Posts from February 2007

In recent weeks, I have been peppered with increasing amounts of spam to my Blueyonder account despite the fact that I rarely use or divulge this email address.

I guess I have become spoiled by Akismet and Gmail which both do such a sterling job of automatically detecting spam.

Anyway, it turns out Blueyonder do have a spam filtering capability. If you log onto Webmail, under Options, there is a section called 'Anti-spam and Antivirus Preferences'.

Make sure the 'Enable Spam Checking' box is checked. You can alter the default spam sensitivity to be 'High' and set the option to tag the email subject with [SPAM].

Then you can create a message filter in Outlook Express or Thunderbird to automatically dump such messages to a separate folder for periodic review.

Yesterday afternoon at 16:09, in Surrey, a sales rep in a red Vauxhall Vectra shunted a plumber driving a white van on the middle lane of the M25. Twenty years ago, the following cars would have quickly stopped to allow the protagonists to pull over to the hard shoulder.

Twenty years ago, a heated exchange would ensue. Then both parties would calm down and exchange insurance details. Twenty years ago, the white van driver would resume his journey while the Vectra owner waited for a tow from The AA to a local garage to replace his pierced radiator.

In 2007, Surrey Traffic Police handle minor traffic incidents very differently. The busiest motorway in England is completely closed while Surrey Traffic Police determine precisely how many lanes need to be closed in order to handle this earth shattering incident.

Eventually, after 19 minutes analysis involving 7 officers and a Chief Superintendent, Surrey Traffic Police decide that, in the interests of public safety, just two lanes need to be closed so the outer lane is slowly re-opened on Britain's busiest motorway. This is now the start of the rush-hour so the queues are building fast but Surrey Traffic Police are completely oblivious to this element of the unfolding drama.

Surrey Traffic Police continue to call for reinforcements from other regions while they carefully and thoroughly evaluate this very dangerous situation. Both drivers are instructed to remain in their vehicles while paramedics are summoned. Counsellors are invited to diagnose and remedy post-traumatic stress disorder.

Chemical engineers are dispatched from a secret government research laboratory to conduct experiments on the liquid spilled on to the carriageway. A high priority call to building contractors is made in case the roadway surface needs to be replaced which would mean a very welcome overnight closure (and overtime). A newly qualified cone engineer arrives to check no plastic cones have been damaged.

Early evening is the height of the rush-hour. The tailback is now 6 miles in both directions and growing. The M3, A30 and surrounding roads are now also affected. Four hours after the original incident, 8pm sees a shift change for Surrey Traffic Police. Three policemen volunteer for overtime to see this major incident through to a successful conclusion. Another decides he will miss Dragon's Den so fires up the siren and speeds off at 70 mph down the hard shoulder.

The chemical engineer decides the liquid from the car radiator is water with a small element of anti-freeze. Surrey Traffic Police decide to wait a further 25 minutes to let the lukewarm water cool down. The driver is cautioned and a sample of windscreen washer fluid is sent for analysis.

All three lanes of the motorway are now completely gridlocked so, unsurprisingly, The AA recovery vehicle can not get through. Surrey Traffic Police decide to use their powers to expedite the situation and summon their own recovery vehicles instead. Due to operational difficulties, they are summoned from Birmingham.

Eventually, at 21:15, the middle lane is carefully re-opened and a trickle of traffic starts to flow. A policeman makes calming gestures to the impatient drivers and is met with a volley of V-signs.

After another two hours, the motorway is fully re-opened and the UK can breathe again. Thanks to Surrey Traffic Police for averting yet another major traffic incident and keeping Britain's roads safe.

Last year, I went to Norway and was enjoying a scenic five hour drive from Bergen to the fjords through a multitude of dark, narrow, winding tunnels carved through solid rock. Suddenly, the traffic came to a halt shortly before the entrance to another tunnel

To my horror, I could make out a collision between a car and a coach with a solitary policeman in attendance. As I waited, I consulted my Phillips Map of Europe; when this tunnel was closed, we would have to make a diversion which would turn a pleasant scenic 5 hour drive into a nightmare, 12 hour drive.

After 7 minutes, a breakdown truck arrived and towed the car out of the tunnel. The coach then exited the tunnel and parked in a lay-by. The policeman ran (take note Surrey Traffic Police - yes he ran) to his patrol car, fetched a brush, ran (yes ran) into the tunnel and frantically brushed debris and glass to the side.

As he emerged from the tunnel, he frantically waved his brush at cars and lorries to get moving quickly in an effort to get the traffic flowing again as soon as humanly possible.

Email

1. You use ELM on a VT220.
2. You use Emacs and Gnus.
3. Corporate standards force you to use Microsoft Outlook and you don't even mind.
4. You use Gmail for all work and personal email.

Documents

1. Quill and parchment.
2. XEmacs.
3. Microsoft Word with 37 macros.
4. Microsoft Excel for all documents .
5. Google Documents for all correspondence.

Newsgroups

1. What are newsgroups ?
2. You use Emacs and Gnus.
3. Your company doesn't run an NNTP server for security reasons.
4. Newsgroups are just another data source mashed into your aggregator.

Home Page

1. Blank - just like your mind.
2. SourceForge
3. Personalised Google home page.
4. Multiple Firefox tabs that take 4 mins to initialise.

Browser

1. Lynx on an amber VT220.
2. Emacs and W3
3. IE 6.0
4. IE 7.0 - feverishly hunting for the File menu.
5. Firefox 3.0 (alpha)

O/S

1. Ubuntu Linux with self-modified device drivers for wireless support on an old 386.
2. Emacs.
3. Windows XP - to provide technical support to all your relatives.
4. OS X because all your trendy Mac friends can't be wrong.
5. Vista because you really do need to manage all those photos of your cat.

Social networking tools

1. Five-a-side followed by the pub.
2. Emacs mailing lists.
3. You are a fan of Ajax but only to clean the sink.
4. You have gold membership on Flickr.
5. You spend more on Skype than your landline.
6. A 'mash-up' is when you play with your food.
7. You finally book an appointment with your GP about your 'long tail'.
8. You think TechCrunch is a breakfast cereal.
9. You think 'First Tuesday' is an investigative TV program hosted by Trevor McDonald.

Blogging platform

1. Large text file in Emacs.
2. Embryonic, unused corporate Wiki.
3. Blogger Beta (101 Oracle bloggers can't be wrong).
4. Hosted WordPress with Snap plugin.
5. Self-hosted WordPress with custom theme and 347 useless plugins.
6. Irritating tendency to send humourous 3MB attachments on a Friday afternoon to colleagues, friends and family.
7. Wooden crate in corner of Hyde Park.

Employment

1. You have 10 years service for a large IT company and a silver pen to prove it.
2. You are a successful, highly paid company director, err, well a mercenary Oracle contractor.
3. You demand money to mind visiting fans' cars at the City of Manchester Stadium.
4. You have founded four failed startups but, undeterred, are contemplating the next.

Answers:

• Mainly 1 - you are stuck in an 80's timewarp.
• Mainly 2 - you probably have a beard and may well be Richard Stallman.
• Mainly 3 - you are a technology Luddite.
• Mainly 4 - you are a Web 2.0 aficionado.
• Mainly 5 - you count Matt Mullenweg and Robert Scoble as close friends.

Student fined £80 for making a 4 foot penis in the snow.

As part of my job, I often have the pleasure of walking around call centers where agents use headsets to enable them to interact with a computer while conducting a telephone call with a customer.

I have often wondered whether it would be cool or nerdy to use such a headset myself. To date, where possible, I tend to use my mobile phone on speakerphone so I am free to continue to type. For lengthy conference calls (abroad), this isn't a particularly cost-effective option but please don't tell the CFO.

With the increasing adoption of VOIP within Oracle and the recent delivery of my deluxe headset, I am typing this while listening to a team meeting using Cisco Communicator. This is really neat technology, the sound quality surprisingly good and even better, the telephone call is free, completely free. So please tell the CFO.

As for cool or nerdy, let's just say I will only be doing this from the privacy of my own home or possibly my office.

My kids think my adoption of this technology is absolutely hilarious. They keep smirking whenever they come into the kitchen for a snack and if I happen to be actually speaking on the device, they simply can't contain their hysterics and have to leave the room.

In addition, my wife keeps smiling and repeatedly asking me whether she can get a motor insurance quote.

Despite a scattering of snow in London that normally brings the country to a complete halt, my return flight from Copenhagen was on time and blissfully uneventful.

Unusually, I was hoping for lengthy queues at passport control in T3. I was praying for four flights to land simultaneously and for the resulting queues to snake around the corner and past the toilets.

Why ? Because today it is finally going to happen. After, inexplicably not flying abroad for 6 months, I had finally managed to arrange my rendezvous with Iris. Tonight was the our first date.

I was a little nervous as I separated from the crowds and waltzed up to approach the Iris barrier. The lady in front of me was already having problems. She was staring blankly into a blank screen. The camera appeared to be off and certainly wasn't scanning her face (or anything else).

An immigration official came over to help: 'Use the lower camera'. The lady dipped her head and stared into the middle screen. Still nothing. How embarrassing. Is it too late to rejoin the queue for passport control ? The assistant said 'No. No. Look into the bottom screen.'

This meant the lady virtually had to squat on her knees and look into a screen positioned three feet from the ground. Finally, the advanced computer system recognised her credentials (and simultaneously sent her personal details to the FBI and Mossad). Rather flustered, she got up from the carpet and proceeded through the exit barrier exclaiming 'Well I don't think much of that system.'

Actually, the lady had made a schoolboy error that was covered on day 2 of the Iris Certified Professional (ICP) Training course. Advanced sensors on the entry barriers electronically scan to determine the height of the incoming body mass. If you enter, swinging your bag first, then the sensors mistakenly think you are a toddler or a dwarf.

Nervously, I entered the zone with my bag behind me. Iris was great fun. You look into a screen with your own image and have to precisely align your eyes with two green dots. This sounds easy but isn't. The computer helps you with 'Move your head to the left', 'Move backwards' and 'Look - a fraction to the right. Now just stay still !' so the whole exercise turns into a game of 3D 'Golden Shot'.

When the system recognises your retinal scan, you are free to proceed, waving at your colleagues waiting to clear immigration and guaranteed to be the first person waiting 25 minutes at the baggage carousel. During the trial period, you get presented with a 'I came through IRIS in 17 seconds' or 'IRIS thinks I am a dwarf' badge of honour.

I completed a feedback form with a couple of enhancement requests:

'Can the screen be upgraded to colour ?' 'Can the green dots be replaced with cross-hair rifle sights ?'

'How does Iris cope with bloodshot eyes ?'

'Can a sound effect (gun shot, hurrah, round of applause) be sounded on successful recognition ?'

'Can the system flash red lights and sirens with 'YOU ARE AN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT' if the individual takes more than 2 minutes ?'

Blueyonder Webmail is down which is unusual. Welcome to the brand new, exciting world of Virgin Media.

Still, at least they have a nice friendly, Web 2.0 style apology. The marketeers must be busy planning the launch party and deciding which dress Richard Branson will wear.

Many years ago, a customer thanked me which was a pleasant surprise and quite unusual. Most simply ask When will your report be ready ?

This particular customer remarked on my logical and methodical approach' to understanding this long standing complex problem, proposing a plan of action and, on this rare occasion, resolving it.

I was interested by his choice of the words 'logical and methodical'. As an aside, I was convinced I heard a surly DBA murmur 'slow, laboured and hopeless more like' which hurt terribly.

Anyway, I don't believe that I have a 'logical and methodical' approach to problem solving. My approach is born from laziness.

For example, if you have 27 users synchronising 176 objects of 5 different types between two IT systems, there is a lot of data to analyse. When you increase the logging on both systems at all tiers, you get even more data to analyse. So much data that your head explodes.

Reducing the number of synchronising users to 1, the number of objects to be synchronised to 1 and limiting the direction of synchronisation to one-way isn't necessarily logical. It is laziness and merely reduces the amount of log files to a manageable volume so you are merely left with a splitting headache.

Sometimes, it may appear like wasted time and effort to stop staring at a monitor and painstakingly review yet again all the previous history, ask the same questions again and possibly repeat test scenarios that have already been executed many times by miscellaneous disgruntled parties. There is simply no substitute for seeing the evidence with your own eyes.

Similarly, many years ago, I used to quite literally get a detailed trace of a working system and a broken system ('let's look at the good versus the bad') and look for divergence. Occasionally, I still resort to this technique which can still prove to be effective.

