April Staines Blog

City rumble to Fifteen in Melbourne

2010-06-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

Went and had a work lunch after a bit of a rumble around the city today as a team building exercise. But at the end of it, we found our way to the Jamie Oliver restaurant "Fifteen". Which i must say, was a very nice surprise.

We had the express lunch, which consists of a glass of wine, an entrée, a main and a desert

Tokyo here we come!

2009-10-15T14:57:00.000-07:00

Well until we got lachlans passport sorted out I wasn't going to make any annoucements. But as of yesterday lachlans passport application went in, so unless there is some sort of problem, Lachlan and I fly out of Melbourne on the 27th of november heading for Tokyo and Tokyo disneyland for a week!

Normally a trip like this will end up costing a fair wack. But thanks to jetstar special, where kids under 12 fly free, and a weak yen for exceptional Japanese hotel rates. So far airfare, 7 nights in shinjuku and tickets to disneyland ended up costing just over $AU2000. Which I think is pretty cool.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Let's face it, I'm addicted

2009-10-14T23:53:00.000-07:00

There was a time when I used to think that there was nothing special about an iPhone and thought that all the folks that would rave on and on about them where nothing more than your typical apple zealots. Well recently I decided to get an iPhone and my opinion has since changed somewhat.

The reason I wanted to buy one in the first place was simple and had nothing to do with all the stuff that so called zealots would go on about. I catch a train to work and would carry mobile phone and an iPod. So combining the two was the main driver. But I have since found several reasons to justify it's existance I'm my handbag.

Some examples would be te excellent assortment of applications both free and paid (right now I'm using an app to learn Japanese) the usability is truely amazing and yes it's Also an iPod.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I have no more excuses

2009-10-11T14:32:00.000-07:00

Ok, well this is just a test to see if this app really works. If so, then it's true, I really have no more excuses.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

First Day in Los Angeles

2009-08-08T07:39:00.000-07:00

Some people seem to like there cars a little on the big side in this town.

But, after 17hours of flying in cattle class, I have made it to Hollywood!
I aplogise if i look like crap, but i had not slept in 2 days by the time this photo was taken.

The only way to travel

2009-08-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

Man you rock quentin!

Im, like so totally going to miss this place. Not!

2009-08-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

Ok, well today is the last day Im here at work before I head off on my little journey to L.A. to catch up with Rachael. We are going to do a road trip from L.A. to Vegas and back, then from L.A. to San Francisco and back. Should be fun, and definately be good shopping wise, well at least I hope.

As usual, I have a bunch of stuff that needs finishing before I go. I definately need to get this solution architecture document out before i leave giving the guys here some time to review it etc. I thought I'd put a photo of me up working hard to set the scene, perhaps it will remind me when Im away of what Im missing... LOL

I think its more or less there, only there are some aspects I still have some trouble with, but Im sure i will have plenty of review comments when I return, that is, if i even return to the same location what with all this talk of moving and stuff.

Anyways, better finish what i can, clean up a little and then power down my computer.

My flight leaves at 6am, so that means i need to be at the airport at 3am, and leave home at least 2am... yuck! Anyway, let the californication begin!

The love of lego

2009-08-02T06:37:00.000-07:00

Actually the following photo was taken on my mobile a while ago but its taken to now for me to figure out how to merge my mobile blog with this blog.

Anyway, we took this at Myers in Melbourne a while back. Lachlan loves lego and currently loves the Miners and rock monster theme that Lego currently has on offer.

Sovereign Hill?, pfft! 10 Pin Bowling in Ballarat

2009-08-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

Well, if you want to experience the past in the Ballarat area you could try going to Sovereign Hill as many people do, but if you want a slightly different "blast from the past" experience, might I suggest you go 10 pin bowling.

Believe it or not the bowling ally in Ballarat still uses these 1980's retro computers to keep score, and you know what, its totally cool. I was impressed that these puppies still operated after all this time.

It would be such a shame if they where to upgrade these to some LCD driven thingy which will just date like everything else. So who knows in another 20 years people might be coming to see the retro 10 pin bowling "computer system" as an attraction.

Scootering to Ballarat, a good idea?

2009-08-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

Every month or so I travel up to Ballarat to help make it easier for the whole time share thing with Lachlan since my Ex moved up here last year. And well, while it makes sence that this way Lachlan isnt always travelling and I share some of it, its still a royal pain in the backside.

Ok, well at first i thought, now there's something i haven't done before. Ride my scooter from home (Springvale) to Ballarat.

Part of the problem is that I dont own a car, and I dont really want to drive Andy's car up here and A. Leave him in melbourne over the weekend with no car, and B. I dont think his car would last very long if i started to drive it up here every month.

