December 4th, 2009 Matt
Well, the installfest continues….
Today, I had problems getting the 64-bit version of VMWare server to install correctly. I uninstalled it, started again, hit errors (some of my own making, some not) and then found out that it was a bug.
Since it took me a while to find out how to fix it, I’ll just give you a link to where I got the info from – it’s here.
Thankyou AcmeLabs – now I just need to find out my username and password to get into it!!
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December 3rd, 2009 Matt
When Windows 7 was released, I gleefully decided that this was going to be my chance to get away from XP Professional 64-bit, since it crashed reasonably frequently (every day or so). Not too much of a problem, since it normally happened overnight, but when you are downloading the latest version of eBusiness Suite, then it can be annoying to say the least.
So, I stumped up my £150 for Ultimate edition, and a couple of days after the release date, it duly arrived. Nice clean install – two new 1.0TB hard drives, two new ATI graphics cards, all ready to go. No problems with the install (which was only to be expected, since the drives were completely new and hadn’t been used before), and then I started to actually use the system.
And it crashed.
And it crashed.
And it crashed again. At least once a day, and every night – the PC crashed. Annoying when you aren’t using it – VERY frustrating when you have just waited 20 minutes for a virtual machine to start and it blue screens. No help from Microsoft, no help on the net, nothing.
And so, this week, while I was at UK OUG, I decided to leave the machine running a live CD version of Ubuntu 9.10 to see how that went. Last night, when I got home, it was still running – 5 days of uptime.
So, today it’s goodbye to Windows 7, hello Ubuntu – and the installfest continues 
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August 27th, 2009 Matt
Normally, I’m described as wither a “consultant” or a “contractor” depending on what the client is expecting me to do – I much prefer the more consultancy-oriented roles, where there is a genuine interest in your input to help devise the best solution for them, rather than the contractor-oriented roles which tend to be much more of the “here is what you need to do, here is how to do it, now go and do it and don’t ask any questions” variety.
Recently, I found an amusing definition of consultant, contractor and freelancer on The Daily WTF (Worse Than Failure!) blog:
Consultants fill the gap when an organization needs to leverage their collective synergy with a quality-driven approach that focuses on delivering key objectives. Contractors are great when the only remaining solution is throwing more bodies at the problem. And freelancers, they’re perfect for companies on a budget, hoping to build their technology infrastructure ten dollars at a time.
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August 18th, 2009 Matt
I can’t remember how long ago it was, but there’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is looking at a prompt on his computer that says “To start, press any key” and he’s saying “Which one’s the any key?”
I always thought that it was a made-up scenario, until I saw this example from a RAID controller:
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August 14th, 2009 Matt
I know it’s an old post, but I was sent this article from the Daily WTF about how you should use flat files rather than databases.
Because databases crash, and flat files don’t.
Just something that made me
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November 16th, 2008 Matt
I’ve been working on a client site recently, where there was a massive restriction on what could be installed on the computers, and the registry was locked down.
Now I think this is fine – security is important and all, and obviously this is something that the client has enforced. But, I like to use Firefox as a browser instead of Internet Explorer, and always use the wonderful UltraEdit as my text editor.
Client restrictions allow me to use a USB stick, but not to install anything on the machines, so I started to look at whether you can run some applications from a USB drive rather than installing them on the client.
Firstly,I emailed the guys at IDM Solutions, who make UltraEdit. The answer was that you can’t install it onto a USB drive, but if you install it onto a hard drive and then copy the files onto USB, it works. Hey presto – the first program was working for me!
Then I started searching for more portable applications, and found this site. There is a whole range of applications that you can download and install onto USB, plus a handy little menu program (with backup software) to manage them all. I think that performance is slower than from a hard drive (since it’s reading from the USB), but I’m using such a slow network that it’s not really an issue! I’m just glad to have Firefox back working, which is what I’m using now.
One final thing to add – Portable Apps is completely free as well! Now that really is a result – so good that I’m off to play Portable Sudoku now…
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September 3rd, 2008 Matt
A while back, I wrote this post about how to make sure that you ask for help in the right place.
I then remembered reading another excellent example of how not to ask for help. Having found the right place to ask questions, there is (or should be) a certain etiquette about how to ask for help / respond to responses and so forth. I think that this post on OTN shows exactly how NOT to do it!
In my search for guidelines for posting on forums, I found this excellent article in Shay’s blog.
If you ever post on OTN, Metalink, WorkflowFAQ, or any forum for that matter, it’s well worth a read – and even better if you follow the advice / guidelines!
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July 14th, 2008 Matt
I was looking at a post on AskTom this morning, which was looking to "Select entire rows with most recent date only. No duplicates" and wondered how Tom would have approached it. The question had been marked as for version 8.1.7 of Oracle.
However, looking at the query that the poster had included, there was a new word that seemed strange to me – readuncommitted. I’d never seen it in an Oracle query before, so I looked at more of the code:
Select Jobstop.PODdatetime Date_Time
, job.routenumber Route , Stop.Name Location
, Jobstop.PODName
, Case When Jobstop.PODSign IS NOT NULL Then 'Electronic' End AS PODsign , JobStop.ArriveDateTimeSource ArriveScan
, Piece.Reference
From Ordermain with (readuncommitted, INDEX=OrderDateOrderID)
Left Outer Join Customer with (readuncommitted) on Customer.CustomerID=Ordermain.CustomerID
Left Outer Join Job with (readuncommitted) on Ordermain.OrderID=Job.OrderID
Left Outer Join Jobstop with (readuncommitted) on Job.JobID=Jobstop.JobID
Left Outer Join Stop with (readuncommitted) on Jobstop.StopID=Stop.StopID
Left Outer Join Jobstoppiece with (readuncommitted) on Jobstop.JobstopID=Jobstoppiece.JobstopID
Left Outer Join Piece with (readuncommitted) on Jobstoppiece.PieceID=Piece.PieceID
Where Ordermain.Orderstatus IN ('N', 'A', 'I','P')
And Left(Ordermain.Service,3) NOT IN ('LEA', 'FUE', 'Wai', 'Mon')
And Ordermain.Orderdate between '9/21/07' AND '9/27/07'
And left(piece.reference,2)='TL'
And customer.customercode='331'
Order By Piece.reference, JobStop.PODdatetime
There’s no way that this could be a query for Oracle 8.1.7 – the ANSI join syntax didn’t come into the database until version 9i . So, maybe it’s a 9i query then, and the poster got the version wrong (unlikely, but possible). No Oracle query that I’ve seen uses the "readuncommitted" term – this would be a really bad thing to do, as far as I can see.
Hmm – different syntax, really bad ideas for data selection. Then it hit me – it’s a SQL Server query!!
Lesson one in getting help – make sure you ask in the right place!
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