Homeostasis…

Over the last few days life has been giving me a little reminder about the usefulness of Homeostasis

On Wednesday afternoon I felt a little under the weather and by the evening I was throwing up in a big way. Eventually the effort of it all drained me to the point where I fell asleep. By the morning I was feeling much better, or so I thought. For the most part the vomiting had finished, but it seemed like my body had totally forgotten it had a homeostatic mechanism for regulating its temperature. I had the usual stuff you get when you are ill, like cold sweats one minute, then feeling really hot the next. The difference this time was I seemed to react really quickly to the temperature of food and drinks I consumed. If I ate some hot (temperature, not spicy) food I would quickly start sweating like a racehorse. Have a cold drink and it would be uncontrollable shivering. Kinda freaky.

For the last few days I’ve been cycling between bed, hot baths and the computer. I think I managed my body temperature pretty well if I do say so myself.

Today is the first day the whole temperature regulation thing seems back to normal, but my throat feels a little dodgy. The joys of secondary infections. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. This blog post is sponsored by Lemsip. The universal cure-all. 🙂

PL/SQL Vs. Oracle JVM: Speed Comparison for Mathematical Operations…

I remember hearing someone talking about this years ago and I never actually took the time to check it out. It looks like the real answer is “it depends”. For the basic loop processing and maths the JVM does look a little faster. It was just a curiosity thing, but I thought I might as well write it up as an article on the website.

Cheers

Tim…

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo…

A few friends mentioned “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“, but the title screamed Chick Lit to me so I avoided reading it until now. Well, it just goes to show you shouldn’t judge a book by the cover/title.

It’s a down-and-dirty detective story with some rather grim elements, but it’s really engrossing and a proper page turner. Considering my usual trauma when moving between authors, I took to this effortlessly. Maybe I’ve finally learned to read… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

SQL Developer and MS SQL Server…

This afternoon I’ve been cleaning up some data in an SQL Server database. I decided to use SQL*Developer to connect to SQL Server by following this post.

I made liberal use of the following tip when dealing with TEXT and NTEXT types.

The joys of dealing with multiple engines…

Cheers

Tim…

Broken(ish) Links…

A couple of days ago Sten Vesterli tweeted about the URL changes on OTN. The previous base URL of “http://www.oracle.com/technology” has been replaced by “http://www.oracle.com/technetwork“. There are redirects in place, so for many of the top level pages this isn’t a problem, but some of the deeper links result in “page not found” errors or redirect to rather generic pages.

Fortunately, most of the links from my site are to the Oracle docs, whose URLs haven’t changed, but there are also plenty of OTN links. I’m trying to clean up the problem links, but it’s going to take a little time. If you spot any broken links, or links that don’t look like they point to the intended information, feel free to contact me and I’ll do my best to sort them.

Cheers

Tim…

More PC support…

One of my Yoga buddies was given a laptop by is dad and wanted to get it connected over wireless. His dad also gave him a wireless ADSL router, but couldn’t get it set up.  This sounds like a job for Captain Support…

The router wasn’t able to connect to the internet. It turned out that the router was not working properly and needed a firmware update. Next issue was the wireless connection between the router and the laptop was kinda funky. The connection would never work when any form of encryption was turned on. In the end I had to turn off encryption and stopped the router from broadcasting in an attempt to reduce the chances of people piggy-backing on it.

How are normal folk meant to cope with this? The answer is they don’t and they need Captain Support… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Wirth’s Law…

I was scooting around the net and I stumbled on a reference to Wirth’s Law and had a flashback (not Nam related) to a conversation I had about 14 years ago with my boss at the time. We were setting up the kit for a new automated warehouse solution (Oracle 7, HP 9000s and ServiceGuard if I remember correctly) and he said something along the lines of, “Why is it that for each customer we buy faster and more expensive computers, yet they take the same length of time to produce the results?”

The answer was pretty simple in that case. We were refurbishing the existing (fairly simple) warehouse as well as adding a completely new one. We were replacing some AVGs with a very complex conveyor layout, which required some difficult routing decisions. The basic “find me a space in the warehouse” decisions were replaced by pretty complex searches that had to take account of conveyor routing, system load and potentional sorting (and defragmentation) of the content in the warehouse. The customer needed a highly available solution, hence the use of ServiceGuard, so we more than doubled the hardware and software costs for no perceivable performance improvement. From the outside looking in it seemed like nothing had changed. It was still, “Here’s a pallet, put it in the racking”, but the process required to do that operation efficiently had increased in complexity manyfold.

So Wirth’s Law, “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster”, is true because people’s expectation of what software can do for them is constantly expanding, without realizing the impact those expanding expectations have on the programming and hardware requirements. Added to that we have a generation of cut & paste developers and DBAs who also don’t understand the impact their lack of understanding has on the software they develop (see Gate’s Law).

I look forward to writing a post in 10 years where I can moan about Exadata V12 boxes struggling to complete my weekly loads before the end of the weekend. Of course I will forget to qualify that I’m loading Yottabytes of data in that time… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

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