Sage Computing Services now on Google+

I've recently created a Google+ page for Sage Computing Services, the wonderful company I work for that has just celebrated 20 years of consulting & training in Perth.

We aim to use this social media presence to announce public training events, community involvement, and anything else we find relevant. No doubt it's usefulness will expand over time.

Check us out!

Google Web Designer - a HTML5 development tool

So, in the coming months Google will be launching a HTML5 web development tool targeted at creative agencies and designers.

My geeky mind thought about that, remembered geocities and thought - boy we've come a long way.

My APEX mind read that and thought - I wonder how many similarities this may have with a tool like Oracle Application Express, and I wonder what we might be able to learn from it?

I wonder what sort of databases could be attached to it, or maybe a good API into further enhanced HTML5 storage capabilities will make other databases superfluous in this instance?

There are a number of tools out there today that probably do whatever Google is going to do, but with Google's brand and inertia, we might just give the crazies an even more effective tool for duping the masses.

I'm also interested what it might mean for bloggers...?

What if Google went bust?

Ever consider that? What would you lose?

During life we put a spectrum of trust in different areas, depending on our own risk assessment. We originally entrusted our tribe members to help protect the community. Now, we might give a dollar to a little boy to fetch us something, and we might not get it back. Who cares? it's a buck.
We trust out mortgage to the banks because they have a proven history of money management.

So what about your data? I trust Google with a lot of my content. In fact, not really content, but information. Dates, numbers, links, hints, prompts, memories...
It's hard to back up because it's a network of information. A lattice that Google so elegantly lets you search.

We occasionally joke about our reliance on these modern devices when an old fashioned diary will do - but what happens when you lose that? I was listening to an interesting podcast recently from our public broadcaster ABC, a program called "All in the mind". A recent discussion on memory suggested we've been using these aids in various forms to help us remember from computers to paper to papyrus to cavern walls - so what's the matter with using this tool aiming for a device harmoniously engineered for bio & robotics. Well, maybe I added some thoughts in the description - but a program well worth a listen.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/new-document/4420956

On a slight tangent (ba-dum), searching is an interesting topic itself - what if all information humanity knows about the universe was in a cube the size of a dice? Search facilitation would have to be impeccable. Search companies are never going to die (altavista? well, companies that aren't a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary)

If Google went bust, I'd be in the doo doo.

So what about your personal finance software? What if that went bust? or your hard disk died? laptop stolen? fire?
How much information would you lose? How easy is to backup? Copy the export to a disk, thumbdrive, cloud service, cd - somewhere off-site.

And know how to get it back.

Risk vs benefit vs simplicity.

I have what I feel is a very strong password - that's all you need, right? Remember the TV show "Weakest Link", think about that with your security. Cars used to be hot-wired, now they can't so criminals steal keys out of houses.

Heck, what happens when our cars start integrating via bluetooth with more intelligence to other aspects of your life? Smartphone applications getting more advanced and integrated than Google's My Tracks or Angry Birds.

People are being asked to put passwords everywhere now right? People using simpler passwords and not caring about that added security because it's too hard an unnecessary - who would be interested in me, right?

Shit happens and sometimes it gets up your nostrils. People might start to take notice - sites are providing shared authentication through a number of accounts - google, facebook, twitter - so the closer we get to one-size-fits-all authentication, we can perhaps think about just having one good, strong, but easy to remember password.

So, passwords is too strong for a super duper force of networked computers to hack? well try basic social engineering.

I think everyone should read the story of Mat Honan, a man who's heavily invested digital life was destroyed with a simple phone call.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/all/

He lost all his information, and tells the horrible story of someone gaining access to a single point of his online identity, then trail blazed from there - just by someone pretending to be him on a phone, getting a password reset. All because they liked his 3 letter twitter handle.

I've had this rambling drafted for a while, and now I encounter the perfect concept to take away from this - Google has now announced a war on the password.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google-password/

I've always had interests in various security aspects of computer science, and I think this will be an interesting part of the journey. I wonder which science fiction writers ended up being right in helping us imagine the future we encounter?

When will we close a year of technology and comment on the general disappearance of the common password, gone like the day of the 3.5" disk that fits perfectly in your starched shirt chest pocket?

To make a title about recursion, you've got to understand recursive titles.

Recursion, that's right, recursion, that's right, recursion. Best I stop that...

This screen shot an example showing one of Google's easter eggs that I found amusing.

In honour of creating a subtle one myself by accident recently, and the inspiration for me to add it as an option in a PL/SQL Challenge quiz question I submitted. If you're not playing, get in there, learn & have fun - who doesn't like quizzes!

The question submission stemmed from testing out a idea from reading Gary's blog post, which I found interesting, concise and thought provoking. Just something simple involving compiler directives.

For those chasing a simple example of recursion, this would create an infinite loop if executed in Oracle.

create function recursive(pc varchar2) 
return varchar2 is
begin
  return recursive(pc);
end;
/

select recursive('me') from dual;

Done!

