Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Various thought balloons #1

Not too many people visit this site, which is fine. It is an ongoing experiment in learning blogging, mucking around with ads etc.

You might have noticed the adsense ads are gone. I did a quick check on google and even the pages which used to be on google are gone now.
Seems I must be a spam blog or splog in Google's eyes. oh well. Does this look and feel like a splog?

I was struck over the weekend by the various blogs I read about databases. Sometimes I feel it is a pissing contest i.e. look how deeply we have delved into the internals... look at the complexity which we understand.
Reality is most people are looking for information, mostly to make their job easier or finding a distraction from their everyday life or wondering what is happening elsewhere.

Enough ranting.

There was a slight note in passing about Jim Gray on a blog I read, apparently he is missing after going sailing, I clicked the link and bingo. This is an awesome site. I have already more than 10 presentations and documents to read and some more websites to visit.

Go check it out. There was a recent debate about disk bandwidth, there is plenty of fuel on rekindle to fire from Jim Gray's website.

Have Fun

Paul

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Just works right.

In my day job a reasonable percentage of my time I tend to have to check the same things, in some cases fix or monitor the same problem.
I have a need for automation and I spend time making scripts so I don't have to type, using dynamic sql is a good example. I dislike GUIs which force too much of the workflow onto you by not handling the general case well.

If you don't know the power of dynamic sql, it is sql which generates sql.

Example:


select 'alter session kill session '''||sid||','||serial#||''';'
from v$session
where username is not null and last_call_et > 3600;

Produces a list of SQL commands to kill all non-Oracle sessions who are idle for more than hour Note: Use sqlnet.expire_time=60 instead

alter session kill session '24,34567';
etc...

So my script library is a spawling bunch of sql and sh scripts, I find myself not remembering the syntax of the command (I know the table/view and command I need) but I just go and grep for the command or table and 9 times out of 10 I find a script I have already written.

If I combine several scripts into one, I now have a tool. Suddenly what took 2 mins to run and diagnose takes 10 secs, I am investigating the why sooner. No stuffing around getting the info I need.

When I am working I tend to listen to dance music, apparently the specific genre is vocal trance. As I have mentioned in the past I use Pandora as their range of music is superior to anything I have here. Other times I listen to podcasts, they just go in the background and I continue working, occasionally stopping and rewinding a bit (using the slider) to listen to a bit.

This podcast was good. I would recommend you too listen to it, a couple of times.

I love unix and the power of the pipe. Locate and grep can find files and contents faster than anything Windows XP can do.
I hate how PC Linux still exposes too much underlining hardware/software conflicts. The expectation is you will drop everything and debug the device driver or even better patch and recompile the kernel.
I am a techy I can handle it, noone else in my family, including my wife who is a techy as well can be bothered with it. I don't use linux now, I use cygwin which has all the unix I need.

The message from the podcast was really to ask what the user wants, what task is the user trying to achieve. Just make it work.

Have Fun

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Great article about Enron and disclosure

I found this article on Enron and puzzles via econlog and whilst it is a long read it is extremely interesting.

Basically the information is in plain sight that Enron was in trouble.

Here is the student report that Malcolm Gladwell. A little bit of Google produced the pdf.

Perhaps a good rule of thumb is to always get the cashflow against profit and also profit against tax paid.

Whilst Malcolm mentions that Enron was unaffected by short-sellers, it was in the end. The short seller who spent hours checking 10Q and 10K filings could have ridden Enron into insolvency, keeping in the effect the whole amount which was short-sold.

Update:

I read the student report on Enron (ENE) and it reads like any other financial advice/analysis ie. slightly slippery, hedging bets, the short term recommendation was to sell. However the students remained convinced of Enron's strategy and remained neutral longer term.

They did in fact discover the possibility of earnings manipulation however chose to disregard it. In the reports word "no cause for concern".

Unfortunately any analysis now is tainted by hindsight. Enron was not some much a energy company more an "energy bank", where 88.9% of its revenue (but only 28.6%) of its income came from it financial arm. So like a bank it lived and died by the risk and cost of capital plus unlike a bank, there was no reserve bank to provide cash when the reserves are gone.

Have Fun

Paul