This is the famous ‘Hello world’ program written in Python in colour using Markdown. #!/usr/bin/env python import sys def hello(name='world'): greeting = "hello " + name print(greeting) if __name__ == "__main__": hello(*sys.argv[1:]) This took me a long time to get working. The music video for Rihanna’s song American Oxygen depicts various moments from American history, including the inauguration of Barack Obama. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ...

I use SQLcl a lot and install it on every environment I work on. It’s fully compatible with SQL*Plus and has useful extensions to interact with OCI, Autonomous Databases and Data Pump. My SQLcl configuration file is named ’login.sql’ and located in the ‘~/work’ directory. I also keep my ’tnsnames.ora’ file here. The location of these two Oracle configuration files is configured in ‘~/.bashrc’. # Oracle TNS location export TNS_ADMIN=$HOME/work # SQLCL login file export SQLPATH=$HOME/work This is my SQLcl configuration file. ...

I like reading about the hardware and software various people use so here’s my version. Introduction I work for Oracle as a technical consultant based in the UK (fully remote). I’m old and evolved from a Unix/C developer to PL/SQL, Oracle DBA and now work on database migrations and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Hardware Lenovo ThinkCentre M900. Intel i7-6700 Memory 48GB (upgraded from 16GB) Disk 1TB Samsung Galaxy S24 Expensive phone kindly provided by my employer. I don’t use many apps (Gmail, WhatsApp, BBC Sport, Tusky). ...

Occasionally I find myself migrating Oracle databases between environments using Data Pump. Enterprise applications tend to use multiple tablespaces for logical separation (and historical reasons). However, this isn’t possible when the target database is Autonomous Database (ADB) hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). ADB is a managed service so DBA’s can’t create tablespaces and are limited to ‘DATA’. However, Oracle 19c Data Pump supports wildcards for the REMAP_TABLESPACE parameter which allows multiple tablespaces from the existing application to be mapped to the ADB DATA tablespace. ...

I was interested by Kev Quirk’s “Blog Questions Challenge”, so here’s my answers. To recap, the questions are: Why did you start blogging in the first place ? What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it ? Have you blogged on other platforms before ? How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog ? When do you feel most inspired to write ? Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft ? What’s your favourite post on your blog ? Any future plans for your blog ? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature ? Why did you start blogging in the first place ? I had a web site from 1999 but this was essentially a set of static HTML pages. ...

Stung by the criticism of our Football Web Pages APEX application, we decide to try to address the various issues raised by end users and peer code review. When clicking ‘Fixtures’, I get ‘ORA-20999: REST Data Source returned an HTTP error: HTTP 400: Bad request’ If you enter a Competition only, it works fine. If you enter a Team only, it works fine. If you enter both a ‘Competition’ and ‘Team’, the results look weird. Should ‘Team’ be a cascading LOV based on the ‘Competition’ ? The column names and labels need tidying up. There are a lot of meaningless ID fields displayed. It would be nice to have the option to review past results separately from fixtures in the future. Performance - the Popup LOV’s for Competition and Team are sluggish. Why are they so S L O W ? The navigation menu looks chaotic and ugly. HTTP 400 error entering Fixtures report This error is because the REST parameter for ‘Competition’ or ‘Teams’ is required. When we first run this page, there no values defined for the ‘Competition’ or ‘Teams’ parameters which results in the error. ...

Your Main Content This is where the magic happens. Write your awesome content here! Here is the wonderful second paragraph. Standard text markup bold italic underline Verbatim code StrikeThrough Lists Unordered list Apples Oranges Pears Ordered list First Second Third Blocks Sample quote Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler –Albert Einstein Example code block #include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { printf("Hello world"):; } Tables Sample table ...

Flushed after the success of getting GoToSocial 0.5.2 working successfully, I was about to celebrate with a cup of tea when this post appeared in my timeline about the release of 0.6.0 (Release Candidate 1). Good morning everyone! We just cut the first release candidate for v0.6.0 of GoToSocial: v0.6.0-rc1. There’s a preposterous amount of changes included in this one (we’ll do a proper organized list when we do the release proper). ...

I like experimenting with software and technology. Many years ago, I built a Laconica instance. Not because I needed a Laconica instance but because I was curious and any knowledge gleaned would be useful. Standard LAMP stack. Same as the WordPress blogging software which I had already built. Plus Laconica releases were named after R.E.M songs by Evan. Similarly, I got an account on mastodon.sdf.org in preference to Twitter because I favour OpenSource software and the underdog. ...