Reading “In Praise of the Zune?”:http://www.macuser.com/ipod/in_praise_of_the_zune.php over at “MacUser”:http://www.macuser.com, the last paragraph really cracked me up:
bq. That’s right, the Cult of Mac is advocating a product that Mac users can’t even use. I hear next week they’re doing a special on anti-virus apps. I hear that OS X version of Norton AntiVirus is really the pits. It never finds _anything_.
After reading “The Pragmatic Programmer”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/020161622X/hvirringdk-20 this summer, I’ve been trying to follow some of their tips, one of them being
bq. *Tip 22: Use a Single Editor Well*
Choose an editor, know it thoroughly, and use it for all editing tasks.
My editor of choice is “TextMate”:http://macromates.com, one of the very first applications I bought for my Mac. I’ve been using it more and more lately, but unfortunately there’s no support for working with Oracle databases. The supplied SQL bundle works only with MySQL and Postgres, and Google wasn’t any help in finding a bundle specifically for Oracle.
After spending a few hours looking into what these “TextMate bundles”:http://macromates.com/wiki/Main/Bundles are, it turns out they’re very, very nifty and it’s not all that difficult to create your own. So, without tiring you with more chatter, I present my first TextMate bundle, the “Oracle Bundle”:http://productive.dk/pub/Oracle.tmbundle.zip.
I could possibly have added Oracle functionality to the existing SQL bundle, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of overlap between MySQL/Postgres and Oracle in terms of the code implementing the bundles, so I decided to create a standalone bundle. So far, it’s only got a few basic features, but I’m hoping to add more as time allows for it. The syntax just piggybacks on the SQL syntax from the SQL bundle, and I haven’t added any support for PL/SQL.
This “preview” has the following commands:
!http://productive.dk/images/oracle-bundle-preview.png(Oracle Bundle Preview)!
Go ahead and “grab your copy here”:http://productive.dk/pub/Oracle.tmbundle.zip.
I finally got around to signing up for a “Mixed Grill”:http://textdrive.com/specials account at “TextDrive”:http://textdrive.com, so I’ve begun moving my sites and mail-services over. Apart from a small hiccup in the account creation, everything has been working great at TextDrive so far.
This means that I can finally start posting here without worrying about incoming traffic making my residential DSL connection the electronic version of the dreaded “M3”:http://trafikken.dk/m3/ freeway here in Copenhagen.
First thing coming up within the next couple of days is a “TextMate”:http://macromates.com bundle for “Oracle”:http://www.oracle.com that I’ve been working on — but more on that later.
I didn’t make it to the Preboot boat party this evening, but Thursday and Friday I’ll be at the “conference”:http://reboot.dk. Unfortunately I’ll be without my new “MacBook Pro”:http://productive.dk/2006/04/07/my-journey-to-macland.html — it’s in for repairs, but that’s another (sad) story. Luckily I’ve managed to loan an iBook, so I won’t be a complete outcast at the conference. Hope to see you there!
With the release of “Oracle Portal”:http://productive.dk/category/oracle-portal 10.1.4, Oracle replaced the URL format
/portal/page?_pageid=6,3&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
with the somewhat nicer
/portal/page/portal/TOPLEVELSITE/Navigator
On top of this you may add rewrite rules to your page groups, so that you can in fact end up with some fairly nice URLs, that are both speakable and search engine friendly. The URLs are constructed from the page group name and page name, so don’t forget to update the names of your pages and page groups, to remove spaces and other unwanted characters in the URLs.
Unfortunately my “Edit Page bookmarklet”:http://productive.dk/2005/12/08/edit-page-bookmarklet.html didn’t work with the new URL format, so here’s an updated version that works with both 10.1.4 and older versions:
Bookmark this link: Edit Page, to add the updated bookmarklet.
My new “MacBook Pro”:http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ finally arrived last Friday. Here are my first experiences from life on the other side:
* *Last Friday*: Unpacking, installing essential software. Everything just works?!
* *Saturday and Sunday*: Installing more software, moving all my work-related files over. Had some great laughs with the famliy while playing with “iSight and Photo Booth”:http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/isight.html. “Front Row”:http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/frontrow.html rocks. No troubles yet — it just freakin’ works! I’m slowly realizing how much I’ve gotten used to software _not_ working.
