OTN APAC Tour: NZOUG Day 1 & 2

The evening before the NZOUG conference was a bit chaotic. There was still no resolution to the Qantas fiasco and I was starting to believe I would have to cancel my sessions in Perth and try to fly home from Auckland. I tried to switch my flights, but everything was sold out.

By the next morning the Qantas strike seemed to be over, but there were reports of delays and disruption, so I was still not sure if I would make it to Perth.

NZOUG Day 1:

I was just about to start my first session (Clonedb) when there was a fire alarm. Fortunately it was resolved pretty quickly and I was able to get things back on track. From there is was straight on to do my second session (Edition-Based Redefinition), with no fire alarms this time. Both my sessions seemed to go down well. I got some good questions in each session, which is always cool, and some more later in the day and at the evening event.

I spent a little time chatting to some of the guys on the Quest stand and the guys from the DBVisit stand.

My first session of the day as an attendee was Graham Wood’s Exadata session. I saw this session for the first time a few years ago when it was known as the “Terabyte Hour”. With the hardware refreshes and a few software tweaks that have happened since then it now only takes about 18 minutes to complete the demo, so the name has changed. 🙂 My comment to Graham at the end of the session was, “Much as I hate to admit it, it’s really impressive.”

That pretty much took me to the end of the presentations on the first day.

Chris Muir told me to check my emails as my flights had been sorted out. Sure enough, when I checked Lillian Buziak from the OTN team had contacted Oracle Travel and fixed everything for me. She is a total miracle worker. If I was younger and more attractive (and she wasn’t already married) she would be mine, oh yes, she would be mine…

In the evening we all went to the conference dinner. The theme was “Murder Mystery”, which involved a few poor souls getting selected to be made a fool of in front to the rest of the audience. Unfortunately, I was one of the fools in question, along with Chris Muir, Debra Lilley, Bambi and a couple of guys. The compere and the ghost of the victim (my wife, murdered on her wedding day) lead us through various “role playing scenarios” to determine who was the murderer. The final decision for the murderer came down to me (the husband) and the chef, with the chef being voted the winner/loser/murderer. It was all very confusing, fun and embaressing, all roled in to one. 🙂

The whole event seemed to go down really well with the audience, who had plenty of comments (and photos). I have a feeling this is going to haunt (no punn intended) me for a long time.

NZOUG Day 2:

This was cut very short for me. My new Perth flight was arranged for 14:10, so I had to leave the conference at 11:00. I still got time to chat to a few people, mostly about the previous evenings events, and check out Ronald Bradford‘s session on the top 9 issues people have with mySQL databases. I’ve been a casual user of mySQL for years, but never really spent much time looking at it in any depth. I learned quite a bit from this session. Maybe I’ll spend a little more time playing with it in future.

Assuming the rest of the conference carried on the way it started, I would say it was a big success.

Perth:

The flight to Perth was pretty straight forward and I got to the apartment with no dramas. I took a walk over to the conference venue, which is significantly further than I thought. It took be about 60 minutes to walk it at a pace, with no bag in the (relatively speaking) cool evening air. I’m not sure what it will be like in the summer sun.

At 06:00 this morning I went out for a run along the river, then made myself look like a freak by doing sprints on the way back. Nothing like the sight of a fat sweaty bloke panting like a dog to turn heads. The locals were out in force, walking, running and doing boot camps on the banks of the river. Even at that time is was very sunny. I think it would be damn near lethal to try it at midday. The flies and mossies were out in force. If nothing else the swatting and endless ticks you develop when they fly round your face and ears helps you burn more calories. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OTN APAC Tour: Beijing, China (update)

Following on from my previous post, once the OTN APAC event was over I managed to see some of the sights of Beijing and the surrounding area, including the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall and Ming Tombs. I’ve uploaded some photos here, but it seems my photography skills are getting worse, not better. I’m ashamed to say these are the better photos. Let’s not discuss the ones I’ve not bothered to upload. 🙂

I have a few suggestions for any travellers to China:

  • Do not consider driving yourself. The traffic is crazy! I’ve never seen anything like it before. I experienced several “we’re all going to die” moments in every trip I took. Probably the worst was when two lorries moved together with our minibus between them. If our driver had not sped up in time, I’m quite convinced the ACE program would have lost several members. As you may have already read, some of the ACEs were in a crash, but came out of it unharmed. I was only able to wear a seat belt on one journey because all but one of the vehicles either had no belts, or belts but nowhere to plug them in. This takes a lot of getting used to.
  • If you have any sort of respiratory issues, it’s probably best to avoid Beijing completely. The pollution is very bad. It quickly makes you feel like you’ve smoked 40 cigarettes for breakfast. Even at the Great Wall (50+km from the city) it is still really bad.
  • Make sure you have printed copies of the Chinese names for any locations you want to visit. Having an English address is pretty much useless. Even with the Chinese addresses, it was often very difficult, especially if the print was small.
  • Don’t rely on any cloud services for your journey. You need local copies of everything and any apps you want to work with should have full offline functionality. Why? The Great Firewall of China is very effective at blocking a variety of services. Most Google services were trashed. Gmail was intermittently offline and I was never able to access attachments. Google Docs essentially doesn’t exist. Google Reader would work for about 5 minutes at a time, then fail bigtime. Most annoyingly, I was unable to use Google to search for anything. 🙁 I was able to search with Bing, but I could only see results in Chinese. Even when I switched to English, I still got results in Chinese. Like I said, be very well prepared because searching for information is not easy. I’m sure there are ways to cope if you are clued up, but I was a little naive and went with very little preparation as far as logistics were concerned.
  • Take money with you. I was able to get cash advances from my credit cards, but the ATM failed to get cash from any of my bank accounts.