Blog re-name & re-design (round 1)

Some of the more astute of you - or those that may have taken notice to the final "slide" of my Apex security presentation at the AUSOUG conference - may have noticed that I registered a new name for my blog.

There were a few reasons for this. Initially it took some time for me to decide on a name when I decided to start blogging, and in hindsight I thought it needed a re-jig. (my personal gmail account could probably do with the same adjustment)

I also thought that after getting into the groove of blogging, it was time to select a name that suited my particular style and removed the blogspot moniker.

So I've chosen the following:

grassroots-oracle.com

I've updated the about me page to describe this choice a little further. You may also notice I've got some other tabs across the top for common information you might like to view - using bloggers ability to create Pages for this very purpose. Feel free to check them out.

For those of you visiting my actual page as opposed to viewing through an RSS feed or aggregator, you may also notice the blog design has changed dramatically.

I've finally taken advantage of some of the new tools blogger provides. I don't think I've finished yet though. One reason - I'm on the road, it's really late, and I'm using my phone tether to work on the net.
The other reason - I like to sit on things for a while to see how a like it, and see if any other ideas come up. I'm also not quite happy with the colour scheme - I'm a little spoilt for choice and I wasn't quite ready to perform those finer adjustments.

I also think there may be some other ramifications from my template of choice - I notice my favicon has disappeared, and it seems I need to re-apply my syntax highlighting. Ahh, the life of a software developer...

And if you're wondering about the background image in the logo - I took that in my backyard using my smartphone, plus a little trickery - no software involved, except of course adding the text.

I hope you like the adjustments so far. If you have any tips or ideas, feel free to let me know.

Compute the area of...

Riddle me this

Somewhere in the world there must be an exam or test that asks the question to compute the area of a given shape using PL/SQL. I know this because occasionally I look at the Google Analytics for my blog and see some pretty crazy google searches that arrive at my page because of my chosen blog name.

In just a few hours I take off for Hong Kong to take the kids to Disneyland and visit the city for a few days. I'm happy, so (while I don't condone the use of the Internet to solve all your problems) I thought I'd make a few other people happy, and make the visit to my site worthwhile :-)

I've used formulas according to Maths is Fun, and also demonstrated a few other SQL rounding functions you can find well documented here. That's right kids, documentation is your friend.

declare
  lc_pi constant number := 3.141592;
  
  -- triangle
  ln_t_base    number default 2;
  ln_t_height  number default 4;
  
  -- square
  ln_s_length  number default 5;
  
  -- circle
  ln_c_radius  number default 200;
  
  -- ellipse
  ln_e_width   number default 3;
  ln_e_height  number default 2;
  
  -- trapezoid / trapezium
  ln_z_a       number default 2;
  ln_z_b       number default 5;
  ln_z_height  number default 3;
  
  -- sector
  ln_r_radius  number default 4;
  ln_r_degrees number default 45;
  
  ln_area  number;

begin
  -- triangle
  ln_area := 0.5 * ln_t_base * ln_t_height;
  dbms_output.put_line('Triangle: '||ln_area);

  -- square
  ln_area := POWER(ln_s_length, 2);
  dbms_output.put_line('Square: '||ln_area);

  -- circle
  ln_area := lc_pi * POWER(ln_c_radius, 2);

  dbms_output.put_line('Circle: '||ROUND(ln_area, -2));

  -- ellipse
  ln_area := lc_pi * ln_e_width * ln_e_height;
  dbms_output.put_line('Ellipse: '||FLOOR(ln_area));

  -- trapezium
  ln_area := 0.5 * (ln_z_a + ln_z_b) * ln_z_height;
  dbms_output.put_line('Trapezoid: '||CEIL(ln_area));
  
  -- sector
  ln_area := 1/2 * ln_r_radius**2 * ln_r_degrees / 180 / lc_pi;

  dbms_output.put_line('Sector: '||ROUND(ln_area, 5));
  

end simple_calcs;
/  

Triangle: 4
Square: 25
Circle: 125700
Ellipse: 18
Trapezoid: 11
Sector: 6.28319

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

See you on the other side of Hong Kong!

Why I use Google Chrome for Oracle APEX Development

I keep it no secret I'm a fan of Google products. Funny considering I remember I used to go out of my way to use other search engines when I was at uni, like Altavista.

Recently I read a great an eye catching article 20 Instant Upgrades to Make Chrome Better than Firefox. I've been using Chrome a fair bit recently - it certainly loads faster than Firefox, even though I've been advised that's because of all the Firefox add-ins I've applied. In some ways I beg to differ - I have a VMware instance with only Firebug added, and Chrome still anecdotally performs better.

As a database developer when it comes to Application Express, Chrome seems snappier and more responsive. I thought I'd mention a few things about this article that stood out for me when it comes to APEX.

Searching

I like to provide people options to search through Oracle Documentation, and here is another new trick.

Under the search options you can add a search engine.

An example URL might be:
http://www.oracle.com/pls/db102/search?remark=quick_search&tab_id=&format=ranked&word=%s

Then when searching within the "Omnibar", you can type "oracle", press tab, and all search results will be pertinent to Oracle 10gR2.

