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open letter to Tony Hawks

This is the first in a series of 'open letters' when I send emails to people who I admire or have had a major influence on my life.

I will post my 'open letter' and subsequently will post the individual's response (with their permission).

To kick things off, an open letter sent in February 2008 to Tony Hawks (UK author, comedian and occasional 'talking head' on those interminable BBC series that look back to the 1980's).

Obviously, Tony has been very busy this year which must explain why I haven't had the common courtesy of a reply (yet).

Hi Tony

You don't know me (I bet a lot of your emails and fan letters start like this) but many years ago I saw you in the reception at the Chine Hotel in Bournemouth.

I recognised you, you saw me staring at you and gave me a weak, knowing smile, probably dreading the awkward exchange that you feared was about to happen.

I was considering coming up and introducing myself. However, I didn't for the following reasons:

  1. I had this awful mental image of stuttering 'Hi Tony. I've see you on TV and I think you are quite funny' while you were trying to query a mysterious charge on your hotel bill.
  2. My wife has never heard of you and would wonder why I was accosting a complete stranger at the reception desk.
  3. I had to go to check on my two little children who were at loose in the soft-play area.

Anyway, I never did make it over and many years later, I still think you are quite funny and I have just finished 'Piano in the Pyrenees' which I thoroughly enjoyed. So much so I am immediately going to buy your other books ('Fridge Round Ireland', 'Playing Moldovans at Tennis' and possibly 'One Hit Wonder').

All the best, Andy

PS. Tell those techies who designed your Web site, it doesn't appear to work on Firefox thus alienating a large part of your target audience.

Posted 19 November 2008 † Andy C § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Who Owns Your Address Book?

Friend of the ‘Lab Dan McCall sent this post my way last week.

The issue in question is whether your LinkedIn contacts could be considered the property of your employer, should you decide to part ways.

This is an intriguing question, considering:

  • LinkedIn’s self-described purpose as a “professional network”.
  • People use LinkedIn to keep track of their business contacts, sometimes from work computers.
  • Most networks on LinkedIn include a hodge-podge of contacts, friends and acquaintances made at various points during a person’s career both at the current employer and at prior employers.

I did some digging, and it seems there has already been some precedent established, at least in the UK. That case seemed to hinge on the timing and usage of the contacts, i.e. they were made near the end of the employee’s tenure, which ended on his accord, and they were subsequently used to start up his own competing business.

So, this points to a clear intent to use contacts against the former employer, but I’m sure future cases won’t be as clear cut. I tried to find some cases that handled the use of Rolodexes by former employees, since that would seem to point to a precedent.

There seems to be a big gray area here though. When hiring certain types of positions, e.g. sales, employers frequently judge candidates based heavily on their contacts. And how do you really categorize a business versus a personal contact.

Take a look at your LinkedIn/Facebook/MySpace contacts, your address book or business card Rolodex, and try to segment them into business and personal. There’s bound to be some overlap. Now, try to segment all the business contacts into job buckets. Again, it’s not that easy.

I tend to agree that the legal precedent will evolve around this issue rapidly over the next five years, much as the law has coalesced around how to handle corporate email. It’s only a matter of time before there is a high profile case to set the standard.

So, what do you think? I’m guessing pretty much everyone thinks their address book is personal, which is how I feel. Still I’m interested to get your thoughts and ideas on how this will play out in the future.

Find the comments.

Posted 19 November 2008 † Jake § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Best Invention of the Last 20 Years?

Meg’s comment on my post about TiVo (note to self, add TiVo to iPhone as a topic that gets lots of comments) got me thinking about the best of the last 20. She said:

I have said often that Tivo is the best invention of the last 20 years, in my life it is equal to the remote control and far surpasses things like wireless networking and digital cameras (which I love).

At its basest form, blogging is about opinion, i.e. your own and maybe some others for “balance”. Meg brings up an interesting point, not only about how much TiVo rocks, but also about comparison.

Is it fair to compare TiVo with wireless networking and digital cameras? So, for giggles, let’s have an good old town hall around this topic.

What is the best invention of the last 20 years? Bonus points for why. If you’re wondering, here are a few arbitrary ground rules.

There aren’t any, aside from the last 20 years bit. I tried to come up with some guidelines, but I’m pretty sure the fun (if any is to be had) of this exercise lies in an open field. I’m interested to hear thoughts.

Here are a few I like, obviously focused on stuff I use every day, not picking a favorite:

  • Digital Video Recorder, i.e. TiVo
  • The cellular telephone
  • The World Wide Web, i.e. consumer version of ARPANET
  • The digital camera
  • Satellite and cable television

This is food for thought. Find the comments and share your thoughts.

