Quick life and presenting update…

Just a quick post to let people know what is going on in the next few weeks/months…

UKOUG DE SIG

I’m speaking at the UKOUG DE SIG on the 10th July. Andrew Clarke had a free slot so I offered to speak to help him out. I owe him a few favors and it is on my doorstep.

I had a bit of a panic last night while I was rehearsing the talk. My laptop died and I ended up having to uninstall and install VMware Server. Not what you want to happen the week before a talk. As a backup, I’m going to use PortableApps to have my talk on a USB stick just in case. I won’t be able to run the demos, but I will have expected output ready to go just in case. Hopefully, the laptop will be fine and I won’t need it. 🙂

OpenWorld 2008

I’m speaking at OpenWorld 2008 as part of a group presentation organised by Lewis Cunningham. The lineup is Lewis Cunningham, Eddie Awad, Mark Rittman, Arup Nanda, Rich Niemiec, Bradley Brown, Hans Forbrich and myself. As you would expect with so many speakers, it’s a panel format, not a formal presentation. Should be fun.

I’m not sure if I’ll do the Unconference this year. I would like to, but I think it’s a bit unfair of me to hog a slot that someone new could use. If the uptake is slow I’ll jump in there.

I’m registered for OpenWorld and I’ve reserved my hotel room. I can’t book my flights until I know what’s happening with the AUSOUG and NZOUG events.

AUSOUG & NZOUG

I’m waiting to hear if I’ve been accepted to speak at the AUSOUG and NZOUG events this year. I’ll post more about this when I know. If I do it’s going to be a pretty hectic schedule. One of the percs of quitting your job is you have lots of free time to do conferences. 🙂

Life Update

The last person from my office quit work on Friday, so I’m now alone in the dungeon for a couple of months before I leave. I’ve been taking servers out of racks and rebuilding them for deployment in a new site. I can do RHEL, DB and AS10g installations in my sleep now. Yesterday I was setting up a system consisting of a database, two middle tier app servers and two front end web servers. It’s all sitting on the desk next to me making an awful noise. It was overloading my air con, so it was kinda tropical in here. 🙂

Today is the start of my final year of being 30-something. Happy birthday to me. How am I going to celebrate you ask? I’m teaching two Yoga classes to cover for someone who’s ill. Not exactly what I had in mind. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

99 problems, but Glastonbury ain’t one…

The press has been having a field day recently about Jay-Z headlining Glastonbury. I’m watching his set on TV and it’s awesome. The guy is a genious and he’s got a huge field full of people eating out of his hand.

I find it pretty funny how they make a big deal about a rap act headlining, when Chemical Brothers or The Prodigy have been massive festival draws in the past.

The guy’s dropping hit after hit that I recognize from the UK charts, including his collaborations with Linkin Park. On top of that he’s rapping over samples from loads of famous songs by people such as Amy Winehouse, The Prodigy, Jackson Five, Punjabi MC, U2 and loads more. I doubt there is a person in the audience that’s not been able to hook into something. I think there will be a lot of people in record stores next week buying Jay-Z records because of this. One of them will probably be me.

You don’t need to be a rap fan to appreciate a guy at the top of his game. If booking Jay-Z was a disaster, Glastonbury needs a few more…

Cheers

Tim…

Wanted…

Takes a large dose of John Woo, inject it with steroids and give it a crack habit. What do you get? Wanted.

It’s uber violence that resembles a live action cartoon, kinda like Shoot ‘Em Up! Don’t go looking for story or even sense. Just enjoy the messed up freak show.

It’s wrong on so many levels but it works. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PortableApps.com…

Just a quick mention of PortableApps.com, which lets you run a whole bunch of apps of a USB stick without the need for installation on a your PC.

I had a look at this a while back, but I didn’t really have much of a need for it at the time and the number of apps were limited. A colleague mentioned it today and I took another look and I’m quite impressed. The number and quality of the applications has improved a lot. Added to that, I’m travelling a lot more now so the extra security of apps on a USB stick makes me feel good. 🙂

It might be worth you taking a look if you move between machines or locations a lot.

Cheers

Tim…

SQL Injection is still a big issue…

I just thought I’d pass on this story…

One of my friends has been running an Internet business for many years. It started as an ASP website against an Access database. At the time Access didn’t support bind variables, so all the SQL was written using literals concatenated into the SQL. This didn’t present much of a problem as nobody ever talked about SQL injection in those days…

Over time, the site progressed and moved over to SQL Server. Unfortunately, none of the code was revised to use bind variables, still leaving it wide open to SQL injection attacks.

I got a mail from my friend this morning telling me his hosting provider has turned off his site because it’s getting battered by hackers. I guess the only thing I can say is he’s been lucky for the last 10 years. I could have happened any time during this period…

This post isn’t a criticism of the security of any particular database engine, scripting language, application server or browser. It’s merely an observation that there are still plenty of public websites out there that have gaping SQL injection holes in them, not due to the underlying technology, but due to sloppy programming.

It’s easy to get caught up in the security ratings of our infrastructure and forget that one dodgy SQL statement can give people the key to the door.

Let the paranoia commence… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 2.5 linking problem…

I guess anyone following this blog will have noticed the problems I have when trying to link to other pages on this domain. It has been a common occurence for the first comment on every post about a new article to point out the link to the article doesn’t work…

It would appear that when I place a link to an article on oracle-base.com, WordPress tries to strip off the domain to make it a relative reference. I guess that makes sense when linking to other blog posts because it means you can move the blog to a new domain and not break all the links. The problem occurs when the link is to the main website, which is effectively an external site. More often than not, this results in a broken link. When I link to pages not part of oracle-base.com, it work fine.

This only seems to have happened since I moved to WordPress 2.5…

Is anyone else having this problem? 

Cheers

Tim…

Automatic Memory Management in 11g…

I’m still trying to work my way through the 11g new features for the OCP upgrade exam. I’ve had so much going on recently that I’m still only about 2/3 of the way through the syllabus. Here’s the latest installment.

Automatic Memory Management in Oracle Database 11g Release 1

I guess I need to write about 10 more articles before I’ll have covered the syllabus. I’m hoping to complete them and sit the exam before I go to OpenWorld, but if things keep going like they are at the moment that might be a struggle.

Cheers

Tim…