Thursday Thought: Boredom

Do you ever get bored? I do.

What do you do when you're bored? I eat. I think. I watch.

Sometimes I play on my phone. I whip it out, play some quizzes, read some feeds, send a text.

What I prefer to do is watch the world. There's plenty going on, I walk through a nearby bush regularly and sometimes it's almost like I'm absorbing pleasantness, contentment.

I saw a commercial a few months ago that made me sigh a little. I can't find a link, but it was basically a person at a bus stop, waiting for the bus but had nothing to do. The alternate was to "beat boredom" by getting connected, so he grabbed his phone, dropped his head and played. That was the slogan: beat boredom.

I think boredom is something we should all have and experience. Some of the best ideas probably came out of a state of boredom. It helps us think, helps our brains consolidate information, and rest.

Today I saw another advert, this one for the Apple watch. I don't see it in this list, but it was essentially the same thing. Beat boredom by having a device that's always attached to your arm that at any moment in time you can simply lift your arm up and see a computer screen.

Aren't we all consciously fighting that impulse with our smartphones?

At least the videos in the link show the device in mostly functional uses, though it's a big commitment, and to then not have it - though realistically, anything a watch can do, a phone can do, better.

And I also hear that, not surprisingly, Android gear and software are ahead of the game, not that I'm interested.

I remember giving up wearing a watch not long after I started my professional career, not that I was a big wearer anyway. I love the wrist freedom, in the same way I'm not looking forward to ever wearing glasses. I love not knowing the time, a fact further engrained after experiencing martial arts.

I think I'll wait a few generations until the wearable is much less intrusive, offering real gain.

All that being said, I'm sure there's niche markets to be filled, such as the medical industry where monitoring patients from a distance can free many hospital beds. I'm sure there's a few million dollar ideas to be had.

Maybe try walking amongst the trees.

Perth - Free 1/2 day Education Event

Thanks to Sage Computing Services, AUSOUG are hosting a free 1/2 day education event for it's members.

Join us Wednesday 19th August, 2015 at the Duxton Hotel from 2:30pm to be regaled with tales of tuning, APEX, SQL and PL/SQL.

• Penny - Practical Tuning Tips for Developers
• Kylie - Snazzy SQL: Titbits to advance your code
• Katie - PL/SQL: Are you making the most of it?
• Scott - APEX 5 isn't just a sexy new IDE 

Full details here, but we'll make sure it's a fun afternoon :)

My Kscope15 sessions

My Kscope15 sessions are now available on my presentations page.

I linked to the Prezi version as they don't translate well to PDF, as those of you who tried downloading off the Kscope mobile app may have found.

The supporting code from my deep dive demos can be downloaded here:
http://sagecomputing.com.au/workshops/jquery_workshop_code.sql

Thank you to all those who attended, and cheers for all the great feedback, I sincerely appreciate it. I wish I had more time when I was there to talk for longer with more people.

It was so awesome to meet a bunch of bloggers I've only known online, fun at times to match live faces to minute avatars. In addition of course to the plethora of other community participants I met and chatted with.

It was spun out to hear how many people were aware of my blog and were waiting to meet me, how flattering! I do what I can with my geo-isolation ;p

For those looking for other sessions from Kscope15, try Oracle's APEX collateral pages or check through recent uploads on slideshare, or become an ODTUG member for access to all the sessions plus much more.

I'll be back, not sure when, or for which conference, but I'll be back for sure.

Scott

Podcast recommendation: SGU

Another item on my backlog is getting up to date on my favourite podcasts. I've got a post drafted that lists my recommendations, but if you're looking for a fun, well produced science podcast then go no further than The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

They are generally 90 mins an episode and if you're not into podcasts already that may seem daunting. To me they fill my commute with fun but thought provoking stuff in lieu of commercial radio, which I'm sure causes ear cancer.

The episode I linked in particular (517) would be a great starter for software developers - some of the early topics might pique your interest. For many they get hooked in and start listening to the back catalogue... I did.

Soon we may even get a special Pluto episode treated perhaps with a guest commentator like Phil Plait.

@skepticsguide

Exploring dynamic pivot options

In looking for information on pivoting variable number of columns, I stumbled across a question I once managed to AskTom, many moons ago.
https://asktom.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:7644594042547

Adrian Billington has an interesting lead into an XML solution with pivot, but would need more digging to finalise conversation of XML data for APEX to use.
http://www.oracle-developer.net/display.php?id=506

Then I found Tom's answer using easy to understand dynamic SQL (properly asserted, no less)
https://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:4471013000346257238

Then I found this gem, courtesy of Anton Scheffer, via Lucas Jellema
https://technology.amis.nl/2006/05/24/dynamic-sql-pivoting-stealing-antons-thunder/

The link to Anton's blog post no longer works, but the relevant sql zip is still available in the resources.

It accepts queries like this, which solves my current problem:

select * from table( pivot(  'select deptno,  job, count(*) c from scott.emp group by deptno, job' ) )

   DEPTNO    ANALYST      CLERK    MANAGER  PRESIDENT   SALESMAN
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
        30                     1          1                     4
        20          2          2          1                      
        10                     1          1          1           

What an awesome solution.

For anyone receiving this error:
ORA-29913: error in executing ODCITABLEDESCRIBE callout
check you have direct SELECT privilege on table, similar to resolving PLS-201 error.

Now to work it into an APEX region, which seems like will be a little wild when applying PPR on report with generic number of columns.