Posted 18 November 2008 † Jake § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Investigating the Oracle BI Management Pack for OBIEE and DAC

Although I posted the other week about having finished all my presentation writing, in fact I’ve actually been working on and off on a couple of fairly big demos. One, that I’ll try and post about soon, is an attempt to get all of the EPM 11.1.1 (or even, EPM 11.1.1.1) software up and running and integrated with OBIEE; the other is about getting the new BI Management Pack installed and running alongside OBIEE and the Oracle BI Applications.

The basic premise with the BI Management Pack is that it comes with Oracle Grid Control 10.2.0.4 and allows you to manage your BI infrastructure as well. Price-wise I think it adds about $11k to the standard $260k (list price) for OBIEE and it’s already pre-installed if you patch Grid Control up to 10.2.0.4, from the standard 10.2.0.1 version that’s on OTN. Once you apply the patch you then have to make sure the Usage Tracking and Scheduler tables are installed and configured for OBIEE, there’s an additional JMX agent to get running so that OEM can check all the OBIEE counters and so on, and then you can go through the “discovery” process detailed in the docs to register your OBIEE and DAC components.

Add Biee Target

This went fairly straightforward for me, the only issue I had was that the discovery process couldn’t initially “log on” to my Windows XP host until I made sure the account I was using had the “log on as a batch job” privilege. Once I did that, I was able to add my OBIEE BI Server, Presentation Server and Scheduler to the Grid Control list of targets, along with the DAC (Data Warehouse Administration Console, used for controlling BI Apps ETL jobs) repository. Once you’ve done this, and you’ve added the various Grid Control, Oracle Management Agent and Oracle Management Service elements to your OBIEE setup, your architectural diagram now looks like this:

Bi Mgmt Pack Arch

So once you’ve set this all up, what do you get?

Once you’ve set everything up, you access the various OBIEE components by initially selecting the host they’re on, and then locating the “targets” in the host’s list, like this:

Targets

The little “up arrow” next to the target shows whether, for example, the BI Server is currently running, the Scheduler is up and so on. Notice the DAC Server bit in the middle? That’s reporting on whether the DAC Server is up and running and able to service Execution Plan requests from the DAC Console.

The overview for the BI Server shows the general CPU usage, memory usage and so on of the BI Server process. You can also use this page to get a general overview of how “busy” the BI Server is, either currently in minute or so intervals, or over the past day, seven days or so on.

Bi Server General Performance

The Dashboard Reports tab shows you data from the Usage Tracking tables, so that you can see which dashboards (note, not requests/reports) are the most active, which users are making the most use of dashboards and so on.

Top Dashboards By Resource Usage

In my case, the OMMgr and admin users have been making the most use of the system.

Top By User

You can also see to what degree the cache has been used, the cache hit ratio (!) and so on - note that this is the BI Server cache, not the database buffer cache, before anyone gets too excited…

Cache Perforamnce

The Presentation Server pages give you a bit more information about how active the front-end of the application has been, how much activity the charting engine has undertaken and so on.

Presentation Server Details

Here’s the overview page, not much to see here though apart from uptime and load.

Presentation Server

Now something I did find interesting was integration with the DAC Server and Repository. The BI Management Pack links in to the DAC Repository and shows you graphs on ETL runs, for example:

Dac Etl Runs

Here’s a bit more detail on the specific ETL runs that have happened.

Dac Etl Runs 2

So, it looks quite interesting, particularly if you’re already a user of Grid Control 10g and you’d like to bring your OBIEE targets into the fold. For me, what’s particularly interesting isn’t what’s here at the moment; this is obviously a pretty early version of what’s possible, the data that Grid Control is getting from the various OBIEE servers is pretty basic and nothing really more than what you can get from the Usage Tracking tables and reports combined with operating system CPU, RAM and I/O reports; for me though, the interesting thing is what’s possible going into the future.

If you think about your complete Oracle BI stack - going from storage, through to the database, application server and then the various OBIEE servers, then you can see how a tool like this can help you manage performance and your architecture from top to bottom. If you get the classic request from users - “the system is running slow, can you take a look and find out what’s up?” - well with a system like this, if Grid Control in the future links together the reports that are running, with the application server session that hosted them, with the database query that provided the data, combined with the self-tuning (ASH, AWR etc) bits of the database, plus the diagnostics and so on that are in ASM and the general storage layer, well you can really imagine being able to trace a query through from report through to the underlying server system and understand just exactly where the time is going. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, the reports that the BI Management Pack produces are a bit simple and somewhat disjointed, but if the product management team start adding in the sort of advisors that we get from the database side - perhaps an “Aggregate Storage Advisor” that recommends aggregate tables or even Essbase cubes, then passes the details through to the Aggregate Persistence Wizard to create the required summaries; maybe a cache advisor that recommends caching, maybe even a request performance wizard that recommends changes to the underlying data structures including the addition of indexes or materialized views, well, that would be very interesting.

