December 2012

I had a HTC Wildfire for 2 years without any problems. Now, 2 days after posting about getting a Nexus 4, the glass on the back panel is broken. I hadn’t even taken off the protective sheets yet.

The design of this back panel is a complete pile of shit! Why would you possible want to put unnecessary glass on a mobile device? It’s asking for trouble. It seems I’m not the only one, as seen here and here.

I’m not sure what to do now. I guess I better contact Google and see how I can get it repaired, or cover my hands in plasters to prevent the little shards of glass it is dropping from slicing my fingers to pieces.

I am lazy, therefore if I can type less, I will type less.

Often people are surprised to see that Oracle supports the ANSI DATE and TIMESTAMP syntax in the SQL code, which allows me to shorten the lengthy TO_DATE( …. , ‘YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS’) syntax a bit. You can just type this if you want to compare some field to a date (day precision):

SQL> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dba_objects WHERE created > DATE'2012-12-01';

  COUNT(*)
----------
         0

SQL> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dba_objects WHERE created > DATE'2012-01-01';

  COUNT(*)
----------
       804

This way you can always use the standard date format regardless of any NLS settings that may say otherwise.

Here’s a little puzzle if you have nothing better to do between now and the new year. The following extract came from 11.2.0.3, but could have come from 10.2.0.5 or 9.2.0.8 (and many others). I’ve got a simple heap table where the last thing I (or anyone) did was “alter table t1 move” before dumping the first (data) block of the table. Looking at the resulting trace file, I see the following:

fsbo=0x56e
fseo=0xf4d
avsp=0x5f
tosp=0x5f

If you need to have the acronyms decoded they are (according to my best guess):
fsbo – free space, beginning of
fseo – free space, end of
avsp – available space
tosp – total space

Doing the arithmetic, the free space starts at offset 0x56e and ends at 0xf4d, which means the free space gap is 2,527 bytes; but the total space available for use is only 0x5f bytes, i.e. 95 bytes. So what has happened to the other 2,432 ?

For all those that are in the midst of some form of religious, seasonal or statutory holiday at the moment, I hope it goes well for you.

I promised myself I would forget about work for the next couple of weeks and just play with technology, but I’ve already logged in to check the backups etc. What a dope.

Wishing you all a happy holiday and a productive new year!

Cheers

Tim…