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Happy Birthday!

Posted 14 May 2008 † Jonathan Lewis § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Random Twitter Effects

Hard to believe I haven’t blogged about Twitter in a while. Like New Web in general, Twitter has reached that cusp where early adopters are calling it “established” and new people are kicking the tires.

Lots of them.

The recent departure of Blaine Cook, Twitter’s former chief architect, could mean any number of things. Many speculate that he was a casualty of the downtime bug; if this is true, I really feel bad for him, since Twitter 1) has no apparent business model and 2) is Twitter and not mission-critical.

There have been no reports of anything more serious than annoyance due to a Twitter outage.

When it’s up, Twitter is a great vehicle for support, e.g. Eddie’s tweet @me last night about this post (incidentally, the pop-up error will be cleaned up this week). And as more people jump into tweeting, I’ve noticed new, interesting effects.

Twitter != Private
People think Twitter is private conversation because many use it for replies to people they follow, like IM. Well, guess what? Unless you have protected updates, everyone can see your tweets.

Like many, I Tweet Scan to monitor what Twitter says about certain keywords, like “appslab” and “jkuramoto”, a common and understandable misspelling of my Twitter handle, jkuramot. Tweet Scan produces an RSS feed of any keyword search, so I can consume any updates in digest form.

One keyword I follow is “oracle”. This makes for some funny reading, since people also treat Twitter as a quick way to vent.

Just as with blogging, the lesson here is assume people will find what you say eventually. Armed with knowledge, tweet on and know it’s not private or protect your updates.

Beta Invite Market
I’ve recently started using Twitter to get beta invites, which in turn has helped me find some interesting people to follow. For example, I had 20 Fire Eagle invites, most of which were claimed by readers. I tweeted about the remaining ones and many people responded.

I’ve used Twitter to get invited to Brightkite and to invite people to SocialThing, Fire Eagle, Brightkite and Evernote. Spreading invites via blog is a tried-and-true way to gain positive points with your readers (incidentally, sound off in comments if you want invites to any of these), but Twitter adds a bartering dimension.

Here’s an example. This is my favorite so far.

At first blush, it seems insane, but if the beer is free already, then this is a good deal. Better than giving away beer for free. I wonder if anyone replied . . .

Drive-by Following
Through the beta invites market, I realized that many people drive-by follow, i.e. they follow someone for a short period of time, then remove them.

I had a vague sense this was true, since my followers count fluctuates up and down without any discernable reason. It makes sense when you add the previous two observations together though.

If you want something, e.g. a beta invite, use Tweet Scan to follow references to it, then swoop in when you find what you want, and then remove the person. Makes perfect sense.

I don’t take it personally when people I follow don’t follow me in return, and I enjoy watching stuff like this grow out of the Twitterverse.

Have you made the leap into Twitter recently? What do you think of it? Are you a diehard user? How do you feel about the recent influx of n00bs? Has Twitter jumped the shark?

Sound off in comments.

Posted 14 May 2008 † Jake § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

“Clinton exposes Obama’s vulnerability: white voters” DUH!

Ran across the following article in USA Today, May 13, 2008 - which means of course that I was staying in a hotel.

The Forum: Clinton exposes Obama's vulnerability: white voters

And my reaction? Well, duh....

I have to admit that I am surprised and inspired by how far Obama has gotten in the presidential race (and it does look like he has actually garnered the Democratic nomination. Simply amazing). I think it is a reflection of at least these two factors:

** A major change in the attitudes and basic life perspectives of young people (and by that, I - almost 50 years old - mean anyone under 35 or so). From talking to my kids, their friends, and others, I really do get a sense that they see things differently. That race and gender and just plain difference is not such a big deal to them. And that the way things have been done in the past have only led to rather awful situations that do not give them confidence in existing leadership.

** The depth of revulsion and disgust that so many Americans have for the Bush Administration. Bush, Cheney and others have lied through their teeth, manipulated us, I am certain broken many, many laws, caused the deaths of more Americans than were killed in the 9/11 attack, and are directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis. Clinton voted for the war and has not even found the basic decency to apologize. The Pentagon is sucking up so much of our money that our country is falling apart.