Of course this is all potentially quite a while off, so my next task is to come up with some sort of approach where we can use what’s currently in the BI Management Pack, along with the various database advisors and application server reports to try and diagnose and improve the performance of queries today. I’m actually writing this up as an article for OTN, so keep an eye out after Christmas and hopefully I’ll come up with some good guidelines and a simple methodology so that you can start using this interesting new addition to Grid Control 10gR4.

Posted 18 November 2008 † Mark Rittman § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Athens (Greece)

I am very conscious that I have not posted much on this blog recently. In part the technical stuff has been surfaced through the company blog - I get in to trouble if I say Mark’s blog because it is the company one now, an in part because of a load of domestic events have [...]
Posted 18 November 2008 † Peter Scott § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Carl Backstrom

A very quick note - there's a very long one on Streams coming, with real code and everything, to say that Carl Backstrom's family have updated his blog with details of how to give in memoriam to this most excellent technologist and evangelist. Go here and donate appropriately please.

Posted 18 November 2008 † Niall Litchfield § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

more fun with keyword searches

The gift that simply keeps on giving.

  • '914 scam' - if you don't know the correct name, you may already be doomed to failure.
  • 'reasons for isolation' - spending too much time on the Internet searching for 'reasons for isolation'.
  • "craig gordon" "ian curtis" - odd combination of a dead pop star and a living Sunderland goalkeeper.
  • 'my wife's shapely legs' - yeah right. Take those stockings off. Now.
  • "("current vacancy" or vacancies or opportunity or careers or "working with" or "working for") and ("oracle dba" or oracle dba )and london" - with such a superlative grasp of search term syntax and semantics, you would simply be wasted as an Oracle DBA.
  • 'dead bodies in the floor boards' - stop it. You are worrying me with the use of 'in' as opposed to 'under'.
  • 'how to become a virgin again' - Please sit down. Have a drink. I have some bad news for you.
  • 'ian curtis hanged ice block' - Look I've already told you twice This is an urban myth.
  • 'make friends under 14 to 16' - try Facebook or Beebo. Just don't get caught.
  • 'oracle killed siebel' - Mr. Ellison with the lead piping in the library.
  • 'selling strategy of siebel system anatomy' - yet another reason I don't work in sales.
  • 'the most important decision of my entire life' - undoubtedly left disappointed at my lack of insight.
  • 'urinal pulled his zipper down' - yet another reason I always favour a private cubicle.
  • 'why durex gossamer withdrawn' - apparently on the advice of the Pope.
Posted 18 November 2008 † Andy C § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Anychart 5 integration kit for APEX

A few days ago we released our Anychart 5 integration kit for Oracle Application Express (APEX).

Background

APEX has the ability to create (flash) charts. They are based on an older version of Anychart, version 3.3. Although these charts are already nice, there are some problems with it. You can't do everything you want with it, you can't print for ex, in short they look fine but not great.
Anychart released a while ago Anychart 5 which not only looks a lot nicer, but it resolved the problems and it has a lot more possibilities and features! Below, on the left, a chart created in APEX by using one of the predefined examples and on the right, the chart in Anychart 5 format.

I hope the charts speak for themselves ;-)

Installation

You can install this integration kit in a couple of different ways. If you prefer to keep the original APEX installation intact, you can do that and copy the integration kit in another folder. That means you can use the Anychart 3.3 and Anychart 5 charts together (like on the site of us).
You can also overwrite the files that came with APEX (take a backup first!) and that should change all your charts (also existing ones) in Anychart 5 format.

In both cases you can still use the wizards in APEX to create the charts, but if you decided to not overwrite the files, you need to make a small change in the chart region to point to the right path where you installed your files. The integration kit was tested on APEX 3.x (0, 1) and database 10g, 11g and XE with both the http server and the Embedded PLSQL Gateway. However if you do find a problem, please let us now or write a mail to apex@anychart.com.

Under the hood

So what's happening? The Anychart 5 file format is in a very different format, so what we did is creating a translation file which converts the Anychart 3 xml into Anychart 5 xml. You'll see the 2DColumn.swf of the integration chart are really small, that's because only the translation is done there and then sent to the anychart.swf file in the format it recognizes.


