pushd & popd

If you are ever writing a shell script that has to change the directory but you want to go back to wherever the user was, use pushd & popd. Here is my example case where I wanted to write a shortcut for deploying a portlet to my portal project.

function upDeployPortlet() 
{
  pushd  ~/projects/uPortal/myuw-madison/
  ant deployPortletApp -DportletApp="$@"
  popd
}

New Syntax Highlighter

I came across this syntax highlighter on Eric's Notes (thanks Eric). It works quite well. I am impressed. I added the following to my blog setup:

To The Cloud!

The League

Oracle is releasing Oracle Database 12c this year.  What does the C stand for, cloud.  There are some interesting features that they are pushing with the latest trend, cloud networks (or private cloud as they called it).  My second favorite feature in 12c is the plug-able databases.  With a cluster setup, you can create a database that lives on some of your nodes.  Technically you can do this now in 11gR2, but now it is more transparent and easier in 12c.

My favorite feature of 12c isn't even part of cloud, but it is when creating a table you can put in a sequence as the default value.  No more row level triggers on insert/update to get a nextval.  Woot!

The "cloud" is the mighty buzzword of the year, and a lot of companies are jumping on board.  It seems to be cost saving (businesses love saving the money), however it does have its downfalls.  You see a lot of redundant cloud based services going down with complete outages, and when the company utilizing the service comes out with a statement, they blame the service provider they are using.  A great example is the latest outage with a popular streaming service utilizing a competitors cloud service (names removed, but google search "Christmas streaming outage" and you will find it).  Is that reasonable?  I'm not sure.  Regardless if it is tagged as "cloud" or "fully redundant" there can still be an outage.  Nothing is that safe, yet.  What the cloud does introduce is dependencies on other companies.

Most of you admins with any experience is shaking there head, yup.  A part of me thinks, we will get there eventually, but we will see.