Author: francis

Incidents and accidents

December 8, 2006 /

Ok,

No diary entry for a while. What have I been up to?

Birthday

47 at the beginning of October. Jings. Looking 50 down the barrel. 

Still looking for another job.

Think I may have found one but it involves a pay cut, at least in the short term. Given that my current pay review is 8 months late as it is and inflation has’t gone away not sure how much of an issue this is, these guys do at least pay their bonuses (as in there is a bonus to be had). Could mean serious tightening of belts though. Already 20% down on what Oracle used to pay me.

Sent my book off to a publisher

This was much harder than you’d think. However I got the author bio, synopsis etc. together and sent it off about 4 weeks ago. Will give it until after christmas and then send off to another.

Still running my own internet based business

This is making steady progress. Main problem is one of consistency: I keep doing some activity but not often enough. We had a huge conference in Belfast, which was brilliant and very uplifting, but now I’m short of energy again

Still fighting with health problems

Man, have I been down recently. Partly because of a sudden death and partly because I feel stuck on someone else’s wheel. This past week I’ve been floored by some viral thing that’s attacked the glands in my head. Very tired and listless and quite painful. Hey ho, keep taking the supplements and the antibiotics and it will pass like it always does.

Music software

I’ve been experimenting with Cubase and Studio to Go. I think I prefer studio to go (definitely for software synths and midi – it even understands VST DLL’s as well) but it’s audio recording screeches nastily whereas Cubase just takes the input from my USB audio capture thingy and works. Hmm.

The kids

Jon started senior school in September. He’s hockey captain and also has been praised by the school for modern languages (French to you and me). Wants a trials bike (which is a push bike these days). Deb is doing really well, winning all sorts of awards and going on visits and so on because she’s in the top set. Still crazy about guide, gonna go up to Senior Section in Jan when she’s 14.

We’re counting down to Xmas. I had a lot of leave left and said that I would take Thursdays and Fridays off in December, but this week was a dead loss because I was ill. 

Closing the browser window in Forms 9i

December 4, 2006 /

NB – this works for IE only. See comments in the code. 

First create an html file called close_window.html and put it in your htdocs area:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//E” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
<html>
<head>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”docs/iamsdev.css” />
<Title>Close parent window after waiting</Title>
</head>
<body>
<script language=”javascript”>
var doneTimer = 0 ;
function myMess( mesg )
{
  document.writeln(“<br />” + mesg ) ;
}
function close_window(){
  myMess(“Attempting to close”);
  doneTimer = 1 ;
  window.opener.opener=‘x’; // IE only FF/NS don’t like this, but it stops the prompt to close the window appearing

  window.opener.close();
  window.close();
}
function do_close_wait(){
  myMess(“calling timer”);
  setTimeout(“close_window()”, 5000);
}
do_close_wait();
</script>
Waiting to close window
</body>
</html>

Then, in the post-form trigger put this:

web.show_document(‘/close_window.html’,‘_new’);

This spawns a child window. The close window code will wait 5 seconds and close its parent window and then itself. If anyone has time to get this working with FF please tell me how you did it.

Oracle Security Vulnerabilities

November 25, 2006 /

See

What kind of bugs are these Oracle bugs?

If there’s ways of breaking into the database, then fine, but first the attacker has to have broken into the systems and got behind the firewalls. I work for an Oracle shop and some of our customers got very excited about the security bugs.

What they had’t grasped was that in order to exploit them their entire infrastructure had to have been compromised as well. If people can break the Application Server and/or the Portal and get information they should’t then this is a serious issue, but vulnerabilities that involve messing with, say, SQL*Net, can only be exploited if everything else has been compromised first and an attacker can log into a machine or start looking at network packets. If this is the case, you really have more to worry about than you database.

Ecademy

November 23, 2006 /

Ah, Ecademy

I was a member years ago when it was new – and it was’t worth bothering with.

