Oracle Database SQL Expert (1Z0-047) Notes…

About 7 months ago I wrote about sitting the Oracle Database SQL Expert (1Z0-047) exam. Since then I’ve been promising myself I’d write some articles about some of the sections tested by the exam. Lots of the content is pretty straight forward if you’ve been writing SQL for a few years. Also, there are lots of things that are covered in existing articles on the site.

I finally got round to writing a few posts about some of the exam content that isn’t covered, or is a bit “dispersed”, on my site.

OK, so the last one is not tested in the exam, but it should be. 🙂

With a bit of luck I’ll remember to link to these articles when people ask me questions in the future.

Cheers

Tim…

ORACLE-BASE on Facebook…

I’ve said numerous times I’m not a fan of Facebook, but in true “jumping on the bandwagon” style I’ve created an ORACLE-BASE.com Facebook Page. Big thanks for Jake from AppsLab for his post about the WPBook pluggin. It certainly saved me some time looking around.

Now all I need is 25 likes and I can get a proper URL for the page… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I have my 25 likes now, but feel free to continue adding them if you want to. 🙂

The Social Network…

I’m not really a fan of social network sites. I use them from time to time, but if they dropped of the face of the earth tomorrow it wouldn’t make much difference to my life. I have email addresses and phone number of everyone I want to talk to. Nuff said.

With that in mind I really didn’t give a crap about watching The Social Network when it was at the cinema. I was visiting friends last night and they both wanted to watch it, so I was forced into a corner. As it turned out it was a good film. If it had been about some company other than Facebook I would have enjoyed it even more. The film portrayal of the characters is as follows:

  • Mark Zuckerberg: A socially retarded, completely untrustworthy and annoying uber-geek thief. If he’s like this in real life I would definitely not want to meet him and putting a single penny in his pocket is bottom of my list of desires.
  • Sean Parker: A serial screw-up, style over substance, paranoid and incredibly annoying wannabe uber-geek. Once again, if he is like this in real life he’s not on my list of people I would like to meet.
  • Eduardo Saverin: An honest, if a little naive, guy who was surrounded by prize-winning sh*ts who were all out to screw him.

The fact the film is based on a book whose content is mostly drawn from interviews with Eduardo Saverin prior to the completion of his court case against Mark Zuckerberg suggests that maybe the view of the characters is “a little bit biased”. 🙂

Anyway, get it out on DVD and try to forget it is about Facebook and I think you will like it.

Cheers

Tim…

HTML5 heading for an early grave?

I was very dismayed when I read this yesterday.

A number of news services have done the rounds since, including this today on Slashdot.

I think it’s all a bit depressing really. So we have another 3-4 years to wait for the final spec to be sorted. Then of course we have to wait for the spec to be implemented (badly) by all the necessary browsers. Of course they are already supporting various bits of it, but their implementations will no doubt change along the way and cause untold numbers of apps to break with them. Then we have to wait for everyone to upgrade their browsers. So what is the real date that HTML5 is go? 2020?

All of a sudden native apps seem kinda appealing and Flash doesn’t seem quite as evil as it used to be. 🙁

Cheers

Tim…

Furies of Calderon…

I was getting a bit of Dresden Files withdrawal, so I decided to give Jim Butcher‘s other series (Codex Alera) a go, starting with Furies of Calderon.

It’s very different to the Dresden Files style. For a start, it’s not in first-person, so you don’t feel like you are in the head of any specific character, but you get a more rounded view of the other characters. Second, there is no magic, although I guess you could call the furies a type of magic. Third, the books are big. Speaking as a born-again-reader, I’m still a bit daunted by large books.

Despite the obvious differences, I really enjoyed it. I will no doubt start on the second book in the series some time today.

Cheers

Tim…