Back to work, post Kscope15

After landing late Wednesday night I'm officially back to work on Monday morning, greeted with this:

My return to work present, but I was told they missed my enthusiasm, which was nice #geekflattery pic.twitter.com/OK60sl66Bh

— Scott Wesley (@swesley_perth) July 13, 2015

It's good to be back. There is an APEX 5 instance sitting on 12c ready for app regression testing once it has data, but work before play - got a small backlog of tasks but even those are turning out interesting.

The backlog extends to finishing this book I'm writing. Kscope kinda bit hard into the schedule so we're probably going to enlist the help of a new conference buddy to get it done in time.

I have a bunch of notes from the second half of the conference that I want to re-affirm and blog about, plus some more general lessons I learned at Kscope, plus some thoughts from other US states we visited. I also promised ensuring my session links and supporting files where available.

Perth residents & AUSOUG members, we have a Sage Technology half-day event coming up, Wed 19th August - save the date.

All that, and I've had an awesome idea that I need to foster, involving APEX.

Enthusiasm, huh?

KScope Day 2

I struggled a little bit this morning, for the first time in a few days the alarm woke be up with a start. I'm not sure my brain was ready. Kudos to those that tackled the 5k, I had the energy a few days ago...

Printing with node.js

Dimitri provided a great intro to help us all understand what node.js is all about and how to learn more, covering
- Installing node
- Nodeschool
- Node package manager
Then he showed a simple text-to-speech demo using the npm.

The demo that generated a word and ppt document really showed the potential, and there were plenty of good questions about how to take this further.

Apparently an earlier session when into detail regarding an oracledb driver to help negotiate with information direct from the database.

It was certainly code heavy, and it was great to see Dimitri jump straight into the concept of using Word to create a template to be used instead - of course solved with a plugin. Though when googling "APEX Office Print plugin", I couldn't find until I removed "plugin" - apexofficeprint.com. It does come at a cost.

FOEX Vendor Presentation

Matt Nolan reckons he struggled but it's just nerves, I think he did a great job of demonstrating the capabilities of the FOEX feature set. It was good to finally see first hand, and hear another Aussie.

When comparing value for money on the product's value against development time, it seems worth further investigation.

Once again I found myself conflicted with the other option in the same slot with the Insum team talking about what makes the profile of the best APEX developer.

Creating Hybrid APEX applications

I've seen a similar presentation online, but the great value in attending the conference in person is to see and hear everything Roel (pronouced "rule" ;p) has to say about the topic. We've been using Cordova to create hybrid applications at a client site with success, giving us the benefits of talking more directly to hardware features, but through a black box.

Roel had some great coding examples showing how to synchronise contacts to/from the database/phone, utilising RESTful web services to do some heavy lifting.

He mentioned this as a resource for finding other plugins suitable for your hybrid app: plugreg.com/plugins

Lunch & Learn

What a great idea to add some excitement to an otherwise awkward lunch. After following murphy's law (as described by Don McMillan yesterday) I picked two bad lunch lines to grab a box of food, but made it in time before the start.

There were some great questions asked by the audience to a panel of experts, plus a few comments from audience gurus.

One more generic question was regarding some wish list items for future APEX versions:

• Better IR printing
• Two instances of APEX on the same DB to help upgrading
• Version control
• Easier local documentation/help (there is some recent history in this regarding supplying a zip)
• Pivot tables with drag drop (a plug-in to come available soon)

Another interesting outcome was the news that AnyChart has a finite future within APEX and will not be upgraded. A related add-on will be available at oraOpenSource soon.

I managed to get a couple of questions in, the crowd seemed a little shy and David Peake was accomodating. I first asked a somewhat open question about debugging steps if an app seems ok from an SQL perspective yet bottlenecks appear when the user set grows. Tracing seemed to be a common response to ensure it's a problem, but do check middle tier settings in regard to connection pool management. Some sort of new quality assurance setting was suggested (I think my swyped note on the phone gave me a red herring)

I also asked for suggestions when dynamic actions start to get "complex", partially since conditional (re)actions are not yet available. General consensus was to head into jQuery land after all.

I had another more technically esoteric question which I managed to ask Anthony Rayner afterwards regarding the async parameter. This relates to the "wait for result" option in JavaScript actions, where calls can effectively be made synchronous. Browsers will at some point stop supporting this, and APEX will make changes at some point.

APEX, node.js, HTML5 (websockets)

I was particularly interested in this session from Alex and Alan and it certainly delivered. The paired up well and gave the perfect lead up to help people understand the potential of websocket solutions, even with mundain examples of echoing output and chat, which ended up being a simple yet effective example.

In short Alex described websockets allow push notificaitons in lieu of continuous polling from the client. Alan highlighted node.js as having an "event driven, non-blocking" capability.

Alex said node.js could live on either the database or middle tier, but the wow factor came with their demo. With the connection I have I'll limit it to this tiny video, or you can check the picture in this tweet.

They combined a lego mindstorm with a brick hacked it accept websockets, with a rasberry pi (I still don't get it) to allow APEX to control which coloured bricks would be accepted or rejected.

Touché boys, touché. Most creative demo ever.

Interview

I took a session off before an interview during the final session (all the best spots were gone) with Martin D'Souza. I've never been interviewed before and it was an interesting experience. Martin said I did well, and I can't wait to see the final product. We'll have to keep on eye on the ODTUG youtube channel at some point in the future.

During my time-out I took Zara to the pool and saw none other than Steven Feuerstein already doting on some other kids who'se dads are also in the nerd-pool upstairs. He's bumped into her a few times already as I've taken her up to the exhibition hall a few times, his grandkids must love him.

Conclusion

We've gotta be halfway through already, right?