Could never find others local to yourself because it was a free-text string. I live in Merseyside so, you had to look for

Liverpool/Wirral/Merseyside – or even an area like, say, Childwall

No idea how London-based people managed. It was was a useless unsearchable pile of free text that was only of use if you had the time to scroll through everything. I gave up.

Even then you might see a village or area name that you know is local to you if you could be bothered scrolling down the long list of people.

I unsubscribed three or four times and then was sent an email every couple of weeks until I was rude to the sysadmin in a reply and that sorted it.

I’m amazed people still use it, last time I looked it was still a free text heaven with poor searching.

Fun with Open Office and numbering sections

November 22, 2006 /

I’m writing a document that has numbering.

Chapters have numbers and each section is numbered using Roman numerals.

I wanted to swap chapters 1 and 2.

In MSW you can put the document in outline mode (which does’t seem to exist in OO), change the number of displayed levels to 1, and move the sections.

All of the numbering stays together.

OO, on the other hand, does’t have this view. OK, says I, let’s just cut and paste the chapters. It’s a bit 1980’s but hey OO is free.

The section numbering goes west. The pasted in chapter is numbered 1, and the sub sections carry on from the earlier numbering.

Joy.

I tried loading it into AbiWord (not yet used in anger) but it was too confused. Left it for a day and had another go. Discovered that you can press return at the beginning of the line and it will do the numbering on the new line. Go back up, set the style to Normal and remove the line – then the numbering is correct. I have since loaded the filter add-ons for Abi and will maybe have a go just to see if it can do it.

This is a pain – most technical documents have numbered paras and OO just does’t seem to get it. MSW can do this without much of an issue. Maybe I missed something. I don’t have time to try and fix OO. maybe I’ll put a test case together and see if the developers can sort it out.

In my hunting on the net I discovered Lyx , which I am looking at at the moment. What You See Is What You Mean – uses Latex and then integrates lots of O/S tools to glue it all together. I’m thinking that this would be by far the better way of producing camera ready copy if I could only find the time to learn it. No issues with WYSIWYG numbering either – it just does it. I did once use these markup languages in another life (before decent word processors) and don’t mind them at all. Lyx just hides the complexity from you.

Also using Firefox 2.0 spell checker – useful.  

A sad waste

November 18, 2006 /

My manager died in a car crash on Thursday on the motorway.

He was going to help me with some issues I’ve had and we were trying to overcome the problems. I was looking forward to the next few months of working with him and getting stuff done. Now, he’s not there.

I was very late to work this morning. I could’t get in my car. I was up at 6:15.

These things affect us all in strange ways. Bought a card for everyone to sign which has been sent on.

Nothing I can do. Nothing at all.

Puts all the upset and nonsense of the last few months into the irrelevant nonsense category they really belong. 

Response to an article about Microsoft Forefront

October 24, 2006 /

 http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-1009_11-6127915.html

I still don’t get what it is …

Client software that you can install on a central machine and then distribute as your organisation grows – that makes no sense? A set of filters you put on your incoming streams that looks for malware? A (mere) virus scanner? What is it? All of the above plus whatever? An LDAP server? Does it actually do authorisation and have a bunch of other stuff to keep viruses and so on at bay, hence confusing authorisation with protection? Or is it just a load of acronyms hiding a hodge-podge of things under the Microsoft banner so you can buy them all together in one package?

I also did’t like the word “integrated” there – that’s one of the huge problems with Windows as it is, compromise one thing, you’ve compromised everything – all part of the fundamentally flawed architecture in the first place. Everything uses the IE DLL’s – compromise them and everything is compromised. It’s not like modular software and interfaces are a new idea, but what do I know?

Migrating Access to SQL Server tool

October 16, 2006 /

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/10/13/access_migration/

I was demoing Oracle’s migration product that does exactly the same thing (without the dumb bits) the best part of 10 years ago. The access app quite happily now talking to an Oracle back end.

I never realised that Microsoft did’t do this themselves!

Probably easier to migrate to Oracle and back again. At least it can sort out the types properly.

If memory serves Oracle’s tool is also free.