Well, this took a while.
For those who don’t know the story: I let the oracledoug.com domain lapse years ago when I was in Singapore and busy with other things, and by the time I thought better of it, someone else had grabbed it. The domain was gone, the database was gone, the files were gone — the lot. All that survived of fifteen-odd years of Oracle writing and unrelated personal nonsense was whatever the Wayback Machine had quietly archived along the way.
So that’s where I started. Every post has been pulled back out of the Internet Archive, HTML and all, and rebuilt from scratch on a new home: orcldoug.com. It wasn’t a restore — there was nothing to restore from — it was a reconstruction. But it’s here, and it’s a lot more complete than I dared hope.
What’s back:
- The Oracle blog — 700-plus posts, with the original comments, which for my money were often better than the posts. There are a few images missing here and there (sadly including me wearing the famous red Oracle ACE Director vest garment) but plenty survived.
- The old personal blog too, for anyone who remembers that side of it.
- The white papers — Parallel Execution (“How Many Slaves?”, “Suck It Dry”), the CASE and Decode papers, the Dynamic WAP one, and the rest — all rehosted as downloads.
- A few odds and ends, including my CV and, for the truly nostalgic, the ZX Spectrum games I wrote in the ’80s — Hypaball and Ping Pong — now playable in your browser. No emulator to install. You have been warned. 😉
A couple of asks, if you’re so inclined:
If you’ve ever linked to something on the old oracledoug.com — a paper, a post, an answer — those links are dead now, but the content lives at the same paths under orcldoug.com. There has been a lot of work on mapping to the original links so you should be able to just search and replace from oracledoug to orcldoug! I’d be hugely grateful if you’d repoint them. And if I linked to you and it’s rotted, tell me and I’ll fix it.
I’m not sure how active I’ll be here but mostly, it’s just good to be back. Come and say hello — I’m working out where everyone went after the Twitter diaspora, so if your corner of the Oracle world has a new home these days, point me at it.
All of this would never have happened without Anthropic Claude. It felt like too big a mountain to climb and I never had enough time to see it through, but became enjoyable and doable over a number of days.
Ultimately, treat this as a mildly interesting archive restoration. Much of the content will be inaccurate now, but it gives a nice dip into the online Oracle community at the time. I’m enjoying parts of it anyway 😉
Cheers