Oracle JVM: Speed Comparison for Mathematical Operations

Cheers

Tim…

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A few friends mentioned “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“, but the title screamed Chick Lit to me so I avoided reading it until now. Well, it just goes to show you shouldn’t judge a book by the cover/title.

It’s a down-and-dirty detective story with some rather grim elements, but it’s really engrossing and a proper page turner. Considering my usual trauma when moving between authors, I took to this effortlessly. Maybe I’ve finally learned to read…

Cheers

Tim…

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The APPEND_VALUES hint is new to 11gR2 and allows you to use direct-path inserts from “INSERT INTO … VALUES” type statements. Pretty neat if you are doing inserts in a FORALL statement and need the extra punch.

Cheers

Tim…

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This afternoon I’ve been cleaning up some data in an SQL Server database. I decided to use SQL*Developer to connect to SQL Server by following this post.

• Using Oracle SQLDeveloper to access SQLServer (The “Check for Updates” functionality doesn’t seem to work properly on my SQL*Developer running on CentOS 5 (64-bit), so I had to install the JDBC driver manually.)

I made liberal use of the following tip when dealing with TEXT and NTEXT types.

• How to use REPLACE() within NTEXT columns in SQL Server

The joys of dealing with multiple engines…

Cheers

Tim…

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A couple of days ago Sten Vesterli tweeted about the URL changes on OTN. The previous base URL of “http://www.oracle.com/technology” has been replaced by “http://www.oracle.com/technetwork“. There are redirects in place, so for many of the top level pages this isn’t a problem, but some of the deeper links result in “page not found” errors or redirect to rather generic pages.

Fortunately, most of the links from my site are to the Oracle docs, whose URLs haven’t changed, but there are also plenty of OTN links. I’m trying to clean up the problem links, but it’s going to take a little time. If you spot any broken links, or links that don’t look like they point to the intended information, feel free to contact me and I’ll do my best to sort them.

Cheers

Tim…

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I was recently nominated and approved as a member of the OakTable Network .

Do you ever get that feeling that one day people are going to realize you don’t have a clue what you are talking about? I think that day just got a little closer.

Cheers

Tim…

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One of my Yoga buddies was given a laptop by is dad and wanted to get it connected over wireless. His dad also gave him a wireless ADSL router, but couldn’t get it set up.  This sounds like a job for Captain Support…

The router wasn’t able to connect to the internet. It turned out that the router was not working properly and needed a firmware update. Next issue was the wireless connection between the router and the laptop was kinda funky. The connection would never work when any form of encryption was turned on. In the end I had to turn off encryption and stopped the router from broadcasting in an attempt to reduce the chances of people piggy-backing on it.

How are normal folk meant to cope with this? The answer is they don’t and they need Captain Support…

Cheers

Tim…

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I was scooting around the net and I stumbled on a reference to Wirth’s Law and had a flashback (not Nam related) to a conversation I had about 14 years ago with my boss at the time. We were setting up the kit for a new automated warehouse solution (Oracle 7, HP 9000s and ServiceGuard if I remember correctly) and he said something along the lines of, “Why is it that for each customer we buy faster and more expensive computers, yet they take the same length of time to produce the results?”

The answer was pretty simple in that case. We were refurbishing the existing (fairly simple) warehouse as well as adding a completely new one. We were replacing some AVGs with a very complex conveyor layout, which required some difficult routing decisions. The basic “find me a space in the warehouse” decisions were replaced by pretty complex searches that had to take account of conveyor routing, system load and potentional sorting (and defragmentation) of the content in the warehouse. The customer needed a highly available solution, hence the use of ServiceGuard, so we more than doubled the hardware and software costs for no perceivable performance improvement. From the outside looking in it seemed like nothing had changed. It was still, “Here’s a pallet, put it in the racking”, but the process required to do that operation efficiently had increased in complexity manyfold.

So Wirth’s Law, “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster”, is true because people’s expectation of what software can do for them is constantly expanding, without realizing the impact those expanding expectations have on the programming and hardware requirements. Added to that we have a generation of cut & paste developers and DBAs who also don’t understand the impact their lack of understanding has on the software they develop (see Gate’s Law).

