Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

300…

I went to see 300 at the cinema last night. There are lots of good things about the film, but when you sum it all up my overall opinion was it was a bit lame.

  • The visuals are very stylised, like Sin City, which at times makes for very iconic scenes, but most of the time leaves you wondering why the whole film looks like a sepia photograph.
  • The dialog is a little predictable, and delivered in a rather over the top way. I guess a lot of this was due to direction, rather than bad acting, but the final result is the same.
  • The spartan soldiers looked like they had just come off the set of a Calvin Klein advert. More homo-erotic than fearsome fighting machines.

Overall, it seemed like a mix of Lord of the Rings, Troy, Sin City and Calvin Klein. Not exactly a winning combination in my book.

There were six of us at the cinema, and two fell asleep. Kind-of says it all.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. The trailer looks great! 🙂

Stag Weekend…

I was at a friends Stag weekend between Friday evening and Sunday. He gets married in about 4 weeks, so a group of 10 of us guys went down to a village near Bath and spent the weekend doing stupid stuff including:

  • Karaoke
  • Driving “Rage Buggies”
  • Clay pigeon shooting
  • Driving quad-bikes
  • Drinking
  • Eating crap food

It was a pretty cool weekend, and we all managed to get through it relatively unscathed.

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG – SIG Talk…

A few months ago, Andrew Clarke invited me to speak about PL/SQL tuning at a UKOUG Special Interests Group (SIG). I accepted, and today was the day. I woke up ridiculously early this morning and set off for Slough. I was totally knackered by the time I got there, so I spent most of the first two presentations yawning, nothing to do with the content. Then it was my turn…

I started off feeling a little nervous, but nothing major. About 5 minutes into the presentation I was meant to start talking about baselines, but all I could think about was code instrumentation. This threw me completely and my mind went totally blank. I mean completely! I must have looked like a rabbit in the headlights, because a lady in the audience (Seema) tried to prompt me. Anyway, the batteries in my brain must have reconnected because I remembered who I was and what I was doing and continued with the rest of the talk. As usual, once I got going there was no shutting me up.

When I finished the presentation I closed down Powerpoint and revealed the note I left on my desktop that read, “Don’t Choke!”. 🙂

It’s quite difficult to know what level to pitch these talks at. After-all, 45 minutes is not long to talk about detecting and tuning PL/SQL performance problems. Fortunately, Andrew gave me some good advice on that point, and apart from the brain-fade incident, the presentation seemed to go down well.

I’m not sure I’m a natural presenter, but I do think it’s fun. Although the preparation side of it is a bit painful.

Anyway, thanks to Andrew for giving me this opportunity. Thanks to the audience for coming to hear me speak. And finally, thanks to Seema for helping to kickstart my brain. I’ll drop a book off at your office tomorrow morning!

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress, Karate and other stuff…

WordPress 2.1.2 is out. It fixes a big security flaw. Upgrade now!

On Saturday I went on my first Karate course since the knee operation. It consisted of a 1.5 hour session, an hour break, then a 2 hour session. I wasn’t exactly a superstar, but I survived and the knee is still intact. Onwards and upwards.

Kevin Closson’s blog post on Quad-Cores and Oracle licensing is thought provoking, especially the line, “could it be that SE will start to be the preferred multi-core edition?” I’m sure there are plenty of people out there using Enterprise Edition when they could get by with Standard Edition. Perhaps this will swing the decision in the short term. Only time will tell.

Windows Vista is still making people say WOW for the wrong reasons (Falling into the Vista trap). Of course, Slashdot readers have the sort of unbiased reaction you would expect to this article. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Vista and VMware Server…

In some recent posts I wrote about my troubles with using VMware Server with Windows Vista as a host operating system. After some abortive efforts I gave up and bought Parallels instead. Howard Rogers had mentioned he’d used Parallels on Vista with no problems, so I thought it was a safe bet. Sure enough, it seemed to work fine.

I’ve been having an assortment of networking issues with Vista, one of which is my virtual machines can’t get to the internet when I’m using a bridged connection in Parallels. Out of frustration I reinstalled VMware Server for one more go and it worked!

I have no idea why it didn’t work originally, and as a result I have no idea why it has now decided to work. This is quite cool because now I can use some existing virtual machines on may NAS… If only I were able to connect to my NAS from Vista…

So now I have two options when I want a virtual machine, unless I want a Vista guest operating system, in which case I would have to use Parallels… Probably…

Cheers

Tim…

Fame, Fortune and Random Things…

Fame and Fortune

Someone just mailed me to say I’m in the Peer-to-Peer section of the latest Oracle Magazine, with two guys nobody has ever heard of… 🙂

I’ll use this as a stepping stone to get my first movie role, then branch out into a music career, quickly followed by a clothing line and a his/hers aftershave/perfume line. Then, after becoming a billionare I’ll start to doubt my own ability and turn to drugs as a way of hiding my insecurities. During this time, I’ll probably do a little shoplifting, just as a cry for help. Finally, after making a number of failed attempts at rehab, I’ll clean up my act, do a comeback tour and win an Oscar for playing a has-been star who’s trying to kick a drug habit. And to think, it all started with one mention in the Peer-to-Peer section of Oracle Magazine…

Random Things (Like it could get any more random than the last paragraph…)

I nearly got wasted by a big white van this morning. On my way to work I have to drive through Spaghetti Junction and at one point, a sliproad merges into the main carraigeway on a curve. The white van driver obviously wasn’t looking, because he pulled right across and nearly smashed me into a concrete wall. Fortunately, I slammed on my anchors, and just before we were going to hit he noticed me and jerked back onto the sliproad. I felt like I needed a defibrilator for the next few minutes. They say you should do something that scares you every day. That’s today sorted! 🙂

I got the Checkpoint Secure Remote beta software installed on my Vista laptop. It seems to work fine, so that’s a relief.

I’ve bought Parallels as a replacement VMware Server, which currently doesn’t work with Vista. There are a couple of cosmetic things I don’t like about Parallels, but it works and it’s cheap. I don’t know if I’ll stick with it, or switch back when VMware get their act together.

I’m having a love-hate relationship with Vista so far. I’ve not spent that much time using it yet, but I can tell you a couple of things:

  • The searchable menu is great. It doesn’t just search the menu, it displays executables and sub-options of groups like Control Panel or Computer Management. Once you start using it there’s no turning back.
  • The amount of confirmation dialogs required for simple tasks is nuts. I use a login with an account type of Administrator, yet when I want to delete a folder I get the regular confirmation message, followed by one telling me I need Administrator privileges to perform this action, and asking me if I want to proceed. Finally, I get the User Access Control (UAC) confirmation, which blanks the screen when it pops up the dialog. This last one looks a bit like the machine has crashed at first. I tried turning off the UAC, but this makes the red shield appears in the task bar and bubbles constantly pop up saying “Danger Will Robinson”, so I turned it back on. It seems a little over the top. Perhaps I will figure all of this out once I use it a bit more. 🙂
  • The networking on Vista seems a little funky. Connections to Samba shares and other windows machines seem eratic, or impossible. I’ve seen some posts on the net about it, so I’ll have to spend some time reading and playing. So far, I’ve not got a connection to my NAS, which is a pain.

Cheers

Tim…