apex.oracle.com

Well, I like it. It has been everything they said it would be. I have worked on local installs of 10g + Apex 3.0 and this hosted solution is just the same. Of course, you don't get to create your own workspace or manage the administrative stuff, but you have complete control over your own workspace. The only thing I have not investigated yet is LDAP authentication, which you probably wouldn't need to worry about if you are generating public-accessible apps.

Occasionally, it is slow. Yesterday morning, for example, it took over 7 seconds to return 30 rows from a table. This was a select * from t_xxxxx query, too, to it's not like it had to process a lot. And creating a view took so long I finally just logged out. But when I went back a couple hours later the view was there and worked properly.

Y'all take care now, Dubya!

Finally, the mental midget of the midwest is leaving the WhiteHouse. Thought I'd pay tribute to the man who brought us so much but gave us nothing...

1. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

2. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000

3. "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

4. "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."—Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

5. "Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."—declining to answer reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

6. "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.''—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001

7. "I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2006

8. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

9. "I've heard he's been called Bush's poodle. He's bigger than that."—discussing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as quoted by the Sun newspaper, June 27, 2007

10. "And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq."—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008

11. "We ought to make the pie higher."—South Carolina Republican debate, Feb. 15, 2000

12. "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

13. "And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it."—speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007

14. "We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers."—Houston, Sept. 6, 2000

15. "It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet."—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

16. "One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures."—U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 3, 2000

17. "People say, 'How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?' You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

18. "Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."—CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000

19. "I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend."—on the prospect of visiting Denmark, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005

20. "I think it's really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing baseball."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006

21. "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

22. "You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one."—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 26, 2006

23. "There's a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, 'I don't want you to let me down again.' "—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000

24. "They misunderestimated me."—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

25. "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."—Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008

apex.oracle.com

Well duh. Sometimes I miss the obvious. Most of us do at one point or another, but this is a fairly spectacular example of not seeing the obvious.

I spent a day or two trolling around the web looking for free APEX hosting, and found maxapex.com who offer a pretty good deal for free hosting (see previous post) with 5 mb database storage. That's certainly enough to play around with and learn a bunch of stuff. But somehow I completely missed apex.oracle.com offer of free hosting. So I signed up there and got 10 mb db storage right off the top, plus they included the DEMO tables so you can follow along with their tutorials.

So I am going to eventually poke around on both hosts and figure out which works best for me. I will post my findings.

apex update!

No update really - haven't had a chance to try the maxapex.com stuff yet as I was consumed by the World Junior Hockey Championship which was held in Ottawa this year. Canada won Gold for the 5th time in a row. The IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation) would probably be happier if another country won Gold every once in a while, but hey, we don't brag about anything else except hockey, we Canadians. Oh, I guess we go on a bit about our Maple Syrup, and our beer, but all that's pretty harmless if you ask me. Americans portray themselves as Canadians when they go abroad because they are treated better. I personally hope there is a special place in Hell for those Americans.


Come to think of it, that's a bit harsh. Plus, I have no say in the afterlife, as such, so it seems a bit presumptuous of me to hope there is a 'special' place for Americans who impersonate Canadians abroad.


However, isn't it telling? I mean, if you have to pretend that you are from another country, just so you get treated with even the smallest amount of courtesy, what does that say about your own country? Or rather, it's citizens' behaviour when travelling? Shouldn't this be like a raging siren to you, saying, 'Wow the Americans who were here before must have been utter assholes, and pissed everybody off so badly I have to pretend I'm not American just to avoid being beaten with sticks and driven from the land.' Bit of a bloody giveaway, don't you think?

maxapex.com pulled through

Looks like maxapex.com pulled through for me. I received my log on details earlier today and gave it a whirl. It all works! I will have to start developing something tonight after work. Will post later.

apex hosting on the web

I have found a site that ostensibly hosts APEX apps for free. I am waiting for an email with details of my account. You don't get much (5 MB db space, 1 user, 1 workspace) but it's enough to practice on. Plus if you are mocking-up an app for a prospective client you don't have to host through your own web site, or put your development box in your DMZ.

Check them out here.

Evil LDAP Trickery

Before you even try to use LDAP authentication between APEX and Microsoft's Active Directory, you need to remember that MSAD is NOT standard. Do not, repeat, do not use a DN structure such as DN=userid, OU=people, DC=your, DC=domain, DC=com. The DN Microsoft's AD wants is domain\userid. Very VERY frustrating.

Oracle Application Express 3.1.1

I've recently been working with the Oracle Applications Express 3.1.1 development tool provided free with Oracle's 10g and up database product. It is pretty cool. Not being a DBA or a web developer, but also not being wholly ignorant of either, has not prevented me from creating some pretty useful tools at work. The best part is that you can create 'apps' from spreadsheets, which is very useful.

Once you start messing around with it you start to see how it works, and you can really expand on what you have done. For example, you can create your own javascript functions and implement them directly with buttons etc. And you can reference application variables, constants easily.

Go here ---> http://apex.oracle.com

Donkeys!

Donkeys!

firefox test

Firefox (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15) works. It isn't pretty though.

