54% less productive in 2009

In 2008 I noted I was 1% more productive than 2007 with 101 posts. This year my statistics have plummeted, with just on 56 posts, a huge drop in "productivity". I wonder if it's anything to do with having a second kid?

Like last year I find it an interesting exercise to look back over my blog's statistics to work out the most popular pages for the year.

In 2009 the top 5 read blog posts were:

• Using multiple faces-config.xml files in JSF
• Configuring WebLogic Server Domain/Machine/Server instances with the JDeveloper 11g ADF installer
• Configuring a JDev 11g ADF Security app on standalone WLS against MS Active Directory
• SoapUI for web service testing
• JDev/ADF: How to log user login/logout/timeout to the database

Like 2008 the multi-faces-config.xml post wins out again, being hit just over 5500 times in 2009. Again this is probably indicative that there's a lot of JSF programmers out there beyond ADF programmers.

Of content that was written in 2009, the top 5 blog posts were:

• Configuring WebLogic Server Domain/Machine/Server instances with the JDeveloper 11g ADF installer
• SoapUI for web service testing
• Stress & load testing web applications (even ADF & Apex) using Apache JMeter
• JAX-WS Provider API based endpoints in JDev 11g
• Enabling SSL and disabling non-SSL under WLS 10.3

These statistics aren't overly representative of the 2009 results as some posts were written later in the year. However the first post received on 2700 hits in 2009, not a surprise as many developers jumped onto the JDev 11g bandwagon and discovered (at the time) configuring WLS needed some thought. I also not a bias towards web service posts, but again they go beyond the Oracle arena where there are plenty more developers.

Like last year I have no large plans for the blog in 2010. My blogging is mostly based around problems and solutions I work on for clients, while I reserve more comprehensive solutions for the SAGE Computing Services training courses and the odd paper I write for OTN or Oracle User Group magazines.

I might still though get a few extra posts in before the end of the year. But if not I'd like to wish readers a relaxing Christmas and New Years or whatever you celebrate on your part of the big round thing.

A little bit of a twitter

I'm taking a little break from the blogging gig while I recoup my enthusiasm after finishing the ODTUG-OOW-AUSOUG-AUSOUG conference circuit, and catch up on about a zillion forgotten tasks.

For a change of pace, I'm giving the Twitter lark another go, feel free to follow me along.

You're not famous until you're on the cover of an international magazine

Many a budding fashion model becomes world famous when they're first printed on the cover of an international magazine like Vogue. Obviously the same rules (must) apply to the IT market. I'm betting your fame also soars if you make it onto the front of Oracle Magazine, which apparently has over 100,000 subscribers around the world!

As you would have noticed (of course you did), I managed to make the front cover of the May/June 08 edition of Oracle Mag.

What, you can't see me?

I'm row 15, picture 23.

Or is that row 23, picture 15?

Or is it..... oh, never mind, the important part is:

See. Me. Front page. Instant Oracle celebrity. In all my black and white 0.5cm x 0.5cm glory. My Mum is going to be so proud.

For any future photo ops, please contact my agent.

(Normal JDeveloper transmissions will resume on my return from teaching an Advanced Oracle Developer course ..... hey, if Richard Foote can have an ego, so can I ;)

Grumpy Old Bloggers

As an unashamed rip off of Grumpy Old Men, following are the top 10 signs you're becoming a Grumpy Old Blogger when you:

1. Feel like calling everyone who leaves a comment on your blog an idiot.
2. Diss bloggers starting off for their immature and uninformed points of view.
3. B1tch about dropping AdWords revenue or its changing policies.
4. Whinge that people continuously don't appreciate your point of view.
5. Complain about people are not using your blog like you want them to.
6. Whine about needing to change the blog look and feel yet again.
7. Track people down on their blog and leave comments that they're idiots.
8. Fail to believe and support people in having different points of view to you.
9. Think blogging has gone rapidly down hill since the good ol' days (2 years ago).
10. Expunge anybody with any hint that they've joined your exclusive brethren.

