Amazon Kindle…

One of my justifications for buying the iPad was I would use the Kindle App on it and save lots of money on buying paper books. That didn’t happen because the iPad is a really crappy reading device for novels. It’s way to big and heavy and has a nasty glossy screen that it totally crap for reading unless the light is perfect…

Using the same price justification again, I finally got round to buying myself an Kindle from Amazon. I bought the lowest spec one, which should be fine for me. My first impressions are it’s really cool. It’s very small and lite and most importantly the screen is great for reading novels.

I’ve just started reading the Repairman Jack series. Comparing the Kindle and paperback prices of the books, that series alone should pay for the cost of the device.

Let’s hope I do better with this than the iPad… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. So now I have to travel with a laptop, iPad and Kindle… 🙁

Should SQL have a compulsory ORDER BY clause?

How many times have you heard someone say, “The rows always came back in the correct order, but since the *event* it’s now wrong. The *event* may be an upgrade or some maintenance task on the table etc.

Oracle clearly say,

“Use the ORDER BY clause to order rows returned by the statement. Without an ORDER BY clause, no guarantee exists that the same query executed more than once will retrieve rows in the same order.”

This also applies for the GROUP BY clause, that haunted people during their 10g upgrades.

“The GROUP BY clause groups rows but does not guarantee the order of the result set. To order the groupings, use the ORDER BY clause.”

Both these statements can be found in the docs for the SELECT statements.

So why not make the ORDER BY clause compulsory? The statement could include an explicit NOORDER, like this.

SELECT * FROM emp e ORDER BY e.empname

SELECT * FROM emp e ORDER BY NOORDER

Of course, if that happened I would probably be in the group of people complaining about how ridiculous it is to force us to specify a clause we don’t need, but it would make people think… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: There seems to be a little confusion about what I am saying. I am not suggesting ordering should be mandatory. I am suggesting the ORDER BY clause could be mandatory, making you have to explicitly say if the output from the query is ordered or not. So these two statements would be functionally identical.

SELECT * FROM emp

SELECT * FROM emp ORDER BY NOORDER

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is OK for a Tom Cruise action vehicle. It is more or less the same as all the others in the franchise, which is not a bad thing. It just doesn’t bring anything new to the table. I knew it would be like this which is why it took me some time to work myself up to seeing it.

If you like the others go to see it. If you have not been won over to the franchise yet, I don’t think this one will do it. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Terry Pratchett: Snuff…

Snuff is book 39 in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. In this one Sam Vimes is forced by his wife to go on holiday to his country estate. Being a copper he’s on the lookout for anything amiss and ends up getting involved in more than he bargained for. It’s typical Vimes, typical Discworld and typical Pratchett.

I love how Terry Pratchett manages to state the obvious in a way that makes it sound novel. It’s not just what he says, but when he says it. For example, in one part of the book a rather nasty incident occurs, then he hits you with the line,

“I tell you commander, it’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they are doing it for best, especially if there is some god involved.”

You’ve heard this sort of line a million times, but it is set up so well in the book it feels like an epiphany.

Please Sir, can I have some more?

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I need some fresh inspiration. I’ve finished all the Terry Pratchett,  Jim Butcher and Mike Carey stuff and I’ve got some Waterstones vouchers that need spending. 🙂 Anyone got any ideas what I should try next?

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo….

This trilogy of books is awesome. I wrote about them here, here and here. You should definitely read them first.

I initially resisted watching the Swedish films, thinking they would be crappy compared to the books. On the insistence of one of my friends, who watched them after reading the books, I eventually saw them on DVD and they were great. They felt very much like the definitive films of the books to me. You should definitely watch these after reading the books.

When I heard there was going to be a Hollywood remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo I was very skeptical indeed. It’s just so rare for things to come out of that machine without being sanitized and homogenized to the point where any hint of potential hasn’t been washed away. When Lisbeth Salander got out of bed and put on a T-shirt with the words, “FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK”, I knew things were going to be OK. 🙂

As always, there are elements of the story from the first book that are missing and a few pieces that have been changed, probably to improve the pace of the film. Luckily, these don’t detract greatly from the overall theme. If you’ve read the books you’ll know they contain some very dark material. The film does not shy away from this, but is also not gratuitous about how it is portrayed, leaving enough to the imagination to allow you to think the worst. That’s not to say there isn’t any graphic stuff, there is, but not as much as there could have been…

It’s weird because the film and the actors themselves are not better or worse than those in the Swedish version. They are just different. Once you’ve read the books and watched the Swedish films, you should definitely watch the Hollywood version.

I guess I see the books, the Swedish films and the Hollywood film(s) as three different Universes, each with their own value. It’s hard to describe something so dark as enjoyable, but it’s well worth reading/watching in my opinion.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. At one point Lisbeth is writing SQL. I chuckled to myself as I sat in the cinema in my OTN T-shirt… 🙂

DNS Config for RAC SCAN… Again…

Some time ago I wrote an article about configuring DNS for the SCAN address in Oracle 11gR2 RAC.

Over the last couple of days one of the Oakies has given me some feedback on the article based on his experiences with Oracle Linux 5.

For my virtual RAC installations I typically do the DNS configuration on the host machine, which is running Fedora. It seems Oracle Linux 5 is a little different. Just to make sure I ran through the setup on Oracle Linux 5 and 6 to see what the score was.

Oracle Linux 6 is pretty much the same as Fedora as far as installation and configuration of BIND is concerned. Oracle Linux 5 (and also RHEL5 I assume) is a little funky in that it doesn’t create the default config files automatically. There are sample files you can use, but they contain a load of crap you don’t need and are missing some stuff you do. The easiest way to get it configured is to install the “system-config-bind” package and start the GUI. This notices you have no config and sets it up for you. You can then exit the GUI and do the manual config as described in the article. Very odd.

I’ve made a note about this in the article, so it shouldn’t trip anyone else up. I’ve also given some examples of the manually adjusted default named.conf files for each distro.

Cheers

Tim…