Author: francis

Quoting from this site:

It’s wrong to wish on space hardware

Esther’s true purpose amongst us is revealed later in the interview, where she boasts that “I’ve never met a government that could pick winners” and advises regulators to get right out of town. Of course you don’t need to be a genius to see that government makes a lousy businessman, which is why governments don’t even try to anymore. But government can fund technology projects that are both hugely useful (TGV) and aesthetically beautiful (Concorde). Japan, Germany and now the People’s Republic of China have proved that judiciously directed public investment provides a welcome alternative to the bulimic US model of private investment: huge splurges followed by copious vomiting. And only a churl would point out that of the last three technology upturns in Esther’s old launch pad of Silicon Valley, two (the 1980s and the current modest revival) have been stoked by government defense spending, and the one in between was the result of exploiting a publically funded defense project: the Internet.

This may be some use to you. Most of this stuff has been in SQL Server for a long time because they came late to the party and built to ANSI 92.

Left, Right and Full joins

This is the industry standard syntax which is now supported by Oracle (just in case you ever wondered)

select dname, ename
from emp
right outer join dept
on emp.deptno = dept.deptno
order by dname, ename

See <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/04/23/fulljoin.html> and http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96540/statements_103a.htm#2107297.  Ansi can outer join more tables (so it says).

You can also do inner joins, which are your straightforward join. I think the left and right say which table is outer joined to in the statement, as in left in this case would be emp. A full outer join outer joins in both directions, meaning you no longer have to union left and right together.

If someone wants to rustle up an example of outer joining to two tables go right ahead.

Some other useful things from ANSI 92 in 9i are replacing DECODE with CASE, NULLIF and COALESCE

CASE:

SELECT cust_last_name
, CASE credit_limit
WHEN 100 THEN ‘Low’
WHEN 5000 THEN ‘High’
ELSE ‘Medium’ END
FROM customers;
(see http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96540/expressions5a.htm#1033394)

COALESCE

COALESCE (expr1, expr2)

is equivalent to:
CASE WHEN expr1 IS NOT NULL THEN expr1 ELSE expr2 END
Similarly,
COALESCE (expr1, expr2, …, exprn), for >=3
is equivalent to:
CASE WHEN expr1 IS NOT NULL THEN expr1 
   ELSE COALESCE (expr2, …, exprn) END

NULLIF:

NULLIF compares expr1 and expr2. If they are equal, then the function returns null. If they are not equal, then the function returns expr1. You cannot specify the literal NULL for expr1.
The NULLIF function is logically equivalent to the following CASE expression:
CASE WHEN expr1 = expr 2 THEN NULL ELSE expr1 END

(see http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96540/functions85a.htm#1001199)

Christ, I dunno

One of those things. Loads going on but not space to sit back and think about it. The printing press of life continues to weave some kind of bloody narrative. Bones and guts and living. Things falling apart, not satisfactory. Pushing like crazy and the door opens on another door.

Spent last week at the Canoe Camping Club meet at Mordiford (Hereford, about 10 miles out) paddling up and down the river Wye. Did some training and 2*assesment. The main thing that happened was me realising what Buddha meant when he talked about things being unsatisfactory, even if you have a good life, there is always dukkha, which is translated as being unsatisfactory. Just think about it, you get settled with your book or cup of tea or whatever and even if nothing happens either the thing you are enjoying ends or you need to attend to some biological thing.

Unsatisfactory doesn’t cut it, really, its a very deep malaise. If you can’t live in the moment and treat everything that happens as empty, and not having any particular form that forces you to act, even in some minor way, you’re fucked.

Getting on top of my new job. There’s a lot to do and I’m worried about having the authority to make things happen, but what can I do other than push and try to make sure people start talking and understanding each other’s point of view?

Reading a great book called The Leader’s Digest by Jim Clemmer, which gives a lot on how to help people to grow, I say help because people will do nothing if you try and make them. It’s all in short digestible lumps. The only problem is that it runs together.

Had a good BBS last Sunday. One of the speakers was talking about the wellness industry (food supplements and so on) vs. the sickness industry (keep your chronic conditions while we charge you for treating the symptoms). Apparently most modern vegetables only contain about 10% of the goodness they used to. When I can find it I will post the URL’s he gave here for others to read.