* *Monday*: First day working with the MBP. Had the old Windows laptop in the bag, just in case. Didn’t need it, though. “OS X”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/ found the office network-printer all by itself, it just showed in the list of printers. Way to go!
* *Tuesday*: Left the Windows laptop at home. The co-workers might be a little tired by now of me showing something oh-so-cool, every 10 minutes. Frederik mentioned the MBP looks awfully nice together with the Fritz Hansen table and the Arne Jacobsen chairs in the conference room.
* *Wednesday*: I decided to retire my almost new and very buggy Windows Mobile powered “Qtek phone”:http://www.qtek.nu/europe/products/8310.aspx, and replace it with a Sony Ericsson from Apple’s list of “supported Bluetooth phones”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/isync/devices.html. Need I mention that Bluetooth syncing just works perfectly? Also today Apple released “Boot Camp”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/. I installed Windows XP and in an odd way it feelt like I did something terribly wrong, so I decided to only set aside 5 gigs of diskspace for Windows. I’d still prefer “VMware”:http://www.vmware.com/ or something “similar”:http://www.parallels.com/, over dual booting.
* *Thursday*: I “migrated over my Outlook calendar and contacts”:http://www.littlemachines.com/ in preparations for completely retiring the Windows laptop. Finally figured out that there’s a “prerelease build of Firefox 1.5.0.2”:http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mac:intel available as a universal binary know as “Deer Park”:http://www.mozilla.org/projects/deerpark/ and it’s way faster than the PPC build of Firefox 1.5.0.1. I was actually a bit disappointed by the speed of the MBP, as I spend a great deal of time in Firefox, but not after installing Deer Park, yay!
* *This Friday*: Blogging about the past week…
“Konkurrencestyrelsen”:http://www.ks.dk/ skriver:
bq. Nu er der hjælp at hente, når kommuner og andre offentlige myndigheder skal vurdere, om et indkøb skal sendes i EU-udbud. I en ny pjece sætter Konkurrencestyrelsen og Statens & Kommunernes Indkøbs Service (SKI) fokus på, hvordan udbydere skal beregne en kontraktværdi…
“Læs hele pressemeddelsen”:http://www.ks.dk/presserum/PM2006/ski/ eller “download pjecen”:http://www.ks.dk/publikationer/udbud/2006/kontraktbereg/.
Yet another great “Paul Graham”:http://www.paulgraham.com/ essay. This time he’s writing about “How to Do What You Love”:http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html. From the essay:
bq. I’m not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later.
And about what not to do:
bq. Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.
I sure hope I’m on the right path here…
“ThoughtWorker”:http://www.thoughtworks.com/ “Obie Fernandez”:http://jroller.com/page/obie came up with the nifty new term “Productivity Arbitrage”:http://www.jroller.com/page/obie?entry=productivity_arbitrage:
bq. _Productivity Arbitrage_ is a strategy of statistical arbitrage which leverages innovative new technology to deliver solutions at the market price that is based on the historical price/value proposition of older, less-productive technology.
In software terms, it is the competitive advantage gained by delivering solutions at or slightly below market price, but incurring lower delivery cost due to early commercial use of a new, relatively unproven technology. Over time, the market’s price/value expectation aligns with reality to reflect a new status quo, in turn diminishing profitable opportunities for productivity arbitrage until innovation once again causes a productivity imbalance to arise.
Also a great story on how ThoughtWorks recently won a $800,000 bid with a “Ruby on Rails”:http://rubyonrails.org powered system.
Here’s a quick little tip for “Oracle Portal”:http://productive.dk/category/oracle-portal. If you’re tired of adding “&_mode=16” to the URL of pages without the standard “Edit Page” link, you can save yourself some keystrokes by adding the following bookmark in your browser:
javascript:location.href=location.href+’&_mode=16′
(bookmark this link: Edit Page, to create the bookmark)
Now, on any (Oracle Portal) page you simply select your bookmark, and the page reloads in edit mode. If you add the bookmark to your bookmarks toolbar, you can enter edit mode with just a single click.
Jesper Hvirring Henriksen
hvirring.dk 
