Jack fixes things. Not washing machines and stuff like that. He fixes situations for people. It’s a job that takes him outside the law and means he has to separate himself from most of the things society think of as normal. It also recently separated him from his girlfriend when she found out his job doesn’t involve fixing household appliances. Now he’s got to fix a situation for his ex girlfriend involving a family curse that started generations ago in India.

Followers of the blog know I love The Dresden Files and the Felix Castor series. Repairman Jack hooks into exactly the same groove for me. Harry Dresden, Felix Castor and Jack are the same type of men. Strong, self-reliant and they get the job done in an action-packed way. Very appealing for a cowardly computer geek like myself… I’m looking forward to the next 14 books in the series.

Cheers

Tim…

I put the card in the machine and it booted up and I had a display again. Trouble was, GNOME shell had failed to start and I was knocked back into fallback mode, that looks a bit like GNOME2. Sigh. Forgot to check the the card against support for the ever-so-picky GNOME shell.

I now have a choice to make:

• Ditch it and get a new graphics card… again…
• Switch to KDE or XFCE… shudder…
• Stay with the fallback option until Fedora 17, when allegedly GNOME shell will not be so bloody fussy.

I’m probably going to stick with the last option as I can’t be bothered to waste any more time on this. All of a sudden, Windows and Mac OS X don’t seem so bad after all…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I don’t need a lecture on why GNOME shell is so picky. I know all the arguments. I’ve read all the crap. Doesn’t mean it’s not a pain in the ass when you buy a newer and more powerful graphics card and you end up with an inferior user experience.

It has the “shot on my camcorder” feel, like Cloverfield, and has a kind of Akira feel to me. While I was watching it I kept expecting someone to say, “With great power comes great responsibility!”

The effects are pretty cool. At the start they look like they are going to be a bit low budget, but by the end they get pretty impressive.

Nice mix of teen angst, super powers and destruction. Obviously not targeted for 42 year old men, but it hit the mark for me. I guess that says a lot.

Cheers

Tim…

Currently, the G+ badge options are not particularly WordPress widget friendly. Even the small option is a bit wider than the width of the sidebar on my blog theme.

I’m not planning on double-posting, so feel free to connect to both profiles if you like. You won’t get everything twice. For the time being, my regular G+ profile is what I’ll be using and the ORACLE-BASE.com G+ page is really only present to support the badge for those people who like to show the site some love.

Cheers

Tim…

Once I got a link checker that didn’t put me at risk of a jail sentence, things got a little more depressing. A very large number of my articles contain broken links to Oracle documentation. As I started looking at links it became apparent that Oracle have used at least 3 main URLs for documentation over the years:

• http://download-west.oracle.com/docs (8i -> 10gR2)
• http://download.oracle.com/docs (11gR1 -> 11gR2)
• http://docs.oracle.com/ (post 11gR2 stuff)

The versions listed are based on the links I’ve added in my articles. If you check today, all/most docs come from the “http://docs.oracle.com” address.

This in itself shouldn’t present a problem, because any company with an involvement in the web knows that URLs should never change. If by chance you do have to change something, you put a redirect in place. The problem is, Oracle don’t do this, or at least not consistently. Check out the following three URLs:

• http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96566/rcmdupdb.htm#441628
• http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96566/rcmdupdb.htm#441628
• http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96566/rcmdupdb.htm#441628

They are the same document, just using the three base URLs I mentioned previously. If you click them, you’ll notice the first one fails and the following two work. My guess is Oracle have created a 301 permanent redirect from http://download.oracle.com/docs to http://docs.oracle.com, but not bothered to maintain the http://download-west.oracle.com/docs URL, thereby breaking just about every link to its docs on the internet that references anything older than about 11gR1. That includes forums (including their own), blog posts, documents containing URLs etc. It’s just a nightmare.

So PLEASE Oracle:

• Stop changing URLs.
• When you do change them, PLEASE use rewrites/redirects properly.
• Remember, your rewrites/redirects should be permanent, not just long enough for search engines to update their indexes.

This would solve the vast majority of my gripes about the links to the Oracle docs…

Notes:

• For those not familiar with web servers, this kind of rewrite/redirect for a whole domain name is really simple. It’s one line in your “.htaccess” file, not a separate one for each page, so I’m not asking for the world here.
• I am aware there are other issues with changing URLs at Oracle that a blanket redirect would not solve. I’m not even going to start on whitepapers and PDFs…

Cheers

Tim…

• When I started the website, over 11 years ago, my knowledge of HTML was very limited. In going back through all the pages to clean up the logical corruption it gave me an opportunity to clean up the HTML as well. I don’t think anyone on the outside looking in would notice the difference, but it makes me happier to know things are a little more in order.
• I used my web stats to decide which pages to sort out first, figuring it would make sense to focus on the stuff that people are actually reading first. That in itself was a bit of a revelation. There are a lot of very old articles on the site and I kinda figured people don’t look at them much these days. It appears that’s not exactly true. This presented a couple of problems. First, some articles were really bad! I managed to turn a blind eye to this when I thought people weren’t reading them, but once I saw people were still hitting them I decided to rewrite them. That took a lot more time than I expected. In other cases, all that was required were more obvious links to the updated content. Many articles now have “Related articles” links at the top.
• I use a home-grown CMS to manage the site. This process has forced me improve it and fix some of the things that were bugging me.

Even with all the positives, I still feel a little frustrated by all this. The time this has eaten up has impacted badly on my to-do list. I started this process the evening after I attended Cary Millsap‘s Mastering Oracle Trace Data course. As a result, I’ve not reviewed the material from the course, or even downloaded the free tools yet. That’s pretty high up my list.

Cheers

Tim…

• iPhone4 vs HTC EVO

And you loved this,

• Mongo DB Is Web Scale

• Oracle Cloud Computing

Cheers

Tim…

I’ve made my feeling know about 3D several times and this film changes nothing. The 3D element is an expensive gimmick I can live without. What’s more, the 3D in this film is pretty crappy. It looks like a post-production thing, rather than being filmed in 3D. It just so happens the cinema I went to was only showing it in 3D so I had little choice.

3D gripe aside, what did I think of the film? I liked it. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table. In fact it’s very much like the previous two films starring Kate Beckinsale, but it is crammed with iconic slow-mo shots that scream cool to people like me who are fans of women kicking ass in films. Just like the Resident Evil films, if they keep making them, I’ll keep watching them, pretty much regardless of plot or quality…

Cheers

Tim…

Now I’m not saying I would want to run Oracle on Windows out of choice. I’m a Linux fanboy, as you probably know, but even the most staunch Linux fan would have to agree that Oracle installs on Linux require quite a few prerequisite steps, even with the oracle-validated package. There is just nothing to do on Windows except put in the CD (iso image) and go…

Anyway, having spent a minute thinking about the “dark side”, I’m going back to Linux…

Cheers

Tim…

There are two free e-books to be won. The two people that contact Sunil Chakravarthy (sunilc@packtpub.com) giving the best reason why they want a free copy of this book win.

Please don’t contact me about this offer. It’s not my book and it’s not my competition. Good luck.

Cheers

Tim…