Posts from November 2005

I was investigating the bewildering world of trackbacks, pingbacks and blog comments and found that my existing provider, blogger.com, supports backlinks (inbound links to a specific article from a Google search) but not trackbacks.

Then I discovered Wordpress.org which is a blogging tool that supports proper trackbacks, pingbacks (and a whole lot more besides). Although Wordpress is a freely available OpenSource PHP based application, I would need to upgrade my current web hosting to include PHP (for the massive sum of an additional 4GBP per month).

Then I discovered the hosted service Wordpress.com which offers the same functionality so I registered for an invitation email. A little more research unearthed the useful fact that the recently released Flock browser also includes a free Wordpress.com account. I immediately downloaded Flock and got myself this new, shiny Wordpress blog.

I like the blog editing facilities (you can tag each post in multiple categories) which may render that tedious task of manually adding Technorati tags obsolete.

Pros: trackbacks, pingbacks, categories, builtin referrer tracking, immediate WSIWYG preview, automatic Technorati pings

Cons: no direct access to Web server logs and statistics, need to manually import existing blog from blogger, centred formatting, need to burn new feed, lose thousands of readers

I have got an old radio cassette in my car with a aerial mounted in the rear windscreen. The MW reception is pretty poor and if you go under a bridge, the interference nearly makes your ears bleed. As I listen to Radio 5 Live quite a lot, this is rather irritating.

After months of prevaricating and thinking, I impetuously went out and bought a Sony DAB6650. This is a DAB radio (with FM/MW/LW as well) and a CD player. The unit looks and sounds great and I now have access to lots of different DAB stations.

Although I haven't travelled that far yet, the digital sound quality is excellent, even in towns and under bridges.

The only slight downside is that the CD formats include MP3 or Atrac but does not include WMA. Unfortunately all my CD's are ripped in WMA format but I have a handful also copied in Atrac format for my Sony MD player.

Dear Reader

We had some great times on blogger together but all good things must come to an end.

I just feel we need a break from each another. I need some time to think and some personal space (on Wordpress) and there is no other ISP involved. Please - believe me.

The Web site hits were bubbling up nicely, the feedburner circulation peaked at 14 and we even had a couple of people referring to and commenting on this blog.

However, unfortunately my owner's head has been turned by the use of 'categories', an RSS feed for 'Comments', trackback links which he still doesn't understand and a new, trendy beta version of a blogging platform used by the Scobleizer (and Eddie Awad) so he has dumped me in favour of http://andyc.wordpress.com/

Wordpress automatically provides a feed for the new blog from http://andyc.wordpress.com/feed/ and a separate feed for comments (which is a nice idea) - http://andyc.wordpress.com/comments/feed/

My owner also deleted and recreated the Feedburner feed despite the dire warnings (he was too stupid to fathom out the fancy auto-redirection) so http://feeds.feedburner.com/AndyC may or may not still work or you might have to remove and recreate it.

After all we have been through, you still mean a lot to me and I hope that we can still be good friends.

All my love

The Blogger bytestream that was 'Blog in isolation'

I used to work for Ingres (in London) who were a fantastic company to work for. Amazingly, they are the only company I have ever worked for to use newsgroups for internal technical discussions and knowledge sharing instead of email aliases. I once read that processing an individual email costs a company 10 cents.

In the early 90's, Ingres was under commercial pressure from another large relational database vendor, Oracle. Instead of responding to this challenge, Ingres tended to 'fiddle while Rome burned', discuss the API naming convention by committee and stoutly defend the technical purity of page level locking (Oracle supported row level locking and capitalised heavily) from a lofty ivory tower.

Eventually, Computer Associates took over Ingres which most staff viewed as the end of the world. The truth was that CA saved Ingres from Chapter 11 (bankruptcy).

Although I had never visited Alameda and Islandia (Ingres' and CA's respective corporate headquarters), I still have this vision of hard nosed businessmen in sharp suits invading the Alameda campus to interview all these bearded techies in sandals.

On the day of the takeover, Oracle parked a truck outside Ingres' UK offices with a billboard 'Oracle are hiring now'. The story got a lot of coverage in the UK computer press. Once again, superb marketing from Oracle.

The Ingres engineers left the company in droves, formed self-help groups and arranged annual wakes to commemorate the anniversary of the black day.

CA subsequently rebranded the product OpenIngres but it largely disappeared from view into CA's vast portfolio of thousands of different software products.

So, it was nice to see Ingres back in the news this week as CA announced that Ingres Corporation will be once again be a separate company and the product will be available as an Open Source database.

Dear Cathy & Claire

I have just started going out with a boy much older than me...

No - sorry. I have just started blogging and find myself increasingly worrying about blogging etiquette. For example, I just read an interesting article about Oracle by Jeff Moss and wrote a followup on my blog. I felt my article was too long to be posted as a comment on Jeff's blog.

So what do I do ? I want to acknowledge Jeff's original article. Do I post a comment on Jeff's blog saying 'Nice article Jeff. This inspired me to write my own followup here' (with a link to my blog).

Or would that be considered rude and close to spam or trawling for traffic by the blogging community ?

Should my thoughts truly been a lengthy comment on Jeff's blog ?

Also, people occasionally comment on my blog but don't leave an email address so I am unable to followup directly with the individual. Again, I don't think it merits a comment from me on my own blog to say 'Thanks for popping by. I found your blog on the Palm PDA very useful'.

Alternatively, if I visit their blog and add a comment, it would be totally out of context.

Thanks for any advice

Norman

Jeff Moss article about the commercial and free versions of Toad and the incredibly tenacious, persistent breed of salesperson bred by Quest Software got me thinking about the Oracle DBA tools I use.

• People
• SQL*Plus
• Statspack
• putty

People are important because people have developed the application, people are using the application, people are managing the servers, people are managing the database and intelligent people have configured that very expensive storage array.

These people know a lot about the application, the history of the project, the successes and failures, the lessons learned, the architecture, the infrastructure whereas I may know, quite literally, nothing about the same subjects.

I have seen people using Toad (and similar GUI based Oracle development tools) very effectively, multi-tasking, flipping between windows at breakneck speed. Sometimes it makes me quite tired just watching them.

However, I prefer SQL*Plus to do most of the work because :-

• SQL*Plus provides a complete report of my session, with timings, query plans, statistics. No need to frantically try to write it all down.
• The SQL script can be incrementally developed and is repeatable. It is quite easy in Toad to execute an arbitrary set of mouse-clicks so it is not clear which of the six 'alter session' statements were actually in effect when you finally got the optimal results.
• SQL*Plus is the 'vi' of the Oracle world. It is the one Oracle tool you are guaranteed to have access to, everywhere. The sys admin may not allow you to install commercial software without a valid license or may use another tool you have never seen before.
• SQL*Plus can use bind variables, provide the query plan (with or without retrieving the 6 million records) and provide the vital statistics (consistent gets) just the same as the GUI tools. Almost everything you need in fact.

Statspack is important because it is an Oracle package. Oracle will maintain and develop statspack for the latest features available in 10g. Statspack produces reports in a standard format which can easily be analysed by others (colleagues, DBA's, even Oracle). Statspack can also be configured to run automatically at regular intervals. If there is always a problem with the overnight ETL at 03.30, I would rather statspack gets the overtime and gathers the performance metrics rather than me sitting there in the middle of the night.

Statspack tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is incredibly tempting to use an Oracle monitoring tool like OEM or Spotlight, obsessively watching the screen, drilling in on what appears to be an expensive query and your salvation. The problem is that you don't know the query in question is only spawned once a quarter for the accountant's financial report and runs in batch. The query could take 37 minutes and no-one would care. It is simply not important. It is not what the users are complaining about.

Worse, because your refresh interval is 5 seconds, you are blissfully unaware that you have missed the crucial SQL query with literal SQL that takes 1.7 seconds but is executed hundreds of times per second. Statspack does.

Setting the default statspack level to level 7 means that statspack can (retrospectively) produce the query plan for any problematic SQL statement identified in the summary report. This is handy where you may have long winded SQL statements where the summary report has tantalisingly truncated the SQL text just as the WHERE clause starts.

Putty is important so you can run O/S utilities (prstat, glance, topas, top, iostat, vmstat) to monitor the actual database server during the investigations. If the server is a development server hosting multiple Oracle instances with 2 CPU's running at 100% and saturated disks, then the performance of the application will be impacted, no matter what wizardry you weave.

Dear Bill

I live in London (near England) and would like to buy Microsoft Money and Microsoft Office. My preferred method of obtaining the goods would be to download these programs from your Web site and pay using a credit card.

A small discount to reflect the reduced administration costs, packaging and margin taken by the retailer would be nice but not essential.

However, when I attempt to buy these Microsoft products in the UK, I am redirected to third party Web sites (Amazon, Dabs, PC World etc) or I can delay the purchasing decision by downloading a 60 day trial version.

Buying the products from another outlet means that I have to do extra work just to make the order. This delay will be irritating and I might even consider using OpenOffice which I can download for free and start using now.

In fact, the only disadvantage of OpenOffice is that I anticipate my children handing in a piece of homework that Microsoft Word/PowerPoint/Excel is unable to convert correctly. Consequently their fantastic effort will receive a mark of zero and a detention as the teacher will not accept 'But, Sir, my Dad is an OpenSource evangelist' as a valid excuse.

Once I have ordered from Amazon, I then have to wait for the goods to be shipped, pray that Royal Mail doesn't mislay them and the postman doesn't leave the package unattended on my doorstep in the pouring rain (just because I didn't tip him last Xmas).

When I finally receive the goods, I then have to unwrap a large box containing fresh air to finally get my hands on the CD-ROM. There is no hardcopy user guide included as all the product documentation is now available online.

Note that Microsoft Money only costs 20GBP so comes supplied in a smaller box with less fresh air than Microsoft Office which costs 90GBP and, obviously, comes in a larger box with more fresh air.

I would prefer any response from Microsoft to be in the form of a old fashioned handwritten letter instead of this new fangled email technology.

Kind regards

Norman Brightside (Mr.)

My post about Patrick Gibson reminded me of another Irish genius who, sadly, is currently critically ill in a London hospital.

A bell-boy was summoned to George Bests luxurious hotel room. He stared in amazement at the scene that greeted him. Empty, discarded bottles of champagne everywhere, a scantily clad Mary Stavin (Miss World) lying on the bed surrounded by ten pound notes.

'Tell me, Mr Best, just where did it all go wrong ?'

A kind lady called Sarah encountered my blog, was horrified by what she saw, and and proffered this suggestion for tweaking the standard blogger template to add the readability of long articles by adding the heading to the footer section.

Eventually, I managed to successfully apply the changes (she left a spurious space character to ensure you have a little work to do) so I hope you enjoy the changes as much as I do.

What would you do with 1 million GBP ?

Would you buy a mansion, a yacht and a Ferrari, give up your job, go on holiday, donate it all to charity, buy your parents a new house, take over your local football club or get U2 to play at your son's birthday party ?

Don't worry - I haven't succumbed to the lure of '1001 subjects to blog about' for people with vacuous brains.

This was precisely the quandary facing Patrick Gibson in 2004 when he scooped the top prize of 1 million pounds on the ITV show 'Who wants to be a Millionaire'.

Anyway, Patrick chose to buy the complete Iain Banks' books catalogue together with DVD's of Quentin Tarantino's films and every single episode of Channel 4's hilarious TV comedy 'Father Ted'. The reason was that these were to be Patrick's specialist subjects for BBC's Mastermind quiz.

Don't laugh - Patrick was crowned Mastermind of Great Britain on last night's enthralling show ! Even better, the narrow victory for the Irish software developer prevented an Australian gentleman hoisting the impressive, crystal glass fruit bowl aloft.

Another crushing defeat for the Aussies - oh dear.