Gena01.com Forum - Gena01 Blog

Firefox 3.0.4 and Firebug

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:05:40 GMT

If you have installed Firefox 3.0.4 update and have Firebug installed then you might have notices some problems after the 3.0.4 update. Personally I've seen tabs spinning endlessly and a couple of other quirks on two different PCs. I wasn't quite sure if it was related to Firebug up until recently.

First of all 3.0.4 is not just a minor release. This update included some fixes that were supposed to make Firebug integrate better. It seems that there was some bugs in on the firebug side. Firebug developers have been busy trying to implement a nice and clean solution to the problem(s). I've been testing some alpha builds that are supposed to make some things better.

Hopefully these problems should be resolved soon. I'll try to update things once I have a nice and stable environment again with a build recommendation. I am sure firebug developers will also make their own announcement with the recommended build to use with FF 3.0.4.

Update: Firebug 1.4.0a6 build is running great so far.
Update #2: We are not out of the woods yet. I have found another bug with Firebug 1.4.0a6. This one is related to file downloads.
Update #3: Firebug 1.4.0a7 is out that addresses the file download bug among another things.
Update #4: Firebug team has started a blog: http://blog.getfirebug.com/

Gena01

NyPHP and NyMySQL meetings

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:50:33 GMT

Things have been busy. We actually had two presentations/meetings last week (Tues and Wed).

On Tues we had the honor of Giuseppe Maxia presenting about MySQL Proxy. [Slides]

On Wed we had the honor of Duleepa Wijayawardhana a.k.a Dups presenting about High Performance Social Applications with PHP/MySQL.

For me it was an honor to meet both speakers and have a chance to bug them about various things. Both nights the room was packed. It was nice to see such a big turn up and to see people interested in what these speakers had to share.

It was also nice to meet Dups and congratulate him on his new position at Sun/MySQL. For those who don't know Dups is trying to fill the shoes of Jay Pipes.

Some interesting points from both presentations:
- people have infrastructure and scalability problems.
- there's way more questions than answers.
- Giuseppe's blog is something that I highly recommend. There's a ton of knowledge and information there.
- you should NOT use MySQL Proxy in production. (repeated by Giuseppe a number of times during his talk)
- MySQL 5.1 should be out before Christmas? Actually Dec 6?
- You can load balance databases (not just Web Servers). Take a look at SQLRelay as one possible option.
- There's already a MemCached client implementation in Lua. You should be able to use this with MySQL Proxy.

Gena01

RSS feeds and what you should know about them

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 05:53:05 GMT

For the last couple of weeks I've been using Google Reader. I do have to give credit to a co-worker of mine who told me that using RSS is way better than keeping a ton of tabs open and trying to stay on top of things. It's something that I tried to stay away from before. Now on the other hand I feel that I am on top of things. I also have to admit that using RSS reader is quite neat. Another neat benefit is using it to bookmark feeds. Also Google Reader supports OPML format for importing and exporting feeds you are subscribed to. I know that there's a ton of RSS readers out there, but for now I am sticking with Google Reader.

I have also spent some time looking at the RSS 2.0 specs and making sure that my website produces proper feeds and provides a usable and friendly experience.

Right now there's two RSS feeds on my website: News and Blog. There's something about "eating your own dog food". I had to make some tweaks and corrections to get things to work better.

News Feed:

News feed has been redone from scratch using PHP5 DOM XML Api. It was quite an educational experience. I'll try to post up my learnings in a separate blog entry.

Blog Feed:

The blog feed is based on the existing API from SMF. Actually they are documented, but you do need to make some decisions and corrections in order for it to do the right thing. Here is the link to a whole thread discussing various options that SMF makes available.

Some things to keep in mind:
- SMF is actually quite slow if you produce a feed that covers a large number of topics/items.
- You need to tweak a setting to make sure that the whole content is included in the RSS feed. Otherwise you only get a portion of the text.
- You need to select the right option to make sure that RSS produced is the news feed that you want.
- The way SMF allows you to produce RSS feeds has it's problems and limitations.

Update: Microsoft has posted Windows RSS Publisher's Guide.

Last recommendation i want to make is do test the feeds and content that you publish on your website.

Gena01

General Update

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 01:33:31 GMT

I know things have been quiet and I haven't posted much (even though I do have a ton of ideas and stuff to post). Some things have kept me busy and i'll do my best to post them.