I guess next up is trying to geocode addresses on the fly. I won't be putting addresses in though; most likely it will be Lat Lon coordinates, which Google's API does not seem to support. Innaresting....

twittering some more

I think most of the really serious bugs have been eradicated from my little twitter experiment. I will eventually post code here. Please be warned: I am not a coder, I am at best a copy/paster with a bit of insight. Use at your own risk. And if you don't like my coding, too bad I don't want to hear about it. Make it better yourself.

new twittering URL

I decided that 'redneck-haiku' isn't much of a name for web development, so I have rehosted at another free service. The new URL is http://twittering.net63.net.

Masters of Our Domain

For your viewing pleasure, a slideshow of the Masters of Our Domain has been added to this blog.

SMS - Twitter - Google Maps Geocoding Craziness

It works! I must admit it's a little surprising because my programming talents could fit into a thimble. But it works! Check it out at http://redneck-haiku.f-sw.com/.

There is alot of streamlining and rewriting to do. A number of features came to mind after the core code was in place, so it will mean a busy few days. Of course, having it rain every day while you are on vacation makes it easier to code and not do other things, outside.

Hacking Twitter

I've recently create a Twitter account, which in and of itself, is fairly pointless. However, it does allow you to post to the web via SMS. So if you are like me and work for a cheap-ass company that doesn't pay for email phones, it works well because you can post via text-messaging.

This gave me an interesting idea. If you could scrape that info using a web-app of some description you might be able to do something interesting with it. Having recently acquired a Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 with GPS for a stupidly low price, I have been playing around with Latidudinal and Longitudinal coordinates, the Google Maps API, and Javascript/AJAX. I occured to me that if I posted coordinates to my Twitter account, maybe I could scrape those coords off the page and generate a Google Map from them.

It turns out the HttpRequests in AJAX do not like to play outside their own domain (ie. you can't pull data from twitter.com from a page on google pages). So to get around this javascript issue, I used PHP. It's really simple, actually, and here is a rough outline of how it works:

1. PHP creates a SimpleXML object that pulls my last twitter entry (in xml format) into a variable.
2. The PHP script writes a cookie with the coordinates pulled from twitter.
3. PHP forward to another page that uses Javascript (the Google API language of choice).
4. The javascript page reads the cookie and parses out the coordinates.
5. The javascript uses the coordinates as the centre of a Google Map.

I will post more info later. Still in the debugging / thinking of features stage. I am sure there are a grillion or so real programmers who will shoot holes through my methods. I don't care. As a non-programmer this seems like a pretty slick set up to me.

google api

This might turn out to be interesting. Playing with .NET these days and there are a whole slew of things you can do with Google. One thing I surely need is a way to get my calendar to my desktop... I am so bad at remembering things that I forget I wrote them down so I wouldn't forget them. Occasionally I remember something, but that could be just because I forgot that I forgot it....

rock on white stripes!

Rock on White Stripes! Thankyou for playing whacked-out mini-shows for free for your fans up close and personal! That's rock and roll as it's best. The White Stripes are breathing life back into rock like the Sex Pistols and Nirvana had done, by making it accessible to everyone. I love Keith Richards, but I don't love the Stones Corporate Machine despite the fact I understand it's necessity.

One of the best shows I have ever seen myself was nearly 17 years ago at a small club downtown. Teenage Head, a band that had a couple of rockabilly/punk style semi-hits in the eighties, playing to a crowd of about 100 or so... absolutely intense, sound was rockin' loud but clear as a bell, totally professional. And the band was just there, as if this was it, the last show, no more after this one. I've seen much bigger names, even been right up to the stage, and nothing comes close to the Teenage Head show.


Although I bet the Arva Grain Mill White Stripes show would have summarily kicked my white ass!

some people's egos....

I have a co-worker who has dedicated a website to his forthcoming marriage. Apparently 'Love is Forever', although I am sure if you asked his first wife she might have something to say about that...

All that aside, he has this irritating little 'Only xxx days until the Wedding' counter. So I have countered, so to speak, with my own counter. My wife and I have purchased a lovely home in the nicest part of our town, called 'Old North'. We move in ... well you can see how many days, then, can't you?

Irritated yet? I hope so...

review: Virtual Lego

If you are going to start using MLCad, you require the book pictured to the left. I have had the book only 4 days and already I have learned so much it's astonishing.

It is an outstanding reference book and worth every cent.

I bought it specifically to learn how to create flexible parts such as hoses; within a half an hour I had not only run through the tutorial, but also implemented what I learned in my own model.

Click here to buy it from Amazon.ca.

update: am I 4 cents ahead, or not?

Back on December 15, 2005, I posted a blurb about how I owed the bank 11 cents interest on a line-of-credit account, but had a 15 cent credit on a cancelled credit card from the same bank. At that time I was speculating about whether I would ever see my 4 cents.

Well I finally have the result. Actually, that's not true; I have had the results for quite some time, but forgot I had created the original post. My follow up is 'tardy'.

The upshot of it all is: I am out exactly 1 Canadian dollar. I wasn't allowed to pay the bank just 11 cents, I had to transfer the minimum of $1.00. And of course the credit card company said they would transfer the 15 cents to my account, but never did.

What more can you say?