Cloud Storage Pricing for Home Use

I’ve just done a quick survey of cloud storage pricing for some of the popular providers. Times have certainly changed since I last looked at this. Depending on what you are looking for, each service has its own sweet spot, so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. All the prices are in GBP for a whole year based on today’s exchange rate and rounded up to the nearest pound. Check the pricing in your region, as this stuff varies, as does service availability by region. 🙂

Provider            Free          100G        1TB       10TB      Unlimited

Google Drive        15G           £16         £78
MS One Drive        15G           £24         £80*
DropBox              2G                       £79
Box                 10G           £84                             £132
Amazon Cloud Drive   5G           £32         £325
Hubic**             25G           £ 9                   £87

* Price based on buying an Office 365 license for a whole year, which comes with 1TB space.
** Thanks to Eric Grancher for pointing out this service.

Things of note.

  • If you just want a straight 1TB of space, then Google Drive comes out ahead.
  • If you are just paying for space, One Drive is way more expensive than Google Drive, but the Office 365 deal makes it look appealing.
  • If you think you need more than 1TB, then Box looks very interesting! Of course, you need to check what they mean by “unlimited”. 🙂
  • The Hubic prices are amazing! For the 10TB service your data is stored in 3 data centres in France.
  • Microsoft are rolling out unlimited storage for some US customers, but this is not available for me, so I’ve not included it.

As with everything, you have to check the T&Cs for fair use policies, maximum file sizes, bandwidth throttling, data jurisdiction etc.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Someone tweeted this Top 5 comparison.

Birmingham City University (BCU) Talk

Last year I spoke at the UKOUG Next Gen event at Birmingham City University (BCU). One of the lecturers, Stuart Hutchison, from BCU saw me speaking and asked if I was interested in coming to speak to the students about Oracle. He’s trying to get a handful of external speakers to come in during the year and speak on a range of subjects to give the students a feel for what’s going on out in the world. Life was pretty hectic towards the end of last year so it took quite a while to actually get something sorted out. On Monday I went to BCU and did my first talk to the students.

I was quite nervous in the lead up to the session. I’m used to a dealing with an Oracle technology crowd, but I didn’t really know what to expect from the students. I spent some time talking to Stuart to try and get a feel for what he wanted. He sent me some of their Oracle course material and labs, which helped me to pitch my stuff at the right level and stopped me treading on his toes. 🙂 The students are currently in the middle of an Oracle security module, so I spoke about SQL injection, data redaction and transparent data encryption (TDE). The idea was to touch on a few subjects and leave plenty of time for questions.

I think it went pretty well, but I’ve got some room for improvement. 🙂 Despite it being an Oracle talk, it is quite a different crowd, which needs a different approach. I’ll be going back in about a month to do another session before the exam season kicks off, so that should give me some time to work on my approach a bit.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to do some of these sessions every year. I’m interested to see how this helps me develop as a speaker. Let’s see how it goes. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Sharknado and Sharknado 2

I watched Sharknado a few months ago and it was brilliant. I have this nagging doubt that they were serious when they were filming it, which only adds to the quality of what they produced. There are great movies, good movies, bad movies and movies that are so bad they come full circle and become great. Sharknado is in the later category.

I recently watched Sharknado 2 : The Second One on Netflix and it is really good! I mean properly good. It’s like they’ve almost made a parody of the first film. It’s just bigger, more outrageous and better.

Sharknado 3 is due out in July in the US. I hope they get it on Netflix pretty sharpish, because I really want to see it.

Cheers

Tim…

Fifty Shades of Grey

The wife was in town last night and decided we should see Fifty Shades of Grey. Despite having only seen each other about 4 times (including yesterday) since we got married on the boat at OUGN2014, I like to think this is not an indicator that our relationship is on the rocks…

OMG. What a terrible film!

I’ve not read the books, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. The following contains spoilers (assuming you can spoil something that is complete toilet in the first place) and some rude words. Those of a sensitive nature should not read on. You have been warned.

