Software

I like experimenting with software and technology. Many years ago, I built a Laconica instance. Not because I needed a Laconica instance but because I was curious and any knowledge gleaned would be useful. Standard LAMP stack. Same as the WordPress blogging software which I had already built. Plus Laconica releases were named after R.E.M songs by Evan. Similarly, I got an account on mastodon.sdf.org in preference to Twitter because I favour OpenSource software and the underdog....

Tim Hall recently made a wonderful suggestion that the Oracle community remember the much missed Joel Kallman on 11 October 2021. My contribution doesn’t demonstrate APEX technical wizardry. Instead it’s a short story from a real-life customer project implemented using APEX. Just to avoid any potential law suits, this post isn’t about Agile development either - more how APEX can be used to quickly respond to changing customer requirements. One particular post from Joel stuck with me about his attitude to customer service which can be encapsulated in a single line:...

Five years ago, I purchased a Roberts Digital radio for the kitchen. Mainly to listen to the radio but also this device could play music from Spotify, a USB stick or act as a UPNP client. As I already had the Plex Media Server set up which had a DLNA option, this looked attractive. The setup worked pretty well apart from one minor glitch. And, like a dripping water tap, or the endless, harrowing screams of a baby played on a tight loop in an American interrogation facility, any minor technical glitch can’t simply be ignored....

Sometimes, I spend a lot of time on technical tasks that are of seemingly questionable benefit or limited practical use. For example, I remember converting the format of my 977 blog posts between markup languages and migrating the content to esoteric blogging platforms (more then once). I also wasted an unbelievable amount of time meticulously editing the meta data (YAML front-matter) and writing scripts simply to preserve Disqus comments after a change to the permalink structure....

Connor McDonald posts an excellent series of articles about tuning a database application. This analysis from a end user perspective reminded me of my own experiences when I was a technical consultant helping customers running a large CRM application, typically in call centres scattered across Europe. I was often summoned onsite and told to solve the problem that ‘The application is slow’. Usually, different people were eager to give me their view on the issue:-...

I tend to switch Linux distributions quite often. Consequently, I tend to have this process down to a fine art and it doesn’t take me that long. The most time consuming element is ensuring the necessary backups are in place. However, you normally find some package or configuration option you forgot about and my recent switch from Arch Linux to Fedora 29 and back again unearthed a strange problem with the Dovecot IMAP server I hadn’t encountered before....

Occasionally, I have to search lots of files for a pattern. It was only recently I discovered the wonderful silver searcher utility which saves me a lot of time. To install ‘ag’ on Fedora, use the following (which isn’t entirely obvious or intuitive if you’re used to typing ‘ag’). # sudo dnf install the_silver_searcher I believe there is an Emacs interface which would save me even more time. $ time ag 'sql statement execute time' ~ real 0m0....

When I initially revisited Emacs, I used mu4e (instead of Thunderbird) for my email. I used the wonderful Gmane service to read mailing lists in Gnus and Elfeed to read blogs and RSS feeds within Emacs. This worked fine but after a while it became a little tiresome having to remember different key bindings to essentially perform the same repetitive tasks; reading messages, navigating (next/previous) messages, moving messages, saving messages, marking messages, deleting messages, searching messages, forwarding messages, replying to messages and occasionally composing brand new messages....

the early years 1962 Entered the world as I intend to leave it. Kicking, screaming, naked, held upside down by a nurse slapping me on the backside. a night at the Lesser Free Trade Hall 1977 Wrote my first basic program in BASIC on a Tandy TRS-80. Editing facilities were fairly limited. I think to modify Line 10, you had to simply re-enter Line 10. In its entirety. This was rather time consuming, tiresome and almost put me off computers for life....

I have used the Unix bash shell for many years. As I am incredibly lazy and forgetful, I have become accustomed to using ctrl-r ‘find’ to find and scroll though the latest ‘find’ commands I have issued. Occasionally, I noticed that a lengthy, complex, useful ‘find’ command’ (which I mercilessly plagiarised from a clever person via Google) was no longer in my shell history. Investigations revealed the default bash history is a paltry 1000 commands so I decided to increase this to 10000 by adding the following line to ‘~/....