Questionnaire on Virtual Communities

Imène Ben Yahia, a doctoral student at L'Université Paris IX Dauphine, has posted a questionnaire about participation in online communities, meaning discussion board, newsgroups, usersgroups, etc, focused on software products. That is, they are collecting data on things like the OTN Forums rather than Second Life.

If you feel like helping out there is an English version here. The translation from the original French is a bit odd (it says "editor" meaning "software vendor" or "forum moderator"). The Francophone amongst you may want to check out the French version instead.

OOW2K7 Scheduler Builder open

Those of us fortunate enough to be going to Open World this year can now start planning our days with the conference Schedule Builder. I've begun the process but be warned: it requires a lot of time and mental stamina. In a world which has gone Web2.0 mad, the Open World Schedule Builder is proudly, defiantly Web1.0.

Yes, it's the user-unfriendly single long HTML table which makes it impossible to see which sessions you've booked and which sessions clash. It's the agonising network round trip every time you book a session. And it's the long scroll back from the top of the page after every booking. Oh, and Firefox users will need to use the IE Tab add-on to see the popup boxes but you probably guessed that already. In short, a trying experience, and one which shows the UKOUG agenda builder in a very good light (to be fair the UKOUG sites require the IE Tab too).

Whilst choosing sessions I noticed that just about all the developer sessions are in the Oracle Develop stream. At first I thought this was just Oracle's policy of making all the best stuff a chargeable extra. But it's actually more complicated than that. Looking at the web site it seems that Oracle Develop is not a licenceable pack. Rather it's an semi-autonomous event running alongside Open World, with some overlap (access to the OTN social events, the exhibition hall and the keynotes). So I guess Oracle have decided that not only is there a difference between developers and DBAs, the difference is so vast the two groups require separate conferences.

Web Conferencing with FireFox

I have just signed up for a web conference about the Lifetime Support Policy for 9i Database Release 9.2. Naturally enough Oracle host their own web conferences using Oracle Collaboration Suite. The registration process includes an option to test the configuration of your desktop, to ascertain whether it is compatible with Collab Suite.

Inevitably the test software doesn't work with Firefox. In fact it fails so badly that I couldn't resize the pop-up window to read the failure message. This is the second time this week I have had this problem with web conference software. Earlier this week the culprit host was Interwise. Thank goodness for the Firefox IE add-on. In both cases all I needed to do was add the conference site to IE tab's list of sites.

Firefox now has 20% of the UK browser market and 30% in Europe, and 17% worldwide. Judging by my immediate circle, the take-up is much higher amongst IT professionals. These are precisely the sort of people most likely to sign up for web conferences. Isn't it about time web conferencing started to catch up?

There is a final irony. The Oracle site does have a Quick Tutorial, which specifies Browser—Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher Java—Enabled in the system requirements. Unfortunately the Quick Tutorial (and the Help text) only work in IE. Even the Firefox IE tab renders them as blank pages.

What's up with Oracle WTF?

Last week William Robertson invited me to join the Oracle WTF crew for a drink. This was quite a daunting prospect. They've known each other - socially and as co-workers - for a long time. They're all very sharp, both in Oracle and in communication skills. In short I felt a bit like the new boy at school being invited to join the gang of the coolest kids. Or at least the snarkiest.

As it turned out only William and Adrian Billington could make it, which was a manageable number. This was the first time I had actually met William or Adrian in meatspace. However, our paths have crossed on the web and obviously William is a regular in the OTN forums. So we did already kind of know each other. It was a good evening.

One of the things we talked about was the current stasis in the Oracle WTF blog. William et al had started the enterprise in a flurry of excitement and with the blessing of the owner of a code base full of howlers. So initially they had lots of examples to draw on. The problem is, that as contractors, they have to move on to other clients. It is a bad business strategy for them to make fun of their clients code. This is why the original WTF site tends to feature war stories from years ago and guarantees the anonymity of its submitters.

I understand this completely. As as consultant I operate under the same strictures. True, the other day I did write about a system which had been written for my current client. But I think putting zeroes instead of nulls in a number column is an understandable design decision. A misguided decision but not WTF material.