Time for sleep. Very tired but didn’t want to go to bed because it only involves waking up again, Dukkha, what can I say? If I could only stop time and rest properly. Time is an illusion brought on by things moving about, but how can you stop them when the processes appear to be outside of you. Think about it. If there is no barrier between subject and object then what is moving? (getting a bit Zen there, I need to go to my bed)

Will post a longer report about the Rivers Access Rally in Chester when it’s happened on Sunday.

Have fun

If you learn from your mistakes then all is well and good. On the other hand, if you carry on doing the same old thing forever you are in deep shit. Yesterday we relaunched our business with a meeting that Joanna was kind enough to help us with. After a frenzy of contacting people we managed to get only three to come and see the business offering. That said one of them was very interested in it.

The second session was not a success because I hadn’t checked back with the people coming and qualified them properly. A lesson learned. I was very embarassed because Joanna had travelled so far, but she seemed quite relaxed about it. There is an adage in the business: only about 15% of your time will be directly productive but that 15% will make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

Worth doing? I think so.

So. the next thing to master is qualifying people better and then the follow up.

Just started my new job. I’m in total brain dump mode. I feel like the aliens in Red Dwarf that sucked peoples brains out through a straw. The guys here use messenger (and some of their customers use Yahoo as well) so I guess I will finally get round to finally using messaging services. I’ve been holding off; mainly because I have always felt a little overloaded with email anyway.

Just posted this (but I’ve also added and moved some stuff for euphony) on http://battlinbog.blog-city.com/read/607125.htm:

It’s so good to see a different side of the gender debate. I was also really interested in the “war against boys” that you link to on your resources. I remember very clearly becoming confused when I first started looking at gender issues many years ago, and rejecting the hatred of men “thing” without being able to articulate what should go in its place.

As a human being I’ve often thought that the alleged “opposites” male and female are not opposites at all; we are the same species and have essentially the same interests. I do hear a lot of women say that men are very different from them but my own experience after one failed and one very successful marriage is that women and men need to talk to each other and also (the hard bit) listen. It’s really that simple, but it’s work and people are very lazy (read: self-centred?) about relationships. That’s where the problems come and then get extrapolated into general distrust based on gender; which is quite ridiculous, really. If you look hard at what your friends of the same gender do they are just as unreliable, devious, kind, inconsiderate, loving etc. etc. but it isn’t treated with the same intensity because sex doesn’t rear it’s intense ugly head and complicate things, giving incidents and accidents of relationships a significance they wouldn’t otherwise have.

I live in the UK and it’s well-known that boys are doing badly but nothing’s being done about it that I can see. My son is 9 and very intelligent but I can see that he, and a lot of his peers, aren’t getting the mental nourishment they should be. This is partly because of the obsession with SAT scores.

Another problem is that we now seem to live in a world of powerless victims, where everybody is a victim of everybody else and nobody is responsible for anything. This is quite bizzare and will hold us (human beings) back until we get over it. It might be a product of 50 years of relative peace – when you look at what my parents’ and grand-parents’ generations had to face a lot of this petty stuff didn’t make it into their lives because mere survival was where they had to put their energy.

I’d like to have a longer chat with you some time. Keep up the good work. I read your open letter and found a lot of interesting food for thought: it’s interesting how changing where you start from allows you to draw totally different, and more balanced, conclusions from the facts. I bet the men-haters don’t like this but they need to think about what you have to say.

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20040506.html

(BTW Elbonia is where Scott Adams talks about other countries in a way that doesn’t offend anyone)

I was reading http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA518.htm. I loved the line [Michael Howard] jumps on any bandwagon that seems to be going somewhere, then promptly falls off on the first bend. I think this describes most of our political elite. What I find amusing is that the lack of credible opposition was also a feature of the whole Thatcher era but everyone seems to have forgotten it.

At Powergen we get copies of the local Nottingham newspaper. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve had:

1. Students nearly drove me to suicide
2. Let’s fine youngsters who are causing trouble
3. Police swoop on yobs on stolen motorbikes
4. Lots and lots of gun crime stories

I worry about the journalists who write for this rag. They are what would used to be called reactionary and very backward looking. They promote some kind of victim culture where all people do is whine about how bad the world has treated them and call for someone else to do something. Why not:

Confront other people’s lack of consideration (in a friendly, open way)?

