Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion

I sent an email to a colleague earlier today. I just read the out of office auto reply that I received in response:

“Note: I will be on a holiday until 5th January 2009. Please resend your important emails after my return date as I will delete all email sent before that date. Perhaps put a calendar entry in your diary. See you all when I come back.”

Who said customer service was a dead concept?

Dear Lazyweb, what should I put in a website style and branding guide?

When I’m developing software applications I am used to producing a number of guidelines that should be followed during development. These usually cover:

• Architecture – these are the parts of the system and how they interact
• Tools – these are the things you will use to build the system
• Coding standards – these are the practices you should adopt with the tools we are using
• Design – this is how the application will look and interact with people

I’m currently building a web site and struggling to find good examples of the last part. We have graphic designers engaged on the project but they don’t have any templates to work from so we need to come up with our own. I don’t want to re-invent the wheel so can anybody recommend a good template for a web site style guide?

I have found a couple of examples on the web, from Monash and Penn State Universities but would be interested in looking at any more that anyone can suggest.

Python’s setuptools is able to build source distributions from Subversion and CVS. But thanks to the wonders of plugins, and in particular the setuptools_hg plugin, you can now build a Python source package using setuptools from a Mercurial repository.

I’ve just added a couple of plugins to this here blog, in preference to writing something useful, can you do me a favour and leave me a comment. In it you can tell me if the funky new preview functionality works for you or not.

And if you are using Internet Explorer 6 you should be seeing a yellow bar at the top of the page. Shame on you and let me know, because then I will know that the plugin is working and I can remove you from my address book. Double bubble.

Just to prove that I am doing things even when I’m not posting here I am leaving my mark on the internet at these other places as well;

• My tumblog – is that even what they are called?
• Twitter – of course
• Plurk – although these messages may be suspiciously similar to my tweets
• Facebook – just to keep up with the juvenile party photos of people I went to university with
• Flickr – although most of the photos are restricted, if you want to see them drop me an email.

And you never know, I may actually post something technical here in the near future.

I have packaged and released version 0.2.4 of gerald. This is a minor release with a couple of little features and some documentation and admin updates. You can find all of the details in the CHANGELOG.txt file that comes with the source distribution (or view it here) but in a nutshell the changes from the last release are;

• Added support for comments on columns in Oracle
• Added support for comments on tables in Oracle
• Changed the stylesheet used for documentation
• Added more information to the README file and converted it to reStructured Text format

Please download, install and enjoy. Bug reports or tumultuous praise to the usual address please.

This isn’t going to be news to any Oracle DBAs reading this. So if you are one, can I suggest you move along quickly to the next item in your feed reader.

Anyone left is hopefully curious like I was to figure out the difference between ‘traditional’ oracle initialisation files (init.ora) and the new fangled server parameter files (sp files). Well wonder no further fair reader for I can explain all.

Prior to Oracle 9.2 (a long time ago in Oracle database years) it was only possible to permanently effect the configuration parameters of your database by changing the init.ora file and restarting your database instance. You could make changes whilst the database was running by using the ‘ALTER SYSTEM SET’ command but these would be lost the next time your database was restarted because the startup process would use the values in your init.ora file. This meant that any instance tuning would require some informed ‘twiddling’ by the DBA to settle on a suitable value for an instance parameter and that would then be followed by a restart, causing anyone using the database to be mightily inconvenienced.

With the introduction of server parameter files in 9.2 and above changes made interactively (using ‘ALTER SYSTEM SET’) are automatically persisted. This is because whenever a change is made this way it is automagically written to your spfile.

This article has a much more comprehensive description of the differences between the two different types of files. One of the useful things it mentions is the resolution order the database server uses to select an initialisation file on startup. This is;

• spfile<SID>.ora
• spfile.ora
• init<SID>.ora

Tick another thing off the list of ’stuff that has been bothering me and I need to figure out’.

I’m currently in the foyer of the Sydney Masonic Centre setting up the registration desk for the Open Source Developer’s Conference 2008.

It may be late notice but if you want to see keynotes by Larry Wall, Chris DiBona, Anthony Baxter and Pia Waugh, not to mention interesting talks by another sixty or so speakers, you can still register up to the official conference opening tomorrow morning. More details can be found on the conference web site. Come and say hello if you make it.

Early bird registration for The Open Source Developers’ Conference 2008 is now open.

OSDC 2008 is a conference run by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a rangeof operating systems, and related topics such as business processes, licensing, and strategy. Talks vary from introductory pieces through to the deeply technical. This year we have an exciting selection of presenters and keynote speakers including:

• Larry Wall, the creator of Perl
• Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager for Google
• Andrew Tridgell, Founder, Samba Team
• Anthony Baxter, Python Evangelist
• Pia Waugh, Consultant, Waugh Partners

Check out the draft program: http://www.osdc.com.au/2008/papers/

Please visit http://www.osdc.com.au/2008/registration/ to register. Early bird registration closes on the 27th October, 2008.

For more information about this event, please visit: http://www.osdc.com.au/.

Instructions: Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair – just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.

Hat tip – Steve Holden and Simon Brunning