Falling down the stairs…

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you will know I fell down the stairs last night. My office is upstairs and I often put mail on the stairs to remind me to take it up. I also have a habit of walking around the house with the lights off in the evening. These two factors combined beautifully yesterday and resulted in me launching myself down the stairs with a couple of empty mugs in my hands. The initial assessment was left knee and right elbow were sore and I had some small cuts on my hands and arms from the shattered mugs in my hands. As the adrenaline wore off I noticed more cuts and various bits of my body started to ache.

Everything is OK this morning. My left knee still feels a bit dodgy, but all the cuts were so fine they are barely noticeable now. Apart from that, it’s just an all-over body ache similar to minor whiplash. Fun, fun, fun… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

First Lord’s Fury…

First Lord’s Fury is the sixth (and final) book in the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. The book follows on from where the Princep’s Fury ended.

This book returns to the juggernaut pace of Captains Fury. I mentioned previously that some parts of the series were quite predictable, but that didn’t detract from the enjoyment and expectation. That is also true of this final book. You are pretty sure where you would like things to end up. The question is, how are you going to get there?

Part of me is very sad it’s over and part of me is relieved as I don’t think I could cope if it carried on. It’s an awesome series, but I quite draining because it is so intense. If this were a 38+ series like Discworld, I think I would have to retire on medical grounds… 🙂

It’s about 4 months until the next Dresden Files book is released, so I think I will have a rest and maybe look at the Earth’s Children series, suggested by @Boneist.

Cheers

Tim…

Battle: Los Angeles…

For some masochistic reason you decide to watch Independence Day, realize it’s a steaming pile of crap (of almost Twilight proportions) and decide the only way to make the world a better place is to redo the film properly. What you end up with is Battle: Los Angeles. It’s pretty much the same story.

I’m not saying it’s a great sci-fi film, but it’s pretty darn good. I wasn’t holding out much hope during the first few scenes because the person with the camera seemed to be having a fit. On stationary shots where people were just chatting it looked like the camera was sitting on a washing machine during the spin cycle. Once the action kicked in the camera work seemed much more appropriate, even steady at times.

The feel was very much like that of District 9 and Skyline, which is a good thing in my opinion. Dirty and gritty wins out over Hollywood polish for me. The budget was quite a bit higher than those films, but it had some recognizable actors and everything was so much bigger. It still came in at $5,000,000 under the price of Independence Day, and that was made 14 years ago.

There were a few inevitable bits of cheese and gaps in story development, probably from cuts to bring it just under 2 hours, but it still worked pretty well.

I was surprised to see Ne-Yo in the film, but he did an OK job. If Michelle Rodriguez is one tenth as cool in real life as she is in films, she will be mine. Oh yes! She will be mine! It would be great to have a girlfriend who could beat the crap out of guys if they don’t respect my authoritah… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Real-Time SQL Monitoring… Update…

Real-Time SQL Monitoring got a lot of air-time when it was released in 11g. I remember being wowed in a number of presentations. What I had failed to notice until recently was a quite interesting update in 11gR2. Previously, the reports always looked a lot prettier in Enterprise Manager than they did in the HTML reports produced by the DBMS_SQLTUNE package. In 11gR2, the introduction of an ACTIVE report means you can now get the EM-style report using the DBMS_SQLTUNE package. Of course, if you are always using EM to look at your SQL monitoring reports, this change is of little value, but if you are using DBMS_SQLTUNE to generate the reports you may want to give it a try because the layout is definitely better. I’ve updated my article on the subject to reflect the changes in 11gR2.

Just goes to show, every time you open the manuals something pops out to make you realize how much you don’t know.

Cheers

Tim…

Princep’s Fury…

Princep’s Fury is the fifth book in the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. The book starts a few months on from where the Captain’s Fury ended.

This book seems a little calmer in comparison, mostly because I was still recovering from the onslaught of the previous book I guess. Each book in the six part series only tells a fraction of the whole story, but the previous four books were written in such a way that they also felt reasonably self contained. Princep’s Fury in comparison feels like the author was planning for the last book more than concentrating on this one. That sounds kinda damning, but even though it drifts a little at times, it was still cool.

Cheers

Tim…

TalkTalk is dead. Long live Virgin Media…

After suffering for far too long with poor ADSL performance, I finally ditched my TalkTalk ADSL service and replaced it with cable from Virgin Media. A couple of years ago I was getting 8Mb on my ADSL line. In recent times I’ve been struggling to hit 2Mb. The breaking point came when one of my former colleagues sent me a picture of his speedtest.net result showing a 30Mb service on a day when I was struggling to get connected.

I went for the cheapest service Virgin Media offer. I’m paying for 10Mb and I’m actually getting 10Mb (who’da thunk it). I figured that things have been so slow recently, 10Mb would feel rapid and sure enough it does. No doubt in a few weeks I’ll be bitching about it and want to upgrade…  🙂

The change over left me with one little issue. My Virgin router is down stairs, but my wired network is upstairs. That problem was solved today when a man in a van dropped off a present from Amazon in the form off a “Buffalo Wireless-N Nfiniti Dual Band Ethernet Converter”. I plugged that into my switch upstairs and Bob’s your uncle, I now have a bridged network.

