The sunrise wave and coffee

I've been on vacation for the past week, and had the opportunity to do some touristy things here in Juno Beach.  Marybeth and I have been walk/running for the past couple months and I've been clicking off numerous photo's using my cell phone camera at the dawn.  This time off from working and a lull in training has allowed me time to take the nicer camera and tripod out to capture some "better" pictures.

My first photo session on Thursday was great... I setup on the Juno Beach Pier and captured some great photo's of the Dawn (see below)

Juno Beach Pier

With some success under my belt, I was now more motivated to set the alarm and capture Friday's sunrise too.  

On Friday morning I had the coffee ready, the camera and tripod near the door, and plans for a quick 5 minute drive to Loggerhead Park to catch the sunrise.  Arriving with time to spare I set out across the narrow beach towards the waterline.    I traveled light carrying just the camera, tripod and my coffee.   After opening the tripod and sinking it into the sand I set about placing the camera and setting up for the shot.  Immediately I noticed that the battery that I had placed in the camera wasn't working.  I was checking the battery when out of the corner of my eye I noticed a large wave rolling towards shore.   My immediate dilemma was three fold:  I'm going to get wet,  camera/tripod was going into ocean, and I hadn't had my coffee yet.  

I really had only one choice, and saved the camera while trying to run backwards from the approaching wave.  I was partially successful and the camera didn't get a salt water bath but my shoes  where now ankle deep (with my feet still in them).  About this time I noticed that my coffee cup was rolling down the shoreline being carried by the retreating wave.   I planted the tripod on drier ground and ran back towards the ocean in an attempt to rescue my favorite travel mug.

At this point it has become one of those cosmic setups with God having a good laugh at my expense. I was running towards the water chasing my coffee, I was slogging in a $120 pair of now wet running shoes (which I needed to wear on Saturday for a 10 mile race),  I had left the camera and tripod behind, and was now chasing a $10 aluminum hiking bottle that was surfing it's way into the ocean.    Sanity prevailed and I assumed that my shoes were wet enough already.   I stood their watching as my untouched coffee (with cream) permanently sealed in an aluminum water bottle started on it's long journey to Nova Scotia.    

If anybody on the Atlantic seaboard finds a black aluminum (it has an Oracle logo) with red plastic top water bottle on the surf feel free free to email me, I'd be curious to see if it's ever found. 

Sometimes it's the simple things...

I just helped a friend with what she thought was going to be a "day ending" computer problem.

I got this phone call back in response to an email that I had just sent. "Kevin, I got your email... I only have a minute... I need to get on a conference call." Wow, I must be important. Not really, it seems that my friends computer was acting up. Every time she went to answer an email windows would pop-up, menus would open, beeps and bells would sound. She said that she may have a virus, so she was calling people instead of replying to emails.

Well an hour or so later, my friend called me back. No luck identifying a virus, maybe something was corrupted on her computer. She described her computer as "acting up only when she typed, it didn't matter what program, just any typing would make it go crazy!"

So I asked, is your "Alt" key stuck?

Problem Solved: People forget that keyboard shortcuts typically use "Alt" + "some key". So the next time you think it may be something complicated, just remember that it's the simple solutions that escape us.

Windows RAC and Lesssons Learned

Want to know how-to break an Oracle RAC on Windows installation?

I recently completed an implementation of 10gR2 on Windows and found two new ways to kill a RAC install.

#1 Windows allows you to customize the name of your network interface. So, my administrator named one of the interfaces "10.3". This was a good idea on the surface, but VIPCA didn't like it in the least. When attempting to run VIPCA it generated a trace file saying "Interface 10, Subnet 3" was an invalid number. It looks like the parse routine reading the interface definitions looks for a pattern of number"."number to begin parsing the interface definition.

#2 My administrator did me a favor, I wanted to bond a pair of interfaces on the computer (more speed, improved fault tolerance) . This happened overnight, and he rebooted the nodes after completing the work. When I came in the next morning, the RAC environment was up with no apparent errors on the local nodes. The problem was that no other computer would speak to the cluster managed services. ORA-12516 no suitable protocol for service. The maintenance on the network had changed the order of the interfaces in windows. Once I reset the interfaces to the correct order (Public, Private, etc...) rebooted and everything worked.

Use 11g features for a 9i to 10g upgrade!

It's 10:50PM, and you know that all us night owls are coming to life.

I just finished reviewing the Oracle white papers on Real Application Testing for 9i and 10g databases this is great technology. If you are looking to migrate your existing systems to 11g and Real Application Testing is in the budget, this is a great value proposition to sweeten the deal.

Here's the scoop: If you have an existing 11g database installation, you can use "opatch" to retrofit the workload capture functionality of the 11g Real Application Testing to an existing 9i or 10g database. After the patch is applied and the capture process enabled, it is a simple process to "replay" those transactions inside the 11g environment.

Oracle put together a great white paper (all 48 pages) on how this technology can be applied to an 9i to 10g migration. It looks like all us procrastinators who dreaded the regression testing in our future just got a lifeline.