Month: April 2013

Win A free copy of the Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Integration and OA Framework Development and Extension Cookbook

Following on from last weeks book competition, the kind people at Packt have offered another prize. This time 2 e-book copies of
Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Integration and OA Framework Development and Extension Cookbook by Andy Penver.

The competition will run for about two weeks, so I’ll be selecting the winners on 10th May 2013. To enter, comment on this post, telling me why you think you need this book and what you hope to gain from it. The two lucky winners will be selected based on their comments on this post (not Facebook, Google+ or Twitter), so try and be creative or you won’t stand out from the crowd. 🙂 The winners will be contacted via email, so please use your real email address when posting your comment.

You can read more about the contents of the book and the author on the Packt website, but here is a little marketing message about the book.

“Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Integration and OA Framework Development and Extension Cookbook is an
extensive guide for both beginners and intermediate users that describes how to develop extensions in Oracle
E-Business Suite. The book also discusses some of Oracle E-Business Suite’s vital features, such as creating and
distributing BI Publisher template files to the file system, authoring, managing, delivering highly-formatted
documents using BI Publisher and configuring a browser.

This is a practical hands-on guide, designed to demonstrate the newest features in Oracle E-Business Suite
Release 12. With an in-depth knowledge of personalizing OA Framework pages in Oracle E-Business Suite,
readers will not only be able to install JDeveloper with OA Extension and set up a development environment,
but also deploy an OA Framework page within Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.”

Good Luck!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Connor, death threats will not work this time. 🙂

Iron Man 3…

Iron Man blew me away when I first saw it. Iron Man 2 was good, but not as good as the first. Iron Man 3 was better than Iron Man 2, but not as good as Iron Man or The Avengers movie, in my opinion. Don’t take this as a major criticism, because all of these films are very cool. It’s a relative thing…

The tech didn’t take so much of the center stage during this movie. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot, but it seemed much more about Tony than the suite. That’s not a bad thing, but the suit is the cool bit for me. There were a few suit-related scenes I would have developed a bit more. Also, it needed some AC/DC during a kick-ass action scene. If they were there I didn’t notice them. 🙁

The end was a bit weak, but stay until right at the end credits to see the extra scene and a little message before you leave…

I’m being extra picky here. It’s definitely cool and worth going to see!

Cheers

Tim…

 

Nightmares about exams…

It’s been over 20 years since I finished my finals for my first degree, but this time of year never fails to affect my already terrible sleeping patterns. I’ve started waking up in the morning panicking about an exam, which I’ve forgotten to revise for. It takes a few minutes for me to realize there is no exam, so I’ve got nothing to worry about… 🙂

Like I said, this happens every year, but I think the fact I’m currently working for University has reinforced the panic in me. I sense a few more weeks of exam panic induced insomnia, before I settle back into my normal insomnia.

Cheers

Tim…

Prize Winners : Managing Multimedia and Unstructured Data in the Oracle Database e-book

A couple of weeks ago I started a competition to win 4 copies of Managing Multimedia and Unstructured Data in the Oracle Database byMarcelle Kratochvil. Thanks to Packt for donating the prizes. The competition closed today and the lucky winners are:

  • Kim Berg Hansen
  • Stuart Uren
  • Steve (dnunknown)
  • Bayu Satria Setiadi

Once I’ve published this post I’ll be sending your email address to my contact at Packt, who will contact you to deliver your e-book.

I was severely tempted to award one of the books to Connor McDonald for his ingenious use of death threats in an attempt to sway the judging process. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OPT_PARAM Hint saves the day…

One of the developers was performing a delete using a nested subquery, which was throwing out ORA-00600 errors. The ORA-00600 Lookup Tool on MOS suggested it was caused by this bug:

The workaround in the bug suggested running this ALTER SESSION command.

alter session set "_optimizer_unnest_disjunctive_subq"= FALSE;

Rather than alter the whole session, we used the OPT_PARAM hint, making the subquery look something like this.

(SELECT /*+ OPT_PARAM('_optimizer_unnest_disjunctive_subq' 'FALSE') */ ... FROM ...)

