Everyone needs an IT friend…

It strikes me that IT companies are getting away with murder as far as usability and support are concerned.

As soon as my friends or family get a new bit of hardware or software, I get a phone call. I actively encourage people to use firewalls and antivirus software to reduce the amount of time I spend ridding their machines of nasties. Sometimes I feel like sending an invoice to Dell/Microsoft/Norton for the time I’ve wasted because their products are not fit for use by “normal” home users.

It would be interesting to see the state of home computing if all the “IT friends” turned round and refused to help their friends! I’m guessing it would be a serious mess…

Cheers

Tim…

AEON FLUX…

I went to see AEON FLUX at the cinema last night. It was quite a stylish film, in a kitch kinda way, but it was pretty rubbish.

Charize Theron was totally not right for the part. Aeon is supposed to be a highly trained assasin, but Theron looks weak and moves like she’s never done a days exercise in her life. She’s gangly, like a foal. On occasion, when stationary, she looks kinda iconic, but when she moves she looks like a slob whose had liposuction.

In my opinion, they should have used someone like Jennifer Garner, a babe who looks like she can kick your ass.

In my opinion, you would be better saving your cinema money and putting in towards the price of the animated series!

Cheers

Tim…

Auditing in Oracle 10g Database Release 2…

I wrote/revamped an article yesterday called Auditing in Oracle 10g Database Release 2. Most of the information was already present on the site, but it was spread across several articles including an 8i article and several new features articles for 9i and 10g. Rather than write a small article on the XML audit trail in Oracle 10g Release 2, I thought I would bring the whole lot up to date.

One point I spotted was an unusual change in the AUDIT_TRAIL parameter. In 10g Release 1 there was an allowed value of DB_EXTENDED, which indicates that the audit records should go to the DB audit trail and the SQL_TEXT and SQL_BIND columns should be populated. In Release 2 this has been changed to DB,EXTENDED. Can’t see the point in this change myself. Personally, I would not have been offended by XML_EXTENDED, rather than XML,EXTENDED… 🙂

Whatever…

Cheers

Tim…