 | 16 May 09:13 I owe you, my dear reader, a quick update. If you have been following me on Twitter, you already know that on April 23 I started a new job with a new employer. In the last three weeks, I have been adapting myself to the new environment. This is not easy to do after being [... 27 Aug 18:00 Here is my top 10 from this list of 101 ways to know your software project is doomed: Developers use the excuse of “self documenting code” for no comments All of your requirements are written on a used cocktail napkin Progress is now measured by the number of fixed bugs and not completed features Your source code control system [... 24 Aug 17:00 I stumbled upon an interesting article titled: Comments Are More Important Than Code. In this article, the author, Jef Raskin, writes: Good documentation should be readable on its own, with bits of code showing how the design is implemented (and making it run, of course). Reconstructing code from good documentation is far easier than [... 10 Jul 22:26 Last May I published a list of top Oracle blogs ranked by Technorati authority. Since then, I have had requests to publish an updated list. I was reluctant to do it because creating the list takes quite a bit of time. However, last Sunday afternoon, I was able to automate the creation of the spreadsheet. [... 15 Jun 08:32 I have lost confidence in Oracle’s ANSI style SQL. Eric, in his comment to the post Back to basics: anti-joins and semi-joins, warned me of the following gotcha: If you are writing queries that select from many tables, like denormalizing data for warehousing, and the sum of the columns in those tables exceeds 1,050, [... 8 Jun 04:54 Oracle SQL Developer, the free graphical tool for database development, has just been upgraded from 1.1 to 1.2. Here is the list of bug fixes and here is the release notes document including new features and known issues. If you are already running production release 1.1 (v 1.1.0.23.64) or above, you can use Help > Check [... 7 Jun 04:01 Here is the email I received from Oracle: Dear Edward Awad, The history of information technology is a journey, defined by innovations such as the internet and grid computing. Oracle would like to personally welcome you to see the next generation of innovation by inviting you to the launch of Oracle [... | | |