The upshot is, Oracle WTF needs contributions. And those contributions will have to come from its readership. So please send your Oracle WTFs to William. He'll be most grateful.

Worse than J2EE

There's an interesting thread on the OTN PL/SQL Forum about Real Time Database Design. At least that's how it started. It has now morphed into another pop at J2EE and .NET developers. Zlatko Sirotic has posted a nice satire of the average OO developer's approach to databases:

METHOD 4: sending XML files to OO2EE.Net;
super-fast and clean method that ensures database independence;
we need database independence - maybe one day we must replace our RDBMS with flat files

Which is almost too true to be funny.

I fear my latest contribution to the debate is likely to spoil my chances of getting a Director's tiara to go with my ACE of spades.

It is worth bearing in mind that it is not just OO developers who have a poor understanding of databases. This recent WTF story shows how a VB developer with just the wrong amount of knowledge can inflict a lot worse than J2EE on your system.

What's worse than finding a NULL in a NUMBER column?

Finding half a worm! Oops, wrong punchline. No, the worst thing is finding a zero. Twice in the last week I have had to rewrite some code to handle an application which was using zero as a magic value instead of populating a numeric column with null.

One of these columns was a code which described the nature of some free text held in another column. 1 through 6 were assigned to pre-determined categories but the users can enter text outside of those categories. My program did a lookup to expand those codes with the category description; what I hadn't anticipated was that the rows for extra-mural text would have a code of 0 instead of null. NO_DATA_FOUND. Irritating but simple enough to handle.

The other case was slightly more worrying. Here the column was one of two; the other column had a data type of date. One or the other column or neither could be populated, but not both. Overwhelmingly the date column was populated . But when the date column was null roughly have the number columns were zero. Given the nature of the data it was not credible that half those rows would really have a value of zero. Most of them should have been null. However, for a handful of those records zero was probably a legitimate value. It was just impossible to tell which rows they were.

And that is the problem with "handling" nulls by using magic values instead. The magic values often need special handling themselves. Also they can subvert our data integrity. For instance substituting a null with zero may not affect the calculation of a total but will it will change the value of an average.

Nulls are annoying and it is a good idea to avoid them in a data model. But few of us are prepared to go to 6NF. Thus we have columns for which we cannot assign values. So be it. Much better to face the fact and use nulls than to fill our columns with magic values. In a very real sense disguising nulls in such a fashion is just like having an exception handler to suppress exceptions:

    ...
exception
    when no_data_found then
        null;
    ....

We need to know.

Stupid things to do with triggers: Pt.42 in a series of 94

As is well known, the concept of :OLD values in an INSERT trigger makes no sense. Obviously there is no OLD record in such a scenario case. What is perhaps less well known is that Oracle will let us build an INSERT trigger which references an :OLD value.

SQL> create or replace trigger t1
  2  before insert on t1
  3  for each row
  4  when ((old.col2 is null) or (new.col3 is null))
  5  begin
  6      if :old.col2 is null then
  7          :new.col3 := 'COL2 is null';
  8      elsif :new.col3 is null then
  9          :new.col3 := 'COL3 is null';
 10      end if;
 11  end;
 12  /

Trigger created.

SQL> 

This means we can use the trigger to corrupt our own data without really trying...

SQL> insert into t1 (col1) values (1)
  2  /

1 row created.

SQL> insert into t1 (col1,col2) values (99,56)
  2  /

1 row created.

SQL> select * from t1
  2  /
      COL1       COL2 COL3
---------- ---------- --------------------------------
         1            COL2 is null
        99         56 COL2 is null

SQL>

Obviously it is unlikely that anybody would deliberately set out to do this. But it is the sort of mistake we might make by confusing the scope of variables between the INSERT and UPDATE events. Another good reason for having separate triggers for each event. Or indeed, if you are of the anti-trigger persuasion, another good reason why triggers should never have been invented in the first place.

UKOUG 2007: Chair registration

Yesterday I wrote a blog article saying that the registration to chair conference sessions was open. Unfortunately I was premature on this and have deleted the original article. The UKOUG asks its volunteers who assist throughout the year with SIGs and the conference agenda to select sessions first. Once they have made their selections, the UKOUG may be able to open up the opportunity to members outside of the UKOUG's regular volunteer community.