I must admit I'm definitely guilty of some of these and I've only been blogging for a year. Time to sit back, chill out and restock on life's priorities I guess.

Tag! I'm it dag-nab-it!

Having been tagged by Dan Norris, here are 8 random things about me:

• Before I started down the heady road of IT, for 6 years I used to push trolleys, scrubbed meat rooms, and cut fruit and veg at the local "SupaValu" supermarket. My most favourable memory was finding a tree frog in the lettuce bin. My least favourite task was emptying the meat room's grease pit once a week. The most important lesson I learned: while the customer is always right, they're only buying milk and bread, so it's pretty trivial all round really.

• I'm a "2.5 generation Australian", with Scottish heritage before that. In fact along with my Scottish surname Muir, my middle name is Campbell, which was my mother's maiden name (oops, there goes one of my password security questions!). My Scottish heritage probably explains my long pockets.

• My parents were early outback teachers in central Australia, teaching at aboriginal settlements like Yuendumu (pronounced u-n-da-moo).

• Before I reached high school, I'd attended 11 primary schools in and around Australia.

• I've lived and worked in Pittsburgh USA, London and Marlow on Thames UK.

• I've been a programmer all my adult working life, and started out many years ago working on a C++ real-time distributed database for Westrail, a defunct Western Australian State government railroad agency. The project was eventually canned after millions of dollars of tax payers' money and several years development, a whole generation of programmers burnt out, and probably the best learning exercise ever on how not run an IT project. The term IOCS still lives in infamy in programmer circles in Perth.

• I'm a sucker for British comedy, including the Goons, Yes (Prime) Minister, Douglas Adams, Monty Python, Terry Pratchett, Rumpol of the Bailey, Coupling, Green Wing, Black Books, and so on. "If it ant British, it ant funny."

• I've 4 pleasures in my life, of which my partner Jenny and my toddler daughter Emily are the 2 most important, while cycling and reading are the other simpler 2. I'm still working on a daring plan to combine all 4, but might have to wait until Emily is old enough to read and Jenny will agree to do all the work on a tandem.

I'm going to cop out like Justin and only "tag" 6 bloggers as I know a couple others I would have chosen are already "it". So tag, you're it: Andrejus Baranovski, Doug Burns, Tim Hall, Frank Nimphius, Grant Ronald, and Shay Shmeltzer.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

(Okay, I couldn't think of a funny and original title, but this one says it all really)

To the readers of this blog, plus the great people I've met this year at OOW and other events, and those kind people who have helped me out via my overly insistent emails, and everybody in the Oracle blogger arena (did I miss anyone?), I'd like to wish you and your family a relaxing and fruitful Christmas and New Years!

I'm shutting the blog down for 2 weeks while I take a well earned, um, well, nearly well earned break from all things Oracle. I've been threatened with a thumping from the missus if I mention the "O" or "J" words over the next 2 weeks.

Have a beer for me! :)

Conference widows

Filed under "I'm really all pink and squishy inside."

I've just come off 3 weeks of conferences, having visited OOW in San Fran, the Perth Australia leg of the AUSOUG conference, as well as the Melbourne leg too. Conferences, whether you're just attending or actually participating, can take up a fair amount of work and home time in preparation, during the conferences and the lead up time. Multiple that by 3 and you'll know that I've recently had a very busy time.

In all the excitement of attending such events, it can be easy to forget the "significant other parties" who make a pretty clear sacrifice to allow us to attend these events.

My partner said to me the other day that she felt like a "conference window" over the last few weeks, having looked after our baby daughter, kept the house running with the usual array of chores, and working part-time to boot. All of this without me around to lend much of a hand at all while I swanned around the world. As you can imagine, an ever-so-small-incy-wincy-tiny-bit of guilt invaded my conscious.

