DISQUS

Sounds good to me Eddie. Darn all that Oracle blogging activity!

By the way, when we read from the aggregator, is there a limit in the number of posts it sends us on a request? I note you're definitely aggregating my blog (because I can search the OraNa.info history), yet my posts don't always come through the aggregator.

Thanks for the great service. I really appreciate the time you put into these things for the benefit of others.

Ah, I note the Oracle wiki has more content (authored by Marius) here http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Customer+Selected+S....

CM

Thanks Jake and Marius. I've added a comment to the Open World Blog too.

Cheers,

CM.

Jake, do you have any comments on the selection process please? How many presentations will be picked, does Oracle have veto, what if there is no proposed presenter etc?

Thanks,

CM.

@Jake: I note that some of the submissions are suggestions and ideas, why are others are real sessions proposed by presenters. While ideas and discussions around this are great because they may lead onto presentations, a proposed presentation is a much more substantial beast and needs to be flagged in some way so people can browse them.

Also there is a h3ll of a lot of ideas already building up with the usual duplicates and cross ideas that needs careful pruning, otherwise the usual duplicate clutter is going to happen.

I've worked at too many organisations and government departments where somebody who thinks they know something about computing (normally a PhD) has built some system (in my personal experience a database), which at some stage then needs to be integrated into the rest of the organisation. It quickly becomes apparent the original "guru" had no idea about normalisation (in terms of RDBMSs), change control, scalability, coding standards, standard software selection, security etc etc etc.... where do you want me to stop? And then the IT departments get stuck with the #*@!, the politics of trying to educate others why it's #*@!, and then the maintenance of a system that they didn't build in the first place. Lucky IT.

I wont admit to a CS grad will give you this stuff, but the hackers out there certainly don't. They should stick to playing with their iPods.

(hopefully this doesn't sound like too much of a bitter and twisted Sunday morning post ;)

CM.

Hi Eddie

Not sure I agree with you on this one in all cases and you hint that you nearly always use named notation, implying there are cases when you use positional notation. In particular I'll point out 2 cases where positional notation is typically used:

1) Oracle has a number of predefined functions that we rarely ever use named parameter notation for. eg upper, lower etc.

2) If you have a simple function with 1 parameter such as get_name(id IN person.id%TYPE), the code is self explanatory without the named notation extension and I think overkill for simple cases:

DECLARE
person_id person.id%TYPE := 5;
name person.name%TYPE;
BEGIN
name := somepackage.get_name(person_id);
END;

Besides these trivial cases, I agree with the rest of your points. Now you need a post on writing "meaningful parameter names" ;)

Regards,

CM.

I've been waiting for reports that Oracle bloggers brought the internet down with the power of 8..... but no luck so far.

Like others comments here I've been hanging out for every "tag" post too. It's been a great exercise in removing the elitism shroud from Oracle staff and (non-Oracle) bloggers out there. I found it tough at OOW not knowing much about the people I met to crack the ice, but now I'm going to track a few people down and see if we can build on relationships based on common themes published in the tag posts.

Howard is entitled to his point of view and he can react in any way he sees fit, but so are we.

Keep up the good work Jake. Do you have any other fun games for us all to play? How about tag*32 ;)

CM.

@Eddie: good luck with your user group activities.

In answer to your question about what most people seem to get out of it, from my experience in Australia, networking is the top benefit mentioned. Seems to be a common theme that people like meeting people who are interested in the same thing.

As for the other comments here regards user groups in general, these groups are fraught with politics, pain in the butt personalities, agenda seeking organisations etc etc etc. But so what? The biggest threat to the great benefits of user groups is nah-sayers. Nothing gets done without someone throwing in effort.

Couple hints I'll give you regards running a user group:

1) Delegate delegate delegate. Avoid burning yourself out. You'll do a much better job long term and still be happy with what you're doing.

2) Work to promote enthusiasm on your user group committee continuously. Find the people who are keen and work with them really hard to get things done.

3) (as follow on) Those who put in opinions and actually do something about it are worth every penny. Committees are fraught with people who are all opinions and complaints, but never do anything. Recognize early on who your talent and dedicated team members are.

4) Start looking for a number of potential successors now, and have a long term strategy of building them up for the job.

Good luck. It's great learning opportunity and once you're out of it, you'll really appreciate what you've done. And the best bit, you might be earning big $$$$ in the Oracle arena as a money grabbing consultant (humour for anyone misreading this statement), but at least you're putting something back into the community for nothing.... that's a pretty special commitment. Well done.

Enjoy your Christmas and New Years mate!

CM.

Like you, the cynic in me says it sounds like a move by corporations to take over control of blogging and the openness it has created in their business.

