DISQUS

Personally I'm still stuck in the Web1.0 meeting paradigm: lots of people gathered together in a single room. This model usually means that there is usually a chunk of the meeting which I'm interested in and a much bigger chunk that doesn't concern me. But I still have to be in the room, because the interesting bits are sprinkled throughout the meeting: more curate's egg than long tail.

The appeal of virtual meetings is that by abolishing the need to be physically co-located we can be mentally absent too. We can get on with something useful while keeping a weather eye/ear on the meeting's stream. Of course, the useful task mustn't be something too important (no brain surgery, bomb defusing or tweak data in the production database). But anything would be more productive than abstract doodling in the margins of a notebook.

Cheers, APC

@David H

I know what you're saying and I acknowledge that you may be correct: maybe I should give Mix a second chance.

However, I already write a blog, answer questions in the OTN forums, chair the UKOUG Development SIG, have a family and do my job. So I haven't got a lot of spare time. I've decided to run with OracleCommunity.net for a while. If that doesn't work out perhaps I'll come back to Oracle Mix with my tail between my legs.

Cheers, APC

>> If APC still used Mix

You don't get a second chance to make a first impression ;)

If the initial software had worked better then I probably would have stuck with Mix longer to figure out what it could be used for. If it had had a focused use then maybe I would have put up with the poor navigation. But as it was, the site was deluged with curious people doing all sorts of things but the software made it hard for me at least to get a handle on it.

This is where Oracle Community wins. The basic software works, so that means we can focus on what we can do and what others are doing.

Cheer, APC

Funnily enough, after writing the above I clicked back onto Reddit to find I was now logged in. Ho hum.

Cheers, APC

I see the Reddit site boasts "register in seconds". Well I've had several cracks at it without apparent success. perhaps the site is running v v slow, perhaps there's something wrong with my account. Unfortunately, the interface is so suck-y it is hard too tell.

On the bright side it is good to be reminded that the one thing worse than a poor web2.0 interface is a poor web1.0 one.

Cheers, APC

>> for putting Conference 2.0 (I think I just made that up)

Alas, as I have discovered myself when claiming fresh coinages, the first rule of the web is "Someone else thought of it first: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Conference+2.0

Cheers, APC

Well I think that's precisely the sort of spartan approach to features we shhould expect from a man who names his blog after vi. :)

Cheers, APC

>> this eclectic collection merely reflects my antique collection of vinyl so I also resurrected my last.fm account in an effort to reflect more recent musical tastes.

so that's "more recent" in the sense of music that sounds like it could have been made in 1979 except the production's better....

Cheers, APC

May I be the first to point out that strictly an acronym is an abbreviation that is pronounced as a word. So SOAP is an acronym but XML is not.

Of course, acronym is one of those words whose meaning is shifting through misuse (like enormity to mean magnitude).

Cheers, APC

P.S. Bonus fact SOA is the Dutch abbreviation for STD (the medical term not the telecom one)

Hmmm, I get enough e-mail as it is. I think ZapTXT just transforms a problem rather than solving it.

Still, it's nice to know such things exist. Thanks for pointing it out.

Cheers, APC

>> Enquiring minds still want to know whether Andrew ever did get reunited with his lost socks and underpants though.

LT Lost Property are on the case but alas have yet to find it. Thanks for asking though.

Cheers, APC

in fact, I link to and quote part of his article in my post above.

Doh! How dumb does that make me :(

Have you read Philip Lenssen's article "Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb"? It's well worth reading

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-08-24-n14.html

Cheers, APC

Oracle have launched their own toolbar for searching "DBA resources on OTN":

http://www.oracle.com/technology/toolbar/install/index.html

But as it only supports IE (at the moment) I haven't installed it.

Cheers, APC

Robert Anton Wilson observed that it only takes twenty years for a liberal to become a conservative, without changing a single idea.

What he had in mind was the uptake of ANSI notation over the Oracle (+) way of doing things. Probably.

Cheers, APC

Congratulations, Eddie. You have done many things to prod the rest of us OraBloggers into raising our game.

Be sure Tom Haunert gives you several copies of the magazine so you can present them to your folks - and your employer, if you think they might approve of blogging ;)

Cheers, APC

Well "guru" is derived from the sanskrit word for weighty and it is only in that sense that I may be regarded as a guru :) But I do have a beard.

Cheers, APC

Hi

I thought I'd introduce myself was I suspect some people confuse us (the A in APC stands for Andrew).

Cheers, APC

I note that they don't list Feuerstein's Oracle PL/SQL Programming in the O'Reilly section. Maybe they figure everybody in the world's got that one already.

Cheers, APC

Well this is just the old argument about NULL. Arguably all columns in a database should be NOT NULL, with suitable values decided upon for each meaning we might assign to NULL (inapplicable, unknown, file not found, etc). This is, of course, particularly tricky to implement for numeric, without using magic numbers. I know of no database anywhere that does this. We all live with NULLs.

Still this did remind me of a happy few weeks I spent on a Forms 3 project many years ago. One of the clients wanted all the flag columns to be trivalent. I got chosen to go through all the Forms, making the flag columns optional, removing the default values and changing the code to handle null values. Even now it still sends shudders down my spine.

Cheers, APC

I noticed that yesterday afternoon (BST). Then it only seemed to be aggregating posts from the Oracle employees' blogs but I see now it's picking up stories from us civilians too.

The problem with releasing so often is that they haven't sorted a mechanism for exporting and importing configuration data (preferences, update centre URLs). This is particularly odd given that there's apparently been over thirty builds between March 2 and March 7. I guess The SQL Dev team don't tweak many preferences...

Aha. When I posted the comment I got told that my comment had been intercpeted by a spam blocker and it looks like it stripped out the URL I posted. google for splasho superbrowser and you'll find it.

Cheers, APC

Thanks for fixing that Eddie.

BTW having you seen this site, showing what Firefox looks like with all of the 100 most popular extensions?

Shame that Oracle News isn't there (yet)

Cheers, APC

And what's wrong with GOTOs anyway? haven't they been officially considered not harmful for sometime now?

They have? Nobody tells me anything.

Actually I was thinking about the NTK newsletter and not some computer science pronouncement. I don't think Dijkstra has revoked his fatwa. Still, if you've ever had to follow the possible paths through a function that has over a dozen RETURN statements you might find yourself pining for a nice GOTO exit_point.

GOTOs are like triggers: there's nothing inherently wrong with the construct, it's simply the potential for abuse that renders their use suspect. Simply avoiding the use of GOTO statement does not make our code well-structured.