So here's a small public thanks to my partner, and all the other wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, family, children, friends and work colleagues, who kindly and patiently put up with all of us who follow the conference trail, who understand and support us while we pursue our passions and interests, who nod and humour us when we return and rant about the latest Oracle 11g feature, the future of Fusion Middleware, or how many free Toad shirts we scored this year.

Thank you very much.

At least until next year of course.

OOW Report 2 - Highlights

Day 3 at OOW, and the last day of Oracle Develop. Today I checked out the following sessions, mostly JDeveloper, with a smattering of left field topics:

Tom Kyte's "How do you know what you know?" - Tom's definitely the feel-good speaker of the conference. His presentations are like the stories you have at the end of the news where "Fireman saves dog from tree", or "Record sized pizza made downtown". Attendees came out of his session smiling, laughing, but more importantly looking like they'd learned something that wasn't necessarily all about Oracle.

Tom's best point for myself, effectively system requirements are mutable. I've been saying this for years of course to justify that what the customer really wants is not a boring asset management system, but instead for me to work on my blog ;)

Peter Henty's "Hands on Lab: A Practical Introduction to Oracle WebCenter" - this was my first play with WebCenter besides some failed attempts at home. I must admit the demos look good, but the performance at the moment is horrible. So much so that I have my doubts about the future of WebCenter if out of the ranks its performance is this bad. The JDev team has announced that performance is the key issue they're looking at for the Tech Previews, and I hope they can prove my doubts wrong.

I'm also very curious about the future of Oracle Portal when Oracle's focus appears to be on WebCenter. The cynical would say that Oracle has a large history of killing off multiple competing products regardless of what Oracle staff say, but I guess time will tell.

Frank Nimphius's "Mind the gap: Building Secure Ajax Web Applications with Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client and Oracle ADF Security" - Frank's knowledge on web security shows no bounds and Frank took time out to explain many of the security issues in the Ajax sphere. These sort of sessions really show the complexities of issues that Oracle has to solve when building products like ADF Faces, and again gave me new found respect for the Oracle products and the teams that work on them. Frank also looked at the new security JPS mechanisms within JDev 11g, and how the binding layer acts as a choke point for all security within our app.

Umm..... then I intended to attend Duncan Mill's "Oracle ADF Binding Internals: Understand what you are building" ..... but unfortunately my jet lag got the better of me, and I went and had an hour nap after a horrible night's sleep. Following my little nap, with a new spring in my step......

Shay Shmeltzer's "Hands on Lab: Developing Ajax-based UIs with JSF" - while I've played with the new ADF Faces RC components, I've not yet had a chance to create a drag and drop web page. The lab had a huge amount of steps to get through, but the drag and drop functionality was achieved in only a very few. I did hear somebody behind me say "I'm a Netbeans expert, and this stuff is impressive - I think we'll seriously need to investigate JDev further".

Frank Nimphius's "Integration ADF & SOA" (title paraphrased) - the last session for the day, and admittedly I'm typing this post up during the presentation, but an interesting demo of combining the 2 technologies for the uninitiated.

I'm off to the annual Blogger's dinner tonight organised by Mark Rittman. Very much looking forward to it; all the bloggers have very interesting opinions and personalities - it's great to talk about Oracle with people who are so passionate.... though we're not allowed to mention the "O" word tonight of course ;)

Disclaimer: I'm at OOW under the invitation of Oracle and the Oracle ACE Director program.

Top 10 signs your DBA might need to retire

The top 10 signs your DBA might need to retire:

1. Complains about these "new fangled stored procedures".
2. Rants about the good old days of Oracle PE (Punchcard Edition).
3. Thinks Thomas Kyte is a whipper-snapper (even with the beard).
   
4. Still demands all Oracle manuals in hardcopy.
5. Has a service request with Oracle Support to forward port the RBO to 11g.
6. Knows about Edgar's secret 13th rule.
7. Thinks Oracle Support went downhill when they moved the HQ to Redwood Shores in 1989.
8. Has larry@rsi.com in his address book.
9. Still replaces blank lines in PL/SQL with single line comments.
10. Has an open 10 year old Oracle Support "TAR" to fix a bug in version 7 which he/she wont close because of the "principal of the thing."
    