Show others how you feel and actually talk to them? Most people are very reasonable and contrite if you approach them in a spirit of friendliness and openness, allowing them to realise that they are perhaps in the wrong without shouting it at them.

No, just complain to some raggedy-arsed journo who uses your whining story to paint you into victimhood. Then the Chief Plod can start screaming for fines for 8 year olds. The other problem with victimhood is that it doesn’t move you on; you just stay a victim and the “other” person stays an enemy – not a lot of use, is it?

I didn’t see, anywhwere, calls for creating community programmes that would give these kids a positive focus. Oh no, that would mean doing something other than complain that someone else isn’t doing something, but you don’t know what. That said, a positive approach could mean spending some cash, and it’ll all be in the wrong fuckwit budget. For example, I know that one of the local schools has a brand-new sports hall that they can’t use because heating and staffing it is too expensive. They lost half of their playing fields getting it built and it’s a white elephant. Oddly, this hasn’t appeared in the local paper, maybe I need to go on a victim hunt for them.

I’m not defending louts – I can’t stand them either. But if people have somewhere to go and something to do they might stop being loutish and excluded. How does fining kids achieve anything? Well, I suppose it allows Chief Plod to be seen do be doing something, but solving nothing. Solving problems, being kind, being human; it’s not hard, but it’s not fashionable.

Another blog – gender issues without the anti-men thing

I found http://battlinbog.blog-city.com really interesting. In particular have a look at the article he links to: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/05/sommers.htm.

Counting down the hours before I can move on to my new job next week. Very lonely and bored. Have been suffering from a cold for the last couple of days. I have this thing where I wake up in the middle of the night when the fever breaks: it was about 2 am. I feel OK today, just a bit blocked up. Think I will go for a walk later to clear my head.

We were about to go live tomorrow on our shiny new database and there was a problem with the backups. The job that unplugs the pluggable tablespaces didn’t run because the DB was down for a hardware upgrade; the job that puts a new business copies of the tablespaces over the old ones ran; the backup backed up this inconsistent database; the database is broken and this was to be the first live backup – whoops! Oracle support dialled in and said they had never seen anything so broken, the headers on the files are all wrong, not just the pluggable ones; everything.

The upshot is that I won’t see the last three months of work go in before I leave, which is a bit frustrating. On the other hand the pressure’s off, which is great!

Going for a goodbye meal at the Royal Thai in Nottingham tomorrow. Last week we went to Sagar; I liked it but it didn’t bowl me over.

Borrowed Deborah’s copy of Public Enemy Number 2. Loved it.

By the way, does anyone ever read my stories? Just curious.

SATs

My daughter has done nothing for the past term other than be trained to pass her SATs. As she could already do this standing on her head she’s bored out of her mind. With the amount of attention that the school pays to them and the amount of cramming that is going on to help the less able students the results are meaningless. The first thing her secondary school will do is retest using a different method so that they can place her in the correct classes for her ability. The whole emphasis is meaningless and makes the tests pointless.

One of my friends said that their child went through exactly the same experience.

All that is being measured is how good the school are at cramming children with dead facts. It’s rubbish!

Medics

I am getting very worried about becoming ill in the next few years after talking to a friend of mine who is a newish hospital consultant. When he was helping examine some candidates recently (for the first time) he decided to be guided by the person who was the experienced examiner along with him.

He thought the first candidate was terrible and in his day wouldn’t have got through. The other examiner thought the candidate “quite good”! This individual was the best of the bunch! Basically they now have an “educationalist” approach: an answer has to be near enough (as in sub continental distances) and is then spun into being correct. This is wonderful when the individual is calculating how much painkiller to give your child, isn’t it? Please realise, it isn’t their fault, either – it’s the government minister(s) that encouraged this change in practice who will be long gone when this comes home to roost. The current system seems to be letting everybody down and the individuals responsible won’t be around when there is a reckoning. Good eh?

Just to add some icing on the cake: one of the examiners in another room would not pass one of the candidates because he or she was just awful and on their second attempt. What did they do? Got another examiner, later, to pass them.

Are you scared yet?

When I get old these are the people who will be looking after me. Like I said, their lack of training and proper testing isn’t their fault, but it will be me and my generation who pays the price. Hopefully the mess will be sorted when my kids start falling to pieces.