Bitter Sweet

13 August 2006Family, LifeAlistair Lattimore

Today was an incredible day, for more than one reason.

Important Reason #1

Claire’s Grandfather, Eric Colls passed away in his sleep at the age of 86 after suffering a stroke a few weeks ago.

Important Reason #2

Claire’s older sister Emily gave birth to a healthy 8lb 8oz baby boy.

Reflection

It is hard for me to begin to explain the emotion we went through today, so I don’t know that I’ll bother trying. What I will say is that Claire’s Grandfather Eric was fantastic. He was sprightly, quick minded and very funny. I always remember him constantly having a joke with us and telling us a yarn. He has lived in the Chinchilla area for most of his life, served our wonderful country in the Australian Army and survived the war. He has an incredible memory for history and can remember most of the people who have passed through the Chinchilla area over the last 50 years, which in my opinion is quite remarkable.

It has been an incredible day which I didn’t expect; then again who would have expected it. The one thing I think is uncanny is that the expression about one door closing and another opening has been fulfilled in this instance. I’d like to leave you with something that I think sums up Eric in many ways, which was presented to him on an award recently by the Returned & Services League:

Your country called
You answered
We salute you

We’ll sure miss you Grand Dad.

Google & News Corporation Strike USD$900 Million Deal

11 August 2006Internet, NewsAlistair Lattimore

On the 7^th of August 2006, Google announced one of the biggest online deals in the history of the internet with News Corporation. The multi-year agreement between News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media and Google will see Google part with approximately USD$900 Million dollars and for that pleasure, it will deliver exclusive search and keyword targeted advertising to the growing Fox Interactive Media network of sites.

The agreement states that Google will provide advertising to the Fox Interactive Media group sites, which include a swag of technology, computer gaming sites, sport related and also the behemoth that is MySpace. The benefit to News Corporation is also clear; with strategic alignment with a leading technology company like Google – it will allow News Corporation to transform its company into the dominant force in the digital media realm.

This deal, in my opinion, is going to position Google to be the premium provider of online advertising in the future. Google obviously already delivers an excellent product for the text based advertising, however affiliation with Fox Interactive Media should see them deliver more image based advertising. If they do start delivering more image/flash based advertising, this should translate into Google enhancing its current AdSense and other advertising programs which should put it clearly out in front.

The amazing thing about the agreement is that it is going to cost Google approximately USD$900 million dollars between 2007 and 2010. News Corporation have to be particularly chuffed about the whole situation since they only began investing heavily in the internet space in July 2005 with their high profile purchase of MySpace for approximately USD$580 Million dollars.

It sure is a changing landscape in recent times.

Uplate Game Show Returns Worse Than Ever

1 August 2006GeneralAlistair Lattimore

In September last year, I posted about The Uplate Game Show and noted that it was possibly one of the worst shows that has ever hit the TV.

I had secretly hoped that with Big Brother 2006 ending, that The Uplate Game Show would have died a swift and quiet death; unfortunately I was wrong. As of last night, Simon Deering aka Hotdogs, has returned for another season hammering. The last ‘season’ of The Uplate Game Show was painful and forced, where Hotdogs babbled on and on. In an attempt to ease that pain somewhat, it appears that Channel 10 have slotted in a co-host. If you’re up to the challenge, try and imagine a female version of Hotdogs that has even more of the superficial fake enthusiasm; I know, it hurt.

I was shocked last time around but I cannot believe that Channel 10 are that desperate for a showing that they’d put it back on. Then again, with the advent of everyone’s favourite ‘please little teenager, SMS and make us millionaires’ tactic, it isn’t really that surprising.

Ragdoll Relaxation

1 August 2006Animals, PhotosAlistair Lattimore

It has been nearly three months since I last posted anything about Princess; so it is time for a little update.

As I mentioned in the last update, Princess isn’t very lady like. For whatever reason, she has taken to sleeping in her perfectly lady-like position in the doorway of our bedroom. At night, if she isn’t sleeping on her back in the doorway; you can be sure she is sprawled over one of our bedside tables.

To unwind from a stressful day, Princess likes to play with her toys. One of her favourite toys is a simple household clothes peg; she thinks they are just great. She has been known to play with them on her own steam for hours at a time and also retrieve them too! A little while ago, we kept on losing her favourite pegs and we couldn’t work out where they were vanishing to. On the weekend, Claire and I decided we’d hunt the house high and low to find out where Princess has been stashing them. After checking all the expected places, we ended up being very surprised!

Oracle ORA-04030 Application Errors

17 July 2006Database, Programming, SoftwareAlistair Lattimore

Recently I posted about an ORA-04030 Oracle error we received at work. At the end of many hours of pain, the solution was to swap the apparently damaged physical memory for fresh sticks of memory. This post is a follow up to highlight that an Oracle ORA-04030 can be generated by an application error as well.

As soon as the application started generating the ORA-04030 error, we immediately started working through the first set of points from our last excursion with this error. Thankfully, when looking through the Oracle log files it was throwing an error on a particular PL/SQL package. After inspecting the PL/SQL package, there was a clear opportunity for the PL/SQL procedure to spiral out of control and consume all the memory on the server.

In this instance, the PL/SQL procedure was building up a tree of information using the Oracle CONNECT BY PRIOR clause. As you can imagine, if for some reason a node had itself as its parent or child or any recursive relationship; the SQL statement would loop infinitely. Soon enough, the statement has retrieved a million or more rows and the server suddenly has no more memory left and it throws an ORA-04030 error.

The solution in this case was just as simple as the cause, remove the recursive data. For safe measure, there will be checks added using a BEFORE ROW INSERT and BEFORE ROW UPDATE triggers to make sure that the same problem doesn’t resurface in the future.