If you enjoyed this, you may also enjoy Top 10 signs your new Oracle DBA may not be all what he (or she) seems.

(Yep, still a slow week while I prepare for OOW and the AUSOUG conference, as well as teach a SQL course. I promise no more "DBA bashing" ;)

A little self promotion.....

This post is a little self promotion for SAGE Computing Services. If you're not interested in marketing, use the back button now! I promise I wont be doing this sort of post often.

To all the SAGE Computing Services fans out there (hi Mum!) we've had a chance to update our website. What made me particularly excited about the site is we've managed to include flashing text, JavaScript menus, Flash animations, and audio of the SAGE team singing "row, row, row your boat".

On a slightly more serious note, we've gathered the last 3 years of the 40 odd Oracle papers, presentations and masterclasses we've run in Australia and internationally, which you can now download. I must admit we've been a bit lazy in indexing this list, because marketing isn't really our thing.

To the various user group members out there, we're more than happy to support your group and present for you. Why? Well lets just say we're a bunch of Oracle geeks. So if you have a topic that you know we specialize in, particular Oracle development, Oracle RDBMS tuning, SQL, PL/SQL, Oracle Application Express (Apex), JDeveloper or Oracle Portal, drop us a line, and we'll work something out. As long as we get a free bottle of wine out of it, we're normally happy (no white wine please).

Hopefully the updated site will generate us slightly more revenue so we can take next Friday off, rather than sitting here posting about our updated site.

OOW Unconference - oh, me, me, me!

I've taken the chance to throw one of my presentations into the Oracle Open World Unconference ring and hopefully it'll be selected. You can check my session proposal on the Oracle Wiki:

Take a load off! Load testing your Oracle Apex or JDeveloper web applications

I note Andrejus Baranovskis has entered a JDeveloper paper too:

Oracle JDeveloper/ADF Real Life Story

....great to see a JDeveloper case study; more of these please Andrejus! I'm sure we're both very keen to meet our peers interested in JDeveloper too (assuming either of our sessions are selected of course ;) so please show your support if you can.

I think the Unconference is a great idea, giving lesser known mortals a chance to present something they're interested in at this mega-event. I must admit it's also an important learning opportunity on how to present in front of an American audience for myself; let's just say I need to learn to turn down some of my Australian colloquialisms ;)

I hope more attendees will take up this great opportunity, real users presenting real topics, it doesn't get much better than that.

Top 10 signs your new Oracle DBA may not be all what he seems

The top 10 signs your new Oracle DBA may not be all what he (or she) seems:

1. Arrives day 1 with "SQL For Dummies" in hand.
2. Searches for ORA-00600 errors on AskJeeves.
3. Is president of the local MS user group.
4. Resets the production database password to "manager" to make life easier.
5. Thinks utl_file is a package the developers wrote.
6. Is planning an organisation wide upgrade to Excel (but then shelves the plan as copy 'n paste from SQL*Plus to Excel proves too difficult).
7. Proclaims "A reboot a day keeps the Oracle demons at bay."
8. Uses ANSI SQL joins.
9. Looks blank at the mention of Thomas Kyte.
10. Proclaims that administration is impossible if SSMS isn't installed.

If you enjoyed this, you may also enjoy Top 10 signs your DBA might need to retire.

(This post courtesy of a slow blogging week while I prepare for OOW, and papers for the AUSOUG conference)

OOW Blogger catchup

OOW 2007 is nearly upon us, and Mark Rittman has kindly organised a meetup at the Thirsty Bear on Tuesday 13th 7pm for all the Oracle bloggers.

