Having experienced a minor panic about not having sufficient material for my presentation, I decided to stay at home yesterday morning to work on some 9i examples to go with the existing 10g ones and put together some additional slides. In the end it took longer than I expected and by the time I’d got the train through to Glasgow I only had time for a quick chat with a few mates, attend one presentation and then do my own.
However, imagine my surprise when I opened my laptop bag at the venue to find a stow-away. After virtually no discussion I’m reasonably convinced that the Oak Table Network’s charter has been changed for good. Temporary membership may be granted to non-human applicants as long as there is at least one member of the Junta present who can approve it.
It was the first time that Peter Robson has delivered his new presentation on regular expressions and, although I didn’t see the whole thing, I thought it was terrific. Well-worked slides, beautiful (but functional) slide animation and a first class teaching style. Using Regular Expressions is one of those subjects I’ve known a little about for a long time, but never got to grips with properly and I learnt quite a lot from the small amount of material I watched. Well done, Peter. (Then again, didn’t you say that a negative review of The Art of SQL was compromised by being based on the first half of the book? Does that apply to a positive review of half a presentation, too 😉)
I was in the last slot of the second day of what a few of us agreed had been a poorly attended event, so the audience for my presentation was very small but I never worry about that kind of thing. If one person learns a few new things, it’s been worth my while. Strangely, after the panic and the agenda running a little later so that I was short of time, I actually enjoyed this presentation far more than usual and was fairly pleased. God knows how it was for other people but a few friends where nice about it (they know what’s good for them 😉). It was on Parallel Execution (again!) but took a different approach by spending more time looking at the tracing process, the resulting files and what you can expect to see. I meant it to be more practically useful, so hopefully that came across. I’m definitely happy that this could be a good presentation at UKOUG, though, particularly as I managed it in about 30 minutes to get the agenda back on schedule.
As for the ending to the day, there were several senior Miracle people, some OUG Scotland committee members and a few Oak Table members, all in the same place. Result?
Updated 14th September
Okay, I finally got my act together and put properly scaled photos on this blog after the Howard’s helpful suggestion (and trust me, he was trying to help, so let’s leave him alone about his 1960’s network technology – he must be in enough pain about it as it is 😉). I’m not entirely convinced that the reduced resolution hasn’t compromised my artistic integrity, though.
As a bonus, here’s another photo – this time of Anjo Kolk, Michael Moller and David Kurtz.
AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
What kind of lunacy is it that links TWO 800KB+ images into a blog????????????????
Do you have ANY idea how long your page takes to load on dial-up?
Please visit http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm and use Irfanview or some other image editor of your own devising to SCALE your pictures to about 600 pixels wide and turn them into JPEG images of about 40KB max. You can always provide links to the unexpurgated originals.
Just because your Blog provider turns the images into cutsey thumbnail-ish preview images doesn’t mean some of us scmucks don’t have to suffer through the entire download process before your page loads completely. And if your page is loading, other pages don’t.
Yeesh. Please don’t do it again. It is serious enough, seriously, that I wouldn’t recommend links here if it was a regular occurrence. Serious seriously.
it’s just because he’s self hosted.😉
Don’t blame us for using 1960’s level networking Howard….
Well, at least he doesn’t rule out looking at his site with a PDA anymore. As long as it has a 20″ screen, anyways.
I did almost think about scaling, but was in a hurry to get it done before going in to work. I didn’t think it was that big a deal, but that’s because it’s a while since I’ve used dial-up.
It probably p*sses of blog aggregators too. I think I’ll just use thumbnails in future 🙁
Thanks for letting me know what a nightmare it is …
How’s that?
I am temporarily consigned to dial-up at the moment, having just changed just changed employer and my previous employer having paid for my broadband… I had forgotten just how slow it is 🙁 But pleased to say the blog loads up in not too bad a time now.
It’s got nothing to do with 1960s networking… as the kind person who mentioned PDAs attests. And as Doug’s own comments about aggregators sort-of concurrs.
I have a dear friend that sends me unedited originals from his very fine digital camera… the fact that I think him entirely insane, thoughtless and careless doesn’t mean I don’t still think of him as a very dear friend indeed.
So if I carp, I carp in a loving way, possums.
Most of the world isn’t using broadband. Most of the world that IS using broadband is using a plan that limits the megabytage that can be downloaded before additional costs (or slower speeds) are incurred.
No-one, not now, not ever, should assume that bandwidth is unlimited… simply because for most people it isn’t. And no graphic, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, should ever be published in any form that assumes it is.
I don’t think my blog suffers from having a red-bellied black snake in 600-pixels wide only. I don’t think Doug’s (gratefully) revised blog suffers from having thumbnails to images rather than the images themselves.
So what do I advocate? A practice which harms no-one, but which advantages everyone. And am I supposed to feel guilty in so advocating? I hope not.
I still try hard to design my website for visually impaired viewers, even though I’ve never heard from a single one that is. Why? Because if it works for a near-blind person, it will work for a fully-sighted person too. But if I design only for the fully-sighted, it won’t work for the near-blind. So which is the fairer, more inclusive and more reasonable approach?
In a world where even Tom links to huge video downloads, I appreciate the limitations here. And if you (one) wants to charge ahead and assume that the entire world acts according to your standards and with your resources, fair enough. Don’t let me stop you. But just remember that reality isn’t like that and you’re leaving people behind as a result.
And can I just finally add that Doug still hasn’t quite resolved this issue properly.
Thank God he’s only got thumbnails in the main blog. But if I want to see anything other than a tiny thumbnail, I still have to sit through a download of a 2032 pixels-wide by 1524 pixels tall.
I seriously doubt the photographic artistry in his efforts requires anything more than 800×600 at the very most, and 600xsomething at best. (sorry about the artistry comment, Doug, but I think you’re man enough to take it…)
More importantly, I have so far seen the top third of the full-blown last photo. That’s after a day or so of trying.
Feel free to exclude anyone who’s not up to one’s own technical standards, but I don’t think that’s what Doug would want, actually.
I hate commenting from work but, briefly, I happen to agree with just about everything Howard is saying here, so here’s how it all happened.
I was on late shift yesterday and on-call for Production support too – not a happy combination. I originally uploaded the full photos and thought when I changed the dimensions that Serendipity might re-scale them but I was wrong and it was an unreasonable expectation in the first place. So, as a quick fix (because I was at work by now), I changed them to thumbnail display. Personally, I prefer properly scaled and fairly small photos to thumbnails or monster photos, but thumbnails could be implemented with a couple of quick clicks. I do try to limit the time I spend on blog maintenance because I don’t have much time out of the office.
I would have liked to have fixed the problem properly but my late shift ran on and on and I had little time left to sleep. The little time was broken into a couple of even smaller bits when I was called out at 3am.
So, I agree with what you’re saying and have learnt lessons from it, but it was just a bit of a rush job and work has to take priority before I’ll fix the problem properly …
Be careful with the cuddly toys. I see that Tom Kyte has a bit of a rant on at present about eliminating Tiggers from Oracle databases.