Disqus - Latest Comments for jgarry

Re: ignorati - Blog in isolation

joel garry — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:35:34 -0000

They ought to give a foot button to the clerk, that turns off all cellular within face distance.

For my monthly train passes, metrolink (southern california) requires people to use automated machines, within a certain unspecified time window near the end/beginning of the month. Naturally, this overloads the system during rush hours, often the symptom is credit/debit card rejection for no apparent reason, causing people to try it again, and again, making the line longer, upsetting the people who need to catch the next infrequent train... I've learned to make a special trip to the station to avoid this. I've seen it happen on one machine and not on the one next to it, then the reverse a few minutes later.

Re: My Oracle Support Community to Launch Soon

joel garry — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:44:16 -0000

OK, I didn't spend too much time looking at this, but one thing caught my eye: No sharing code. WTF? We can hardly get people to say exactly what they are doing now! I'd quote some notorious forum posts, but I don't want to embarrass anybody specifically, since there are a lot of people generally who don't want to take the time to ask good questions.

Did they mean proprietary code?

I lol when I see anything called "My..." anyways. I can't help thinking of a local adult contemporary radio station that had a series of TV ads showing this lady dressing as purported listeners of other radio station formats. She looked better as a metalhead with bad attitude than as the adult contemporary!

Re: knowing me, knowing you - Blog in isolation

joel garry — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:00:03 -0000

This seemed an interesting need, so I started poking about on pseudodictionary.com to see if something might be there. Being me, I was of course thinking of a perhaps rude word like blofriend, so I put blo%friend in the search box there. Didn't find it, but the strange things it gave seemed interesting enough to mention here. Just putting in % gives a mysql message, among other things...

Actually meeting bloggers has generally confirmed what I've expected, except for physical appearance (even when I've seen pictures). In a couple of cases, it brought into focus traits I hadn't really noticed, but did afterwards. What they think of me... I couldn't say :-)

Re: Your First Computer?

jkuramot — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:43:37 -0000

Good stuff. All this begs the question: What do you run now? Or maybe it's more, what hasn't yet been shelved, given away, banished or used as a curiosity? I'm a bit surprised you gave up on Linux.

Or have you modded the Amiga to do Intertubes and what not?

Re: Your First Computer?

joel garry — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:14:48 -0000

I learned programming in high school, watfor on the LA unified school district IBM/360/40. We used these sticks with graphite in them to write letters in boxes on paper, which were shipped to keypunch operators and run, then the greenbar was shipped back to us. When I started being paid to program, I was fortunate enough to get an online programming job on a PDP 11/34. When the first apple II's came out, the newbie MBA's had me help them run... whatever. I used to hang out with a couple of Barton brothers, Fred and Mark. Apple gave Mark a Lisa, because he was writing Lisatalk. Later I lost track of them, but I hear Mark did the talking computer for the Mac introduction. Fred has the coolest job in the world http://www.the-robotman.com/ . So I didn't actually buy my own computer until I got a PDP 11/23 around 1983. Later, I traded some programming to a hardware guy to upgrade it to a 23+ (so it could address 4M of memory). I still have it in my basement. Later I got an Amiga 1000, I still have it in my office, sometimes boot it up to amaze people. 1992-ish I finally got a PC, built at some local place, upgraded various hardware as I needed to, eventually gave it to kids, not long ago finally banished it to the basement since it would be too much trouble to go past W98. Gave up on linux about 7 years ago, too much hassle to keep from being rootkitted.

Since you asked.

Re: Green is the New Black

jkuramot — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:47:18 -0000

Hmm, you may be on to something. I think it would need a pager to show how the cloud changes over time, probably by month. Interesting idea. Maybe Matt Topper or Eddie Awad can hack something together using their PHP-fu.

Re: Green is the New Black

joel garry — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:45:12 -0000

Example? Maybe it would be a new idea! :-)

Re: Green is the New Black

jkuramot — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:28:39 -0000

Good points, sustainability chief among them. I hadn't thought about batteries, good point.

I'm also a bit underwhelmed by all the hype cycles right now. We all know Detroit could have gone electric in the 80s if they had been sufficiently motivated.

The internal combustion engine is the punch-card reader of technology. Seriously, car engines haven't even jumped to the mainframe era yet. Why? No motivation to advance.

I'm not sure about the tag cloud. Because they aggregate all posts, time isn't a dimension. I've not seen a tag cloud applied to time. If you have an example, let me know, and I'll take a look.

Re: Green is the New Black

joel garry — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:21:45 -0000

I remember the first Earth Day, sitting in English class listening to the chattering and thinking "this could be good, but how much of it will wind up being hypocritical?"

This morning I'm listening to the radio, and the dj is going on about the governator getting out of a new Dodge Challenger with the big Hemi and being hypocritical... (google if you haven't heard, yes, I'm envious).

I can't help thinking of what will happen with all these hi-tech car batteries when they get old, or are defective - you thought exploding laptops were bad... not to mention all the extra energy used shipping them all around...

And those effing flourescents... they're hazardous waste!

But what really cheeses me off is the corporate hype. I won't even depress everyone with that rant. When it comes down to it, sustainability is what is important, and our basic economy is not built to support that, either locally or globally. Scarcity is the root of all economics, and now people are going, duh, we're going to run out of gallium...

Hey, remember the paperless office?

Speaking of colors, those tag clouds, could they imply a dimension of how recent the postings, with color of the tag indicating the date ordering? Red, someone's posted recently, blue old, etc.

Re: AppsLab FAQ: What Do You Do at Oracle?

jkuramot — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:33:58 -0000

A 12 year old, as a member of the digital generation, would probably understand it better.

Re: AppsLab FAQ: What Do You Do at Oracle?

joel garry — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:01:30 -0000

I forget who said it (David Brin?) but it went something like this:

If you can't explain to a 12 year old what you do in 6 sentences, you don't understand it.

Re: So Very Tired

joel garry — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:46:20 -0000

"... but what can I do."

Tom has discovered it, not to mention ancient Jewish sages: turn everything off at least a day per week.

Re: Oracle Blog World Exclusive

joel garry — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:04:06 -0000

There are no prompts on the "Leave a Reply" (XP Pro, IE 6 through a proxy server).

Re: The Top 10 Beards

joel garry — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:02:27 -0000

I've had a beard for a good part of my adult life, except when I blew it off lighting the water heater.