So I really shouldn't have said it was open to all. I wish to apologise to the UKOUG staff for jumping the gun, and also to anybody who experiences inconvenience or frustration because they acted on my advice.

Now, where did I put my sackcloth and ashes?

Keep clear

Last night I went to the ICA cinema to see Helvetica, a documentary about the typeface. No doubt some of you are wondering why I didn't go to see The Bourne Ultimatum instead, but honestly, what would be the point? I'm sure it's well done, but you know, some fisticuffs, some car chases, Matt Damon pulling that face for the whole film... What is the point? Escapism? Well, this is a world where a man sets himself on fire and then drives a Jeep stuffed with gas canisters through the main entrance of an airline terminal. So in what sense is The Bourne Ultimatum escapist?

Whereas immersing yourself in the slightly arcane world of typography is completely delightful. This is a film which makes you look at the world about you in a completely different way. Unless you're the sort of person who obsesses about fonts you probably aren't conscious of the ubiquity of Helvetica. It is the film's task to make you see how widely-used is the type, and explain why this is the case.

Eduard Hoffman and Max Miedinger consciously designed Helvetica in 1957 to be a modern typeface. It is sans serif, with special attention given to the space around the letter. Each letter has a uniformity. It is clear, simple and straightforward. It is a typeface which is ideal for signage, corporate logos and general usage.

Helvetica has been almost ridiculously successful. The film is stuffed full of different usages of the typeface. Corporate logos, concert flyers, t-shirt slogans, posters, shop fronts, road signs and vehicle labels. The rest of the film features a number of designers talking passionately for or against Helvetica. These contributions are nicely judged: everybody cares deeply about typography but demonstrates an awareness that this might make them seem slightly unhinged.

It is just a joy to listen to articulate intelligent people talk about a topic with passion and humour. Michael Beirut has a fantastic riff on the parlous state of fifties advertising with its jumble of typefaces (especially "nuptial") scripts, goofy logos and lots! of! exclamation! marks! Jonathan Hoefler, pondering the difficulty of evaluating Helvetica, says it's like having an opinion about off-white paint. Inevitably the people who are against Helvetica have the best lines. Erik Spiekermann says he hates Helvetica because it doesn't break any rules, despite the fact that he's German and he likes rules. Paula Scher started designing in the seventies and regarded liking Helvetica in the same league as supporting the Vietnam war. "And the current war?" prompts the interviewer. "Helvetica caused the Iraq war!" she laughs.

Stefan Sagmeister rails against the corporate brochure whose front page consists of lots of white space, with six lines of Helvetica-set text, a small quirky logo in the bottom right hand corner and a picture of a business man. It says "Don't read me. I will bore the shit out of you." I have a lot of sympathy for this view. (Disclosure: LCMG is a company which specifies Helvetica for its corporate publications).

My favourite anecdote came from David Carson, of Raygun magazine. He describes how he was faced with laying out an excruciatingly banal interview with Bryan Ferry. He went through hundreds of fonts trying to find the ideal one to express his feelings for this interview. Finally, at the end of the alphabet, up came Zapf Wingding. Perfect. He showed us the double page spread. A photo of Ferry and - apart from the singer's name in the title - all the text was set in the wingding font. He said we could highlight all the text and convert it to another font - Helvetica? - but we shouldn't bother: it's not worth reading.

As IT people we use fonts all the time: in GUI boilerplate, in documentation, in PowerPoint slides. How often do we actively consider which font to use instead of just accepting the defaults? Well, I expect most of us like to use a mono-spaced font such as Courier when we are programming or including code samples in documents. But beyond that IT is a dreary world of Arial and Times New Roman. Helvetica is a film which tries to communicate why that is a bad thing, why typeface matters and why we should take the time to choose the right one for the task.

Last word. Most of the designers had computers on their desks. Every single desktop or laptop - regardless of whether its owner loved Helvetica's clean simplicity or loathed its corporate conformity - was the same brand. You know which one. I just hope Steve Jobs coughed up some sponds for all that product placement.