Here are some of the items that have been happening:
1. Site had some problems from Oct 16-22. Took me some time to figure out that there was a problem and get it addressed. Somehow it was related to some security updates that resulted in some options getting turned off. I do apologize for the inconvenience and will try to keep a better eye on things.
2. I've been working on the Yahoo protocol code again for Miranda. I've updated code to support Yahoo 9.0 protocol. It runs rather stable now and has some nice new features (you can IM your Live, LCS and Sametime contacts now, no more disconnects, better avatar support, improved ignore options, redone the options configuration for Yahoo). Build 24 should be quite exciting once it's out.
3. I've been trying to stay on top of the news. One of our SysAdmins managed to convince me to start using Google Reader to keep track of things as well as mark the interesting items for future reference.
4. I've been trying to follow MySQL and Drizzle. Lots of cool stuff happening there. 5.0.67 has a ton of fixes. Took me some time to go through the list. 5.1 is not out yet. 6.0 is feature frozen. What does that mean? Stuff gets pushed after 6.0 release....
5. I've been looking into Oracle 11g and it's feature set. Some interesting stuff happening there too... and as always Oracle wants an arm and a leg for something that others give you out of the box for free.

Gena01

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 First Impression

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:10:43 GMT

So I've been running Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 for a few days now. Overall it's much much better than Internet Explorer 7.

Download is about 15megs, installation is nice and quick. One reboot does it. And what a difference. You will need to uninstall Microsoft Developer Toolbar if you got it installed now.

A couple of notes:
- I love integrated developer tools (lots of stuff copied from Firebug). However the UI is quite unpolished. The tabs look rather huge. CSS editor only allows edit, delete or enable/disable. It's also very very buggy and quirky. No idea how to add new CSS styles. No right click menus. Had to edit style names and values. You can set a value to an empty string and then you can't edit the value again. When editing the style name and scrolling the mouse wheel the page scrolls but the edit box just sits there. Also clicking around in the edit mode is buggy too. I also miss the right click menu. When going to CSS tab it shows up as a huge and unmanageable tree. I actually love how Firebug shows CSS as text with comments. IE8 shows a tree with checkboxes. I do love the current rendering mode and browser settings right in the menu bar of developer tools. It does reload the page if you change the settings, but it makes things a lot easier to test. With one menu click you can test things with IE7 vs IE8 rendering and standards vs quirks mode.
- I love the new address bar search. It's very very neat and makes things so much easier to find. I know Firefox uses it's own system but there's no clear separation between groups/categories of matches in Firefox. IE8 actually makes it so much cleaner.
- I love the colorful tabs. Makes things so much easier to follow. Esp if you need to know which tabs relate to other pages. And I do tend to open up a ton of tabs.
- InPrivate mode - this one is becoming rather popular lately. Took a quick spin and looks quite neat. Need to run some more tests. It opens a separate window that has InPrivate label next to the address bar.
- And the last and most important: standards mode rendering. - I haven't had much time to test this one out, but no real problems with rendering pages either. Also I would like to say that it's too early for the final verdict since I only been using it for a few days now. I know I am not going back to IE7 though.

So, there you have a quick review... I'll try to test and stress it a bit more over the next few weeks and do a more detailed write up. I do have to say that it's very stable for me. I had one crash and IE8 managed to restore the tab exactly where things should have been before the crash.

UPDATE: Actually after playing a bit with it I am changing my mind about recommending it to web developers. It seems that JavaScript debugger that's built into Developer Tools is a bit buggy and quirky. Also I can't launch the external debugger that worked in IE6 and 7. I checked my settings and tried a few different options. I can not debug JavaScript using MSE.EXE. I can't even open MSE.EXE or any external debugger from IE8 Beta 2. Be warned!

Gena01

OpenDNS and why should you care?

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:48:01 GMT

A few days ago I heard our SysAdmins (SAs) talking and one mentioning OpenDNS. This resulted in a whole Q & A session that went something like this.

Q: What is OpenDNS?
A: OpenDNS is open and free DNS service. Anybody can use it, and they are not required to register.

Q: DNS? What for I already got one from my ISP?
A: This one is a lot better.

Q: How so?
A: Well first of all it's a lot faster. Second it protects you and your family from viruses and phishing attacks. Third it can filter out sites and suggest URLs if you mistype a URL.