Of course the challenge is on not to talk about Oracle all night. Maybe a game of "If you mention Larry it's a round of drinks" is in order ;)

3 things you can do at home *AND* work to reduce your IT environmental footprint

In honour of Blog Action Day, this post is given over entirely to the discussion of ways in which we as IT professionals, developers, administrators, team leaders and managers can help to reduce our footprint on the planet, reduce our carbon emissions, and enable our employees, employers, and associates to reduce theirs.

3 things you can do now at home AND work to reduce your IT CO2 footprint:

Power down your home *AND* work computers each night, and turn them off a the wall socket.

Most would know that there is a number of ways to "switch off" your machine, including stand by, hibernate and shut down. But the power consumption of your machine doesn't stop there. It's important to note that anything that has a transformer (the old 'power brick') such as a laptop, LCD screen, printer / fax / MFP, continue to consume power when plugged in to a live power outlet (i.e. the switch at the wall is on), regardless of whether the appliance is powered off or not.

Even mobile phone (cell phone) chargers plugged in and turned on draw a current, whether or not the phone is actually attached. Treehugger makes the claim that 40% of the energy used for electronics in your home is used while these devices are turned off.

And here's the trick, many consumers are becoming conscious of doing this at home to save some dollars on their electricity bill, but how many of us think of turning off our PCs and powered devices at work when we leave for the day? I haven't been at an IT department or an organisation yet that advocates this at a department or organisational level.

Concerned about the "Wear and Tear" of powering your devices on and off? Well, there is anecdotal evidence that powering a machine down every day may increase wear and tear on components such as the hard drive, however Google Research reported "Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported."

Turn off your "flashy" screen savers

Screen savers use as much power as a screen in normal use. Change your power options to turn the screen off after a period of inactivity, and don't use the screen saver. The original need for them has now all but disappeared with modern screens, the burn in effect doesn't occur in modern monitors, but "burn-ing" of fossil fuels to show that boring Windows logo is very much a problem.

Mystery Machines

Mark Monroe, Sun Microsystem's Director of Sustainable Computing, coined the term Data Centre Drift to describe the situation where a server is installed to run an application, eventually that application is no longer needed and is turned off, but the server remains on, serving no purpose but to use power and take up space. He also described the role of server virtualisation in minimising the number of physical machines required and save energy and emissions in the data centre. Maybe it's time for an audit of your servers to save a few CO2 tonnes and decommission that redundant server?

Many thanks

Many thanks to my friend Ben Harrison for helping me to put this post together. We hope that this post will make at least a few out there think about changing their IT practices at home AND work for the better of us all.

My 15 minutes of fame - Oracle Regional Director

On my walk to work today I saw a great little quote in an art store:

"In the future everybody will have their 15 minutes of fame"

For me my 15 minutes has arrived today. Please ensure to stay on this page for an entire 15 minutes so I'm not short changed. I'll be checking my blog stats continuously so don't skimp me or there will be trouble :P

Oracle has kindly accepted my nomination for an Oracle Regional Director role. I'm appreciative of Oracle (and specifically to their staff -- you know who you are) for this. As I've expressed before, there are a large amount of individuals who don't work for Oracle and spend a large time promoting Oracle products and services, possibly through user group activities such as for myself, and other forums. Volunteering and working for user groups can be a thankless task; you really have to work for a simple thank you sometimes. So a little appreciation and recognition from another direction such as Oracle's efforts here go a long way (well, you sold me anyhow) into keeping things running.

The problem is now I've a reputation to live up to, given all the other great Regional Directors!

Geeking it up with data visualisation

Okay, call me a sick puppy, but I was researching data visualisation techniques the other day, and stumbled across the following graph facility. Make sure you type in a name to watch the display change.

And just to show I wasn't looking up my 12 week year old daughter's name, this was the original digg post that led me there. The graph facility appears to be the work of Martin Wattenberg, a data visualisation expert at IBM. Officially "wow".

Bar graphs are now sooooooooo 2006. Oracle, any chance we might see some of this sort of stuff in EBS 12?

