software

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....

Tim Hall recently made a wonderful suggestion that the Oracle community remember the much missed Joel Kallman on 11 October 2021. My contribution doesn’t demonstrate APEX technical wizardry. Instead it’s a short story from a real-life customer project implemented using APEX. Just to avoid any potential law suits, this post isn’t about Agile development either - more how APEX can be used to quickly respond to changing customer requirements. One particular post from Joel stuck with me about his attitude to customer service which can be encapsulated in a single line:...

Five years ago, I purchased a Roberts Digital radio for the kitchen. Mainly to listen to the radio but also this device could play music from Spotify, a USB stick or act as a UPNP client. As I already had the Plex Media Server set up which had a DLNA option, this looked attractive. The setup worked pretty well apart from one minor glitch. And, like a dripping water tap, or the endless, harrowing screams of a baby played on a tight loop in an American interrogation facility, any minor technical glitch can’t simply be ignored....

Sometimes, I spend a lot of time on technical tasks that are of seemingly questionable benefit or limited practical use. For example, I remember converting the format of my 977 blog posts between markup languages and migrating the content to esoteric blogging platforms (more then once). I also wasted an unbelievable amount of time meticulously editing the meta data (YAML front-matter) and writing scripts simply to preserve Disqus comments after a change to the permalink structure....

Connor McDonald posts an excellent series of articles about tuning a database application. This analysis from a end user perspective reminded me of my own experiences when I was a technical consultant helping customers running a large CRM application, typically in call centres scattered across Europe. I was often summoned onsite and told to solve the problem that ‘The application is slow’. Usually, different people were eager to give me their view on the issue:-...