was the oft levelled criticism of windows based applications. See the wikipedia definition here for example. The interesting think of course is that in over 15 years of windows computing I ran into this issue less than 5 times. In less than 5 years i've run into it more often on Linux. Today's example being with vmware. The issue is documented here though the prose rather glosses over the fact that this error means

1. you can't open any VM image at all that is not in the default location
2. you can't edit the default location
3. the libraries involved are an image library and a compiler library - basic tools in other words.  

farcical.

One of the things that I have been talking about this year at various user groups and in peer discussions are bad practices that we, as database administrators, developers or managers of Oracle teams can find ourselves engaged in. If you are a member of the UKOUG you can get a copy of the presentation here

One of the things on my list is an absence of an up to date and accurate configuration management database - something that Doug referred to as a database catalog back in January. That copy of the presentation talks about the need to know things like versions, passwords, system owners etc from a day to day management and maintenance perspective. I hadn't explicitly mentioned patching since this is a straight DBA type presentation.

I have revised the windows introductory page a little bit, to hopefully allow a better structure to develop over time. In addition I have migrated an article originally written for otn, but never published, to the new site. In the article I cover the use of windows scripting technologies to automate various day to day dba tasks, somewhat similar to Casimir Saternos' article on Linux shell scripts. The new article is Windows Scripting for Oracle DBAs

I've been extremely impressed by the response, both of Brian Duff who commented here, and in particular of Steven Chan in resolving the issue that I had posting comments to blogs on the official oracle blogs site. Steven went way beyond what you would expect from a very busy man in investigating the issue and indeed ensuring it got resolved. I'm very impressed and grateful.

says the man who posted about being unable to comment on blogs.oracle.com, but had neatly disabled comments here. Yep, I do feel pretty daft.

Hmmm

It appears that I cannot post comments to any blog hosted on blogs.oracle.com. I have tried a couple of times on Steven Chan's excellent blog, but just now I tried to remark that the interesting scripts available for concurrent queue analysis available at Senthils' blog appear to give incorrect results - and would probably benefit from the use of analytics as well.

In all cases I get either a 403-forbidden or a blank page. I find it unlikely that I'd be censored, but equally clearly others can comment on those blogs. Does anybody have any ideas what gives?