The slightly smaller (or greater?) cynic in me tells me its just a bunch of money grabbing high flyers trying to cash in on the movement, and grab big bucks from the corporations that can afford it, with an area where the returns are intangible so the corporations would never know if they benefited or not, but should be "seen" to be participating.

Great business plan but now it's taken :(

I also note in the mission statement you referenced in the previous post, there isn't even a mention of the readers; did they forget something?

CM.

Hi

I attempted to send the following message to the Mix email address published above, but it bounced. The gist of my email was as follows (apologies for the cut n paste):

Hi Oracle Mix team

Well done on the new site. This has huge amounts of potential.

Regards the email confirmation process, this is currently failing for myself and as such I can't create ideas.

I've registered as Chris Muir, and have received the confirmation email asking me to click on one of the 2 confirm links. However on navigating back to the Oracle Mix website after clicking on either link, then selecting the Confirm button, my profile page still shows the following message:

"We haven't validated your email address yet, or your email is not an Oracle customer email address. Please check your email and confirm your address."

In turn I can't create ideas for the same reason.

Could you please look into this issue? I notice others are lodging the same complaint under the Messages for the Oracle Mix group within the site.

Thanks & regards,

Chris Muir

Oh boy, I can only agree with 110%.

Okay, there are definitely some very small program units that don't need any explanation, but....

Often I discover some hellish program unit (read: large), that looks beautiful, but no comments. Questions like where did the original coder intend the routine to be called from, what business requirements was it trying to hit, what are the preconditions and postconditions on the unit running, are there any hacks in the code to get around bugs or unusual situations, if a workaround for a database issue -- what version of the database did the bug occur in ..... and so on.

"Just" readable code without any comments just doesn't convey this sort of information.

The fact of the matter is most developers don't like writing documentation, they're too lazy, and this is another reason developers as a group get a bad wrap.

I think a lot of developers who took the whole readable code band wagon on board, took it outside of the context that you need to comment when commenting is necessary. They are both useful techniques.

Phew! So much pent up rage for a Saturday morning ;)

Cheers,

CM.

Congratz on the Oracle ACE Director nomination Eddie, very well deserved. I look forward to meeting you in person at this year's OOW.

Cheers,

CM.

Thanks Jake. Yeah, sorry, I messed up on the post above.... basically doing too many things at once without enough sleep.

Keep up the good work with the blog. You've plenty of fresh content that I read frequently.

Cheers,

CM.

And apologies, I'm answering an email while posting on blogs. I meant "G'day Jake", not Justin in the 2 posts above.

CM.

Justin, also meant to say well done on what seems to be a lot of web2.0 work across OTN.

Can I make a suggestion regards the RSS feed page too please:

Most of those RSS feeds (such as Oracle Magazine) also have web pages at OTN. As well as providing the RSS link, how about a link back to the web page too (if it exists)? This will assist in navigating around OTN and for those who are disinclined to read RSS feeds, a link to the useful web page instead.

Cheers,

CM.

G'day Justin

I managed to track down a number or Oracle related RSS feed/aggregators and post about them last month. Check out:

http://one-size-doesnt-fit-all.blogspot.com/200...

Cheers,

CM.

Sorry Jake, I dunno. You may have been caught up in the whole Web 2.0 marketing shmozzle, and my feeling your timing is far more premature than 3-5 years? I think more like 10+ years or not even then before you can walk into 50% or more businesses and seeing email not being used in replacement of some other computer specific technology. I'm not saying the other technologies wont make an impact, but predicting the death of email is premature.

In my experience, most workers are still coming to terms with email, including IT staff, let alone the other social network tools -- and it will take a long time for the older ones to move on. Just because teenagers, web-Ajax coding monkeys, blogosphere and the new 2007+.com crowd think this area is the beez-kneez, in reality we're all the tip of the iceberg. Our experience is not the majority's experience and business moves waaaaaaaaay slower then the cool internet stuff. And remember the majority of people in business couldn't really give a st*ff about the technology, they have a business to run.

In turn organisations have invested heavily in email servers, but I've been at a number of sites where messaging services (and more) can't even be used, thanks to firewalls and lack of standards (in terms of messaging services, and adoptance of new technologies).... and managers have no interest in wasting (the preceived) time on it.... this is not the case everywhere, but is definitely the majority of my experience.

In turn, especially in IT, once a technology becomes so main stream such as email, it'll take it a long time to drag it down.

So in summary I guess I just disagree.

Cheers,

CM.

Eddie, thanks very much for the time and effort for following this up.

Haha! I gained 22 positions. I've Tom in my sights! ;)

Cheers

CM.

G'day Eddie

If you'd like a hand updating the list I'll be happy to help you in the near future. I'm currently blocked out till mid August, so what say we schedule a date in then, divide the work by two and go through the entire list then?

Cheers,

CM.