So why not, many people seem to be saying, why not try something - and someone - new? [And while Clinton being a woman is new, Clinton the politician is nothing new.]

Having said all that, the US is still a very racist country. OF COURSE there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Americans who cannot tolerate the thought of anyone but a European-American male being the President. Even if that anyone is so obviously smarter, more eloquent, more thoughtful, more compassionate, more honest than our current President.

So, OF COURSE, the fact that Obama is NOT WHITE is a key "vulnerability" for the man.

But what is less obvious and much more alarming is the fact that Clinton has decided that she should capitalize on this vulnerability and play the race card as she (and her husband) has. We have come to expect Willie Horton attacks from the Republicans. But Clinton has run a campaign that has me (and, it seems, many others) questioning her ethics and judgement.

I suppose that if through some miracle or disaster Clinton did get nomination, I would still vote for her - though it is getting harder and harder to acknowledge that.

What I do find odd is that so many Clinton supporters vociferously claim that if (when) Obama gets the nomination they will not vote for him.

Why wouldn't they vote for him? As far as I can tell his most frequent response to Clinton's attacks is to criticize them as "political silliness." Obama has generally taken the "high road" and maintained a sense of personal dignity. Why would a Clinton supporter punish him for their own candidate's lousy performance?

Ah well....hopefully soon this will be past. Obama will be the Democractic nominee. Clinton will vow her support. He will then pick a white male with a solid national security background. And then he will engage in electoral battle with a man who, while a very pleasant and likeable guy (he actually enjoys visiting Jon Stewart on the Daily Show - can you imagine Bush doing that?) also promotes truly awful policies, worse than Bush in some ways.
Posted 14 May 2008 † Steven Feuerstein § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

drop all objects

warning: the script below is destructive and not 100% safe

A question was posted on the french forums of developez.net about how to drop all objects of an user. The drop user toto cascade; followed by create user toto identified by tott; was suggested as an easy answer, but I commented that create user must re-grant quotas, roles, system privileges, table privileges. Create user must also set the correct security status of the account (password, case-sensitive password, lock status, expiration status, profile), and the password history and failed login history is lost. Also it must set the default and temporary tablespaces.

It is also important to note that “drop user” requires dba privileges, when dropping the own object does not require privileges

To drop all objects I tried with plsql and a dictionary loop.

select object_type, count(*) 
from user_objects 
group by object_type;

OBJECT_TYPE           COUNT(*)
------------------- ----------
INDEX                        6
TYPE BODY                    1
INDEXTYPE                    1
PROCEDURE                    1
JAVA CLASS                   2
JAVA RESOURCE                1
JAVA SOURCE                  1
FUNCTION                     1
TABLE                       10
TRIGGER                      1
TYPE                         1
MATERIALIZED VIEW            1
DATABASE LINK                1
PACKAGE BODY                 1
CLUSTER                      1
DIMENSION                    1
OPERATOR                     1
SEQUENCE                     1
PACKAGE                      1

19 rows selected.

purge recyclebin;

Purge successfully completed.

begin
for f in (
select object_type, object_name from user_objects
where object_type in (
‘MATERIALIZED VIEW’)) loop
execute immediate
‘drop materialized view “‘||f.object_name||’” preserve table’;
end loop;
for f in (
select table_name from user_tables) loop
execute immediate
‘drop table “‘||f.table_name||’” cascade constraints’;
end loop;
for f in (
select object_type, object_name from user_objects
where object_type in (
‘DIMENSION’,'CLUSTER’,'SEQUENCE’,
‘VIEW’,'FUNCTION’,'PROCEDURE’,
‘PACKAGE’,'SYNONYM’,'DATABASE LINK’,
‘INDEXTYPE’)) loop
execute immediate ‘drop ‘||
f.object_type||’ “‘||f.object_name||’”‘;
end loop
for f in (
select object_type, object_name from user_objects
where object_type in (
‘JAVA SOURCE’)) loop
execute immediate ‘drop ‘||
f.object_type||’ “‘||f.object_name||’”‘;
end loop;
for f in (
select object_type, object_name from user_objects
where object_type in (
‘JAVA RESOURCE’)) loop
execute immediate ‘drop ‘||
f.object_type||’ “‘||f.object_name||’”‘;
end loop;
for f in (
select object_type, object_name from user_objects
where object_type in (
‘JAVA CLASS’)) loop
execute immediate ‘drop ‘||
f.object_type||’ “‘||f.object_name||’”‘;
end loop;
for f in (
select object_type, object_name from user_objects
where object_type in (
‘TYPE’,'OPERATOR’)) loop
execute immediate ‘drop ‘||
f.object_type||’ “‘||
f.object_name||’” force’;
end loop;
end;
/