Anyway, this time I thought i would ride my TGB 150cc scooter up here. And while it seemed like a good idea at the time, as I finally have all the correct safety gear. The poor little thing really really struggled.

I think i knew it was totally inadequate for the job when i was going up this massive hill. This particular section of the road was marked for 110KPH, but my poor little scooty was barely managing to keep 80KPH and was starting to make a burning rubber smell from somewhere.

The smell seemed to only come when I was pushing the scooter extra extra hard, so thinking it would blow up if i persisted for too much longer, i would need to pull over and wait for it to cool down before proceeding again. Needless to say, this didnt make for a rapid journey.

Anyway, Im still up at Ballarat, so I still need to head back to Melbourne, and the plan was to leave monday morning and go straight to work, well thats the plan.

Heres hoping im not too late in at work Monday

Why are motorcycle boots so uncomfortable

2009-07-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

I recently purchased a pair of motorcycle boots from Aldi. Yes they where cheap, $89 to be exact. But I just ride a motor scooter, and well they are bound to be safer than my dress boots that I have been wearing to date.

I guess there are a couple of problems, one they are guys shoes and while they say size 8, no way in hell are they an eight, more like size 10, but they where the smallest they had, so i have to wear mega thick socks which is cool, but i feel so clumsy walking around in them.

But the big problem is the location of the zipper. its small like most dress boots, but the leather of the boots is so thick and stiff I end up hurting my hands just to zip it up.

I have only worn them once, but am about to see if Aldi will take them back. here goes nothing.

To twitter or not

2009-07-28T03:21:00.000-07:00

Ok, well I think i must be a little slow of the mark with twitter, but alas I think i finally get it. Its not without its problems though. And I can understand why some people just don't get it. But the one nice thing i find about it is the fact that I can synchronise my Facebook status.

So the plan is that I will use (or try to use) twitter to keep everyone in the loop as I travel. Well, thats the plan.

Ok, well here it is..

2009-07-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

Ok, well here it is, my own little personal space to ramble along and capture my thoughts. As scary as it may seem.

the aprilicious 1

2009-03-17T17:47:00.000-07:00

Ok, this was taken a while ago and was posted using my sony ericsson blogger thing. so i need to fix it up a little first.

2009-03-15T19:22:00.000-07:00

10 Years worth of digital camera photos.

Remember when we first got our first digital camera? I can, it was way back in 1998 and at the time I thought, I wonder what it will be like if all my photos where digital. How much easier would it be to find that photo you took of such and such. Anyway, i have come to the realisation that I have been using a digital camera and storing images for 10 years. I have got to the point where Im not even sure what happened to most of my film photos that where not already in old school photo albums.

My first camera was a Kodak DC210 And this was one of the first pictures ever taken on it, my little boy as a newborn in the hospital

2009-03-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

A massive undertaking only an "Oracle" could manage?

Ok, well, I've been working with Oracle products for ages, I mean we all started our IT careers developing with good olde Oracle 8i on a Solaris didnt we? Ah those where the days.

Anyway, it looks like Oracle are onwards to undertake something that could be truely massive: merging the analytic functionality from Reveleus, Mantas, Siebel, PeopleSoft and Hyperion product lines into a suite of solutions "Oracle Releases New Details on Analytic Applications Road Map for Banks"
So I guess something I think Oracle should be getting used to now is integration. But Analytics is potentially a pandoras box if not done properly, so I think this will be an interesting journey.

2008-12-14T22:54:00.000-08:00

SOA I think i should really start posting again on this blog, its pretty pathetic in its current condition.

Well, alot has happened since my last entry here, last time I was working in enterprise data warehouse land, and now, well im working in integration land. Home of things like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and i find myself working on / developing an enterprise service bus for a large financial institution in Australia which, like many of its competitors finds itself trying to get the most out of SOA, outsource partners, and well, just getting the job done ASAP as economically as possible.

Now i dont think Im ever going to be able to publish stuff here thats either new, imaginative nor leading edge in any way shape or form, but I wouldnt mind sharing some of my experiences as I have found the SOA journey so far.

2006-02-21T14:40:00.000-08:00

Developers: “Express Yourself” Part 1

Seems that Oracle are taking a leaf out of the many open source database projects and releasing a community version of there 10g database called Oracle 10g Express Edition, also known as XE

Basically this gives you many (not all) of the features of 10g on a very limited licence, like a different/limited administration toolset, no clustering or multiprocessor support and limited storage capacity to name a few, but essentially the core database is much the same, well from a developers perspective anyway.

One of the attractive features of XE is that its small enough to be installed on a developers workstation, thus not tying down resources otherwise managed by a wider group, normally involving DBAs and such. XE is excellent for you early development and “crash and burn” design prototyping.