The setup of OpenDNS is quite simple and the site has a ton of visual instructions to get you started. You can set it up on your local computer or for your home network so that the rest of the family will transparently enjoy the benefits of this service. If you register an account you can also enable filters and block out a lot of sites that you think that are inappropriate. And your internet will work a bit faster.

These are only some of the great features that it provides and I highly recommend it . There's really not a single reason I can come up with for you not to use it. I started using it myself the same day I heard of it (and so have millions of others).

Gena01

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:50:41 GMT

So I took a plunge today and installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 onto my home PC today. For some time now I wanted to take it for a spin. The final decision was based on a recommendation by Peter Laudati from Microsoft who said he is using it on a daily basis and it's running great. Peter gave a presentation during the last NyPHP meeting. I don't use Internet Explorer for anything critical anyway, so I thought that I got nothing to lose by installing the new beta release. Also I wanted to play with the new Developer tools and other new functionality that I was reading about on the IE Blog. If you haven't visited the IE team blog in a while then you are in for a treat. The team keeps posting a ton of stuff regularly.

Gena01

Virtualization with VirtualPC and Microsoft VPC images available for download

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:53:33 GMT

One of the items that got raised during the last NYPHP user group meeting was VirtualPC. Unless you have been hiding under a rock or just not following the technology sector then you would not know about all the hype about virtualization. This is not a new technology, but something that became quite popular. The idea is based on running a piece of software that emulates a piece of hardware to run another Operating System. In other words if you run Windows as your desktop environment then while you are in Windows you can run other Operating Systems in a window/sandbox. Also if you have plenty of available resources you can run more than one instance at a time. This solves one big issue: not needing more hardware. The hardware box is emulated inside your computer. This is now quite common in the enterprises today. They are trying to consolidate their hardware and virtualize as many of their servers as they can to save on energy and hardware costs. So if you are not an enterprise, then why should you care?

Well one big reason is that Microsoft provides VPC images of different Internet Explorer versions that you can download and use for free. You can download all the VPC images and just start the right one to test your site with. You will see exactly how your site renders in particular version of Internet Explorer without having to mess with your current Windows installation. Also running multiple versions of Internet Explorer is something that Microsoft strongly discourages. Another great reason is for setting up a quick Linux development server to experiment with. I was actually playing with Ubuntu server edition which provides a complete LAMP installation in <15 mins.

Here are some links to get you started:

Gena01

NYPHP meeting: WISP or Why a PHP Developer Should Care About Microsoft

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:53:52 GMT

NYPHP user group has resumed regular monthly meetings after the summer break. This was a very interesting and unusual presentation. It's also something that I almost missed. (I am so glad I didn't.)

I was quite skeptical about Microsoft trying to pitch their platform to the PHP community. Somehow when developing and rolling out PHP code Windows platform is not something that's at the top of the list of contenders. This is something that Microsoft wants to change. Microsoft is spending money and resources to make it happen. That's quite a change of perspective towards Open Source.

This was a great presentation that covered FastCGI support on IIS, SQL Server driver implementation and Silverlight. It also included demos of configuring and running PHP on IIS server using FastCGI. There were also a lot of audience questions on various topics (most of which were unrelated to PHP). Microsoft has also stepped forward and joined various Open Source groups and is contributing and releasing code under Open Source license.

So what is WISP? Lately there's quite a few four letter acronyms being used on the web. Some of the more common are:

LAMP - this one is probably the most popular. Linux Apache MySQL PHP. Some people claim that it's Perl vs PHP.
LAPP - Linux Apache PosgreSQL PHP.
OLAP - Oracle Linux Apache PHP.
WISP -Windows IIS SQL Server PHP.

I am sure that there are others. These are the most common ones I've run into.

Quite a few developers develop code on Windows platform and then deploy that code onto their Unix/Linux servers. The reasons why Windows was not considered included concerns about performance, stability and security. Running PHP scripts through the CGI interface is not a viable option for high traffic sites. Using Apache or IIS module on Windows platform has it's own stability implications. Some years ago another standard has emerged and has replaced the old CGI interface. This new standard is FastCGI. FastCGI is being used as an alternative to native web server modules for various programming languages. For some alternatives to Apache it's also the only option.

A couple of months ago Microsoft has released their own FastCGI implementation for IIS servers. You need to have IIS6 and above in order to take advantage of this module. The benefit is that by implementing this module you get better stability and performance than you could before. It's also a product that Microsoft officially supports. To get more information go to http://www.iis.net/php There you will find a lot of information, articles, tutorials, downloads and support forum for all issues related to running PHP on IIS server.

Microsoft has also released SQL Server driver a few months ago. Until that time there was no official SQL Server driver that one could use to connect and work with SQL Server from PHP. There were a number of third party implementations that people had to use. It's great to see Microsoft releasing a driver for PHP. I am sure it provides great support for Windows and SQL Server (both are Microsoft products). I am also quite positive that it's more stable and provides better performance than some of the third party alternatives. Microsoft has also released code to ADODB project to provide better integration with their SQL Server driver.

Overall a great presentation. I am still waiting for the presenter (Peter Laudati) to post the slides on his site. I also want to thank him for sharing a lot of great information. This presentation ended quite late and people didn't want to leave. There were also a lot of great prizes courtesy of Microsoft. All of the attendees got a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. Microsoft also sponsored food and drinks at TGIF after the presentation.

I am glad to see Microsoft stepping in and trying to convince developers to embrace their platform. I am sure that there's still a lot of great stuff to come. As a PHP developer I would love to know that PHP runs just as well on Windows as it does on other platforms. It's also nice to see that Microsoft cares.

Gena01

Firebug 1.2 and beyond

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:56:09 GMT

Firebug has been in active development and has recently reached stable version 1.2.1. If you are using anything lower then 1.2 then I would highly recommend you upgrade to 1.2.1 release which is listed on the https://addons.mozilla.org site here.

In other news I've been trying to keep on top of things. http://getfirebug.com is back up and running. There's still a broken "blog" link. (Note to self: report this to the firebug developers) The site has gotten a number of updates and now shows links and information about 1.2 release. While checking the site out today I noticed a ton of new information and sections. It has been some time since I visited the site. There's brand new Documentation and Extensions pages that provide a ton of information and links. There's also a releases page that has links to alpha builds for the brave ones. I just installed 1.3a2 build.

Points of interest:

http://groups.google.com/group/firebug - this is the main Firebug discussion group. It has a lot of activity. It's also where developers interact with the users and announce new releases and bug fixes. It's also the starting point to ask questions before submitting bug reports.
http://groups.google.com/group/firebug-working-group - this is the discussion group of the Firebug Working Group (i.e. Firebug core dev team). It has general news items that developers share with the community.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firebug/WeeklyUpdates - is the official location of Weekly Update meeting reports/summaries. I highly recommend it for those that want to know what's going on and where things are heading.

I am glad to see a lot of activity happening around Firebug. I am also excited to see Mozilla stepping in and offering help with getting better integration between Firefox and Firebug.

P.S. Microsoft has posted a ton of stuff on their Internet Explorer 8 progress and is actively integrating Firebug like functionality directly into Internet Explorer 8. They call it Developer Tools. Some of the interesting items include integrated JavaScript debugging and profiling support.

Gena01

NYMySQL Meeting: Best Design Practices for successful MySQL applications

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 03:45:19 GMT

This was a great presentation. I got in a bit after 6pm and the room was close to packed. (It's not a very big room) They also started earlier this time (compared to usual waiting for people to arrive). I was lucky enough to grab a seat and didn't miss the beginning.

Ronald Bradford is somebody who I get a pleasure to listen to. He knows his stuff very well and it shows. This presentation touched a few points (some very important) on MySQL and also provided an architecture to build upon. He presented many ideas of how to develop great websites and projects. I definitely learned a few things and got some nice ideas of how to write better software.

Here is the link to his blog (which also contains the link to the slides):
http://ronaldbradford.com/blog/what-are-the-best-mysql-design-practices-2008-08-12/

Gena01

Migration to PHP5 links and articles

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:55:11 GMT

After posting previous item on the end of PHP4 I thought it would be beneficial to put up a number of pointers for those who are still using PHP4 and are looking for information that will ease the pain of migration to PHP5.

So without further ado here are some resources:

http://www.php5.org/ - is a great and little known resource on PHP5. It has a ton of links and information.
http://www.derickrethans.nl/files/breaking.pdf - PDF version of a talk given by Derick Rethans ( then man behind PHP4 releases).
http://www.slideshare.net/mayflowergmbh/migration-concepts-for-enterprise-php-applications/ - a great presentation on Migration Concepts For Enterprise PHP Applications. It covers both MySQL and PHP migration.
http://ilia.ws/archives/147-Why-are-you-not-using-PHP-5.html - Ilia Alshanetsky ( the main behind PHP5 releases) has a link to PDF talk that he gave on benefits of PHP5.2.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-v5migr/ - a nice guide from IBM.
http://negev.wordpress.com/2007/11/17/migration-php4-php5-php4-references-and-connection-to-mysql/
http://www.webado.net/migration-to-php5.php

Books:

http://www.phparch.com/c/books/id/9780973862195 - This is a recently published book that contains 300+ pages that focus on migration to PHP5. It's a great resource by a great author. A number of people have given this book great reviews.

Gena01

The last day of PHP4

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:04:11 GMT

Today is the day that PHP4 is finally put to rest. There have also been numerous posts on the subject so I'll try to keep this short.

PHP4 is something I have been using for what seems now a very very long time (~6 years?). It has been an interesting and exciting experience.

Having to go through the exercise of transitioning from PHP4 to PHP5 was also something quite more painful that it should have been. PHP Architect has run a two part series on the PHP4 to 5 migration in the latest issues of their magazine in preparation of this day. The author covers quite a lot of material. I was lucky enough not to run into some of these issues. The two most painful things that I had to deal with was XML and OOP migration. Object copy becoming a reference copy which starts to wreck havoc without any warnings is a rather big item in my mind. Overall PHP5 is great and has a ton of great stuff. I'll try to blog about some of the new features in the future.

An aggregate post that links to some of the blog entries by the PHP community on the topic can be found here: http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/10789

The community is taking time to reflect and move on. Change is good...

Gena01

Oracle 10g XE forum is now open to the general public

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:09:12 GMT

Just a quick heads up and thanks to Christopher Jones who listened to my whining about opening up the XE forum and having to go through pain and wait two months in order to get access to Oracle XE support forum. He actually had a chance to talk this over and now it seems that Oracle made the forum public.

Oracle XE Support forum: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=251

On a related note OCI8 1.3.4 is also out. Read about the release here: http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/2008/07/php_pecl_oci8_134_is_available.html

Thanks CJ.

Gena01

NY MySQL User Group Meeting: MySQL 5.1

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:23:12 GMT

This was an exciting topic that I was patiently waiting for. I wasn't disappointed. The presentation was great covering many topics with examples. The room was packed almost till the end. Somebody also suggested looking for another venue that could fit more people.

Some things that were mentioned:
1. Partitioning is a big item that's coming in 5.1. Supposedly it's better than other vendors. Also by the vote of hands it seems that not a lot of people know or use it. There are some limitations though related to indexes.
2. Scheduler inside the database. This one is quite nice, esp for remote DBAs.
3. Performance improvements. This one is probably a regular thing, because there's many areas that are not yet up to par.
4. MySQL Cluster has a separate release cycle and a ton of new functionality. Also seems that not many heard or used it.
5. XML & XPath support in the core.
6. Archive engine enhancements. This one I am not familiar with and was a great thing to hear about. It's optimized for I/O rather than SELECTS. So it's very high performance for inserts/updates. Note: Doesn't support DELETE. SELECTs might run a lot slower though. However it should be possible to combine this with partitioning?
7. Row replication support. I thought we already had this? Row replication is how a lot of databases do replication and at times is a more efficient way of replicating updates vs running the SQL queries again on all the slaves.

Ronald Bradford was also there and provided a lot of technical background and information as well. Overall a great meeting with a ton of people and lots of great information.

P.S. The slides were also posted on the meetup files section: http://mysql.meetup.com/7/

Gena01

NyPHP user group meeting: Postgresql Plus

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:45:50 GMT

I know it's been a while since I posted NYPHP news. I actually missed a couple of meetings. My crazy schedule got in the way. I was quite excited about this particular meeting. Bruce Momjian was the guest speaker of the evening. The topic was PostgreSQL Plus. Before I get into the meeting let me backtrack a little.

About 5+ years ago I was working on various projects and was quite happy. One day I was asked to help out another group in my department. They were a little shorthanded and pressed for time. I was glad to help out and my boss didn't mind. So when I was told what the project was all about and was given some things to start with I found out that it's PHP and PostgreSQL. At that time I heard of PHP. I was also a bit surprised to see them pick PostgreSQL over MySQL. I mean everybody knows about the LAMP stack. But a project is a project and it needs to get done. This is how I started coding PHP. One interesting point was that PostgreSQL was quite superior in functionality back then and I think it was able to do more than what MySQL still can't do. But that's a topic of another discussion.

About 1-2 months ago I heard of something called EnterpriseDB and started looking into it. I also saw that they were building a product based on PostgreSQL. I was also quite curious since it's been a few years ever since I used the product. Since then a number of major releases came out. So my point was to see how far the product has gotten since the time I used it and if they managed to resolve some of the problems that I ran into years ago.

I was prepared and excited to talk to one of the people on the inside and to hear him explain what he and the team have been up to. It was also a nice opportunity to ask technical questions and a lot of people did. I would say that it was a nice turnout and the crowd was very technical. Most of the people are also Oracle users since most of the questions were in relation to Oracle or comparison of architecture and functionality. I do have to say that even though this was not a PHP focused presentation it's one of my favorite so far. It was very educational and informative. I learned and heard many great things that I can follow up on my own and see where that takes me.

Among the attendees I was actually pleasantly surprised to see Chris Shiflett and OmniTI team show up as well. Which in my mind is a first time I see them showing up. Another great thing was meeting up with till who is visiting from Germany. till is one of the core developers behind roundcube webmail application. We actually chatted on irc some time back. He also wrote an article for PHP Magazine on roundcube.

A couple of resourceful links on the topic:
1. Slides have been posted online and are available here: PosgreSQL Plus.
2. PHP PostgreSQL documentation.

P.S. I also won a PHP & MySQL book. The way such things go is that people drop their business cards into a bag and they pick out a business card at random. Let's just say that I was quite surprised to get my name called out as I don't usually win anything (esp at random or by chance).

Gena01

Oracle 10g XE + APEX = blessing or curse? (Part I)

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:11:20 GMT

Preface

This article is something I've been planning to write for some time now. It's also my third time trying to sit down and putting it all together. As you can guess I've been pushing it off and it has been quite a bumpy ride. It's also something that I mentioned to a few people who said I should finally sit down and put together all the things that I had to go through and what we got at the end.

Introduction

So I've heard about Oracle 10 XE (or Express edition) for some time, but somehow I wasn't too excited to go and try it. If you've been reading my blog then you know that I've been trying to get more into Oracle and see what it's all about. Don't get me wrong i've been doing SQL queries for a long time. Including building the right indexes and doing query optimizations. This time I wanted to learn how Oracle works so that I could understand the architecture. This is also a great thing to know, because once you know how things work you have a better idea of what to do and what not to do. You'd be surprised how little developers know about the databases that they use daily. Also overall Oracle Database software is very impressive and has a ton of very cool and advanced features. In many ways it's also technically superior to some other products that I had a chance to work with before. However Oracle licensing is very very screwy and complicated. It's so complicated that people have created start ups that exist to help customers optimize the licensing of Oracle to the customers needs. Also Oracle tries to make you pay at any opportunity that it can. One example is that the first link on the right side of the Oracle XE homepage is a guide on how to convert an XE to a Standard edition. I was quite confused as to why it was there and what was the point until I got the agenda of the link. If you decide to pay up there's a whole guide to get you to a supported edition and platform. Another item to add here is that Oracle provides a lot of documentation that you can download or browse online. However finding what you need is another story.

So I am on a quest for knowledge. After finishing Tom Kyte's book and subscribing to a number of Oracle podcasts i started my journey into the Oracle world. This is the world where Oracle DBA's and professionals live. During my quest I started hearing some interesting success stories about how great Oracle products were. Most of this stuff I don't pay much attention to since it's almost always tied into marketing. One thing that was interesting though was the mention of something called APEX or Application Express. It's also something that comes with the free download of Oracle 10g XE. After doing a bit more research i found out that Tom Kyte was actually quite involved with the XE product and is one of the key people behind XE support forum.

So about a month ago (before my trip to PHP|TEK 2008) I downloaded Oracle 10g XE and had a goal of getting it running on my Windows laptop during the conference and to see what this APEX thing was all about. From what I heard was that you can build a complete web application very very quickly. This application would also provide professional web interface and enterprise level security. I was quite curious to the point of possibly making it stack up against LAMP/WAMP. For those that don't know the terminology basically to compare it to PHP and MYSQL project implementations. And to see how the two compare.

Things started off rather fine on my home desktop system. But when I tried to get Oracle going on the laptop that I took to the conference things didn't go so well. There's an Oracle "XE" support forum. The only catch is that it is a private forum which requires a separate registration. To make things even worse than that my registration resulted in a cryptic error message. So no Oracle "XE" forum for me. No support from Tom Kyte. There's also not much information in the provided documentation. I tracked down Christopher Jones during the conference and showed him the errors I was getting. He tried to help by escalating things within Oracle, however until today I am unable to access the XE forum. I tried to Google for answers, but found more questions and more frustrated users.

Somehow the web interface that had to work after install didn't. I was also quite lost and clueless as to why. Oracle installs a whole directory tree full of various strange looking files. I was lost. It seems that log files are all over as are config files and other things. I am NOT an Oracle DBA I don't have 10-15 years of Oracle DBA experience. I was stumped with no clues to help on my quest. I tried rebooting my Windows laptop. Reboot helped and I finally got the web interface to start and I was finally able to access the web management interface (which is powered by APEX 2.1) I was ready to start my challenge and to see if I can get it done.

Challenge

So here was a challenge I put in front of myself:
1. Getting Oracle 10g XE installed and running.
2. Taking an existing MySQL database and converting it to Oracle 10g.
3. Using APEX to generate at least some form of a prototype of a web application.
4. Taking the data and the APEX application and moving that to a separate computer.

As you can see this is not a list of simple things to do. I was in over my head. I was optimistic though. While wondering through the Oracle site I saw a mention of a tool that promised to convert MySQL database into an Oracle one. The tool is called Oracle Migration Workbench. I even managed to read the docs and the release notes. I was ready to take it for a spin. So I grabbed the free download and hit a wall. It kept asking for a plugin to use against my database. Looking at the plugins page there's no plugin for MySQL. I go through the Release Notes again. It clearly states that it supports MySQL and yet nowhere does it say where to get the plugin. So I go to the product forum link and start wondering there and seeing users having the same problem. At one point I see a suggestion to use SQL Developer. Apparently the Oracle Migration Workbench I was using is obsolete? or is it? Also as far as I know SQL Developer is a developer tool not a migration tool. I guess it does that now? I also find a link to Oracle SQL Developer Migration Workbench. With a download link to SQL Developer 1.5.1 on the right side. Now I am totally confused. Are these two separate products or one? And why is there two different websites and yet the download has the same name and the version numbers.

Anyway I found some instructions and managed to grab the MySQL JDBC connector piece which I then used in SQL Developer. One nice thing with the SQL Developer site is the viewlets where they show you that MySQL migration works. So I tried to repeat the process and failed. I managed to install the MySQL Connector and things seemed fine until I did the conversion. After cleaning up the dataset things failed again. Apparently the way it works is that it tries to convert ALL databases and users from MySQL to Oracle. Since I setup a special user for the conversion obviously this conversion process would never succeed since there are not enough permissions to create other others. Ok for those that are lost or don't know how Oracle works compared to MySQL: In MySQL you have users and you have databases. In Oracle you have users and every user gets a "workspace" = database. So you need to be an administrative or (SYSTEM) user in order to add/remove users and their workspaces.

Anyway after I backed up and dropped the other databases (besides MYSQL, INFORMATION_SCHEMA and my MySQL database that I wanted to convert) things finally worked and I managed to get the data into Oracle. Another interesting thing is that there's no such thing as "Auto Number" in Oracle. In Oracle we got sequences which are stored in a separate location and are accessed in a specific way. So the conversion tool was smart enough to setup triggers to fake the "AutoNumber" bit. This one is quite cool actually. The behavior is the same as working with MySQL and the AutoNumber gets an assigned increasing value. The only difference is that the Oracle sequences always go up and there are no upper limits since Oracle NUMBER type is not the same as MySQL integer and number types. So after some struggle Step 2 is done.

To be continued...

Gena01

Firefox 3, Firebug and YSlow

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:20:58 GMT

Just wanted to post up a quick update on what's going on with Firefox and addons.

