Precision Guesswork

Have you ever had one of those moments where you felt like you showed up at the right place, at the right time?  I know we all tend to have more mixed results of the reverse, but it these time where you have to really think about how did that moment in time come up?  By design, chance, fate, or just dumb luck. 

 

In a lot of cases previous discussions have been geared toward shaping the destiny of a project through stakeholder analysis, or manipulation. However, recently I had an encounter of the truly rare kind in business technology, where the conversation starts friendly and progresses in a direction that is unexpected, almost eerily so.  A close friend of mine, stopped by my place recently just to say hi and chat a bit.  After a few minutes, he noticed some papers on my table, it was an ERD of all things.  Then he asks me a fateful question, "Do you know about Oracle Databases?"  First off my friend is a business guys that knew I am an 'IT Guy' but not specifically my skills.  I told him yes and the conversation took a direction toward his project's efforts and failings with getting an IT group to help them build a pilot environment for a new application they were looking to bring in.  When I asked what the issue was he tells me that they assume that the resources in time, equipment, and money would make it out of the question.  So they declined to even evaluate the pilot request without a full work-up (Business Case, Requirements, Resource Estimates, and all).  My first inclination was that they must've been buying the wrong product to have that kind of response.  When he got into telling me the actual stuff they needed my jaw hit the floor.  Simply put, they needed an Oracle Database, an Apache HTTP Server, and as he put it 'some other product they call Apex'. (pronouncing it "A-pex")

 

In the last three years I have been advocating, outright Evangelizing at times, the use of APEX in this environment.  And just when I thought that I must've found just about every stakeholder that could keep it going, another one comes out of the area that I least expected them to come from, not realizing that it was here.

 

To keep a very long story short, I was able to produce an environment for this project immediately, where they had assumed one didn't exist.  The pilot project is now more than a month ahead of schedule and all it took was having a mess of paper in my space and a chance encounter with a friend that asked the right questions at the right time.

 

It just goes to show that where there is one there might be more so I need to grab my rock once again and get to work.

 

Cheers everybody!!!!! 

This was the way my evening conversation started on August 5th 1992, the day I told my parents and the rest of my family that I had just joined the US Navy. Since my oldest brother, my father, and my grandfather all served as well I thought of it as a tradition, of sorts. This was mainly due to the fact that just about every generation of my family served in the military since the United States was founded.  I had no idea how right I was, about the tradition.  I was wrong about the specifics, though.  As my father explained it that day it was more a tradition of sons disobeying their fathers, and thereby making their mothers cry. 

 

While I was in the service I found that, in many ways, it is exactly like you'd expect.  In other ways not so much.  The one thing I do remember the most, apart from meeting my wife, was the men and women I served with.  There were some really great friends that I had the pleasure of knowing.  I trusted every one of them with my life, even the ones I didn't particularly care for had at least that measure of respect, because that is your reality.  I served seven years,  eleven months, seven days and fourteen hours.  Then I became a Veteran.  This year I made a fun thing for some of the Vets I work with and thought it was funny enough to share.  (Thanks to www.dispair.com for the DIY utility)

 

 

 

For those who may be scratching their heads.  The Purple Heart is a medal that is 'awarded' to soldiers and sailors of the US military if they are wounded in combat.  Some under very unique and daring circumstances that border on questionable sanity.

 

Cheers!    "Smile! It make them wonder what you're up to." -SJ

I had never met Carl Backstrom face-to-face.  Even still, he was one of the reasons I became such an advocate for APEX in the first place.  His example as a member of the community set the bar exceptionally high.  In Denver last month I was at the training center on break and found his number and was very tempted to call.  Thinking now, I wish I had. 

 

I hadn't been keeping up on my reading lately and I got a call today from a friend to see if I had heard the news.

 

Carl will be missed by more than this community.  My condolences to his family and friends, and coworkers.

There are some times when you really have to be comfortable enough with your mistakes that you are willing to not only share them but to allow others to come to terms with them as well.  At the Getty Trust, my good friend Jeremy and I would hand out, usually to eachother, the "I'm with Stupid Award", for all actions that went above and beyond the normal call of stupidity.  I know you've seen it in my avatar pic if you've visited my actual blog page.  In the Navy it was the reference to the DD Form ID10-T which if you were unlucky enough to have filled that one out you were pretty much certified for the whole of you tour, if not your career.  So now I am bringing back these similar traditions into my blog to air the finer points of my own stupidity in the hopes that many may soon know why it is that I learn more from breaking things than taking a class on them.  This is mostly due to the fact that even if I take a class I will, in all likelyhood, break it anyway just for spite.  It is a founding principle of Precision Guesswork and who am I to break with that kind of tradition.

 

So, to the point of this post. (Finally)  In my previous posting I was noting that Oracle has announced the Oracle Application Testing Suite (OATS as I have recently seen it shortened to).   I did have some difficulty installing the tools not because it was ambiguious or truly difficult, but because I neglected to follow the first bit of technical advice I recieved from my father, now a retired mainframe programmer from IBM.  That lesson was to Read The #!*&ing Manual aka RTFM, or in this case the install instructions.  To be fair I did read them I just didn't seem to pay attention.  Once I got past that little tidbit of knowledge it all came together relatively quick.  Now that I have all of the components running I did notice a few really quirky items about the OAT Suite. 

 

The first thing that really jumped out at me is that in order to be effective as a tool set you have to have either Microsoft Access :"|~ or Microsoft SQL Server installed.  Once I finished cringing I started giggleing a bit at the thought that I just downloaded an Oracle product that cannot actually run on an Oracle database, yet.  The OATS forum and their archived forums do have some light at the end of that tunnel that suggests that this bug will be corrected.   Since this product was essentially part of a company aquisition then I guess we are at that critical adjustment phase where not all of the transitions have happened.  Anyway OATS still seems like a winner for diagnosing the Application Express items out there so long as you can build the currently supported databases (which it seems to build the mdb file even without having Access on your machine and SQL Server XE is still available :P.  Hopefully they will announce a Product Manager here soon and they can begin the process. 

 

Play time continues in earnest, so truthfully, go try it for yourself, and sew your wild OATS! 

 

(I know it is a corny joke but I think I might feel less of a troublemaker if I didn't get at least one out)

 

For now, I am with stupid once again.

 

I was sifting through my inbox this week and as I began the surgical removal of all of the SPAM that promotes "Natural Male Enhancement" and ads for dating service that help you to use your new found powers :P, I happend across an email from the IOUG.  Along with the usual listings of tech articles and general announcements I found a golden nugget, of sorts, for the APEX community at large.  The Oracle Application Testing Suite as referenced HERE.  Now naturally, me being the new toys kind of person, I downloaded it and began playing with it like my sons with Legos and XBOX games.  I struggled a bit with the install and eventually go some of the components working enough to build and run a basic test of one of my APEX applications. 

 

I found the e-tester a very quick tool to get to a functional state and testing the steps I gave it to work on and soon I had a full test of the typical 'end-user' experience on my app complete with baseline times for page rendering and such.  When I used this tool in conjunction with the HOTSOS ILO, I could see all of the 'fun' areas of the application where I was bound to need to do some more extensive work with performance tuning of the app before I release it into the wild.

 

Personally I like the tools and hope to get the rest of them working soon to make a more fully informed oppinion on this subject but the is a must see for the APEX developers out there.

 

More on this topic as my play time progresses.

 

Edit:  Unfortunately it only seems to be available to Windows to install but hopefully Oracle can start rectifying that.