The ORACLE-BASE Blog

If you think your network is safe, take a look at this. It would have been fine if it wasn’t for those pesky users!

Cheers

Tim…

This is totally cool!

http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/

Cheers

Tim…

It seems like every other post I read mentions AJAX somewhere. The whole AJAX thing seems like a total farse to me. Let’s take a quick walk through the recent history of application development:

• Back in the day everything was host-based. Everyone had dumb terminals linked to the corporate mainframe.
• Fast forward a few years and host-based computing is evil and client-server rules.
• Fast forward a few years and client-server is evil and everybody wants multi-tier architecture and browser clients, which has essentially moved us back to a variation on the host-based systems with clunky interfaces.
• Bringing us to the present, where people still want their multi-tier environments, but they want client-server style flexibility in their interfaces.

So AJAX comes to the rescue, providing client-server style controls and functionality in web pages by roping together lots of stuff we’ve been using for years. The problem is, it brings all those old problems of cross-browser compatibility back into focus.

I read an article by Frank Nimphius this morning, where he mentions some of the problems with running AJAX applications in browsers, like the “Back” button, and asks if we need an AJAX client, rather than a browser. I understand what he’s saying, but I think he’s asking the wrong question. AJAX is a cobbled together solution for a bigger problem. The problem is the browser environment, so I say fix the problem.

Browsers are good at what they were designed for, but they don’t do complex client-server type work without using poor makeshift solutions like AJAX. You can use ActiveX controls or Java Applets, but neither is universally accepted and both suffer similar problems to AJAX with respect to browser navigation. What we really need is a new standard web application client or runtime environment with all the required functionality built in. That way complex web development can move out of the dark ages. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but it’s got to beat the rag-tag AJAX solutions I’ve seen so far!

Cheers

Tim…

It’s one year ago today that I started blogging and here is the first blog post.

It’s been a year of random posts, with the odd bit of Oracle information thrown in for good measure. Thanks to anyone who’s followed the blog. I’ll try and maintain the low quality nature of this publication 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

During lane swimming, when using a lane marked as clockwise, do you:

1. Float on your back in the middle of the lane.
2. Walk a bit, swim a bit, then walk a bit more.
3. Swim anti-clockwise.
4. Swim up and down the middle of the lane, making it impossible for others to overtake.
5. Swim diagonally.
6. Stop and rest part way through the length.
7. All of the above.

Judging by the actions of one woman today, number (7) seems to be the correct answer! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

A Dell server goes bang. Dell send an engineer to swap the motherboard. The server still doesn’t work, but now the beep error code implies the memory is shot. Dell refuse to ship more parts and will only provide a complete kit swap. The estimated time for memory would be a couple of hours, compared to 6 and 14 days for the kit swap! As you can imagine we were not amused.

Cheers

Tim…

The temperature in the UK has been pretty high recently, which has had an adverse affect on the temperature in our server room. It’s only taken three years of moaning, but I think the message is finally starting to sink in, helped by the fact that some of our kit is switching itself off with heat errors and one server has burnt out completely.

Why is it people will spend loads of money on fault tolerant kit, then think it’s OK to install it in a sauna?

I must admit to feling a certain amount of satisfaction whilst saying, “I told you so!” 🙂

Cheers

Tim…