Indirectly via Jake over at appslab one of those wonderful "I'll summarize you in 20 questions" tests floating around the web. It seemed reasonably fair to me. Unusual and paradoxical, random and nonchalant - My mother would be so proud. Anyway you all might want to have a go.

Niall, you show a slight right-hemisphere dominance with a moderate preference for auditory processing, an unusual and somewhat paradoxical combination of characteristics.

You are drawn to a random and sometimes nonchalant synthesis of material. You learn as it seems important to a specific situation, and might even develop a resentment of others who attempt to direct your learning down a specific channel.

Your right-hemispheric dominance provides a structure that is only loosely organized and one which processes entire swatches of reality, overlooking details. You are emotional in your reactions and perceptual more than logical in your approach, although you can impose structure and a language base when necessary.

Your auditory preference, on the other hand, implies that you process information sequentially and unidimensionally. This combination of right-brain and auditory modes creates conflict, as you want to process data more rapidly than your natural processes allow.

Your tendency to be creative and free-flowing is accompanied by sufficient ability to organize and be logical, allowing you a reasonable degree of success in a number of different endeavors. You take in information methodically and systematically which can then be synthesized rapidly. In this manner, you manage to function consistently well, although certainly less efficiently than you desire.

You prefer the abstract and are a theoretician at heart while retaining the ability to be practical. You find the symbolism in a great deal of what you encounter and are something of a "mystic."

With regards to your lifestyle, you have the mentality which would be good as a philosopher, writer, journalist, or instructor, or possibly as a systems designer or social worker. Perhaps most important is your ability to "listen to your inner voice" as a mode of skipping over unnecessary steps to achieve your goals.

It seems that there is a surprising lack of awareness of basic password security even in the IT industry. This week I had occasion to call customer services at my ISP - a leading player in the UK market - the customer services representative used the password for my user account  to authenticate me. This is information a customer services member of staff should never be able to see. 

Just now I've received an Oracle workflow email from the Oracle store (I wanted to be able to store list prices for quotes for stuff we buy as part of a paper trail) the registration email I received contained the following plain text content. Quite why one should need to send passwords and logins in the same plain text email is beyond me. 

Your account sign-in information is as follows:

- Login Name : <removed>

- Password: <removed> 

Your company Registry ID is <removed> 

IMPORTANT: Do not reply to this mail. If you need to contact us, send an

email to [Customer care email id]

I'm not normally one for blog series. Call it a short attention span, call it an old style approach to blogging, call it what you will but I tend to write about whatever is currently on my mind. Never the less what is on my mind at the moment is the application of Oracle's released Critical Patches to an E-Business suite infrastructure with none applied. I'll be presenting on this subject at theUKOUG in December so if you want to tell me just how badly we did it then catch me there. This topic is rather too long for a traditional blog post, and whilst I do intend to write this up as a longer article - to go with the presentation - I thought I'd try a short series working through the steps.

This post will cover the procedure used by the author for applying the critical patch updates (CPU) released from Jan 2005 up to April 2007.  This series is based on an Applications system with ATG Rollup 5 (metalink registration required) already applied. Whilst the general approach in this paper is likely to be widely useful, individual software levels will mean that precise details of patches required will vary from site to site. This is another way of saying - don't take my list of patches as gospel.

The broad approach I took was as follows. - This will serve as a useful road map for the series by the way. 

1. Obtain a List of all patches issued as CPU.
2. Determine any prereqs required.
3. Obtain patches
4. Review all readmes
5. Upgrade databases to current patch level where appropriate
6. Apply CPU updates to tech stack (OID/IAS, DB, 806_HOME. IAS_HOME)
7. Merge the Apps patches for quicker application

 When I reviewed the various CPU documents on Oracle.com websites (metalink and the main oracle.com CPU site) I realized that the list was way too long! Our architecture looks a bit like the diagram below (where the black boxes are the databases - blame the conversion from visio to png for that.

Consequently I decided that a control spreadsheet was needed that could be updated as the process went on. At the start it looked like this. That's a lot of work to get through. Over the next few parts we'll work through how it went and what we learned along the way.

Rather embarassingly although I described setting the title bar for command line sqlplus as easy, I didn't show how to do it. The script below is a script called session_info that demonstrates the technique. Essentially what you need to do is to select the information you require into session variables (_USER and _CONNECT are predefined for you) and pass those variables through the host command.

define s_sid=unknown

define i_instance=unknown

define s_host=unknown

define i_opid=unknown

col i_sid head SID for a6 new_value s_sid

col instance_name head Instance for a8 new_value i_instance

col opid new_value i_opid

col i_ver head VER for a10

col i_host_name head HOSTNAME format a30 new_value s_host

set termout off

select

i.instance_name,

i.host_name i_host_name,

(select version

from dba_registry

where comp_name like '%Catalog Views' ) i_ver,

to_char(s.sid) i_sid,

ltrim(p.pid) opid

from

v$session s,

v$instance i,

v$process p

where

s.paddr = p.addr

and sid = (select sid from v$mystat where rownum = 1);

host title &i_instance:&s_sid &s_host:&i_opid

set termout on

This is, or was, the visitor map for this site for a recent timeperiod. It doesn't really surprise me that the US/Canada and the UK are the chief visitors. The large white area (no visits) that is Africa worries me though - not because I have a special desire for African visits, but because I rather feel it reflects the level of interest in technology across that continent generally. Yes most Africans have real and direct needs. But their countries also need to invest in the right technologies (not just IT) to help drive poverty away from that great continent.