Monthly Archives: July 2011

Peacocks

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Gaius

To truly understand the IT industry, it is wise to study the male peacock. He struts around with his elaborate tailfeathers, which neither help him fly nor fight. They simply act as a social signal, that this individual controls such … Continue reading →

Posted in Random thoughts | 1 Comment

A Matter of Priorities

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Gaius

I recently helped migrate some internal services, including DNS, from conventional Linux boxes to Infoblox devices. Nifty bits of kit, but one issue occured during the migration: a RAC node eviction! This is an interesting scenario as it illustrates something … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Oracle | Leave a comment

Is Virtualization Worth It?

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Gaius

Before planning any project, the first thing I like to do is ask what outcome are we trying to achieve here? A case in point is virtualization, the holy grail of IT du jour. A virtualized infrastructure is not a … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Linux, Oracle | 2 Comments

Coherence

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Gaius

I am still a little mind-blown by yesterday’s intensive introduction to Coherence. I had thought of it as just a glorified caching layer, as that is pretty much how I have seen it used, but it is in fact astonishingly … Continue reading →

Posted in Coherence, Oracle, Random thoughts | Leave a comment

To the max!

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Gaius

Today is all about Extreme Transaction Processing. Should be an interesting day!

Posted in Oracle | 2 Comments

Extprocs in OCaml

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Gaius

An external procedure or EXTPROC is a technique for calling C or other native code from SQL in Oracle. Why might you want to do this? To interface to a 3rd party system for which there is only a C … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Ocaml, Operation Foothold, Oracle | 2 Comments

Stacks and other stuff

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Gaius

An interesting coincidence: I happened to mention Forth in my last post, and I have also been looking at Tenacious C, a new (sadly Windows-only for now) C IDE with some innovative visualization of a program’s memory use. They’ve a … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocaml, OCIML, Operation Foothold, Oracle, Random thoughts | Leave a comment

Why

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Gaius

A few thoughts on why I decided to start working on an open source project: I enjoy working in OCaml (functional languages in general, in fact), and need a project to work on that I can take in any direction … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocaml, OCIML, Oracle, Python, Random thoughts | Leave a comment