Posts from January 2008

Blue Balloon You saw me standing alone All those balloons in front of Joe Hart Without a red balloon of my own Blue Balloon You know just what I was there for You heard Michael Ball saying a prayer for A FA Cup medal he really could care for And then a ball suddenly appeared before me The only one my feet will miss I heard somebody scream please puncture me But when I looked to the ref it was in the goal

• Joomla! 1.5 has been released and installed over here.
• Drupal 6 hasnt been released but that didnt stop me upgrading this blog to 6 RC2.
• I never thought I would say this but I think I am starting to get Twitter. Blame Tim Hall.
• FTP - Siebel had an FTP site for exchanging files with customers. Oracle has an FTP site for exchanging files with customers. Unsurprisingly, Oracle are standardising on the latter. I simply can't believe how much time I have ~~wasted~~ spent helping intelligent people crossing this chasm.
• The Europa Hotel in Belfast was the 'most bombed hotel in Europe.'

Last Thursday, 152 people (16 crew and 136 passengers), in addition to a significant number of people living in Hounslow, narrowly escaped death when a British Airways flight from Beijing (BA038) was forced into an emergency landing at Heathrow airport.

Several things struck me about this incident and the aftermath:

• After a phone call to update me on all the domestic news and gossip, my wife somehow negated to impart this tidbit of useful and relevant information. I hung up and turned on the TV news to be staggered by images of the wrecked fuselage of a British Airways jumbo jet lying of the fringes of the runway, 15 miles from my house, surrounded by foam, slides deployed with 18 fire appliances surrounding the scene.
• As I was flying from Belfast into Heathrow the following day, I consulted the BMI website which curiously maintained flights would be subject to delays and cancellation following, in a slight understatement, the 'incident at Heathrow'. Funnily, enough, the AAIB agrees with me and defines an accident as 'an occurrence during the period of operation of an aircraft where the aircraft incurs damage'.
• A man from Oxford who walked away with his life would have quite liked British Airways to provide him with a cup of tea followed by some counselling.
• Another couple thought they had just had 'a bumpy landing' and therefore didn't require any tea and biscuits. In fact, these Aussie backpackers were just delighted to get their baggage back without queuing at the carousel and to receive a complimentary return ticket for the Heathrow Express.
• A surreal moment boarding the flight at Belfast, picking up a newspaper with the stricken 777 plastered all over the front page.
• British Airways' decision to parade the pilot, co-pilot and Julie, your cabin service director, before the world's press. The BA crew all looked shell-shocked and distinctly uncomfortable. Mind you, so would I, if I was slowly starting to assimilate the events and trying to recover from a near death experience (without a cup of tea). This implied to me that BA were either very keen to get the media off their backs and leave them alone and/or BA are already absolutely certain of the circumstances of the accident and knew for a fact, pilot error was not a possible contributory factor.

Finally, I must confess that I know absolutely nothing about airplanes, fly by wire or wind shear. I am also totally ignorant of the size of the pigeon population of South West London and possible deficiencies in the quality of Chinese aircraft fuel.

However, if the AAIB investigation subsequently discovers, in the coming months, that the co-pilot had successfully brought a 100 ton aircraft into a crash landing, having lost power to both engines, and miraculously managed to clear the perimeter fence by 10 feet, I will be truly amazed at the skill of the pilots.

If the investigation shows that, following a catastrophic, non-reproducible computer error, the co-pilot somehow had the foresight to raise the flaps to somehow bring the aircraft down on the grass to stop it within 300 feet instead of landing on the concrete runway where it surely would have exploded with complete loss of life, wouldn't that be the most staggering and heroic feat ever ?

Siebel customers (and employees alike) all over the world are busy enjoying Metalink3 which has recently replaced SupportWeb.

Everyone (well me, mainly) is taking great delight in taunting Oracle DBA types with incredulous cries of 'Sorry - did you say you're still on legacy Metalink2 ?'

A number of readers, impressed with this bleeding edge technology and dying for more, have emailed me asking why this humble Siebel blog hasn't yet been updated to Drupal 6.0 RC2.

