Blog in Isolation

There is a radiant darkness upon us

Posts

a short history of Oracle blogging

I was just reviewing the list of Oracle related blogs I subscribe to. Here they are in approximate chronological order with the blogging platform. Apologies for any inaccuracies.

A couple of things struck me…

Read more

finally succumbed

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.

Read more

stampede at London Waterloo

Last night, I was standing at London Waterloo station, sincerely hoping that the engineer would be able to fix the carriages for my train home.

Suddenly, there was a stampede of people rushing past me. What on earth was happening ? Was this some spontaneous act of flash mobbing ? Had a train arrived unexpectedly at platform 4 for those impatient people from Basingstoke ? Or was there some sort of inaudible terrorist alert mumbled by the station announcer that I had missed ?

Read more

curious case of the missing spool file

Bit of a ghostly theme today.

One great aspect of my job is that I write SQL scripts that are reviewed and executed by other people. This suits me just fine. The less work for me, the better.

Obviously, I never add ‘spool off’ to the tail of a SQL*Plus script. This is a whole ten characters to type (including newline). Multiply this by all the SQL scripts you might produce in a lifetime and just think of how much time that would waste. In any case, everyone knows that ’exit’ implies a ‘spool off’ anyway.

Read more

Most Haunted #2

‘Most Haunted’ is a fantastic TV program hosted by Yvette Fielding, where a Liverpudlian psychic medium, Derek Acorah, visits haunted properties resurrecting the spirits of dear, dead departed souls.

The program is notable for absolutely superb acting by Acorah who can fulfil a variety of roles, effortlessly adopting the voice of tortured, Victorian ladies, in pitch darkness, without the aid of a script.

The supporting actors (Fielding and the camera crew) are also superb. They are simply wasted on Living TV. A career in Hollywood surely beckons.

Read more

Most Haunted #1

I have been playing a CD in my car on Disc-Random-Shuffle mode for ten weeks. The CD contains close to 200 songs. I have heard all the songs once, some twice and a handful three times.

This morning, I heard something that sent a shiver down my spine, chilled my bones and momentarily froze me to the spot.

‘Spectre versus Rector’ by The Fall. This ‘song’ is a 8 minute rant from Mark E. Smith accompanied by some noise, detailing a ghostly story from the ‘Dragnet’ LP. ‘Spectre versus Rector’ sounds as if it was recorded in a bleak, industrial warehouse somewhere up North with a hand-held tape recorder.

Read more

Unix for lazy people

I am a very efficient lazy person. I don’t like to type seven characters when two will suffice. I think Unix is a fantastic development environment. However, the overly long, verbose commands irritate me slightly. So I use the following aliases and shell functions

    a = tail -f ${ORACLE\_HOME}/rdbms/log/alert\_PRD.log
    l = ls
    ll = ls -l
    up = cd ..
    x = rm -fr \*
    z = wall 'Anyone fancy a quickie after work ?' [disciplinary action pending]

One of the happiest days of my life was when I discovered the tab completion feature in the GNU bash shell and the environment variable $OLDPWD.

Read more