Posts in category "software"

Yesterday, I stumbled across Newsvine which is a very impressive news aggregator. Until now, I didn't much care for these type of sites. Digg left me a little cold with too many irrelevant, repeated articles (not to mention flame wars) and Slashdot hurt my eyes.

I currently use My Yahoo! with various news feeds configured and was starting to experiment with a similar, personalized Google portal with feeds from Google News as an alternative.

Newsvine is more focussed on news with feeds from Associated Press, tagging, watchlists, personalisation, discussions and your own news column (articles, links). The interface is well thought out, fast, easy to use and I quickly found myself exploring many different topics of interest.

Newsvine is yet another of those Web 2.0 applications currently in beta and needs an invitation to sign up. I anticipate Newsvine supplementing rather than replacing GreatNews as my RSS reader (for personal and technical blogs) but it is certainly a very impressive and interesting application.

I stumbled across Newsvine on this blog and the author was kind enough to issue me with an invite. If he has none left, I also have some Newsvine invites available if you are interested in trying it out.

I have been thinking (yes I do a lot of that) recently about managing my personal calendar more effectively. Ideally, I would like a simple Web based calendar that could also sync to my Palm.

I don't really like the Yahoo! Calendar that much even though it can sync with Outlook and the Palm. I simply don't enjoy looking at the Yahoo! calendar. I just think the interface is ugly and there are distracting ads liberally scattered at the top of the screen.

I am following the development of Sunbird with interest but this project is still in development and I think Sunbird only runs locally.

I have an outstanding, low priority ToDo to evaluate Remember The Milk but keep forgetting.

So, I was interested to read Matt Mullenweg speaking in glowing terms about the calendar functionality from 30 Boxes rapidly followed by similar sentiments from Scobleizer.

Mental note. Forego 'Songs of Praise' for just one week and remember to sign up at 30 Boxes on Sunday 5 February when it enters public beta.

In fact, add it to your calendar with an SMS alert so you don't forget.

Tim Hall was right. I can resist everything except temptation.

• Install Apache 1.3.2 for Windows. Very quick and easy. Slight feeling of version envy. The latest version is 2.x. Will upgrade later.
• Install mySQL 5.0 for Windows. Very quick and easy.
• Install mySQL Administration Tools 1.1. Very quick and easy.
• Install mySQL QueryBrowser 1.1.9. Very quick and easy.

Login to mySQL database. Create a table. Insert a record. Select the record. All seems fine.

Install PHP 5.12 for Windows. Very quick and easy.

But wait, what's that ? I actually have to do some work and edit Apache httpd.con' because that code hasn't been written yet. Read install.txt for details. Oh no. Make the necessary changes. Now the Apache service doesn't even start. No Apache error log. Have to run something called Event Viewer. Investigate for 3 minutes. Get bored. Consider reformatting disk, installing Linux and using

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make test
$ make install

Kids want to use computer. I want to watch the football. I need to get a move on. I haven't got all day.

Stumble across Wamp (Apache 2.0.55, mySQL 5.0.18, PHP 5.12 bundle). Phew. Version envy dissolves.

Wamp (Apache) doesn't install cleanly due to conflict with existing installed programs. Uninstall everything. Reboot. Reinstall wamp which is successful. Nice dashboard with phpMyAdmin and mySQL interface (SQLiteManager).

Download Joomla. Use browser based installation which runs perfectly. Run Joomla. Looks nice.

Download gtd-php. Configure. Create a GTD database and tables. Run gtd-php. Looks nice.

Try to create a project. Get '403 Forbidden' error. Ask politely for help. Google points me at a similar issue in Wamp. Make the suggested edits. Adding items now works ! Add the following 'Next Actions'

• Install Apache
• Install PHP
• Install mySQL
• Install Joomla
• Install GTD-PHP
• Add mySQL to CV

Mark all actions as done. How very satisfying. Turn computer off.

I wanted to export my Newsgator feeds into OPML and experiment with SearchFox, who kindly gave me an account, to take part in the beta program.

Only one slight problem, Newsgator doesn't support OPML export. Strange but true.

I am using the Newsgator Online RSS reader and simply want to order my most important, must-read blogs (i.e mine) at the top. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable requirement. From a cursory glance at the documentation, it is not immediately clear if I can even do this in Newsgator. This is a little irritating as I now have to do some work to scroll down to 'Oracle' or rename the folder as 'AAAOracle'. And, yes, you're right, I am very lazy.

Then I stumbled across a blog article on SearchFox which is another Web based RSS reader (like Newsgator) but with an interesting personalisation and recommendation engine which automatically bubbles your favourite, most frequently read articles and blogs to the top of your reading list.

This sounds interesting. It is a pity that SearchFox is another Web 2.0 application that is in beta and currently open to a selected few who must apply for an account. Still, I sent them a polite email citing my recent review and asked for access to evaluate their product. I even used a Gmail address to prove my Web 2.0 credentials. I sent the email yesterday and am now polling my Google Inbox every ten seconds.

I stumbled across SearchFox on a arbitrary blog search on feedster about RSS and it struck me that, in the past, I would use Google (Web, Groups), TuCows, SourceForge, Freshmeat to find OpenSource, free RSS readers.

However most of these sources are relatively out of date and had failed to unearth SearchFox when I was recently looking for RSS readers. The fast moving blogosphere is much better suited to finding these sort of hip, new Web 2.0 applications.

Don't know where, don't know when but SonicStage 3.3 is available.

Includes ATRAC Lossless format, ripping WMA CDs, wider range of bitrates for ATRAC3Plus and MP3.

However, SonicStage remains the only software application in the modern world without a 'Check for updates' option.

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.

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 £20 so comes supplied in a smaller box with less fresh air than Microsoft Office which costs £90 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.)

When I started this blog, I simply composed the posts in the Blogger editor which was adequate. Until one day, when I lost the complete text of a draft posting due to finger trouble. As I laboriously re-typed my masterpiece, I wished I had a blog editor with the infinite undo, auto-save and all the other features of Emacs.

However, composing the drafts in the Blogger editor was useful as I could edit drafts from anywhere and then publish the blog very easily.

I then looked at Writely and Writeboard which fit the bill but are really intended for collaborative writing on the Web and don't have any integration with Blogger.

The Qumana Blog Editor also looked very interesting as it includes integration with Blogger and built-in support for Technorati tags but still was essentially a cut-down Word lookalike interface.

Then I realised I had the perfect blogging editor sitting right under my nose all the time - Emacs. I can use all of Emacs powerful text editing features and simply save the draft text on my Web server using ange-ftp.

Adding Technorati tags is easy using Marshall Kirkpatrick's BlogTags bookmarklet.

The only thing Emacs is missing is the ability to seamlessly publish to Blogger and another minor irritation is the fact that some whitespace gets jumbled when pasting the text into Blogger.

However, Emacs being Emacs, some kind person has created a Lisp package (weblogger.el) that provides integration with Blogger although I haven't actually tried it yet.

And please don't ask why I don't use the Blogger for Word extension. I can simply think of nothing worse. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies.