The Thing…

The first film I ever saw on VHS was The Thing (originally released 1982). I’m not sure exactly how long after the cinema release it was, but I remember I was still in school, so I guess it was about 1983-84 and I was about 14-15 years old. A kid at school had just got a video recorder and I went over to his house to see it. It was one of those giant top-loader things. I was totally in awe of it. I thought the film was pretty neat too. 🙂

So 29 years after the first film was made they decided to make a prequel called The Thing (2011). If you’ve seen the original, then you’ll remember the scene at the start where the Norwegian helicopter is chasing the dog and a guy is taking pot-shots at it. The film is based around the events in the Norwegian camp prior to the first scene in the original film.

So how was it? Pretty darn good in my opinion. It’s hard to watch the original without feeling how dated it is. The new film is a fairly similar plot, in fact it might as well be a remake, but the visuals are brought right up to date. It’s a bit of a gore-fest at times and it makes you jump big-time on several occasions. If you liked the original, this is a worthy remake/prequel.

Cheers

Tim…

Up the Villa…

I had a bit of good news the other day. Nephew #2 (6 years old) is now playing for Aston Villa Academy. He’s quite small for his age and he trialed with a group of boys a year older than him, so my brother said he looked tiny and the kit they gave him was gigantic on him. He’s used to playing with Nephew #1, who’s just turned 10, so playing with bigger kids doesn’t phase him and he’s a bit more cocky than Nephew #1, which they seem to like at these places. Anyway, at the end of the session they said they want him. They are not allowed to sign exclusively until they are 8 years old, so he can keep playing for Wolverhampton Wanderers Academy and Telford.

So now I have to support:

  • West Brom and Telford because Nephew #1 plays for them.
  • Villa, Wolves and Telford because Nephew #2 plays for them.
  • Man United because Nephew #1 and #2 (and their parents) support them.

I don’t even like football really, but if they can keep improving for the next 10 years and be in the freakishly small percentage of people that actually make it to become professional footballers, I’ll be able to live in the manner I would like to become accustomed to. Muhahaha (little finger in the corner of the mouth)… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Mike Carey: The Naming of the Beasts…

“The Naming of the Beasts” is book 5 in the Felix Castor series by Mike Carey. Juliet, the succubus, has gone all wild, beaten up her human wife and is on the verge of feasting on aroused men’s souls again. Felix’s friend Rafi, still possessed by the demon Asmodeus, has gone AWOL and started a killing spree. Life’s never easy when you’re a freelance exorcist… 🙂

This is the last in the series so far and it maintains the pace of the other books, while tying up a lot of loose ends. According to Wikipedia the next book is out late 2001 (imminently). It will be interesting to see what Felix does next, since the main thrust of the story of the first 5 books is now concluded.

Cheers

Tim…

More Hosting Provider Fallout…

I posted a rant about my hosting provider about 10 days ago. As I mentioned in the post, I quickly got the site up and running again. Pretty soon after that I was at the UKOUG conference and Cary Millsap‘s training course, so I never really got time to look at things again…

On Thursday evening I took a proper look at the site and OMG, what a mess. Here are some of the issues I’ve been firefighting since Thursday…

  • Some images had been lost during the move. I managed to recovery them from a filesystem backup.
  • The version of PHP had changed and the error_log was full of warnings. If seems some of my PHP was not ideal, but it had never presented a problem before. Most of the things were little and fixed quickly once I had found them. In my defense, some of the code was many years old. 🙂
  • Some of the PHP configuration settings had changed, making my back-end code react differently.

The last issue was the big one. Many moons ago I wrote my own custom CMS using PHP and mySQL to manage the site. Most of the site is flat files, but the content of the database is the single point of truth for me. Once I make a change, the flat page(s) are regenerated to reflect the change. The problem was my CMS was screwed. It’s fixed now, but a significant number of pages in the database contain some logical corruption. This doesn’t affect what people see on the site, it just means the database is no longer the single point of truth.

I’ve written some tools to help me fix the data in the database, but I’m not willing to let them roam free. I’m using them to work through the pages one at a time. It’s very labor intensive, but it’s the safest option.

Two bonuses of this whole fiasco are:

  • I’ve got to revamp some of the terrible HTML I used back in the day.
  • I noticed how many of my images are being hot-linked by people. All their requests for the missing images showed up as errors in my error log. This is what alerted me to the missing images in the first place. So not only are these people stealing my content, but they are too lazy to actually copy the images and are using my bandwidth to serve their articles. I’ve put a stop to that. See preventing hot-linking. I’ve allowed Google and Orana.info to continue hot-linking for obvious reasons.

I was speaking to someone in Bulgaria about the site and mentioned that every year it gets bigger and the time I spend maintaining it, rather than writing new content, increases. This just goes to prove it.

So it looks like the next few days are going to be very busy and very boring. 🙁

Cheers

Tim…

Cary Millsap : Mastering Oracle Trace Data…

I was ribbing Cary about missing his unconference session (due to migraine and alarm malfunction). Lenz Grimmer and I both tweeted him to see where he was and in return we received this message in reply.

Very generous indeed. Unfortunately Lenz was flying home so he couldn’t make it. I had a conversation with Cary about it saying I wanted to come, but felt weird about accepting a freebie, so I thanked him for the offer and left it at that.