Slap in a comment reminding us to remove the hint when we move to 11.2.0.4 or 12c and job’s a good’un! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 19 Alpha…

For those eager beavers out there, you can now get hold of Fedora 19 Alpha from the pre-release location.

The release notes can be found here. I’m keen to check out the improvements to MATE in version 1.6, as this is now my standard desktop.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: It installs in Oracle VirtualBox and the guest additions install correctly, so it’s looking good so far. 🙂

Windows PowerShell…

Followers of the blog know I’m a Linux fan, but over the weekend I needed to fix some stuff on a Windows server at work and I took my first tentative steps into the world of Windows PowerShell. It was very much a case of “scripting by Google”, but I managed to get the job done pretty quickly. That episode prompted this tweet.

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That resulted in two little exchanges. The first from Niall Litchfield, who must have been a little under the weather. 🙂

powershell-tweet-2

powershell-tweet-3

The second from @WindowsServer.

powershell-tweet-4

powershell-tweet-5

powershell-tweet-6

I think that’s my first interaction with Microsoft on any social network. I sense a new website called “Windows-and-SQL-Server-and-PowerShell-base.com” coming on. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

 

WordPress Security…

With all the recent press about global brute force attacks on WordPress I decided to install the Better WP Security plugin last Sunday.

It includes loads of security features, including the big ones mentioned in the recent attacks:

  • Changing the name of the “admin” user.
  • Changing the ID of your renamed admin user.
  • Changing the table prefix.
  • Max login attempts lockdown.

Of the 5 blogs I manage, 4 worked straight off with this plugin. Unfortunately, one required a few attempts, so remember to take filesystem and database backups before you start or you may not end up in a happy place.

Over the week since activating the plugin I’ve been quite interested/scared by the results. I’ve been getting several emails a day telling me of user lockdowns due to attempted brute force attacks originating from USA, Russia and the Netherlands.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress installation, you really need to take some basic steps stop yourself becoming a victim. There are a number of security plugins available, which I’m sure work equally well, but I only have experience of this one.

Good luck.

Cheers

Tim…

McDonald’s : Is service really your biggest problem?

I read a story last week called McDonald’s Tackles Repair of ‘Broken’ Service. As I came out of the cinema turned into a drive through to give it a shot and see what it was like. In this case the service was fine, but the food. OMG!

Now I’m a vegetarian, so choice is a little limited, but people who know me know that I’m not a fussy eater. I will pack pretty much anything into my mouth, which is why my waistline is rather ample…

I got some fries, which were OK. I figure you can’t get too much wrong with fries unless they are cold. They were warmish, so that wasn’t so bad. The rather large amount of salt saved them. I don’t tend to add salt to any of my food, so the odd super-salty food feels like a blood pressure busting treat. 🙂 It kinda went downhill from there.

The vanilla shake tasted like it was made of plastic. There was nothing remotely dairy about the taste. Added to that, the cup was only 3/4 full. On second thoughts, the lack of product was a bonus here because it tasted rank.

The really nasty stuff started when I got my Spicy Veggie Sandwich. The bread was made out of rubber. The spicy veggie patty tasted like damp carpet that someone had dropped a jar of chili powder on. It contained salad that must have been a day old, then there was this slimy mush all over it that I can only assume was dredged up from a sewer. Needless to say that made a quick detour to my kitchen bin…

So looking back on that article about the service at McDonald’s, I think there is a much bigger problem than service here. The problem, from my limited experience, is the food is complete muck. Sort that out and you will go a long way toward turning things around!

Cheers

Tim…

Oblivion…

Just got back from watching Oblivion…

I was a little bit reluctant about going to see it because the trailer looked awesome, which these days tends to mean the film is terrible. Fortunately that wasn’t the case here. The film was great. Visually fantastic, with a pretty good story. Why can’t we have a few more Sci-Fi films like this?

As far as the trailers go, Iron Man 3 looks cool and the new Star Trek film looks very interesting. Maybe I’ll get my cinema mojo back after all…

Cheers

Tim…