The ORACLE-BASE Blog

Reaction to riots around the UK…

I spent quite a while watching the coverage of the riots on TV last night and this morning. I also made a few angry posts on twitter. Not surprisingly I am still pretty angry about everything this morning. What follows will be a rather extreme rant about the situation. Look away if easily offended…

What were the recent incidents *not* about?

This is not a mass uprising. London has 12 million people and only a few hundred scum are doing this.
This is not a race-specific issue. I’ve watched the footage and the crowds are made up of people from all races. Roughly speaking, the mix reflects the racial mix of the area that is being attacked. Don’t use this incident to further your racist (positive or negative) agenda!
This is not political. We are not under the control of some unjust dictator and fighting for our political freedom. Likening this to the recent events in the middle east is offensive. Since when has looting a PC store or a phone store been political?
This is not about “the kids”. The age range of the people is mixed.

What should be done in my opinion?

They should announce a curfew. Being on the streets after that time means you accept the consequences of anything that happens to you. Good people will be off the streets, so you know if you see someone they are up to no good.
Police and army reserves should be mobilized. They should be issued with rubber-bullets given a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy.
If someone gets injured or killed as a result of the police/army action, tough! No claims. No law suits. No apologies. Tough! If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t be there.
We have loads of surveillance cameras on our streets. Faces from the footage should be placed on a website where the public can anonymously shop them to the police. I would encourage anyone who recognizes any people from the footage, or has information from any social network sites, to pass the information to the police and get these people off our streets.
Everyone identified should be prosecuted and get a custodial sentence. If it means cramming them into cells and “infringing on their human rights”, so be it. They gave up their rights when they decided to do this.
Stop putting “community leaders” on TV who try to justify this crap. I’m sorry, but as a disenfranchised man I do not feel the need to rob a new pair of trainers or a mobile phone. Some of the footage showed a group of kids talking and one said, “Let’s get some watches!” Nuff said!

This country is going to hell in a hand basket. We need to stop pussy footing about and get some authority back.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. If this stops me seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I’m going to kick off… 🙂

Oracle Linux 5 Update 7 Available…

Over the weekend Oracle Linux 5.7 was released, as noted here.

Upgrades follow the normal path. Do one of the following:

Boot from the DVD and upgrade that way.
Replace the “/etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-el5.repo” file with the new version here, remembering to enable the appropriate entries.

Amend your existing “/etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-el5.repo”, adding the following new entry.

[ol5_u7_base]
name=Oracle Linux $releasever - U7 - $basearch - base
baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL5/7/base/$basearch/
gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-el5
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

If you picked either of the last two options, you can upgrade by issuing the “yum update” command when logged in as root.

I’ve upgraded a couple of VMs running Oracle and everything seems fine so far.

Cheers

Tim…

Super 8…

I can see Super 8 getting really mixed reviews because it feels a little like The Goonies meet Cloverfield.

Personally, I liked it and could see past the odd cheesy bits, but I can also see why some would think it falls short. There is a very E.T. childlike feel to the film, which is hardly surprising as the lead characters are kids. There is also the Stand By Me coming of age aspect. All this is wrapped up with a bow made of some fantastic visual effects.

Cool film, but difficult to pinpoint the target audience they had in mind (in my opinion). I’m sure over the next few years I will watch and enjoy it several times, but I don’t think I will be buying it.

Cheers

Tim…

The Dresden Files: Ghost Story…

Ghost Story is the latest book in The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher.

Spoiler Alert. Don’t read on if you are currently reading the series and haven’t got to this book yet. It’s hard to talk about the book without doing a bit of a spoiler.

At the end of the last book Harry Dresden died. At the start of this book he comes back as a ghost and is sent back to Chicago to help his friends. The fact that there is another book planned makes you think one of two things are going to happen.

He will be so successful as a ghost version of himself he will be able to carry on in that capacity.
He will somehow be ressurected.

This book is more predictable than any of the other books in the series, but that’s not a bad point. The outcomes of certain situations are predictable, but the journeys to those outcomes are far from predictable, which is half the fun. You are sitting there thinking, I know how this is meant to pan out, but how the hell is he going to get there? 🙂

It was a great story, and well deserving of its place in the series. I’ve now got a really long wait for the next book (Cold Days) to be released. 🙁

Cheers

Tim…

Captain America: The First Avenger…

I went to see Captain America: The First Avenger at the weekend. It’s kinda odd because there are lots of elements that make me think I should like this film, but I found it all a little dull. I actually found myself saying “Meh” as I stood up at the end of the film. That’s not a good sign.

I liked the intro to the story. All the stuff from the trailers. Skinny guy becomes superhero etc. I think that works really well and I was looking forward to him actually doing something useful. That’s where it all went a little flat really. Most of the stuff he did just didn’t seem very “superhero” to me. I know nothing about the Captain America comics or history, but he seems like a pretty lame superhero.

What didn’t help was the World War II setting. Being brought up in the UK means you are constantly bombarded films and references to WWII. Pretty much every day there is a WWII film on one of the channels. Not wanting to be disrespectful to the people that were involved at the time, but it has no relevance to my life. You might as well be talking about The Hundred Years’ War. In fact, I would go as far as to say that *most* war-related films don’t do anything for me. It’s just not a genre that really appeals. With that in mind, a lame superhero in a setting that turns me off was never going to hit home for me I guess.

A few bits of the plot seemed very “Indian Jones” to me. It felt a bit lazy in that regard. It will be interesting to see how Captain America stacks up in the 21st century as part of The Avengers film(s) when they are made. Maybe in a modern setting I will have a change of heart.

