Scott Spendolini's Blog

Well, at least that's what the United gate agent told us before we began to board our flight from Washington Dulles to LAX this past Tuesday. You see, we had some "very special guests" on board. United Flight #197 was officially re-named to TURKEY-1. I'm not kidding - every Air Traffic Controller from Dulles to LAX referred to our flight as this, most with bewilderment. I've been flying on United for over 10 years now, and I've seen some pretty dumb things, both on the part of them and their passengers alike. I've had 5+ hour delays for no apparent reason, seen drunk passengers denied boarding, even saw an older man punch a woman. I thought I'd seen it all. Wrong. As I was checking in, I asked if my upgrade had gone through, with little hope as it was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving in the US, one of the busiest travel days. "No, sir, I'm sorry, first class is checked in full. With 2 turkeys." "I'm sorry, but I think I jus...

Tomorrow, I'm off to Los Angeles for the remainder of the week to visit with my wife's family for Thanksgiving. While LA isn't exactly my favorite city, it should be a good time catching up with her family & friends. We're going to see a taping of the Jimmy Kimmel show on Wednesday, so that should be interesting. Amy Smart is the guest, and Def Leppard is performing outside – that alone is a reason to make the trip! I'm putting the finishing touches on my MAOP Keynote and technical session. I've also changed the topic of my Technical Session to Integrating Oracle HTML DB with the Oracle eBusiness Suite . I simply didn'y have time to get the Oracle Forms presentation in order, hence the last minute change. At one of my current contracts, I've been working extensively with the eBusiness Suite and HTML DB, so I think that this will make for a good story, with lots of advise and best practices. If you plan on attending the Keynote on Friday, I wi...

If you haven't already tried it, give Konfabulator a shot. It's basically Apple's " Dashboard " for the PC (and Mac). (Konfabulator actually came first) It used to cost $20 or so, but since Yahoo! purchased them, it is now free. Most of the "widgets" are borderline-useless, with a few exceptions: Calendar - nothing like always having a small calendar on your desk Weather - Complete with the forecast, its the next best thing to being outside Wireless Network Status - a meter which shows the signal strength of your WiFi connection There are many, many more - from dozens of clocks to your favorite movie characters who will say their funniest lines when clicked. But perhaps the most useful one I have discovered is Knut August Johansen's iTunes Companion . This one stands out above the rest, as it truly automates a tedious task - it fetches album artwork & details from Amazon.com and imports it into iTunes for your existing songs....

I'll be presenting the Keynote Presentation at this year’s MAOP Annual Training Conference on Friday, December 8th at George Washington University . My topic will be " The Best Free Tool That You're Probably Not Using " and will obviously mention Oracle HTML DB a couple of times. I'm very excited, as this will be my first keynote presentation. I've seen my share of them, and understand that the topic needs to be more business-focused as opposed to technical. As this year's conference theme is "Leveraging your Oracle Investment", I figured that would be a good theme for my presentation as well. I'm also going to be doing a technical session: Making the Switch: Migrating Oracle Forms Applications to Oracle HTML DB . Before the flame way starts, let me say that not all Oracle Forms applications should and must be migrated to anything. The point that I will attempt to convey is that Oracle HTML DB is a viable platform for some Oracle Forms m...

My article " Migrating to Oracle HTML DB " was just published in the Nov/Dec issue of Oracle Magazine. It talks about the high-level steps required to migrate from MS Access to Oracle HTML DB. To summarize: Oracle HTML DB is one of the best platforms to use when considering migrating MS Access applications to the web. However, there is no "silver bullet" approach – each MS Access application should be examined and then migrated (or not) to HTML DB accordingly.

Lots of activity about Oracle XE over the past couple of days ! I figure that I just wouldn't be "cool" if I didn't weigh in on the topic, so here goes: Brilliant! Here's why: Pure simplicity. Take the situation which happened today: I download Oracle XE and go to install it on my laptop. Download took about 1 minutes, install another 4-5, and I'm was up & running, HTML DB and all.* My officemate, at about the same time, decided to install Oracle Enterprise Edition and HTML DB on his laptop, just so he could learn HTML DB and perhaps close a piece of our production environment. Needless to say, the download of 10gR2 alone took longer than the install of XE. I was gleefully clicking away, while he sat there, counting the bits as they flew by. This is one of the largest benefits of Oracle XE – small, compact size with most of the power of the Oracle Database. While Oracle software has always been available for anyone to download, what was the us...