  • Anastasia Steel (AS) : Hi. I’m rather vacuous with low self esteem, but I’ve come to interview you because my slutty mate is ill. I would just like to say, despite being obviously attractive, I feel very dowdy and “girl next door” compared to all the supermodels you have working here.
  • Christian Grey (CG) : Wow. Despite me being a billionaire and you looking very ordinary compared to my supermodel employees, I find your vacuousness and obvious low self esteem incredibly attractive, not because I believe I can manipulate you into being my submissive or anything crazy like that.
  • Fast forward about 1 hour where nothing really happens. We see CG’s brother who is nothing like him.
  • CG : Please sign a non-disclosure agreement.
  • AS : I am relatively OK with that.
  • CG : Come and look at my playroom/dungeon. Admire all my torture devices.
  • AS : Gosh! That’s a little weird! Oh, by the way I’m a virgin who is just about to graduate from college.
  • CG : Let’s rectify that. Bish, bash, bosh, you’re not a virgin anymore.
  • Fast forward past several scenes where CG manipulates AS into believing his playroom is basically for tickling girls before having sex with them, because that’s what S&M is!
  • CG : I want to you sign a contract to become my official submissive. It’s just got a few silly rules that we will both abide by. By the way, am I allowed to perform anal and vaginal fisting on you? (WTF? A few minutes ago she was a virgin and now you are asking her that?)
  • AS : Oh. Now let me think…
  • Fast forward a bit. Meet CG’s family. His sister is Rita Ora. Is this really a normal family or am I starting to believe the kids are all adopted?
  • AS : I don’t know if I can go through with this because you are emotionally detached, but you are a bit dreamy and a billionaire. Like all stereotypical female characters, I believe I can change you into the man of my dreams. All I have to do I let you beat the crap out of me for a while until I win you over.
  • CG : Look, I’m a weirdo and get off on torturing women. That’s not going to change. When you’re asleep I’ll tell you a little about my childhood and subsequent adoption to try and justify my actions, not that you’ll know about it of course. (Wow. I totally understand why it is OK for you to torture women now… NOT!)
  • AS : Blah, blah, blah. I can’t make up my mind if I want to go through with this submissive thing. It sounds like fun in a horribly painful way and all that, but I just can’t decide. The only way I will be able to decide is if you do the worst thing you possibly can to me and I’ll see how I feel about it. Yeah. That seems like the obvious way forward for us!
  • CG : Awesome. Despite the massive array of torture implements I’ve got, the worst thing I can do is hit you with a belt 6 times. (Admittedly, this is bad, but the worst thing he can do? I don’t think so!)
  • AS : I didn’t like that. Now I’m mildly less vacuous and being beaten has somehow raised my self esteem, I’ve decided I don’t want to do this. Goodbye.
  • The End!

It’s basically Twilight for adults, but worse. OMG, did I really just say something was worse than Twilight?

For the first hour the acting was painfully bad. It was like some mix between Twilight and a “made for TV” movie. Just shocking. Later in the film, as Anastasia developed a bit of backbone, her performance got quite good, which leads me to believe she’s a pretty good actress, assuming there is something worth acting…

There are so many bad stereotypes and cliches in this movie.

Despite the terrible film it was a fun evening. Debra once described a “horror film” she had seen to me. I later found out this “horror film” was Conan the Barbarian. If someone sneezes or twists their ankle in a film, it is essentially a horror film as far as she’s concerned. There were a couple of scenes in this film that made her jump, which was hilarious.

Added to that, some of the dialog was so bad it had me laughing out loud. I don’t believe it was meant to be funny, but it was so stupid I couldn’t help myself.

Please don’t go and see this film!

Cheers

Tim…

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) in 12c and RTFM Carefully

I keep thinking I’m moving forward with this Oracle database 12c stuff, but around every corner there is another surprise. A few days ago I was setting up a demo for Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) in 12c using my existing articles (10g, 11g). That’s when I noticed things had changed, so I had to use an 11g instance for the demo and make a note to revisit TDE for 12c…

On revisiting the subject, I saw that the encryption key management has changed in 12c. What’s more, if you are using the multitenant option it is a bit different again. That resulted in this article.

While I was working through this I was getting some freaky results, which were driving me mad. Whilst trying to figure out that I noticed I had two PDBs of the same name under a single listener. I had created two test instances (cdb1 and cdb2), each with a PDB called “pdb1”. There is a sentence in the docs to say this is not a good idea, which resulted in this little article.

So it turns out that TDE works fine, provided you are not an idiot. 🙂

The moral of the story is RTFM carefully, because sometimes a single sentence can make all the difference!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle, please take my money!

I need to renew my Oracle Support contract. Everyone on the intertubes tells me Oracle are a money grabbing evil empire right? So it follows that they are going to be really on the case with a support renewal right?

Two days ago I wrote an email to customer services to try to renew my support contract. Since then I’ve been bounced between 5 people and I’ve still not managed to pay any money. It surely can’t be this hard!

This has all come about because the Oracle store doesn’t allow me to alter my credit card details, so the auto renewal failed. This feels like a, “Do you even internet?”, moment…

Cheers

Tim…

MacBook Prod 15″ Retina : Mini DisplayPort to VGA Adapter

I mentioned in my recent post about Riga Dev Day 2015 I had some trouble with my VGA adapter and had to borrow one from Andrejs. It seemed to be working fine before I left. I was going to buy a cheap replacement from Amazon, but after reading a few reviews I bought another £25 adapter from Apple. Both the new one and the old one seem to be working fine…

The Apple website says the “Mini DisplayPort to VGA Adapter” will work with either a Mini DisplayPort, like I had on my old 13” MBP, or a thunderbolt connector, like I have on the new MBP.

I did a bit of hunting on the net and it seems there are a lot of people out there having trouble with the retina MBPs when connecting to some projectors. Currently I have the native HDMI connector, which I’m using to connect to a second monitor. I also have 2 VGA adapters and a DVI adapter. I feel like that should cover all the bases, but I still feel like I should be taking my old laptop with me, just in case…

If anyone else out there has a recent 15″ MBP Retina with only thunderbolt connectors, I would be interested to hear your experiences with projectors on your travels. Should I be worried? 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Macs just work… Sometimes…