Cheers

Tim…

Real World Book Shops…

I’ve had a Waterstones gift token knocking around since my birthday, so I ventured into town yesterday to see if there were any technical books I could spend my pennies on. There’s a pretty big Waterstones in Birmingham, so I thought I was in with a shot at finding something worthwhile in there. How wrong I was…

The place was full of “… For Dummies” books for old versions of Windows and Office, along with a vast collection of really old reference books. If anyone needs a “Teach yourself VB 5.0” manual, you know where to go!

When it’s my money I’m spending I almost always buy from Amazon. Part of me wants to support real world book stores, but the truth of the matter is they are really crappy for anything other than the latest bestseller novels, which are still typically more expensive than the equivalent from Amazon.

In the end I bought Ghost Story, the new Jim Butcher book from The Dresden Files series. I’ll see if I can spend the rest of the cash on the Waterstones online store. Must tell family that if they want to waste money on birthday presents for me, they should do it on Amazon gift certificates. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Fitness Update (July 2011)…

A number of things to report on the fitness front…

I’ve switched some of my cardio sessions on the elliptical from regular interval training to Tabata Protocol. A little over 2 months ago Dominic Brooks pointed this out to me. I gave it a try then, but I wasn’t fit enough to cope with it. Now it is just a complete nightmare, rather than impossible. 🙂 So general fitness is going really well. There are the obvious ups and downs, but I feel really good about things and I don’t find the gym daunting now. I know I’m going to survive.

I’ve backed off the weight training a bit. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I was putting on too much muscle. I used to do weights as a kid and I guess the whole muscle memory thing is true. The tubby meat-head thing is not a look I’m interested in. Second, shifting a lot of weight was starting to aggravate my joints. I’ve had operations on my left elbow and knee and both of them have been playing up for a couple of days after doing heavy lifting. Those two factors combined seemed like pretty clear signals that weight training is no longer the right thing for me.

To replace the absent weight training I’ve been doing some circuit training, mostly using functional training exercises. It feels pretty good and isn’t freaking out my joints so far. I’m not a gym-class type of guy, but I figured I need some technique coaching, so yesterday evening I went to a kettlebells class. The bruises on my arms and shoulders this morning would suggest my technique is not quite right, but I’ve already learned a bunch of stuff, so that’s good. Two visits to the gym yesterday was not a great idea, but I’m glad I got off my ass and made it to the kettlebells class. It would have been very easy to leave it for next week. 🙂

As part of the functional training I’ve also started to do handstands again. I used to be pretty good at them, thanks to the yoga, but as I got heavier they got a bit scary and my center of gravity shifted somewhat. Now I’m hitting them pretty well and walking on my hands pretty comfortably. I can even pull out a few half-handstand-pushups on a good day. I was in the dance studio practicing handstands and someone asked me if I was a gymnast, which cracked me up. Is there a gymnastics for fatties competition I can enter?

I’ll be in Australia next month and I feel the need to manage some people’s (Chris Muir and Connor McDonald) expectations.

If you last saw me about 5 months ago, I will look like I’ve lost quite a bit of weight.
If you last saw me about 2 year ago, you will think I look about the same.
If you last saw me 3+ years ago, you will probably think I’ve gained some weight.

Based on that, you should not be expecting to see “the new svelte” version of me Connor. 🙂

Still another 30 years and 30 pounds to go… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Alternative opinions about Oracle Linux vs. RHEL…

Jay Weinshenker has written a couple of good posts in response to my recent post on Oracle Linux vs. RHEL.

I don’t agree 100% with his all his points, but I always think it’s good to hear different sides of the story and I certainly enjoyed reading them.

Cheers

Tim…

Which Linux do you pick for Oracle Installations?

There was an interesting thread on the OakTable mailing list the other day regarding the choice of Linux distros for Oracle installations. It was started by one member (the name has been withheld to protect the innocent :)) who said,

“I cannot imagine (but want to understand) why anyone would pick RHEL5.6 for Oracle as opposed to the vastly superior OEL with the UEK.”

I must admit I’ve kinda forgotten that any distro apart from Oracle Linux (OL) exists as far as production installations of Oracle software are concerned.

Some of the reasons cited for people not to pick OL include:

The customer has a long relationship with Red Hat and doesn’t want to jump ship.
RHEL is the market leading enterprise Linux distro, so why switch to Oracle?
The customer doesn’t want to be too dependent on Oracle.
The customer has lots of non-Oracle servers running RHEL and doesn’t want a mix of RHEL and OL as it would complicate administration.
The customer uses some software that is certified against RHEL, but not OL.
The customer prefers Red Hat support over Oracle support. Wait. Red Hat and support in the same sentence. Give me a minute to stop laughing…
The customer is using VMware for Virtualization and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) is not supported on VMware.

I guess every company and individual will have differing justifications for their choice of distro.

So why would you pick OL and Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for Oracle installations?

You can run it for free if you don’t want OS support. Using OL without support doesn’t affect the support status of the products (DB, App Servers etc.) running on top of it.
It’s what Oracle use to write the Linux version of the products.
It’s what Exadata uses.
Oracle products are now certified against the OL + UEK before they are certified against the RHEL kernel.
UEK is typically a much more up to date version of the kernel than that shipped by RHEL and includes all the patches vital for optimum Oracle performance.
Single vendor, so no finger pointing over support issues (from Google+ comment).
It is the only enterprise Linux distro that supports kernel patching without reboots thanks to Oracle’s newly aquired Ksplice.

For more information you might want to read this whitepaper or watch this webcast.

If you are looking at things from a purely technical perspective, I guess you are going to pick OL and UEK. Of course, many of us don’t work in a world where technology is picked purely on its merits. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Check out this post by Jay Weinshenker for a different angle on this issue.