Mike Schaeffer's Blog

Tomorrow, my employer is replacing my three year old Dell D400 with a nice new Compaq nc2400. I have to admit that I'm a bit apprehensive about the switch; My D400 works quite well and shows few signs of decay. But, I also remember feeling the same way about the D400. Maybe the Compaq will be as good as the last Compaq I regularly used and be another nice suprise. Anyway, as part of clearing out the old machine, here are a few links I've found that I'd like to preserve. No promises on content, but you might find at least one of them to be interesting if you read this blog.

• Nicholas Carr - IT Doesn't Matter - Probably false, from what I've heard about it.

• Folklore.org - Macintosh Stories - Wonderful web site dedicated to stories from the creation of the Macintosh. If you're up for that, you might also be up for this, a detailed history of the old Apple ][ machines.

• Design and Implementation of a Web-based Email System

• Oracle Documentation Home Page - Oracle's website sucks, so here is the link to their documentation that's not as obvious as it should be.

• Y Combinator Startup News - Elitist Reddit.

• Michael Ruhlman's Blog - Good for foodies. This is the guy that went to culinary school to learn enough about cooking to write about chefs.

• SmartServe Chicken - The opposite of the last link, but you've probably eaten this crap if you live in the western world.

• Jaguar V12 Engine - A nice history of an apparantly pretty troublesome, but 'sexy', engine.

• Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations - I have no idea what this is, but it seems important. :-)

• Rob Pike's Notes on Programming in C
• My Lisp Experiences and the Development of Gnu Emacs - By Richard Stallman, of course...
• Emacs Lisp Coding Thoughts
• Ford Six Performance
  • Ford dropped this engine in favor of a 4.2 Liter V6, but this was the entrylevel truck engine for years. I remember very clearly looking at new 4.9 liter F-150's with my dad back in 1991.

• Come Celebrate the Joy of Programming with the World's Most Unbreaucratic Computers - Lisp Machine Stuff...
• Bitsavers - This is probably the most important link on the list, aside from the next one. A huge archive of old computer documentation and software. If you're a computer geek, and you care about where you came from, you should click this link and spend the next couple weeks reading.
• 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer

The other day, I created a table in Oracle with the following command. This is written in the subset of SQL known as DDL, or Data Defintion Language.

CREATE TABLE COMMON.SAMPLE_TABLE (
  NAME      VARCHAR(64) NOT NULL,
  STATUS    CHAR(1),
  X_C       NUMBER (10),
  Y_C       NUMBER (*,10) NOT NULL, 
  Z_C       NUMBER (*,10),
  FOO       VARCHAR2 (18) NOT NULL, 
  BAR       DATE,
  BAZ       TIMESTAMP
 )
/

Once the table is created, it is then possible to ask the database to describe the table:

common@XE> desc COMMON.SAMPLE_TABLE;
 Name                          Null?    Type
 ----------------------------- -------- ----------------------------
 NAME                          NOT NULL VARCHAR2(64)
 STATUS                                 CHAR(1)
 X_C                                    NUMBER(10)
 Y_C                           NOT NULL NUMBER(38,10)
 Z_C                                    NUMBER(38,10)
 FOO                           NOT NULL VARCHAR2(18)
 BAR                                    DATE
 BAZ                                    TIMESTAMP(6)

For some reason, the syntax of Oracle's description of the table's definition is entirely different than the syntax of the DDL used to define the table in the first place. Not only does the description not use DDL, minor details are different too. For example, the relative placement of the nullability (NOT NULL) of a column and its data type is reversed from one representation to the other. This makes converting a table description into corresponding DDL a trickier process than it would be otherwise. Another difference (loss?) is that the DDL syntax allows for table specific attributes and the description syntax does not. That means that the table's full description really might look something like this:

CREATE TABLE COMMON.SAMPLE_TABLE (
  NAME      VARCHAR(64) NOT NULL,
  STATUS    CHAR(1),
  X_C       NUMBER (10),
  Y_C       NUMBER (*,10) NOT NULL, 
  Z_C       NUMBER (*,10),
  FOO       VARCHAR2 (18) NOT NULL, 
  BAR       DATE,
  BAZ       TIMESTAMP
 )
LOGGING 
NOCOMPRESS 
NOCACHE
NOPARALLEL
MONITORING
/

So, if you rely on a table description as the basis for creating a duplicate copy of a table, you not only have to do specific work to convert the description from description syntax to DDL, the DDL you end up with will likely be incomplete. While I am sure that there is an excellent reason for the syntactic split between the two types of table descriptions, I honesly cannot think of it. My current best theory is that SQL*Plus and SQLNET cannot handle non-table returns from a database request. Because of this, the table description has to itself be a table. You could even make the argument that this is the 'right' way to do things, since it gives you a table description in a form (a table) that database code should easily be able to manipulate. However, the description is itself incomplete, so I'm not sure how useful that explanation is.

I'm not a database guru, but it seems like another way to handle this possible limitation is to have the table description query return a one row, one column table with a BLOB or VARCHAR2 containing the DDL description. SQL*Plus could then special case the display of this query to make it look nice on the screen. (SQL*Plus already does special case desc queries, since their display does not honor calls to SET PAGESIZE. If you really do need table information in tabular form, there are always the ALL_TABLES and ALLTABCOLS views. (Of course, a really wonderful solution to all of this would be to make those views writable, somehow standardize them, and then skip the DDL entirely. :-)

I just started reading this blog, but it already looks useful: m-x all-things-emacs.

My current day job involves devloping software that uses Oracle as its back end. I've built a local development environment on my laptop using Oracle Express Edition, the freebie give-away version. To make a long story short, I forgot my local database password and had to uninstall, download, and re-install Oracle. To download Oracle, you have to be logged into their website and of course, I had forgotten that password too.

To save folks like me from themselves, Oracle has a password recovery service in their website. This service works like most other similar services: enter your e-mail address and it then resets your password and sends the new one to your e-mail account. What their service does not do is trim the leading and trailing spaces off of the entered e-mail address. It just tries to look up whatever you entered in the password database. If you happen to have a trailing space on your address, it will not recognize it and not do the password reset. Since the website uses a proportional font, and spaces are quite narrow, it's easy to miss the error and you will likely be left wondering why Oracle forgot your account. This seems perfectly in keeping with Oracle's seeming effort to keep their site as obtuse as possible in comparison with Microsoft's developer site. Seriously guys, you sell a platform: Its value is directly proportional to the number of developers coding for it and the amount of code written to it. Make it as easy as possible, and it will only help your bottom line. Microsoft understands this, why don't you?