Using the integration kit

You can keep using the wizards in APEX to create your chart. This integration kit is meant as a first step towards the full kit we are working on. All the current types of charts in APEX are already supported by this kit and more, like for ex the combined charts - like on the screenshot above-, but Anychart 5 can do a lot more. For the Dashboards and Gauges for ex, which are currently not yet a type in APEX, you would need to write some more code yourself.
The followup kit will also provide you with the possibility to create these types of charts (Dashboards, Gauges, Maps, Gantts) through a wizard or at least with writing as less code as possible. In the meanwhile we (Apex Evangelists) can provide you with consulting to create other types of charts.


Examples

A full set of examples can be found on this site. All types of charts are shown in the standard APEX format (without changing or making it nicer), in the middle (if you enable the checkbox) you'll find the exact same chart but using the integration kit (so no changes made there) and on the right you find the same chart but with a few changes that shows the potential of Anychart 5.
You can also view the source of the region, the chart and the series that are used.

Purchase

The integration kit comes with a trial version of the Anychart 5 .swf file. You can see it by the watermark. If you buy the full version from the Anychart website and replace the anychart.swf file that comes with the integration kit, the watermark will disappear.
The integration kit itself doesn't cost you any money, you only need to pay for the Anychart license. APEX users get a 15% discount by using the code: APEX15

Final thoughts

This integration kit came together by the partnership of Apex Evangelists and Anychart. I would like to thank the people at Anychart for their help in working on this.
Posted 18 November 2008 † Dimitri Gielis § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

How to Do a Set-Top Box

I love my TiVo.

Like pretty much anyone who currently has a DVR, I was interested, but skeptical before I had one. Skeptical not so much about the value-add from a DVR, but because of the rabid fan-ism exhibited by those who owned them.

Now, I’m happily one of those rabid fans. I’ve had TiVo for many years, long enough to have a Series 2 box with lifetime service that I will never surrender. When I bought my second Series 2 box, I was surprised (and saddened) that lifetime service wasn’t an option anymore.

I like TV, and according to research, unhappy people like TV. Oddly, and this is one people who don’t have a DVR don’t get, I watch less TV now than I did before TiVo. So, maybe a DVR is for happy people who want to schedule TV around their happy lives and spend more time on other things.

Anyway, I look at TiVo as the only way to watch TV. To me, not having a DVR is like getting TV out of the air on an antenna. Why would you do that?

I also happen to be a TiVo diehard. I’ve always liked their interface, and they continue to add incremental features that make the DVR more useful, e.g. they just rolled out a feature to allow online ordering from Domino’s through a broadband-connected Series 2/3/HD TiVo.

In and of itself, this feature doesn’t add an enormous amount of value to me, but it is yet another way that my TiVo provides value to me. The more online content I can order from my TiVo, the better.

For example, I was an early adopter of Amazon Unbox on TiVo, and I’m hoping the recently announced partnership with Netflix expands to include Series 2 DVRs.

To me, TiVo represents the way a set-top box should evolve and how it should function. Start with a must-have feature for the TV, make it so awesome that I can’t ever live without it and then layer on value-added features. I may not use them all, but it’s definitely a plus to give me additional features when I’ve already paid for the service.

Dating back to the days of the TV as the window to the Intertubes, set-tops have been hit and miss.

Even now, as Apple, Blockbuster and startups develop movie rental set-top boxes, I wonder why they don’t bundle other services, like DVR or gaming. Or better yet, why strike out on your own when you could partner with a DVR manufacturer, cable provider or gaming console?

This seems logical; look at the XBox-Netflix partnership. As an aside, I like what Netflix is doing (by partnering), but I’m not sure why they’re also building their own box.

Think about your TV area. How many boxes do you really want cluttering up the living room or where ever you have a TV? Used to be that video inputs were the constraining factor, but now that TVs include a minimum of three inputs, it seems like clutter is the overwhelming argument for consolidation.

Or at least that’s what my wife would tell you.

What do you think? Do you want a single set-top box to rule them all? Is clutter an issue? Or do you prefer single-purposed boxes that do one thing really well?

Sound off in comments.

Posted 17 November 2008 † Jake § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Free Oracle Enterprise Linux Downloads Now Also in DVD Format

In a previous post, I mentioned that DVDs of Oracle Enterprise Linux are only availably for purchase via the Unbreakable Linux Store. I was incorrect. As of Oracle Enterprise Linux 4, Update 7, we now offer DVDs as a free download.

oel_dvd.png

Posted 17 November 2008 † sergio.leunissen § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °