Posts from July 2007

Create tables, resize, add rows and columns, preview the output and add the finishing touches in Google Docs.

Then simply paste the HTML into the WordPress WYSIYG editor.

Less than two minutes to index a new article. Impressive.

Please dont tell Norma but, earlier this week, I spent £25 in Shagorika. Such is the life of a sad, lonely IT consultant on a slow Tuesday night in Sunderland.

Unfortunately, contrary to my expectations, Shagorika turned out to be a rather mediocre, overpriced Indian restaurant rather than the sordid den of sexual iniquity I was hoping for.

It took me a while to summon up the courage to cross the threshold. My nerves were soothed when I was warmly welcomed by a beautiful, flirtatious lady who led me by the hand to a cosy waiting area. She gave me a complimentary drink and asked me to wait a minute while she prepared a table. A table, not a bed ! How very exotic.

I looked nervously at my surroundings; comfy seats, a well stocked bar, motoring magazines and stunning ladies peeking out from behind net curtains. Then my host returned with a warm smile: 'Sir, I are ready for you now'. And by now, I was also ready for her. In fact, I could barely contain my excitement.

My glamorous hostess led me to a table with an immaculate white table cloth, set for 3 courses with wine glasses. Perplexed, I reluctantly sat down. I wasn't really that hungry so I asked if this foreplay was absolutely necessary and whether it cost any extra.

My hostess looked a little confused, proffered me a food menu and ran back to the bar. Then the awful realisation slowly dawned. This was not a brothel but an Indian restaurant. Words can not describe my utter embarrassment and how stupid I felt. Particularly, as I had already stripped down to my vest and boxers.

I immediately and rapidly got dressed again and ordered 'The Chef's Choice'. Fortunately, I was able to bury my head in the July-August 2007 copy of Oracle Magazine to avoid the stares of my fellow diners.

Originally, I was going to savour this fine publication with my partner, in the glowing aftermath of our steamy, breathless sexual encounter. Normally, I would smoke a cigarette but a recent change in the law prohibits that nowadays.

One of my favourite sections in Oracle Magazine is the interviews with real-life DBA's. However I nearly choked on my Prawn Patia as I read this inappropriate and leading question to M. K Rizwan:

'What's your favourite tool or technique on the job ?'

I am now frantically leafing through my 157 back issues to see precisely how Tim and Doug replied to this question.

Two weeks ago, I sat in the business lounge at Newcastle airport. I chose a desk right in the corner away from everyone else because I am like that.

Inevitably, the lounge filled up with business types trying to impress everyone else by speaking loudly on their slimline toy phones.

A gentleman came and sat down next to me. He fetched an orange juice and two packets of delicious Kettle Chips (Sea Salt with crushed black peppercorns and Mature Cheddar and Chives) to occupy himself for the next 25 minutes.

Now Kettle Chips are very tasty and I am quite partial to a packet myself but when you are trying to concentrate and not partaking, the act of ripping open the packet(s) and noisily crunching crisp after crisp is incredibly irritating.

Finally, the second packet was exhausted. All the crumbs at the bottom had been shovelled down his greedy throat. Peace at last.

Peace until he got up from his chair and fetched another two packets. Not one but another two.

Now I know that food and drink are complimentary in the business lounge, but, for God's sake, Kettle Chips simply aren't exactly a delicacy that you never get at home.

This afternoon, I find myself in the same business lounge, with a new immediate neighbour for company. Incredibly, he has also just noisily munched his way through two packets of Kettle Chips.

Jesus Christ - he has just got up and and returned with another two packets (Salsa Mesquite and Sea Salt & Balsamic Vinegar).

I've had enough. I can't take any more without saying anything I regret.

I am now going to show some solidarity with the man in the street and sit in an empty departure lounge with no flight until next Monday.

As far away from everyone else, and Kettle Chips, as I can possibly get.

Today, a gentleman approached me and politely asked if he could ask me a question.

Normally, this dialog is a little more protracted and goes as follows:

'Excuse me. Is your name Norman Brightside ?'

'Yes.'

'Do you work for Siebel ?'

'Yes.' (although strictly I work for Oracle on the Siebel CRM product)

'Are you from Expert Services ?'

'Yes.'

'Do you mind if I ask you a quick question ?'

'Not at all. Fire away.'

Anyway, what was unusual and striking about this approach was the fact the gentleman was carrying a Reporters Notebook and a pen.

When we sat down to discuss the various strategies for gathering, refreshing and (in obtuse cases), dropping statistics on objects in the Siebel schema, he actually asked me if I minded pausing briefly while he wrote things down.

I am not very clever. I am always writing things down mainly to avoid forgetting them. I tend to gather a lot of data when I visit a customer. Some of it is important, some of it is not. At first, it is not always obvious which is which.

As I usually have to produce a formal report, I find it necessary and useful to jot things down. My jottings are normally in a text file which I take away with me as input into the report. This is another reason I almost always exclusively use SQL*Plus to script test cases and take away a wad of spool files on a memory stick.

I am not overly organised. Sometimes, I may have a pristine pad of A4 paper but more often I am scribbling on the reverse of my flight/hotel itinerary or a Google map.

If I am talking to a Siebel administrator, project manager, Oracle DBA, in a meeting or a conference call or just chatting with an end user, I will ensure I have a piece of paper available. Just to write things down.

However, the fact I actually noticed this gentleman was equipped with a pen and paper for our brief chat and also made notes and jottings, merely served to reinforce how rare this seemingly obvious and eminently sensible practice is.

Or am I just mixing in the wrong circles ?

I was interested to read that Microsoft have over 17,597 employees registered on Facebook out of a total of 70,000 employees.

I thought I would try to discover how other leading IT companies compared, including my own. The staff numbers come from Google Finance and the rounding errors come from me.

The following Facebook networks are only open to company employees with a valid email address although, obviously, a better metric would have been some measure of recent activity.

Inevitably, I guess - Google lead the way (again) but I was surprised to see that Sun Microsystems have a significant proportion of Facebook members.

IBM were slightly lower than I expected until I remembered that half their 350,000 employees are busy building fantasy worlds in Second Life. No wonder I can't get spare parts for my Thinkpad.

Nice to see Oracle positioned just ahead of SAP after recent discussions about the companies' respective contributions and reputation in the Web 2.0 community.

I still have wildly oscillating feelings about Facebook; on one hand, a walled garden, puerile, teenage and gimmicky but undoubtedly an insidious, strangely compulsive and probably important platform.

PS. For example, I have just seen the immortal words 'Andy and Mark Burgess (The Chameleons) are now friends'. Superb.

Boring, alcohol fuelled haze

• Prelude
• Friday
• Saturday

My friends were disappointed, insulted and absolutely mortified at the suggestion (from a comment on this blog) that the Hook Norton Festival of Fine Ales was merely a

'Boring, alcohol, induced haze'

However, I simply loved the turn of phrase that captures the very essence of Hook Norton in just four words. So much so, I had T-shirts made up for this weekend's antics.

New for 2007: The entire event will be live mob-blogged from start to finish so don't forget to tune in to this blog, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and BBC World Service for exciting, real-time updates.

PS. This will be news to wives, partners and mistresses who have always been told that there is no mobile reception whatsoever in the beautiful, unspoiled Cotswold village which is the only reason their loved ones are incommunicado for a blissful 48 hours.

Weird. This was also the subject of my final year project at University. My AI creation was written in C on Unix and used the curses package.

However, my effort wasn't so accomplished, had severe problems when a piece was crowned and didn't implement the 'huffing' rule correctly.

Having said that, it did beat me on four occasions.

I own up. Its a fair cop. It is 27 years and 5 months since my last confession. Since then, I have sinned, Holy Father. In fact, I have committed an absolutely heinous crime. Please forgive me for I have submitted multiple random guesses.

May the high priests (and priestesses) of the BAAG movement, please have mercy on my wretched soul.

Recently, I have been guilty of supporting and even proposing a multitude of 'any guesses', all of which were proposed as possible solutions to solve a critical system problem on a production system:

1. I failed to cough and splutter in an effort to stifle my laughter when a manager suggested that 500 European users adopted shift working to clear the backlog.
2. I didn't shout down a ludicrous proposal to reboot the Siebel Enterprise every 4 hours in order to maintain some level of service.
3. I wrote on a whiteboard that consideration should be given to reinstating the previous version of the application even though this in itself was risky, time-consuming and unlikely to address the root cause.
4. I even proposed patching to Oracle 10.2.0.3 with no supporting evidence whatsoever.
5. I shuffled nervously and blushed when the customer asked 'Who do we escalate to when you fail to fix this problem ?'
6. I watched in silence as the SAN man was stood against a wall and pelted with questions as senior management all pointed fingers in his direction.
7. I failed to stand up for righteousness and technical purity as runaway, rogue sessions were maliciously and arbitrarily terminated by an Oracle DBA.
8. I failed to suggest running a trivial SQL to determine index fragmentation and stood by as 74 indexes were needlessly reorganised.
9. I watched helplessly as a systems administrator claimed the problem was 'definitely in the underlying disk I/O subsystem' simply because 8,000 operations a second were being performed.
10. I failed to raise my eyes skywards and embark on a spontaneous two hour training session with a DBA who claimed the 'buffer cache hit ratio was fine' and the problems only started once users were allowed onto the system.

My only defence is that all of the above 'any guesses' created enough of a diversionary smokescreen to buy me enough time, alone in a darkened room, to analyze multiple Statspack reports, reproduce the majority of the problems in SQL*Plus and then prove the behaviour was improved when statistics on empty tables were dropped and two additional indexes created.

This lucky 'guess' miraculously restored performance and stability. So you see, 'any guess' is not always such a bad strategy, after all.