I’m now stationed at my friends house about 40 minutes from Auckland. There are cows in the garden, including 6 new calves which are pretty funny, and two pre-school children who are pretty funny too. Although I’m very much a towny at heart, I must admit the change in pace and air quality is very welcome. Last week I was talking about Oracle and this week I’ve chopping down some trees, cleared some scrub and pretended (very badly) to be a farmer. I’ve nearly mastered saying, “Get off my land!”, or as the Kiwi’s say it, “Gt ff my lnd aye!” I’m trying to introduce vowels to the natives, but with the exception of the word “aye” that is added to the end of every sentence, vowels seem to be lost forever. 🙂

In a few days I will transplant to Auckland and start the NZOUG conference.

Cheers

Tim…

APAC OTN Tour: Beijing, China

My flights to China were rather uneventful. The Birmingham to Dubai leg was delayed by an hour due to fog in Dubai. I had a 4 hour connection in Dubai originally, so the delay was no big deal.

Arriving in Beijing was a little unnerving. I misplaced the Chinese version of the hotel address, but had the English version. Finding someone to translate it proved very difficult and as it turned out they translated it incorrectly. Fortunately I found a cached version of the address on my iPad, so that saved by bacon. The second hitch was that I couldn’t get cash with by debit cards. Just a flat-out refusal from any ATM in China. Arrrggghhh! Fortunately, I was able to get cash advances using my credit card. I’m going to pay through the nose for it, but at least I can survive.

Today is the first day of the conference and I had a morning slot. For the English speakers, we had one screen showing our slides in English and one showing the Chinese translation. I was asked to speak more slowly than usual (kinda difficult for me) and as a result I had to reduce the content somewhat. I did a run through last night to make sure my timing was OK with this adjustment.

The conference has a single track, so you get a room full of people from different technical areas. This is always a little unnerving as you worry about the relevance of your material to audience. Here are a couple of photos of the audience I took while I was setting up.

 

Everything seemed to go OK. I hope they understood my accent. 🙂

With a bit of luck I will get to see some of Beijing over the next couple of days. I’m behing the Great Firewall of China, so some sites (Facebook and Twitter) are blocked completely and many other sites (like Gmail and any other Google related services) seem to come and go. For the time being my blog seems active. If I lose access to it I will update things once I get to New Zealand.

Cheers

Tim…

Real Steel…

If you remove the humans from Real Steel, you pretty much have Rocky.

As far as the humans are concerned, Hugh Jackman is ok. The kid who plays his son is a little annoying, but to be fair, so are most of the kids in films. There are quite a few cheesy moments, but they are spread out so they aren’t like fingernails down a chalkboard.

I think the biggest problem with the film is the robots have no personalities. It’s just a giant and very expensive version of Rock’em Sock’em Robots. It’s hard to engage with a chunk of metal when it has no outward signs of personality. They are nothing like Transformers, which are totally real. 🙂

Having said that, its an OK bit of mindless fun. I tried to listen to other people talking on the way out to gauge the general reaction. It seemed to vary from “Awesome!” to “What a complete pile of xxxx!”. I guess I stand somewhere in the middle.

Cheers

Tim…

A History of (my) Certifications…

I was chatting with the lady doing OCP Lounge registrations at OOW11. During this chat I mentioned I hadn’t received a certificate for the SQL Expert certification. It never crossed my mind to re-request it, since my certifications are visible on certview.oracle.com anyway. Yesterday, a DHL man delivered the missing certificate, which prompted me to look though my certifications and scan this image.

First, check out the card on the bottom right. I was unaware the “Expert” certifications had a different colour card.

Second, notice anything funny about the 9i DBA OCP certification?

It’s hard to believe it’s over 12 years since I first completed one of these certifications… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Night at OOW11: Circus Performers…

I mentioned in a previous post that I went to the OTN Night on the Monday at OOW11. I also spoke about eating far too much when I was there, but forgot to mention were the circus performers…

Anyone who knows me knows I’m obsessed with flexibility. I love stretching and I love watching anything involving flexibility. San Francisco has a famous Circus School, so previous OTN parties have had assorted circus performers to entertain the punters. In addition to the usual clowns, this year there was a contortionist with a hula hoop. She did elements of the Cirque du Soleil act made famous by Elena Lev in Alegria. You can see the original act here.

Needless to say I watched the contortionist at the OTN Night while stuffing noodles into my face.

Cheers

Tim…

iOS 5 on my iPad1…

I’ve just put iOS 5 on my iPad, who wants to touch me?

It took about 30 minutes in total, but I’ve heard some on Twitter saying it took them 3 hours. The update does a full backup and restore, so I guess the more stuff you have on your iPad or iPhone, the longer it takes.

What has changed? Still hasn’t turned it into a white iPad 2… 🙂

For the casual user like me it seems pretty much the same. I only use the browser and play the odd little game, so I guess I’m not the person to ask about the life-changing nature of iOS 5. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database on Oracle Linux 6.1…

I mentioned the day before Open World I put a Virtual RAC on Oracle Linux 6.1 article live. Although the procedure was complete, some of the screen shots were from an old article as I didn’t have time to redo them before my flight. 🙂 I’ve just run through the procedure again and taken new screen shots. As a result, I’ve allowed the article to display on the front page of the website, which is why you will see it listed as a new article there.

This kinda rounds out the whole Oracle on 6.1 stuff as there has been a single instance installation guide out for ages and more recently the Cloud Control installation, which references it.

Remember, it’s still not certified yet, but it’s coming.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: It’s finally certified. See here.