a brief history of blogging I have maintained a blog, on and off, for a long time (since 2005). During that time I have used a wide variety of blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Drupal, Tumblr, Django, Posterous, Jekyll, Ghost, Nikola, Hugo) My blog was a personal blog. Looking back, some posts were essentially micro-blogging (trite one-liners), link blogging (interesting, amusing BBC news stories), endless analysis of Manchester United together with some longer form articles. ...

Data masking with APEX Background A common customer requirement is to mask sensitive or personally identifiable data from APEX reports. Oracle has a ‘Data Masking and Subsetting’ product that performs this task. However, for smaller APEX projects, the full blown data masking product might be overkill as it needs familiarity with the product and configuration. This may be time consuming and expensive. However, we are able to use the PL/SQL package DBMS_REDACT to achieve the same result. ...

This blog uses Hugo and was previously hosted on Amazon S3 storage. The traffic and hence the costs were minimal (zero). After recently having to completely re-install Arch Linux after an idiotic mistake, I realised that Hugo was out of date, my Hugo theme was out of date and I’d forgotten precisely how the deployment to S3 actually worked. I was toying with taking my ball home in a mindless fit of pique, migrating 1,000 posts to Eleventy and I also looked at the Publii static site CMS with interest. ...

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: ...

I’m not really a betting man. Mainly because I’m a scientist. On Grand National day, we normally nominate two or three horses each and someone wanders to place our bets at the bookies round the corner. My daughter normally wins. Also, we might cut up the runners from the Daily Mail supplement and do a lucky dip sweepstake. I also used to routinely bet on the final score and first scorer in the FA Cup Final to add some interest (if United weren’t involved). ...

Saturday 18 July A beautiful, sunny Saturday morning but instead of sitting in a field in Hook Norton, drinking real ale, laughing, chatting rubbish and analysing the football season with my mates, instead we enjoyed a long overdue visit from my wife’s hairdresser. She is self-employed and a mobile hairdresser. We opened up the garage door and prepared chairs, black bin liners (to avoid using her capes) and an extension cable for her hairdryer and clippers. ...

I am not sure I like this increasing but irritating use of the ‘More’ or ‘Sensitive Content’ tag on Mastodon. From a cursory glance, I can’t even see how to add it from the Web interface. I’m not sure whether it’s enforced by the Mastodon instance or actively selected by the user. I presume it’s the latter. Microblogging to supposed to be short, snappy and spontaneous. I understand why sensitive media content might merit another key click (to protect the children) but if you’re posting about politics, I’d really rather see all the content in one fell swoop and then I would feel free to choose to ignore it. ...

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. ...

I anxiously coaxed my wife out of the door to her work trying not to raise her suspicions. My stomach was fluttering as I had an important early morning meeting. To fully prepare, first, I chose my mask. I had two options; a flesh coloured creation that resembled a one bosom bra or a more sinister black model. I tried the pale pink mask but as it, err, masked my nose, mouth and chin, it made me resemble a burns victim who had endured time consuming and expensive reconstructive surgery which had either failed or was still ongoing. ...

There’s nothing worse than yet another lockdown Netflix list. Sons Of Anarchy Heard about this series from Linux Outlaws many years ago. Jax Teller is a very handsome man. I am convinced he is the bastard son of Kurt Cobain and Brad Pitt. A decent series about biker gangs in California that inevitably features gratuitous violence and goes through peaks and troughs (the season when they went to Ireland was very weak). ...