As the day progressed I kept mentally revisiting my decision. I think it must be my working class genes expressing the , “I do not need charity”, phenotype. Stupid I know, but that’s how I’m made. In the end I decided if I wanted to go, but didn’t feel comfortable with the freebie, then the solution was to pay for the course. So that’s what I did.

So Thursday morning, after a very long 3 days at UKOUG, I found myself in a classroom being taught the wonders of Oracle trace files by Cary. 🙂

It’s a really enjoyable course. Cary’s presentation style is relaxed and natural, which really gets you into the swing of what you are doing. I’ve seen him present a number of times over the years and his style works really well in conferences and the classroom.

I’ve been using Oracle for many years and in that time I’ve lost count of the times I’ve captured SQL trace and run it through TKPROF. So what was there for me in this course? As it turns out, quite a lot. It gave me a better understanding of what trace files really contain and what can/can’t be trusted in the raw files and the TKPROF output. It also showed how the Method R tools can be used to dig deeper into the trace files than is possible with TKPROF alone. There is some very cool stuff there.

The course includes:

  • The “Mastering Oracle Trace Data” book. This means you don’t have to keep scribbling notes and it is much more comprehensive than just a printout of the slides.
  • A limited license for MR Tools and MR Trace. I’ve used the MR Trace SQL*Developer plugin before, but MR Tools is new to me.
  • A t-shirt. Everyone knows I’m a sucker for a t-shirt. 🙂

It was well worth the money in my opinion.

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG 2011: Days 1 – 3…

I went to lots of good presentations over the three days.

Day 1:

  • SQL Tuning – Kyle Hailey
  • Clonedb – Me (not counting myself in the “good” list, just placing myself in the timetable)
  • OakTable Talks
  • Emerging Trends in RAC – Julian Dyke
  • Upgrading your Cluster to 11gR2 – Martin Bach
  • Learning about life through business and software – Cary Millsap

Day 2:

  • NFS Tuning – Kyle Hailey
  • OakTable Talks
  • RAC Attack – Organized by Jeremy Schneider (I spent the rest of the day helping out here)

Day 3:

  • About Multiblock reads – Frits Hoogland
  • OakTable Talks
  • Simulating workloads with RAT and Simora – James Morle
  • What shape is your data? – Niall Litchfield

There were of course many other talks, but when you do as many conferences as me you tend to have seen many of them already. 🙂 Added to that, I got into interesting conversations with people and ended missing sessions because of that.

I went to the OakTable lunchtime talks each day. I think these were my favorite presentations of all. Each day was made up of five 10 minute slots. Quick, casual and no slides. Very entertaining. I hope they happen every year.

The days were incredibly long, as proved by my parking bills. The first day battered me and it was a matter of survival from that point on.

Thanks very much to everyone involved in organization of the event. That’s my first UKOUG as a presenter. Let’s hope it’s not the last.

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG 2011: When sessions attack…

Just finished my session. What a nightmare…

I was surprised anyone turned up as it was a late change to the schedule and there were some great sessions going on at the same time. Check out the photo.

It was kinda OK, until I got to the demo, which I screwed up. That was really disappointing because it really was the crux of the session. I thought I saw the issue and tried to salvage it, but it failed again so I gave up and moved on. I would like to say it was an OK recovery from a disastrous demo, but that would be a lie. Flipping crap.

Quite annoyed with myself because I know why it got screwed up. When I was in Bulgaria somebody asked me a question and I messed with the demo to prove a point, but forgot to repair it afterwards. Of course, it works again now that it’s too late. 🙁

There seemed to be some real interest in the technology and I assured people that the demo screwing up was noting to do with the tech, it was totally my fault.

So not the best showing I could have put in. I think it is summed up nicely by this tweet,

“session clone db is a mess”

Nuff said!

If anyone wants to see the running demo, drop me a line on twitter (@oraclebase) and I’ll meet you and show it working. If not, check out the article here.

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG 2011: Day -1

I missed the OakTable day because it was the 10th birthday party of nephew number 1, but I did make it back to Birmingham in time for the ACE dinner. Mark Rittman provided evidence of my presence here. I was already full of cake and trifle before I arrived, but the waitress didn’t seem to understand, “I’m not eating”, so I was *forced* to stuff myself again. 🙂 Many thanks for the organizers of this event.

I mentioned in a previous post Oracle RAC was not for newbies. Although the commenters seemed to agree with me, a couple of people suggested I was being a bit elitist and if you read the manuals it is all fine. I found out last night that Connor McDonald is now presenting his “Year in Purgatory” talk at UKOUG. I saw this session in Perth and I can’t recommend it enough. As well a being a great show, it highlights just how difficult managing RAC can really be. If you have, do or plan to work with RAC you should see this session, then decide if I’m wrong about the complexity of RAC. Check out the changes to the agenda…

I better get off my ass and head down to the conference. It’s been a while since I’ve driven into the city center at this time in the morning. I hope the traffic is not as bad as it used to be. 🙂

Remember, I’ve got a session at 11.05 today. Once again, check the changes to the agenda.

Cheers

Tim…