The fruits of my fortuitous bungling

The browsable Oracle data dictionary reference

2010-05-21T03:28:00.001-07:00

Here's a very useful link to a flash reference for the Oracle 10g data dictionary. I found it on oraclepoint.com.

End of the world as we know it is imminent... again

2010-01-05T07:18:00.000-08:00

Modern corporate law has nothing to do with justice. It is war of attrition: you sue your opponents until they run out of money. One weapon big greedy corporations would love to get their hands on is the software patent. It will have nothing to do with protecting the bread & butter of software artists (we have copyright for that already) but just be another big stick, which will be used on all of us in the software industry. The lobby for unchecked greed has tried to introduce these in Europe before. Last time, they failed, but they are about to try again. Let's remind the European parliament that it is still a very bad idea supported by false arguments.

So don't just stand there and let this happen. Sign the petition, already!

Goodbye WhoLockMe, hello Opened Files View

2010-01-01T18:17:00.000-08:00

In November 2009, I migrated my Vista home PC to Windows 7 and I could not be happier. I expect to start using it at work as well in the coming months. At work, I often find myself resorting to WhoLockMe in my development and debugging sessions to kill processes that keep files locked. Unfortunately, that program does not work under Vista/Windows 7 but I have found a good alternative: Opened Files View.

One stop shopping for Windows updates and drivers

2010-01-01T17:42:00.000-08:00

The Microsoft site tends to let users looking for OS patches jump through hoops before giving up the goods. In most cases, it is much easier to use the direct links provided by www.softwarepatch.com.

It's 2010 so this must be the future

2010-01-01T10:49:00.000-08:00

... and since we are living in the future, I for one would like to try out a user interface such as the following this year:

A new year's resolution

2010-01-01T09:57:00.000-08:00

My new year's resolution is to write only good code this year. Nevertheless, sometimes a coder has to code even on a particularly poor night's rest, resulting in the occasional epic fail. Fortunately, indulgences are making a big comeback. To make up for my programmatic sins, I just might buy code offsets this year. My money will then go to worthy causes (such as Jquery and the Apache software foundation) that better the lives of programmers everywhere.

It's all about the indexes

2009-09-28T06:54:00.000-07:00

Currently, I am responsible for the maintenance of a bunch of web applications. They have always had performance issues, which gradually increased over time. The analysis of the problems eventually lead my team to question the performance of the database itself.

With the help of the venerable database expert Anjo Kolk, it soon became apparent that the performance problems were caused by missing indexes. It is my habit to run "explain plan" for every query that I introduce in a database application, but my predecessors apparently had not ever done that.

Anjo pointed out all the places where the application executed full table scans and added indexes to correct them. Of course, this was but one of the many tricks he had up his sleeve for us. When I asked him how I could learn some of these techniques to improve database application performance, he referred me to the work of Tapio Lahdenmäki, and in particular his book: "Relation database index design and the optimizers". It appears to me this is essential reading for every business programmer. Now, if only I could find the time to delve deeper into this tome of knowledge....

You feel agile! You feel strong! You feel wise!

2009-08-06T01:58:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is what you see in Nethack (a text, turn-based based dungeon crawler game) when consuming a potion of Gain Ability. In real life, learning about how to get started with agile development takes a little more effort than that to take in. To experienced developers, the concepts (as first defined by the Agile Manifesto) immediately make sense and still, it proves surprisingly hard to communicate what we should do to apply these ideas. I have been struggling to find a good starting point, but the following two links are the best ones I have found thus far:

10 things you need to know about Agile

Scrum in 10 easy steps

Malware should not be entitled to call home

2009-08-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

Almost every trojan, adware, or other piece of malware will try to communicate with the host of its wicked master at some point. When you replace your hosts file with the one provided by the friendly folks at mvps.org, you will stop these programs even if they do slip through your other defenses. The hosts file provided by mvps.org reroutes requests to localhost whenever your PC is instructed to look up the address of a site known to be a source of misery. I think it nicely complements any home PC defense strategy.

The DBA's potato peeler

2009-08-04T02:33:00.001-07:00

It's not quite the swiss army chainsaw, but it does its job nicely: when you do not have the Microsoft SQL Server client tools at your disposal, Query Express comes to the rescue. This fine piece of freeware has all the basic features I need when developing on SQL server. And it even connects to Oracle as well!

Virtual storm is coming and it's going to be massive

2009-06-24T00:37:00.000-07:00

So what is it anyway? Basically, Virtual Storm transparently embeds applications that are running on a virtual machine in local windows clients. This makes administration of software installations and the corresponding license management a walk in the park.

In other words, Virtual Storm moves desktop administration to the cloud without the users even noticing it. And what's more: it scales like you would not believe.

Here’s a Dutch spoken video showing Virtual Storm in action. The demo is presented by Mike Jansen.

Demo DinamiQs Virtual Storm from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.