The management tool they supply isn’t that bad actually, its web based so a plus for remote administration without the need to install a client. If you look past the clunky-ness of webforms, it does pretty much everything you would ask, including basic import and export of data

Getting database tools like Toad to work with XE isn’t too much hassle, but if you have previously installed an older Oracle Client you might need to modify the path statement so that the XE drivers take precedence over the older bin files, also you’d need to modify the .ora file accordingly. So far I have been using XE with Toad 8.5 and Crystal Reports 11 with no issue.

You can download XE from this location for the windows version.

http://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/oracle10g/xe/OracleXE.exe

For Part 2 of “Express Yourself” I plan to talk about MS SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and the suite of other Express tools that work with it.

2006-02-19T15:59:00.000-08:00

Handling Parameter Lists in MS SQL Server 2000 stored procedures.

Because of how SQL Server compiles stored procedures, it cannot handle a parameter being used in the IN clause that contains a parameter list.

There are a few ways to handle this, one very common seems to be to generate a dynamic SQL statement and concatenate the contents of the parameter to the SQL statement string, then execute using the sp_executesql function. Easy peezy.

Example 1

@vBillingCentres = “'1016','1049','1049A','1122A','1122C','1303','1369','1450','1615','1617'” passed in from Client to stored procedure.

DECLARE @SQLString nvarchar(4000)

SET @SQLString = N’SELECT * FROM tbl_test01 t where t.BillingCentre in ('+ @vBillingCentres +')’

EXECUTE sp_executesql @SQLString

This works nicely, although the use of dynamic SQL negates the performance that one can achieve using pre-compiled SQL Statements. The other major complaint is that as the procedure/SQL gets more and more complex, it can become more difficult to manage the string concatenation leading to issues with maintenance and debugging.

A Nicer Way

Ideally we don’t want to have to parse our stored procedures to differently from the norm, we would also like to take advantage of compiled code, and well, I’m a little bit of a neat freak when it comes to code, so yes, its gotta look right.

Using a SQL Server 2000 user defined functions we can create a function that we pass the parameter list, and returns a table object. Thus we can simple join on its output.

Example 2:

SELECT * FROM tbl_test01 T, fn_GetBillingCentreTble(@vBillingCentres) B

WHERE T.BillingCentre = B.BillingCentre

I think that most will agree that maintaining example 2 is far easier than example 1, there is a catch.

Depending on your requirements, the code sitting behind the function might need to be relatively complex. I have provided an example that I have used, and its by no means optimised. But in places were you have many many procedures needing this processing, it makes sense to invest some time in this functionality in my opinion.

This is the basic structure of the function (it will not compile, you’d need to work out your own logic anyway)

CREATE FUNCTION Fn_GetBillingCentreTble (@vBillCentres varchar(4000))

RETURNS @vTBL_BillingCentres TABLE (BillingCentre varchar(8) primary key)

BEGIN

DECLARE @pos int

DECLARE @TempString varchar(5000)

DECLARE @curBillCentre varchar(50)

DECLARE @tTBL_BillingCentres TABLE (BillingCentre varchar(8) primary key) -- a temporay table variable used to store results

select @TempString = rtrim(ltrim(@vBillCentres)) -- trim and assign input parameter to working variable

if (@TempString <> '') -- split the BillingCentres if input string is not blank

begin

select @pos = charindex(',', @TempString)

while (@pos > 0)

begin

select @curBillCentre = substring(@TempString,1,@pos -1)

select @curBillCentre = rtrim(ltrim(replace(replace(@curBillCentre, '''', ' '),'"', ' ')))

if (LEN(@curBillCentre) >= 1 and LEN(@curBillCentre) <= 8)

begin

insert into @tTBL_BillingCentres values(@curBillCentre)

end

select @TempString = substring(@TempString,@pos +1,LEN(@TempString) - @pos)

select @pos = charindex(',', @TempString)

end

-- Copy the content of the local table variable to the one that will be returned

insert into @vTBL_BillingCentres

select BillingCentre from @tTBL_BillingCentres

return

END

I guess the only issue here is that we use a temp table, but really, its very lightweight in this example as there are limits to the size of the parameter list that is passed in.

Either way, in practice, both these approaches work

2006-02-19T14:43:00.000-08:00

Well I have just started this blog, its hardly a new one, but I have decided to try to seperate my techie, geeky blog entries from my day to day life entries.

Im not 100% sure which is going to be what, but since I already have a bunch of personal stuff on my other blog at MSN Spaces( http://spaces.msn.com/aprilstaines/), i may as well make this the techie one.