Posts

a brief history of blogging I have maintained a blog, on and off, for a long time (since 2005). During that time I have used a wide variety of blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Drupal, Tumblr, Django, Posterous, Jekyll, Ghost, Nikola, Hugo) My blog was a personal blog. Looking back, some posts were essentially micro-blogging (trite one-liners), link blogging (interesting, amusing BBC news stories), endless analysis of Manchester United together with some longer form articles....

Data masking with APEX Background A common customer requirement is to mask sensitive or personally identifiable data from APEX reports. Oracle has a ‘Data Masking and Subsetting’ product that performs this task. However, for smaller APEX projects, the full blown data masking product might be overkill as it needs familiarity with the product and configuration. This may be time consuming and expensive. However, we are able to use the PL/SQL package DBMS_REDACT to achieve the same result....

This blog uses Hugo and was previously hosted on Amazon S3 storage. The traffic and hence the costs were minimal (zero). After recently having to completely re-install Arch Linux after an idiotic mistake, I realised that Hugo was out of date, my Hugo theme was out of date and I’d forgotten precisely how the deployment to S3 actually worked. I was toying with taking my ball home in a mindless fit of pique, migrating 1,000 posts to Eleventy and I also looked at the Publii static site CMS with interest....

Tim Hall recently made a wonderful suggestion that the Oracle community remember the much missed Joel Kallman on 11 October 2021. My contribution doesn’t demonstrate APEX technical wizardry. Instead it’s a short story from a real-life customer project implemented using APEX. Just to avoid any potential law suits, this post isn’t about Agile development either - more how APEX can be used to quickly respond to changing customer requirements. One particular post from Joel stuck with me about his attitude to customer service which can be encapsulated in a single line:...

I’m not really a betting man. Mainly because I’m a scientist. On Grand National day, we normally nominate two or three horses each and someone wanders to place our bets at the bookies round the corner. My daughter normally wins. Also, we might cut up the runners from the Daily Mail supplement and do a lucky dip sweepstake. I also used to routinely bet on the final score and first scorer in the FA Cup Final to add some interest (if United weren’t involved)....