Author: francis

I subscribe to a number of news letters about Java and Oracle and the people that run them seem to think that I want to listen to boring recordings of podcasts that were given by people who don’t understand the phrase Death by Powerpoint. There is a whole movement around this supposed content.

Podcasts are a poor, slow medium compared with the written word. I have lost count of how many times I have come out of an hours-long meeting to discover that the whole thing could be put on half a sheet of paper with a couple of bullet points. Why should podcasts be any different?

We have very powerful senses that can take in huge amounts of information very quickly if it is presented in a reasonably coherent way.

Don’t get me started on powerpoint – it’s a dangerous and poor medium for anything technical.

See here.

I’m a senior Oracle specialist who doesn’t live inside the M25 ring and it’s tough out there. Skills shortage? No, cheap new graduates shortage. Most of the senior-level work I see is either DBA or implementation of apps from Oracle or other ERP vendors.

I wouldn’t send my own kids into IT. It’s BORING. The fun stuff, programming, solving problems, making sure that you can truly meet needs, all that seems to be gone and have been replaced with a cheesy sweatshop mentality.

Also, sending jobs to India isn’t an issue. I work for a software house and we know we’re safe because the guys from Bangalore just don’t get the European cultural references. It isn’t cheaper to go there if everything has to be done twice – it costs a lot more in fact. I’m much more worried about places like Croatia and parts of the former Soviet Union where there isn’t the culture gap.

I also found the other comment here about higher productivity very funny – let’s move away from Oracle PL/SQL, Java and all the other sweatshop rubbish and start using some productive tools. Then it’ll happen. Longer hours? No thanks! That’s why kids are voting with their feet.

procedure dump_clob( c in out nocopy clob ) is
chunk_size integer := 254 ;
n_chunks integer := ceil( length© / chunk_size ) ;
begin
  for i in 0 .. n_chunks -1
  loop
    dbms_output.put_line(substr(c,i*chunk_size+1,chunk_size));
  end loop;
end;

I came across this brilliant article while reading about the big ball of mud design pattern. This design pattern is what you end up with if you don’t do any architecture and the system just grows. It’s not a design pattern so much as what happens when you just keep pushing to get something that works. It’s actually a very popular pattern. I found myself nodding all the way throught the article. I will not comment about what projects I’ve worked on which match these criteria!

http://www.laputan.org/gabriel/worse-is-better.html

It talks about why Lisp is in such a mess even though it has been finally standardised and is such an excellent language. Again very interesting. Higly recommended.

See here

You said “plug-ins such as Flash that allow graphics and drag-and-drop in the browser”

Been there with JavaScript and dynamic HTML forever, just a bit hard to do from scratch – but there are plenty of resources on the web. There’s also the whole chromeless thing (www.chromeless.org) for IE as well, which predates a lot of this allegedly new technology by four or five years. The only really new thing on the block is AJAX.

Personally I can’t stand Flash because it’s too hard (and expensive) and the documentation is rubbish. It claims to integrate with databases and XML but doesn’t say how. It’s a tool for graphic designers that forces the rest of us to care about their tiny fonts, and before ubiquitous broadband it made a lot of sites (where you just want the information, not the cleverness) unusable. It’s also impossible to spider and index sites properly.

Just my two cents

Quote from here

Consumers aren’t stupid. They know that the quality of content has been spiralling downward for years, and the price rising. You can’t blame piracy for everything. The truth is, what’s out there right now is crap. It’s an uncomfortable truth we all need to acknowledge, whether we agree with it or not – the perception is all that matters. Industry execs will dispute it until they are blue in the face, but only with other people in their industry, which speaks volumes. Content owners are wildly out of touch with their customers, and should expect to drift further as long as they continue to persecute them or rip them off with ever-rising prices.

How true – read the article, it’s very good.

See this

These comments are inflammatory and very cheeky. I’ve been using Oracle softare for nearly 20 years and it’s got worse not better in the last 5 or so.

Their original CRM (which must have had 1000 patches in less than 5 years too!) shipped with patches before you could even get it running.

The only thing they do that is’t a bugfest is the database, and even that (9.2.0.7 release 1, 10g release 1) had some unforgivable howlers in it.

Larry, fire this person and fire the one who insulted your  biggest European market after the US. Brits don’t respect authority, true, but that’s because we like to get things right and have documentation that was’t written by 8 year olds.

Got turned down for a job because I’m not technical enough!

Let me see

Wrote book on Unix shell programming. Currently planning white paper on Agile methods in an Oracle environment.

Last project involved 40k lines of PL/SQL and Java; re-architecting things to work using web servers and copying files directly into databases and out again onto the database server. Plus plugging into vast swathes of API’s written by my colleagues.

Using Oracle external tables, views to mask out data types, synthetic row types from those views, dynamic SQL to call the appropriate procedure using that rowtype, and a ruck of metadata plus a loading engine with a restartable three step workflow. Plus facilities to edit the data if it was incorrect. All done in dynamic SQL controlled from metadata. Plus background processing, plus creating batches of files to load one after the other over night. All from a tech spec which I wrote in the first place. Functional spec was written by someone else, I admit, but then I was busy at the time and did write the first couple of drafts.

Not technical my behind. Ridiculous! Suspect there was another reason, probably money or something equally cheesey.

Deep Joy.