I look forward to writing a post in 10 years where I can moan about Exadata V12 boxes struggling to complete my weekly loads before the end of the weekend. Of course I will forget to qualify that I’m loading Yottabytes of data in that time…

Cheers

Tim…

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A little over two years ago I wrote about a new arrival in New Zealand. I got a call last night to tell me about a new addition to the population of New Zealand, so I would like to take a moment to formally welcome Naomi Freya Lukic to the universe. Thanks to the wonders of Skype I also got to see the young lady in question.

Daughter number one (Ruby) is blonde with fair skin and pale eyes. Daughter number two (Naomi) has black hair, olive skin and dark blue eyes. I guess they need to get to work on daughter number three, who should be a red head to complete the set.

It’s fantastic news and it has left me with a permanent grin this morning.

Using my psychic abilities I predict lots of sleepless nights, crying and smelly stuff…

Cheers

Tim…

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I watched The Expendables tonight. As a whole package I don’t think it worked very well. The dialog was poor and they didn’t really do enough to make me give a crap about any of the characters, so it just decended into a bunch of fights and explosions with nothing to really string it all together.

Having said that, there were some elements that I thought had potential. It was quite cool to see fighters from different disciplines working together or fighting each other. I’m not talking about X could beat Y in a fight. I just mean the physical dynamic between the people. Seeing Jason Statham and Jet Li double team Gary Daniels was kinda fun. Seeing Steve Austin fighting Randy Couture was interesting too. The fight scenes weren’t executed as well as they could have been. There was some serious talent available but it wasn’t really made to work.

Statham is really fluid and always works nice angles. Jet Li is one of my favorite martial artists, but rarely gets to show what he’s capable of. Gary Daniels is very flexible and can do some really great techniques, but here he was involved in close-up stuff which doesn’t show him at his best. And of course, you know if Randy Couture, Dolph Lundgren, or Steve Austin hit you it’s going to hurt.

So all in all it wasn’t a great showing, but I hope they do another with better dialog and get someone in to sort out the fight scenes. It could very easily be awesome…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Forgot to mention I saw Karate Kid recently. It was quite good fun from a nostalgia perspective.

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Until a couple of days ago I hadn’t even realized that Fedora 13 was out. I guess that shows how interested I am in Fedora these days.

Anyway, I had a play around with it.

• Fedora 13 (F13) Installation
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) Installation On Fedora 13 (F13)

Cheers

Tim…

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Regarding my previous post (here), it seems Guenadi N Jilevski has now removed the articles that are direct copies of mine. Thankyou for the quick action.

There is still at least one article remaining that contains large chunks of text scraped from my site. I guess the fact he has included his own screen grabs and some minor alterations to the text lead him to believe it is original content. Sigh.

I’m also glad to see he has removed the blog post where he attempts to defend his stance. I’ve taken copies of all the important posts for my records, but I’m hoping this marks an end to this little affair.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I found a new batch of stolen stuff I’m attempting to get removed. The list from the previous post has been extended accordingly.

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Thanks to Don Burleson for pointing me at this article by Timur Akhmadeev that lists a whole bunch of articles that have been stolen by Guenadi N Jilevski.

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Just looking at the stuff he’s stolen from me, there are three types ripoff:

1) Complete Copies.

http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/edition-based-redefinition-in-oracle-database-11g-release-2/

http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/EditionBasedRedefinition_11gR2.php

http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/dbms_parallel_execute/

http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/dbms_parallel_execute_11gR2.php

http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/acfs-in-oracle-database-11g-release-2/

http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/ACFS_11gR2.php

2) Articles where the bulk of the copy is stolen word for word, with a couple of sections added and different screen grabs, which at first glance would make it seem original. Make no mistake, this is still stolen.

http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/oracle-database-11g-release-2-data-guard-deployment-using-oracle-grid-control-10-2-0-5

http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/DataGuardSetupUsingGridControl_11gR2.php

3) Articles that, although they are not direct copies, have very similar names, order of content and are published very soon after my articles were released. A quick scan through makes it pretty obvious that they are copies that are trying hard not be be copies. The sort of schoolboy tricks teachers spot a mile off. Since these are pale imitations of the originals it’s hardly worth bothering about.

Fortunately, WordPress.com (and most other services/ISPs) have very clear guidelines on this matter, see “http://automattic.com/dmca/“, so I’m expecting a speedy resolution. I’ve posted comments on the offending posts asking for them to be removed. If they are not I will contact Automattic directly to get them removed. I’m guessing if everyone concerned does the same the blog will be pretty empty very soon.

I think it’s strange that in an industry that relies so heavily on trust and intellectual property a person would think nothing of stealing someone elses work. You might as well put a tag line on your blog reading, “Don’t hire me. I’m gonna steal everything I can from you!”

Cheers

Tim…

Update:

1. I was advised to break the links to his content to avoid giving him extra publicity.
2. It seems trust is not a big deal these days: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/19/rogue_workers_survey/
3. Looks like this issue is mostly resolved from my perspective. See here.
4. I found another bunch of stolen stuff:

http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/server-configuration-in-oracle-database-10g/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/ServerConfiguration10g.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/improved-vldb-support-in-oracle-database-10g/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/ImprovedVLDBSupport10g.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/performance-tuning-enhancements-in-oracle-database-10g/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/PerformanceTuningEnhancements10g.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/trigger-enhancements-in-oracle-database-11g-release-1/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/TriggerEnhancements_11gR1.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/scheduler-enhancements-in-oracle-database-11g-release-2/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/SchedulerEnhancements_11gR2.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/automatic-memory-management-amm-in-oracle-database-11g-release-1/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/AutomaticMemoryManagement_11gR1.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/data-pump-enhancements-in-oracle-database-11g-release-1/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/DataPumpEnhancements_11gR1.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/virtual-columns-in-oracle-database-11g-release-1/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/VirtualColumns_11gR1.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/sql-trace-10046-trcsess-and-tkprof-in-oracle-10g/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/SQLTrace10046TrcsessAndTkprof10g.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2007/11/06/automatic-database-diagnostic-monitor-addm-in-oracle-database-10g-2/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/AutomaticDatabaseDiagnosticMonitor10g.php http://gjilevski.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/services-in-oracle-database-10g/ http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/Services10g.php Tweet

The Last Airbender is really hard to make a judgement on. At some points the acting is really cringeworthy, followed by scenes with Dev Patel who is really cool. There are sections of dialog that could have been written by a five year old, then visuals that are absolutely fantastic.

I’m sure kids will like it as the problems with the dialog will probably not matter to them, and judging by the popularity of the Harry Potter and Twilight series, acting is not of prime importance either.

I hope they make the next two in the trilogy as I would really like to see what other visuals they come up with.

Cheers

Tim…

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With the recent news that the latest version of VirtualBox now supports shared disks, I thought I better give it a go and see if I could do a RAC installation on it. The good news is it worked as expected. You can see a quick run through here:

• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 RAC On Linux Using VirtualBox

This is pretty good news as that was the last feature that tied me to VMware Server. I’ve now moved pretty much everything I do at home on to VirtualBox and it’s working fine.

It’s worth taking a little time looking at the VBoxManage command line. Some of the operations, like creating the shared disks, have to be done from the command line at the moment. It’s also handy for running VMs in headless mode if you don’t want the GUI screen visible all the time.

Cheers

Tim…

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Unseen Academicals is the 37th book in the Discworld series. When I first started reading the series I found Terry Pratchett‘s writing style a little strange. Having had a long break from reading his stuff, switching back was a little difficult at first. Fortunately the characters are brilliant, so you get drawn back in fairy quickly. The first 50 pages were a little tricky, but after that it was just like home again.

The wizards of the Unseen University are forced to make a decision between playing football or eating less, so obviously they pick football. There are a few new characters introduced, including Nutt, who is awesome.

If you like the others you will love this.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Football refers to real football, not that American stuff.

Thomas Roach just posted about the latest version of VirtualBox supporting shared disks. Seems like I can finally get rid of VMware Server and become a complete Oracle bitch…

Cheers

Tim…