Blogger Dinner and stuff…

I’ve just got back from the blogger dinner in Birmingham. The list of names was like reading a “who’s who” of Oracle. Thanks very much to Mark Rittman for organizing it. Mark, if they don’t give you the money back drop me a line and I’ll send you some cash 🙂

It was like a giant blind date. You know a little bit about the people, and you’ve even emailed some of them, but you don’t really know them. Luckily I recognized Mark Rittman and Peter Scott from their blog pictures, so I knew I was with the correct group of people 🙂

It’s really odd to be recognized by “strangers”. I know this was true for everyone else with a picture on their blog, but it doesn’t make it less strange. I can tell Doug Burns and Peter Scott have been reading because they were both well versed in my list of injuries! I went straight from Karate to the dinner so I had some of the latest bruises on display, my left forearm is a little brown and the right forearm is going to be a mess in a couple of days. Note to self. Shins and forearms don’t go well together!

Anyway, to those I didn’t talk to, I’m really sorry. It would have been nice if we had more time. To those I did talk to, I’m really sorry… 😉

By the way Niall, I forgot to thank you for the book review. Cheers guy!

Great to see everyone, and your secrets are safe with me 🙂

Update: Mark has some pictures of the dinner on his blog. You can quite clearly see my hand, the back of my head and my ear. The joys of being photogenic…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I watched Saw 2 at the cinema the other day. A few gore-fest bits, but not really scary and not really that interesting. If you liked the first film you’ll probably like this. If not, then don’t bother…

PPS. I watched a Manga (Japanimation) film called AppleSeed on DVD the other day. It’s pretty spectacular as far as the animation is concerned! I’ve been a big fan of Ghost in the Shell (the film and Stand Alone Complex) for some time, but for some reason I’ve only just got round to watching AppleSeed. If you like great animation it, go for it…

Website Administration Rewrite…

Last night I finished rewriting all the administration functions for my website.

I converted the main site from ASP & Access to PHP & mySQL a couple of years ago, but up until this week all the administration code was still in ASP & Access. There was no real need to change it, but it’s done now and it’s much neater. Nobody can see the changes, but I get a warm glow knowing it’s sorted 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Neat and tidy, tidy and neat…

My company (who shall remain nameless) has recently been take over by a massive US company (who shall remain nameless). We have a visit from the European head of IT today so I have to wear a suit.

… brief pause …

He was just in the room. So, I had to put on a suit for 10 seconds.

I’m not customer facing so I get to wear regular clothes, like jeans. Not today. It’s important I’m in a suit for a 10 second sideways glance 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Give with one hand, take away with the other…

When I first started working freelance, about 8 years ago, I got a bank loan to buy a car. I paid the loan off ahead of schedule and about 2 years ago closed my account with the bank. Imagine my surprise when I recently received a letter saying they owed me £340. Apparently I paid all the payment protection on the loan in advance and they forgot to refund me when the loan agreement finished early.

I’ve been having a little trouble with the knuckle of my right big toe. I went to the chiropodist and was told I had arthritis in the joint. I’ve got to have some ‘devices’ made to fit into my shoes to manage my foot movement and hopefully slow its progression. It seems all that stomping around barefoot at Karate isn’t the best thing in the world for your feet. What is the cost of this treatment? In total £345.

You’ve gotta laugh 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

XHTML and CSS…

I finally got round to updating ORACLE-BASE.com so that it’s XHTML 1.1 and CSS compliant. The site was already “XHTML 1.0 Transitional” and CSS compliant, so it wasn’t a massive job. Most of the work involved updating 4 include files. I’m sure there are a few pages that slipped though the net, but I’ll pick those up over the coming weeks.

Regular users of the site will see that hardly anything has changed, it was just a revision exercise for my own amusement 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Two new articles…

I’ve posted a couple of brief articles today:

The TDE stuff looks pretty simple, and it seems to work fine. I’ve read a few people’s articles about it, but I wanted to prove to myself it really worked. Sure enough, when you open the datafile in a HEX editor all you get is garbage.

I didn’t realize that conditional compilation was an Oracle 10g Release 1 feature. It was included in the 10.1.0.4.0 patch and looks really handy. All I’ve got to do now is wait for the 10.1.0.4.0 patch to be made available on Tru64…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’ve got a cold at the moment. I am the tissue master!

DML Error Logging and Google Reader…

I’ve just done a brief run through of DML Error Logging. A number of people, including Tom Kyte, have already written about it, but I always find I need to play around with these things before they sit right in my head. Anyway, it’s there if you’re interested.

I’ve given up on Google Reader. I tried using it for a day and it annoyed me so much I gave up. I guess I’ll try again in a few weeks when it’s moved on a bit. The funny thing is, the thing that annoyed me the most about it was the feature I really wanted. I thought I would prefer a list of things to read, rather than a list of blogs with a count of unread posts, but as it happens I don’t. Some of the news sites I subscribe to have so many posts that Google Reader just feels unusable. On Bloglines it’s quicker to sort out what I want to read and throw the rest away. There’s a lession in that 🙂

Cheers

Tim…