The MacBook Pro and iPad have once again been relegated to scrapyard side of my desk and I’m back to using my main desktop. Aaahhhh Linux…

Cheers

Tim…

How important is multi-browser support for specific apps?

In a thread on the OakTable mailing list, James Morle pointed out that Oracle’s Web Conferencing software was IE only. A point that has been mentioned by Jake from The AppsLab a number of times in relation to his need for a Windows VM on his Mac. The discussion turned to the relative browser share and multi-browser support. This post is a minor rearrangement of my posts to that thread.

Before I launch into the body of the post, keep in mind I am talking about complex (typically GUI style) apps with a specific purpose that run from within a browser, not just general web pages!

The breakdown of browser stats from my website over the last month was.

  • Internet Explorer: 42.32%
  • Firefox: 38.68%
  • Chrome: 15.19%

Which is pretty similar to those figures quoted in the summary on Wikipedia.

  • Internet Explorer: 43.55%
  • Firefox: 29.0%
  • Chrome: 13.89%

That surprised me because in the past I’ve always found my stats for IE much lower than the general stats quoted. I’ve always assumed this was because Oracle geeks try out alternative browsers much more than the general public. Most “normal” people I know use IE. Most geeks I know don’t. Now they seem to match. Does this mean more regular folk are moving to Firefox & Chrome, or is this all being skewed by browsers on mobile devices?

The stats for mobile devices are shown here, but I am not sure if these get included in the general stats also. If so, I would expect some of the Chrome hits to be coming from Android devices and some of the Safari hits to be coming from iPhone and iPad devices. If that is the case, then using the general browser market share stats may not be too clever when deciding the impact of whether to support a specific browser for your app. Maybe OS usage is a better option.

Looking at the OS usage stats on Wikipedia, Windows is still kicking butt on the desktop, so all these people have access to IE as well as their preferred browser.

  • Windows XP (41.15%)
  • Windows 7 (26.35%)
  • Windows Vista (14.57%)
  • Mac OS X (7.07%)
  • iOS (iPhone) (2.20%)
  • Linux (1.65%)

Compare that to my site, where Linux is the distant second biggest OS.

  • Windows: 90.56%
  • Linux: 6.37%
  • Macintosh: 2.33%
  • iPhone: 0.21%

For a browser-based app you expect to be run from the desktop, forcing people to use (or have access to) IE is not that much to ask. The vast majority can, if pushed, switch to IE for that specific task.

I don’t think you can lump mobile and non-mobile into one pot. Mobile apps have so many constraints to consider that they will invariably be treated as a separate project that must *definitely* be multi-browser compliant or a native app.

Browser-based apps that are intended for desktop users are different because about 90% of the time (according to the stats) they will be used on a Windows PC, having access to IE.

Obviously, your intention should always be to build apps that are multi-browser compliant, but depending on the nature and purpose of the specific app, having to open IE to run it will have zero impact on the vast majority of users (both home and business) until Windows loses its desktop dominance or the desktop ceases to exist…

Going back to the app that started this thread, Oracle’s Web Conferencing, is it a problem that this is IE only? Well it’s a pain for me because I’m a Mac and Linux user, but it’s not insurmountable because I can use a VM. I’ve never needed or wanted to use this functionality from a mobile device, so the IE constraint hasn’t affected me in that respect. In this case it’s very much a business app, so the vast majority of users will be sitting at a Windows PC. With that in mind, this is one of those cases where the IE constraint is annoying, but acceptable.

Cheers

Tim…

Captain’s Fury…

Captain’s Fury is the fourth book in the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. The book starts two years on from where the Cursor’s Fury ended.

I mentioned in my previous post that the last 100 pages of Cursor’s Fury was exiting. Captain’s Fury makes the previous book seem tame in comparison. It’s like a juggernaut ramming into your head for 600 pages. I felt physically drained by the end of it. Totally cool.

Cheers

Tim…

Cursor’s Fury…

Cursor’s Fury is the third book in the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. The book starts two years on from where the Academ’s Fury ended.

I can’t even begin to tell you how exciting the last hundred pages of this book were. I was totally freaking out. I finished the last page at about 02:00 in the morning, got out of bed with an exited giggle and ran into the next room to grab the next book in the series. I read that for a couple of hours more before I finally gave up and went to sleep.

If you are thinking about reading this series, please don’t read any spoilers. Jim Butcher has done an brilliant job of mixing predictability and complete surprise. The predictability of the plot works really well because you have a good idea what is going to happen, but you are desperate to see if it does because there are enough surprises to keep you guessing, or questioning what you think is coming round the corner.

Love it.

Tim…