Of fake blogs and search engines

A couple of prominent Oracle blog sites have suffered from spam bloggers and plagiarists in the recent past. So we know there is a problem.

Gadi Evron at Securiteam has written a commentary on just how sophisticated spam bloggers are getting these days. I think everybody will find this a worthwhile read, because such sting operations can affect people who comment on blogs as well as people who own them.

Night of the living spamtards

So are there any lessons to be learned from the spamtard ORACLE's adventures in the OTN forums yesterday? Not really. We all know little corners of the internet are vulnerable to individuals with the time and the motivation to be anti-social. This was one adolescent sitting in a Comp Sci class with too much time on their hands (I think in this case we can justly blame the teachers). ORACLE (and at least one other spamtard) posted a lot of silly comments in a number of active threads and started up many more threads of their own. So what? It's not like it was a bot-driven DoS assault. The DB General forum was still usable and none of the other important forums were hit at all. Frankly the forums being down for "routine maintenance" is a bigger pain.

"One monkey don't stop no show" -- Joe Tex

I am therefore surprised by the over-reaction of some of the forum regulars. I agree it would be nice if we could prevent such incidents but actually doing so would be quite difficult. If we trash ORACLE's account today they're back tomorrow with a different Hotmail address. Somebody suggested OTN could block their IP. Well, given that they seem to be posting from a school that might also block other more benignly-motivated students from asking questions. And it certainly won't prevent the spamtard from using some other place - such as an internet cafe - to continue the games.

In a recent article in the Guardian Cory Doctorow explained why effective DRM is impossible to achieve. All it does is punish those people who have actually paid for their digital media. Stopping low level trolls like ORACLE is basically the same case. OTN could put up loads of road blocks which would inconvenience us but won't stop the spamtards. Yes, OTN could appoint trustees to zap every post these gits make, but who wants to be on spam patrol for the whole afternoon? Not me. Much better just to let the spamtards have their fun and wait for the housekeeping bot to tidy up automagically. In the meantime, just ignore them. They'll get bored if nobody reacts to their jibes.

But above all, keep it in perspective. This is not poisoning the well, more like piddling in the paddling pool.

Trolling for laughs

Just recently we have had a troll visiting the OTN DB General forum. They call themselves ORACLE. They're annoying but harmless. Still every evening the Forum moderators eradicate their posts but the next day ORACLE is back. It's just like the Do Long bridge but with disposable e-mail addresses.

Here's an example from today (I won't bother posting the URL, it'll be gone by tomorrow):

Just got my new Oracle today

Oracle 12g, OMG it is so freaking cool.

I can write 9 queries in 5 seconds.

Then I laugh at all of you noobs.

^_^V 

I don't know about you but it reminds me of this recent posting from Dizwell....

Update

Since I posted this I have noticed that ORACLE is really blitzing the forum with postings. I guess they want to be considered more than just an annoying idiot. Still at the rate they're going they should have enough posts to qualify for ACE-hood by the end of the day.

Update 2

Well ORACLE now has control of the OTN forum. So undoubtedly something must be done. Rather helpfully, ORACLE has posted a list of actions which OTN ought to undertake to make life harder for trolls:

On the subject of spammers I suggest that you make so you have responsible oracle users able to ban and delete certain posts. For example, If you where honestly going to stop my spamming you should ban the account instead of just resetting all of the posts the spamming user makes and resetting the name, that is hardly dealing with the problem effectively.
Also, whoever the Forum administrator is. They should try giving more power to users they can trust such as
-N. Gasparatto
-Paul M
-Blushadow
-Hans Forbich (hes funny =P)
You should give them the position know as moderator (these are used on most forums). They should have a certain amount of control on who uses the forum. They should be able to ban (permently immoblilize the account, dont just reset the posts) and delete posts when necessary. Therefore you won't have to wait till your stupid oracle mod comes in and sweeps the place every 24 hours.

I'm slightly miffed that I'm not included in the list of trustees.

Final update of the day

Well the OTN forum housekeeper has woken up and cleared out all the messages posted by ORACLE. But it remains to be seen whether the troll will be back tomorrow.