I was listening to an item on today’s programme where one of the speakers said that the incidence of depression in women is far higher than in men. I remember reading somewhere that in fact the story is more complex than this throw-away statistic might lead you to believe. In communities where alcohol isn’t drunk (US baptists I beleive) the incidence of depression and related illnesses is about the same for both genders. It would appear that the social context allows the expression of the same tendencies by different means. In our wider society drinking and drink-related ills are where the men generally end up. I wonder if this would be a useful start for an item on your programme?

Music

Finally bought One by One, which is my favorite Foo’s recording. In particular I like Tired of you, which is a song that I’ve always felt is very Buddhist in sentiment. This is me talking, I’ve no idea what Dave Grohl thinks. It doesn’t matter what happens or how tired I become I will not quit on you; you being every sentient being. See, I’m putting my own sentiments on it. That’s one of the nice things about music – you can make it what you want. The stuff about diamonds in your fire is very Buddhist, at least very Tibettan Buddhist so …

All my life, I live in that space too and the last track Come Back is, to me a reprise of the sentiments about not abandoning people, keeping them in your heart where it matters. Their music is about uniting people and overcoming barriers most of the time. I’d forgotten how much I liked it. I also like they’ve had trees planted to cover the carbon cost of making the album.

Books

Just been reading the very excellent Leadership and Self-Deception, I can’t recommend the book too highly. It’s central thesis is that we all live (at least some of the time) in “the box”, a place where we do selfish and self-centred things and then start justifying our behaviour by painting others behaviour badly, which puts them into a box also (assuming they choose to join in). Then you end up with a self-reinforcing structure where people just feed each other’s bias and nothing gets done, also, sadly, nobody gets what they want and it hurts. It takes some bravery to admit that you are doing this kind of thing though. You get better results when you turn away from yourself, honest, and it feels so much better. It’s just difficult.

In my own experiences I’ve characterised this as people saying now look what you’ve made me do all the time, which is what happened to me a lot in a relationship that failed badly and was very painful. Other people don’t make you do anything, you choose your response every time. It’s just that sometimes people find your hooks or buttons and catch you with them or press them and start the script running, some people press their own buttons and the best thing to do is keep well back. I remember years ago going on a course where people were taught to say I am not a fish, which meant you didn’t have to take the bait or rise to the trap that’s been set for you. This book explains this idea, using the box metaphor, very well and succintly as a simple story. Don’t be put off by the word leadership in the title. You have to lead yourself before you do anything anyway. I’m thinking of buying several copies through the mentorship system I’m part of (which is where the book came from) and giving copies to people I know who need it. I need it as much as anyone and need to make sure that people understand the gift is not criticism, but a genuine attempt at dialogue.

The next book is Success Acceleration, which is slightly problematic for me because I am not a Christian and there is a lot of God in the book. However this doesn’t devalue the book at all and the strong beliefs in it only show the author’s sincerity, which I can’t fault.

I haven’t finished it yet but it has given me some surprises. In order to set goals you need to know what part of your life they affect. He also reminded me of something from my coaching qualifications (that of course should apply everywhere but I had forgotten it, sigh …) which is how you learn new skills:

• Unconsciously Incompetent. As in you don’t know what you don’t know. Not really even a beginner.
• Consciously Incompetent. You know you need to work on something and are doing so. You are beginning to acquire the skill.
• Consciously Competent. You have acquired the skill and know how to use it but still have to think about it.
• Unconsciously Competent. You can just do whatever the skill is without conscious thought, for example if you were riding a bike you just thing I want to be over there and there you are.

He suggests that a a lot of us are unconsciously incompetent at goal setting. We think we know how but funnily enough our “goals” don’t come true. This has rung a number of very loud bells for me. I am going to go back and look at how I set goals.

He hasn’t mentioned (and may not) that there is a difference between tactical and strategic, tactical being what do I do now to reach my goals and strategic being the long term thing you are trying to achieve. So, for example, you might have a task which is go out and meet more people but the goal is build a big people-based business. So a daily tactical goal could be something like talk to 10 new people every day, but if you don’t know why you’ll probably stop doing it.

[[ Note 16-Apr-06 In fact the last section of the book is called tactics! So more fool me. ]]

Another important factor is persistence, just getting things done that you said you were going to do. Putting dates on your goals and tasks and ticking them off. This means getting the habit of listing and checking them all the time, which is what differentiates people who are good at getting things done.

I also like effective people:

• Accept responsibility
• Get results
• are energetic
• are competent
• are willing to adjust their belief window

If you want to know what a belief window is I suggest you read the book!

An old classic that is just back in print is Your Greatest Power, which is of course the power to choose. Try saying to yourself I choose to be happy, I choose not to fight with people, I choose to be wealthy several times a day. You’ll see. Another point that the book makes is you should avoid things like I can’t afford x like the plague because you are choosing not to be able to afford it, ever. Instead say I will afford it and I will have it. This doens’t mean hitting the credit card, it means opening your mind to the opportunities that come along. My only slight criticism of the book is that the author obviously wrote it in the days before italic fonts and word processors so THERE IS A LOT OF SHOUTING IN CAPITALS, but hey, it’s a product of it’s time and still a classic. I read this book and re-read Keys to Positive Thinking at the same time; the compliment one another very well. I have summarised the summary from this book and stuck it on the toilet wall where I will read it often!

Onward.