This approach can be viewed as a little undergraduate-esque by non-technical people who expect expensive consultants just to waltz in and say 'Oh yeah. I saw this very problem last week in Kazbakistan. You just need to set the undocumented, unsupported and mythical parameter: _firewall_auth=trusted. Right, anyone for lunch ?'

Making use of other resources could also be viewed as lazy but never underestimate the knowledge and experience of the available technical resources who may have different backgrounds and areas of expertise and hence a contrary and valuable view on the underlying problem.

People (myself included) often limit their analysis to the areas they know most about.

Right - anyone fancy a walk to that Copenhagen sports bar for England versus Spain ?

Over the past couple of days, much to my surprise, I have actually managed to answer some questions.

1. The parameter ExtractStartDate was set to 11/01/2007. This means that Siebel will ignore all appointments and tasks prior to this date. The default value of 'ExtractStartDateFormat' is 'MM/DD/YYYY' which equates to '01 November 2007'.
2. Install Cygwin, sed -n -e 'x,yp' < bigfile.log
3. If the Exchange Connector and SSSE Engine component are run by accounts in different domains, trust must be established in order for RPC calls to work correctly. Alternatively, use two separate accounts (least privilege) in the same domain.
4. In the heart of London, surprisingly.
5. Install OHS from the OAS Companion CD
6. F11

And now for the questions...

1. Why, oh why, does Siebel stubbornly refuse to synchronise any of my appointments and ToDo's to Outlook ?
2. How do you print lines x to y of a file too large for notepad ?
3. Why, oh why, don't multiple SSSE engines on different servers work ?
4. Where is London City Airport exactly ?
5. Where do you get the version of OHS (with Apache 2.x) needed for Siebel 8.0 ?
6. How do you switch from full screen mode back to console in VMware ?

I am probably most proud of number 6. If only all my answers were as succinct and technically correct.

[Well, my SEO professor said it was much better than Sports Bars of Europe #7]

Feverishly scoured the Interweb looking for alternative sports bars in Copenhagen. Once I saw the address of my previous haunt, the marvellous 'Irish Rover', my mind was instantly made up.

Tomorrow morning, when the customer politely asks me what I got up to last night, instead of 'Caught up with my email and ordered room service', I can now proffer 'I spent a glorious, unforgettable night up 'Jorcks Passage'.

Inspired, I ran down the 19 flights of stairs down to the lobby to get a city map which I strive to hold the right way up. The pretty, blonde Danish receptionist couldn't be more helpful. She pointed to the hotel (D2) and passed me the map with a knowing smile; 'I am hearing this place (G7) is very popular with the English business men, if you are knowing what I am meaning'.

Even with the map the right way up, I still got lost. I passed a large City square surrounded by an ice rink and then the street signs ran out. Desperate, I opened the map and accosted a young lady in a lonely, darkly lit street asking for directions to 'The Stroget'. Instead of running away, mugging me for my phone or accusing me of date rape, she replied 'Yes. I am going that way so you can follow if you like.'

We got chatting and it transpired she had a late night at work as she was planning for Scandinavia's largest fashion festival in 10 days. Inevitably, as we hit 'Stroget' and the designer shops, our pace slowed to a crawl as we stopped to admire this year's autumnal designs in a very fetching brown.

This was going nowhere. I don't like shopping, particularly when the outlets are closed. Kick off was approaching fast. I could feel that I was really close to Jorck's Passage.

I had to nip this relationship in the bud. Now. 'Do you fancy coming to watch Eng-er-land play Spain, love and maybe get a kebab later ?' My glamorous, shapely, dark haired Danish escort suddenly recognised her best friend and ran away.

Got a Leffe and secured a blissfully unobstructed view of the big screen upstairs. After 20 minutes of boredom, the incessant Danish flirting started again. Personally, I blame that (3 day old) Lynx aftershave. I asked the beautiful waitress a perfectly innocuous question: 'Is it possible to order some food ?'

She leant over, plunging her cleavage over my pint, and whispered breathlessly 'If you can wait till after the match, I can give you my very own Special for 10 Crowns'. I was speechless at this unsolicited but very welcome advance until my neighbour, an Irish student bricklayer, translated: 'Yes. Surely. You can have a Irish Rover Beer & Burger international friendly football special for just 10 Kroner'.

Sigh. Another chance gone.

Oh and here comes the match report. A very uninspiring, mediocre team in white lost 1-0 to an unadventurous team in red with silly haircuts.