Consequently, I downloaded the distribution for Drupal 6 Release Candidate #2 and, unusually for me, I even took the time to read 'UPGRADE.txt'. I followed the instructions therein and took the site offline so any visitors receive a configurable, professional looking message: 'This site is being upgraded to bleeding edge CMS technology. Please spread the news and don't forget to taunt any Oracle DBA's.'

After that completely unnecessary configuration change (I have no visitors), I was then unable to login to initiate the upgrade. Sigh. Thankfully, I discovered this article from another early adopter which enabled me to regain control of my original site.

I attempted the upgrade from Drupal 5.3 which failed to modify the database schema and produced a worrying number of SQL errors.

Not to be defeated, I read this helpful article which implied the Drupal 5.x system should be running the latest stable release (5.6) which seemed eminently sensible advice.

I quickly upgraded from Drupal 5.3 to 5.6. Only I couldn't because my site was now inaccessible after the partial, incomplete upgrade so I had to hold my breath while I restored from yesterday's MySQL database backup which worked perfectly.

Then I upgraded Drupal from 5.3 to 5.6, having naively convinced myself this would fix the problem, and duly repeated the upgrade process to 6.0 RC2 which promptly failed with the same dire, database related, results.

Still, this is a beta release after all and sure enough (as always), some other poor soul has already been there and done that.

No fix yet. Roll on RC3.

It is just over six months since I first placed banner ads on this blog and, much to my surprise, the accumulated income has just reached $100 (which triggers the first payment from Google).

As the introduction of Adsense was purely an exercise to learn how the system works and experiment with different placements and formats, I have decided to donate all proceeds to a worthy charity.

Answered by our roving reporter, Kenneth.

Posts by month. Draw your own conclusions.

I am jet-lagged because a customer asked me to fly, at short notice, from Newcastle to Belfast at 07:05 on Wednesday morning.

I had a suspicion this was important because when I told the client that my flights between London and Newcastle were non-refundable he replied 'I don't care about that. Just get on a plane to Belfast.'

Initially, I was harbouring hopes of watching Newcastle play Stoke City in a Cup Replay on Wednesday evening and I was about to politely enquire about the possibility of departing early on Thursday morning when the project manager added: 'Oh and take anything you might need to install Siebel and clone our existing environment on to brand new, standalone infrastructure.'

My normal concerns about oversleeping were accentuated by the fact I was booked for my first ever flight on EasyJet. I was worried about no e-ticket, additional charges for a seat, additional charges for checking my bag into the hold, additional charges for an overpriced cheese and bacon panini. I was terrified about lengthy queues of people going to Florida and the Alps for £24.99 (+ £110 tax and fuel surcharge) blocking my path to the single check-in desk.

So, I duly went to bed at 20:30 and set my alarm for 04:45 to allow a full half hour to get dressed, double check my passport and Siebel DVD's, find the night porter, check out of the hotel and impatiently wait for my taxi (booked for 05:15).

However, recurring nightmares about being 16 seconds late for the check-in desk and featuring on 'Airline' woke me at 04:12 precisely. I also dreamt of Tony Robinson filming my arrival, flustered and stressed, at the bright orange check-in desk at 06:26.

'Mr. Norman Brightside is desperately trying to get to Belfast for an urgent business meeting but unfortunately for Norman and the hordes behind him, the check-in desk for the Belfast flight has just closed. Norman is now having a discussion with Lisa.'

Holiday makers with young children and lads going to Prague for a stag week are tutting behind me as I plead:

'Listen Lisa, it's not my fault. I have been up since 04:30 but the taxi driver kept talking about Kevin Keegan and I simply must get to Belfast to install Siebel for a training course that starts on Monday.' 'Well I am very sorry, Sir but I have asked the pilot and there's simply no way you can catch this flight. You will have to book on the next one at 17:25 tonight.'

'Listen. You don't understand. This is a brand new environment, on machines yet to be installed, isolated behind a corporate firewall.'

'Why don't the network, comms and infrastructure team just create a secure VPN link between the two data centres ?

'Yeah, I know, Lisa. Tell me about it, but if that was feasible, I could tunnel through from the Sunderland office and I wouldn't be standing here in my pyjamas, would I ?'

I was almost tempted to let Kevin Keegans re-appointment as manager of Newcastle pass without comment.