Support for Kathy Sierra

A typical morning for me includes scanning around 100 blogs. One blog I read from top to bottom is Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users. I wont hark on the quality of Kathy's posts as they speak for themselves. I've always been particularly interested in her views on user groups and presenting.

Recently Kathy received death threats and other horrible comments on various websites, and this has stirred me to post my support for Kathy. Such behavior is obviously not on. I wish the cops all the luck in finding these idiots and throwing them in jail, and I also hope Kathy recovers her composure and sense of self not to be intimidated by what can only be the lowest types on this planet.

I hope you'll show your support for Kathy too.

My most popular JDeveloper pages

Of the 16 posts under my JDeveloper blog since I started a couple months back, the following pages are the top visited:

• Some explicit language about implicit EL objects
• Using multiple faces-config.xml files in JSF
• JDeveloper and the art of the rollback
• Bah - what is JBO-35007?

2 other posts that have low but consistent reads are the following interview articles:

• JDeveloper Q&A with Steve Muench
• E-Business Suite Q&A with Steven Chan

Like a lot of bloggers, it's interesting to see statistics on which articles you write are the most popular. I'm using Statcounter.com to keep track of this, as well as how readers actually arrive at my blog pages.

Curiously, and maybe a bit silly of me not to realise this, most accesses to my pages are from Google searches. I was under the mistaken impression that regular JDeveloper blog readers would be the usual cliental, but Google searches account for 75% of the hits on my blog, usually based around pure JSF based searches, not Oracle, ADF Faces, ADF BC or JDeveloper related.

Otherwise the 3 most common methods for readers to get to my blog are from the JDeveloper blog aggregator hosted by the Ric Smith at The Peninsula's Edge (Great work & thanks Ric, and I'm becoming pretty good at spelling Peninsula too!), the Oracle Java newsletter, or the JSF OTN website.

What countries do the majority of queries come from?

• 24% United States
• 11% Austria
• 7% UK
• 6% Canada
• 4% Ukraine
• 3% Spain
• 3% Columbia
• 3% Poland
• 3% Australia

... and so on. The USA being at the top doesn't surprise me. Austria being 2nd does and shows that I don't know something about Austria's IT market. A dismal effort of Australia at 3%, showing that a) I'm probably nearly the only Australian reading my site (is it really that bad?), and b) Australian Oracle developers don't care about JDeveloper or JSF :(..... Maybe I should start mentioning this blog at my presentations.... but that seems a bit ego centric if you ask me.

I'd be curious to know from other JDeveloper bloggers who are keeping statistics, what services are they using to record stats, and what trends are they seeing.

Congratulations to Tony Jambu - a new Oracle Ace in our ranks

I'm very happy to announce one of our long standing AUSOUG committee members Tony Jambu, has been awarded by Oracle, the much-sort-after Oracle Ace Award. Tony has been a long, consistent and dedicated personality on the Australian and overseas Oracle conference and user group scene, so this award from Oracle is a small and prestigious show of Oracle's appreciation of his efforts. As President of the Victorian AUSOUG committee, I'd like to extend my congratulations to Tony on receiving this award, and note once again how lucky Australia as well as Melbourne is to have such Oracle talent in our ranks.

For the record, how does Oracle pick an Oracle Ace? Oracle Aces are technically proficient and eager to share their experience, whether through writing books, articles, or blogs, speaking at events, participating in OTN Discussion Forums, or simply serving as Oracle advocates in their respective organisations. Candidates are nominated by either existing Oracle Aces or Oracle product management on an ongoing basis and ratified by a nomination committee.

$1,320,132!

Amazing, I've been blogging for a whole month now, and my website if worth $1,320,132! I hope that's US$ and not AUS$.

Now if I can just find a buyer. Maybe Oracle has a few spare dollars after the Hyperion deal.

[Damn! As of March 13th my blog has dropped back to $37. I should have sold while I had the chance :(]