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.


select * from user_objects

no rows selected.

All objects of the current schema disappeared, do not try this as sys, this script is destructive with no confirmation

addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Flaurentschneider.com%2Fwordpress%2F2008%2F05%2Fdrop-all-objects.html'; addthis_title = 'drop+all+objects'; addthis_pub = '';
Posted 14 May 2008 † Laurent Schneider § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Vote for APEX, somebody gets worried

Posted 14 May 2008 † Dimitri Gielis § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Sometimes you love you chose Oracle

Posted 13 May 2008 † Dimitri Gielis § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Interesting notes

Posted 13 May 2008 † Jonathan Lewis § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

I really need to get a new passport!

Posted 13 May 2008 † Peter Scott § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Mix Updates

Rich, ENTP and I spent last week fixing some issues in Mix that you may have seen. Suggest a session for OpenWorld has driven steady traffic into Mix, and we’re rushing to fix bugs that people have encountered.

Virtually all of the recent fixes have been around suggest a session, which makes sense because that’ where people are congregating. Here’s a list of fixes to issues that you may or may not have seen:

  • The comments count is now correct for session ideas and other ideas recently created. We fixed a regression that prevented the comments count from iterating.
  • The member count for private groups is correct. We also expanded the number of My Groups show from four to eight per page.
  • A few Oracle people were stuck in a loop after they signed in for the first time. That was a bummer, and now it’s fixed.
  • Another strange regression prevented people from adding products to their profiles. Fixed now.
  • We expanded the user cards, so full titles show in lists, like the People page or group member lists.
  • Comments on older ideas were getting out of chronological order, back in proper order now.
  • Posts to groups were failing silently. They aren’t failing at all now. There’s a unique constraint throwing an error for blogs posts, which will be fixed this week.
  • UI elements added for suggest a session looked pretty janky in IE6, surprise! We cleaned them up a bit.
  • Ideas needed a reindex; it was throwing Error 500.
  • And finally, Topper found a voting bug that allowed people to vote for ideas multiple times.

I saved that one for last in the interest of transparency. Eddie (jokingly) tweeted what some of you may (seriously) be thinking:

(

Maybe you noticed that Dan’s session suggestions rocketed to the top of the Greatest tab. That was me voting early and often to replicate the bug. Sorry Dan.

Before you panic, rest assured we 1) fixed the bug and 2) reset the vote count.

I also caved into demands that voting be more transparent. You can now see the people who have voted for a session you suggested, or at the first ten as of now. There’s a bug preventing paging beyond the first ten voters. No worries, it’s fixed and waiting to be deployed.

So now you’ll know who your friends are and who they should be.

Anyway, sorry for any frustration caused around bugs. Courtenay (from ENTP) and Rich have been working crazy hours to get these bugs fixes and deployed.

As always, let us know if you find bugs or have enhancement suggestions.

Posted 13 May 2008 † Jake § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Learn Oracle: Triggers

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

Today I will be writing about triggers. One of the questions I get fairly often is "what is the difference between a function, a procedure and a trigger?" I already wrote about functions and procedures in <a href="http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/oracle/guide/archives/learn-plsql-procedures-and-functions-13

Posted 13 May 2008 † An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °