So much catching up, so little time...

Yeah I've neglected this blog a little lately... been almost 4 months since I last posted. I promise I'll try and be more attentive - at least one post per month.

So let's see what 's been happening in my life lately.

Up till July it's been the conference and nothing else. It turned out great and I'm happy about the result. We didn't quite get our ambitious target of 120, but we got 100 so I can't complain too much. Still slaving away on the post event report.

Got into the nitty gritty of Oracle Text and lodged my first tar ball! I was a little disappointed with their support though. Yes they did give me quick responses, but they weren't the answers I was after. I had to repeat myself 3 times to get a straight yes/no which was all I was after.

I'm off the TechEd in Sydney from 22-25 August. You can catch me there if you're going. This is my first time attending the full conference. There'll be a lot to take in and I will be wasted afterwards, but it will be fun :)

I find myself tuning to ABC classic when I have my radio on... scary thought huh? I know zilch about classical music but I find it more soothing than some of the crap they keep repeating on B105. They are repeating so much that even the good chart toppers make me feel agitated.

I did plan for a nice tax refund... damn HECS I only got around $600 back.

I NEED to catch up with my friends. I have been so out of touch it's not funny. Yes I've been to drinks and lunches with some of them but I want to see everyone. I might round up the troop for something in the next month.

And last but not least, I discovered Maggie Massaman Curry mix. Tops!!

Freaked out

3PM, all three developers from the same project (the only ones working on that project) came over and asked if I was running anything against their client-test database. I haven't been in Oracle all day and no one else in our team was running anything either. Problem is, 2 tables mysterioulsy appeared in the main schema, created at 3:08PM. One was called "New Table" and the style of the create script is not the standard we use in Oracle. OK so I believe the developers that it wasn't one of them who did it. Checked the database and there were no suspicious login accounts in the sessions list. Had a look at the history for SQL statements executed. Wola there it was, executed by the application's system account! But everyone who knows the password said they didn't executed the statements..

The table name gave it away that it was created by a GUI tool and defaults the name to "New Table". So which tool? Access doesn't - it calls it Table1. But MS SQL Enterprise Manager does! No jobs on our servers ran any transfers at 3, and the only server with a link to the Oracle database is dvel. But for someone to create a table via linked server, they will need to know the password to the account, which is a different account from the one that executed the statement.

Turns out that the developer who did it (by mistake) is on another project, and who doesn't know any of the passwords in question. How? He copied a DTS in dvel that connects to the Oracle client-test database and modified it. That way the connection details are still intact and he could do whatever the account details in the DTS package allows. He didn't mean no harm. So it wasn't a hack which is a big relief. Tomorrow we'll be doing so spring cleaning to clear out any undesirable DTS packages and server logins.

no work for a week

Well that's not entirely true. I have training for the whole of next week so technically I won't be going to work, but it will be hard work. I got the workbooks I'll have to go through and they are pretty thick.

Long time no blog

Ah it's been a while. So what's been happening lately. Let me think.

Caught up with a few friends for lunch and had a nice dinner at Toowong with Thanh (the organiser), Jared, Jeremy, Anna, Chandni, Sana, Peta, Alan and Mohammad. Yes it's been a while since we've had a get together like this one. The fish I had was beautiful. I'm not a fish fan but I have to give it a thumbs up.

I am not going to the Pancake Manor for lunch ever again. The service was absolutely horrible.

Had our first meeting with the staff at the ACS branch office. Got the nod from them for our ideas. Hopefully we can get the ball rolling soon.

I still have Biztalk coming out of my ears at work. We're getting a M$ consultant in for $2000 a day. Yes, a day! Now I can see being a consultant as a prospective occupation in the next few years.

And speaking of M$, I sat my exam today. It was at Queen St and scheduled at 12:30. I got to Queen St at around 12:15 and starting heading down the road looking for number 549. Got to number 379 and that was it. The next building along the road is on Eagle St. I got to the end of the street and there was no number 549. It was 12:25 then. I called for help. Lucky Jeremy wasn't busy and looked up the map and the phone number for the place for me. I rang up and got directions on how to get there. It was all the way down towards the valley. The first half of the exam was really hard and I thought damn I'm going to fail again. Then I started the second half and it was a lot better. Got right to the end before time was up this time. Passed by a comfortable margin :) I don't think I'll be doing another one of those exams for some time... not until I feel masochistic again.

Happy camper

Yeah my Biztalk server finally works. But I am getting some weird performance issues that seem to apply only to my W2k3 servers. More reading tomorrow.

Big bug

Leopards stage 2 is now in its final days of testing and as usual, there's a mad rush to get as many defects out before all the contractors go away.

Yesterday I devoted myself completely to deployment. I did 8 builds/migrations and am pretty sure that I have broken the record. I have also come to the conclusion that we are in great need of a better, more efficient process.

Today is mostly UAT so only one build was done. But just as I was planning to go home early today (at 5pm) , I got a request for one more build, at 4pm. Now that really ruined my afternoon! So off I went and got started. Then about 5 minutes into it, I heard someone talking about a big bug in the testing pod. I was instantly gratified, because that meant I can leave the build till the bug gets fixed and that won't be until tomorrow. Yay! Poor M though cause he had to stay and get it fixed before he goes home on a plane on Saturday.

I knew there was a reason why I went to uni

More workstation woes over the past few days at work. It seemed that I have been doing nothing but fixing people's machines over the last week.

The machine that wouldn't boot into windows after I've put down the ghost image, well it's finally working. After two calls to operations and two support calls from the vendor (which involved two changes to the hard disk, and a brand new motherboard), the machine just won't boot from C:\.

Having exhausted all our options, I decided to try and install the OS from a CD. After the first few screens, fragments of my ITN533 practical sessions just popped out of nowhere and told me to poke around in the recovery console. The system files seem to be there and look alright, so the image should have gone down ok. Then a whole heap of words came into mind, like ntldr, boot.ini, fixboot, fixmbr... I don't really remember what they are, but I get a pretty good idea from their names. Eventually I tried fixmbr and got asked the usual "are you sure you want to do this" question. Well the machine wasn't doing much anyway so it was worth a try. Ran with it and rebooted and it worked, just like that! It was a big relief as I no longer have the contractor scavenging for a computer everyday.

So I didn't waste my time at uni after all, that going to uni wasn't just a social exercise. I actually did learn something and remembered what I learnt.

What a day!

Work was horrible today, nothing seemed to work. I HATE BUILDING WORKSTATIONS! And I had to build 2 today.

First there was Gaye's which won't compile VB projects after last week's rebuild (which thankfully I didn't have to do). After some series google searching for an hour we decided to scrap the whole thing and do a fresh reinstall. WinXP went down alright so I started installing components like IIS. As usual, it asked for the CD but this time it asked for the SP2 CD. And guess what, we only have the SP1 one. How can operations not have told us that they've upgraded the SOE, especially with something major like that! Reluctantly I lodged a help desk call and some guy eventually came 3 hours later.

Then there was Rebecca's machine. It had a warranty call this morning and got a new hard drive so it too needed to be built. After loading the ghost image of the OS, the thing just won't boot into Windows! It just stayed at a blank screen with a blinking cursor. It would do POST alright so nothing's wrong with the hardware. So off I went and called help desk again. They eventually called back at 4:30 saying someone will come tomorrow morning. Rebeeca is a contractor and she charges by the hour, what am I supposed to do! She won't have a PC for at least half the day and there won't be a spare PC for her to use tomorrow.

But then not everything was so bad. The highlight of the day was at lunch. Jared and Thanh announced that they're engaged. They are so sweet and I am so happy for them. Sana, being the only person who didn't know about it before lunch today was clearly surprised. She was overjoyed, a bit like how I felt when I found out on Saturday. Ah the wonders of MSN messenger. I can't wait till the wedding now. The first thing that came to Jeremy's mind seemed to be what food we will be served at the reception. That's so typical of him. But then he asked whether he'll get invited...