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December 20, 2006
Vacation
Well it's Christmas Time. I love this time of year.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes I'm not feelin' it. But I'm taking two weeks off during the Christmas break, and I'm sure feeling that. It always takes me a day or two to get into the Spirit of things. I'm convinced that this will be one of the best years yet.
My oldest sister will be bringing my new-born neice and nephew. My older sister is pregnant with her first. Brenda and I just painted the inside of our house and for the next two weeks, there will be caroling and cider and parties and family and games and laughing and napping (one of my personal favorites)...
Seems like Christmas usually brings out the best in people (unless you go shopping ... BEWARE!).
The next few weeks will be bliss. I just love being home. If I could be a stay-at-home dad, I'd totally do it. But things like food and heat become problems. I like my job, in fact I'm very thankful for it. But I work to live ... and I live life most at home.
At home, I'm gonna do me a lot of thinkin' this year about Christmas. Charlie Brown and Linus had it right... the true Spirit of Christmas. I'd encourage everyone (religious and non-religious alike, young and old, black or white ... or whatever) to spend a minute or many pondering the real reason for this most excellent season. A star... some shepherds... 3 wise men... and a baby.
Posted by ellism at 2:24 AM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2006
The Latest...
I'm still a bit in shock over the term being over. Seems like it was 'in the middle of the term' for so long I lost track of time. But I got some stuff done.
I have migrated all but one of my PL apps to our standardized security and the WOUPortal (or purposefully not). The last is moving tomorrow. Hmmm, just found another. Oh well, maybe tomorrow too :)
Computrition is back on it's feet and is getting and upgrade tomorrow.
Today we hashed out HOURS and hours of CBORD info trying to not only understand previously written term-to-term instructions, but blaze a trail of our own. That was quite successful, and we'll finish up tomorrow.
It was wednesday and I was at work. That's noteworthy in itself...
WOUPortal is about 2 steps from real public consumption. I'm pretty excited, it's shaping up to be a nice tool, with some real possibilities in the future.
Still working (fighting) with CBORD to get a cost-effective ASA to Oracle DB conversion. We have some technical specs to work out before we can finalize a price. The ultimate option would be for us to use Oracle for a DB (setup a new production campus-wide 10g) and use that same DB for Computrition, Conference Programmer, my PL apps, etc...
One box, every app. It's a developer's (my) dream. But it's money ... and not my money. So we'll see. I can live with what we have, but Oracle is just such a better option.
Made a HUGE (a few lines of code) change to payroll making it ... no joke ... 6 times faster. Oh yeah.
We've had a record number of filesharers this term, with an overwhelming response one specific day and more coming AFTER the end of the term. Sheesh.
Summer and I been trying to get AJAX off the ground. It hasn't been pretty. Alas. Seems pretty stock, so very confusing...
File IO from Oracle has been broken (on and off) for weeks. I have tons of stuff that needs it, so that's getting old. Hopefully tomorrow.... LOL - or at least this week.
Well that's most of it. Been a busy time, but things ARE getting done. I'm into that.
Posted by ellism at 2:34 AM | Comments (0)
December 1, 2006
File IO
After migrating one of our shares, we've gone through a bumpy transition period for Oracle File I/O. After reviewing some of the code I thought it noteworthy enough to post.
I particularyly dislike having to create a new 'block' denoted by the begin statement. You loop through the file and read the next line. Basically you do this 'forever' until the program throws a no_data_found exception. You then exit the block and move on.
Weird. Haven't we heard of EOF()? Seriously. Why can't we just loop until we've reached the end of the file. That's just plain weird. No sir I don't like it. But there it is in it's ... uh... glory.
"
-- Open the file
vfile := sys.utl_file.fopen( cpath||'directory', 'file.txt', 'r');
loop
-- Believe it or not, this is proper file looping structure.
-- Step 1: Read a line
-- Step 2: If there is no more data, just exit the loop
-- Sounds quirky and really piece-meal, but it works...
begin
sys.utl_file.get_line(vfile, vline);
exception
when no_data_found then
exit;
end;
end loop
"
Posted by ellism at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)