Alternatively you could use something like the site: search keyword in Google Search to form your URL.

Stats for Nerds

I can't imagine our APEX applications will consume too many resources, but you can certainly use this nifty feature to find out what other tabs may be devouring valuable CPU/memory on your hardware.

Shift-Escape brings up this little task manager, and the "Stats for Nerds" link give you even more information.


Firebug for Chrome

Don't even need to worry about installing an add-on. Just right click on your page and select "Inspect Element". A wealth of options will now appear before you, allowing you to edit your web-pages on the fly - a necessity for many APEX developers.

Synchronising bookmarks

Xmarks has been a great find for me, and while this feature isn't necessarily APEX specific, I find it very handy in my line of work. For quite a while, Xmarks wasn't available for Chrome, but given a Google account, Chrome will synchronise for you.

Shrink your tabs

While the APEX favicon may not be all the exciting, you can right click on your tabs and pin them to your tab bar, allowing you more room to identify and open other tabs during your day of productive development.

IE Tab Add-on
For those pages that only work properly with Internet Explorer. Sigh.

Split Page View

The article mentions a URL that enables split screen viewing within your browser, which would be great for comparisons within APEX. It's just a shame these browsers don't do this inherently.

Portable Chrome

The article mentions one website, portableapps.com, but I know there's quite a few out there that provide the ability.

Added bonus

Something the article doesn't mention, but I'm sure many APEX developers will appreciate, the ability to resize text areas - out of the Chromium box - no need to worry about the ApexLib extension.

One day Penny noticed this on my laptop and suggested I installed the ApexLib APEX Builder extension - I didn't think I had, and after reading this article the hand slapped the forehead and I realised what was going on.

Chrome has come a long way since its early days. I do appreciate the fact we now have many major browsers affecting the market place and development community, in addition to some minor browsers targeting niche areas - Stainless should be good for those Mac users who'd like to operate multiple tabs with different crudentials - another APEX developer desire.

I know I'll continue to use Chrome for my APEX builder session.

Futher empowering search products

One of my recent presentations was inspired by some colleagues talking about the difficulty they find searching the Oracle documentation to find the information they require.

During this presentation I mention a book I read recently (alas I can't remember now which one) where they refer to the concept of the world's entire knowledge being stored on a device the size of a grain of sand. Seems a little fanciful now, but imagine what sounded fanciful back in 1901, and compare that to what we have today.

Of course the reason I made this reference was that our search engines are going to need to become smarter. And we're going to need to be smarter in relation to how we pool information from all resources.

For years now hardware has been sustaining growth to the approximation of Moore's Law. Hardware companies have certainly had their day in the sun, and that indeed continues. Oracle's recent partnership with Sun, releasing information on Exadata V2 show us what's happening in our little sphere.

Microsoft's time in the sun is beginning to wane. Competition grows strong between Bing & Google, and a recent news item caught my attention.

On Google's official blog they announced their future integration with Twitter. Now I mentioned how we need to be smarter with the way we integrate our information. I feel this is a good step towards this goal. Sites like Twitter are an untapped goldmine in regard to current information, current news stories, and the current opinions of the masses.

One of my all time favourite books explores (among other things) the power of real-time information. Richard Wiseman, psychologist and skeptic, recently used Twitter as a tool to conduct a scientific experiment. I heard him speak on a podcast recently where he's straining his brain trying to work out how to use social networking sites such as this that lead the cultural meme as an effective tool to do powerful studies on mass & diverse populations. Integration of this information with powerful search engines I'm sure will aid his work.

Arthur C. Clarke's book linked above mentions a generic "Search Engine" as being a tool ultimately hard-wired into our brains, such that we can use it to search for information, such as looking at the background of someone you just met while you strike a conversation.

Considering the world's knowledge is now more than just an ancient library of information, I feel that "information finding" companies like Google will be the strong force over the next few decades.

I also believe the tide is turning away from journalism and more towards blogs. I particularly find this on the scientific blogs I read. Recently it's been mentioned that perhaps we'll need to pay a subscription for obtaining news from major sources - just like buying a newspaper. I doubt such a model will work well, and for the type of new I'm interested in, I find science bloggers to a more accurate, objective and entertaining job. So perhaps future search engines also need to tailor to our preferences, our needs of the moment. We certainly see some of this happen now when we search for books on Amazon, or listen to music on iTunes or LastFM - common purchases are linked together and strengthen connections like the neural networks I learnt about in university.

Search facilities are the next big thing.

Now before I finish, considering this is an Oracle themed blog, I best mention one of Oracle's best search facilities is Oracle Text (formerly Oracle InterMedia). I'm waiting for the opportunity to explore this feature even more after developing a wonderful search facility a few years ago. Perhaps this requires a future presentation to highlight this possibly underutilised feature.

My thoughts for this week conclude with a quote sourced from Twitter via my RSS feed.

He who does not research has nothing to teach ~ Unknown