1. Firefox 3 is coming out today. Want to participate in the Guiness World record? Then visit: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord
2. Firebug website is down. From what I hear it's being worked on and should get back online soon. In the mean time you can grab the Firefox 3.x compatible version over at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
3. YSlow has got an update and is now compatible with Firefox 3.x. Go grab it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369

Enjoy.

Gena01

Firefox 3.0RC, Firebug and other addons

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:21:00 GMT

For the last 2+ weeks I have converted from Firefox 2.0 to 3.0RC on most of my computers/laptops and I am loving it. Most of the addons I use daily have been ported to 3.0 and I didn't have too many problems (still waiting for some smaller ones to get up to speed though). Overall for me Firefox 3.0RC feels quicker, stable and seems to use less resources. Kudos to the Mozilla developers on making Firefox better and snappier. I'll have more details once I do some more testing. So far though I am not going back to 2.0 unless I need to test something.

There have also been some updates to some of the addons that I use:
1. Firebug - this great addon is getting better and better. I took a quick look and was impressed. One biggest problem though is finding the right download link. The website is getting more confusing and lots of links making the download harder to find. Let me elaborate on this before I get flamed. I just installed 1.2Beta build of Firebug. If you go to http://www.getfirebug.com/ and look at the homepage can you tell me how I can download 1.2Beta release or if that release is even available? There's downloads for 1.0 and 1.1Beta (I guess this one never gone final). Here is a tip: go to releases page. Personally I think that 1.0 and 1.1 downloads and release notes links are confusing.
2. HTMLValidator - this one you have to watch manually since it's not available from addons mozilla site. Anybody know why? Anyway after my 3.0RC transition I went to the homepage and found that I had a much older version installed.
3. YSlow - this one is not updated yet, but I am keeping a close eye on this one. I know that Yahoo developers are working on an update and I am sure once it comes out the release should be exciting. From reading and following the Yahoo blog it seems that they are expanding the number of checks that could help web developers get their web pages into the top shape they can be.
4. AdBlock Plus - this one is in my arsenal and I tend to use it to remove those annoying ads that take up 60%+ of content on some websites.
5. NoScript - I consider this a must have. This one is also updated often. But be warned, sites will break and act unexpectedly because of this addon. The reason for me on jumping on the NoScript train was a presentation by Rasmus Lerdorf showing the fact that lots of websites are vulnerable to security exploits and XSS attacks. This is the only addon I know that tries to protect you from such things.
6. Download Statusbar - this one is also a favorite of mine. Get your downloads going in the status bar.
7. IE View Lite - if you are doing anything with Web Development and need to test a page in IE then this is a great addon. It adds a menu item to open either this page or a link in IE window (actually launches IE). Nice and simple.

Signing off for now... go forth and upgrade to 3.0!

Gena01

Pear/Pecl website improvement ideas and suggestions

Sun, 25 May 2008 05:07:46 GMT

So I attended the PEAR2 presentation and had a chance to bug the guys behind PEAR/PECL. There's definitely exciting stuff happening and they are pushing forward with many exciting ideas.

Here is a quick summary that I promised to post to Helgi:
1. Documentation - this one is quite important for me since I love and tend to recommend offline documentation in CHM format.
Currently you can find the documentation via the "Documentation" link in the navigation bar on the top. This will take you to the download/browse documentation page. However once I have CHM downloaded to my desktop the documentation is actually incomplete. The API portion is missing and some tutorials look a bit incomplete or dated. Also once I find the package I am interested in either through Search or through the category links there's a separate documentation link that takes you to API documentation. This one is broken down by version of the package. However i haven't found a way to download it. I might need to take a closer look to make more recommendations here. I would love to see all the documentation somehow organized as a complete set which I can download and use.

2. This one is more PECL related. I would love to see "Package News" feature on a package level. This would allow package authors to post small news items for the package users. This would be quick news announcements or tidbits to update the users of what's going on. The only way that I know of right now is package releases and changelogs. One example is branching the source code and letting the users know which branch to pull when building pecl extensions yourself. Also it would be nice to have users leave comments to these items (ala SourceForge ) One example is OCI8 posting a news item about the BETA release and letting users test specific functionality and commenting back through the comments (perhaps). Right now I think there's no way to provide any form of documentation or news for the users via the PECL package setup that I know of.. maybe I am wrong, but as as user I haven't seen anything like this. Also speaking with some people during the conference they definitely had more tips and insights than what's posted and released to the public. I would love to see such information available to the general public.

Gena01