After Mourinho's departure, the Premiership (and the media) desperately needs some more characters and soundbites.

However, I just read that since his departure from Manchester City, Keegan has been running a football circus. YCNMIU.

The ideal preparation for his latest role. And just for old times sake, take a second to remember this classic (in full).

Let the mind games begin.

Howard

When Tim Hall tagged me, my initial, instinctive gut reaction was: God- what an infantile, puerile idea. There's no way I am going to participate in that 'meme'. The concept wasn't new to me as I'd already seen Scoble and those Web 2.0 PR types participate in similar mindless activities which I just chose to ignore.

However, my reasons for objecting were slightly different from yours. Normally, I despise being told what to so and what to blog about. Similarly, whenever my various employers announced a 'Dress down Friday' which was gleefully received by my colleagues, I would purposefully don a suit and tie. After all, a uniform on a Friday is still a uniform.

Secondly, the very thought of having to identify eight further victims to be tagged also filled me with dread. Not because I worried about OraNA being swamped with an exponential explosion and prolonged burst of non-technical content but, because, I feared the unlucky recipients may possibly share my feelings.

Of course, they could all maintain a dignified silence and simply ignore my pleas to join the party but what if they also hated this Web 2.0 'meme' but were too shy, polite and retiring to tell me what they really thought. I know a handful of 'bloggers' but have only met two in the flesh and (thankfully) slept with neither.

While I did discover some new blogs of interest, not necessarily because of the '8 things', I must admit that I quickly tired of hearing about people's job history, favourite cars, mental and physical disorders (mild or otherwise), alternative careers, wild death defying adventures and the fact they once killed a man with their bare hands in the Burmese jungle.

So why, I hear you ask, did I capitulate, run towards the cliff and conjure up a disposable blog entry titled '8 things' ? Well, the truth is I thought it was a cheap post, I was short on inspiration and there was some elements I wanted to write about which don't merit a full blog post but were better suited to a short bullet point.

I followed your analysis, comments and thoughts with interest (for the first couple of days at least). I continued to read your blog, I tracked your posts on c.d.o.s, I monitored your comments on other blogs. When I saw your detailed analysis, use of analogies and various lengthy responses and compared with it my paltry, throwaway one-liners, I felt like a troll.

I occasionally commented myself and you normally responded. Not, I suspect to get the last word but you genuinely care. A lot. I admired your passion and felt somehow inadequate that I had spontaneously chosen to respond to what some Oracle bloggers (unwisely IMHO) had termed a 'chain letter', 'spam' or a 'game'.

I am genuinely sorry that you have decided to shut down your site as (as I have stated before) your blog, forums and articles represent an invaluable set of technical resources for anyone working with Oracle.

I am sorry if my trite comment on your blog that I 'hadn't signed up to your terms and conditions when I started my blog' irritated you and may have, in some small way, contributed towards your decision.

However, just as it is your prerogative to close your site down, I have the same right to post about my travel nightmares, '47 things', my thoughts on Newcastle's new manager or Scoble's laugh.

Particularly, as my blog is not (currently) aggregated by OraNA and hence will not contaminate or interrupt the stream of consciousness.

Mind you, never say never.

Andy

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It is 25 years, 3 months and 47 days since my last confession.

According to Feedburner, Tim Halls Oracle blog aggregator has 723 avid readers.

One of those readers summoned up the courage to send me an email complaining about my continuous off-topic posts. Apparently, the straw that broke this particular camel's back was my participation in the evil '8 things' Oracle TagFest.

Forget the fact, my blog is not currently aggregated by OraNA which is purely a temporary oversight by Eddie and will be rectifed imminently (once my cheque for $250 clears).

Forget the fact, I didn't tag 8 other unfortunates to propagate the Black Death. That was only because I have no mates and am very lazy.

I can only apologise. I owe you, Roger Howard, an apology. I never meant my inane posts to push technical content off the front page within 27.8 seconds.

I never envisaged that this blogging meme might possibly 'inconvenience' you. May the Lord have mercy on my soul. "Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Oh, hang on, I nearly forgot your penance. 67 'Hail Marys' and 43 'Our Fathers'".