Tahiti Views

Opinions, examples, and the occasional rant about database and web programming.John Russellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17089970732272081637noreply@blogger.comBlogger85125
Updated: 3 days 15 hours ago
Deconstructing the iPod Shuffle UI
The new buttonless iPod Shuffle, which moves all the controls onto the headphone cord, is taken to task in this article:The new iPod shuffle: Button, button, who's got the button?Now, I'm a recent purchaser of the previous Shuffle model, and intuitively I prefer the Play/Pause/Forward/Back/Up/Down controls of that previous model. But I like to take contrarian positions sometimes too, so let me John Russellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17089970732272081637noreply@blogger.com0
Comic-Based Communication
These days, there are as many styles of documentation as there are of programming. Structured docs (waterfall model), topic-based writing (object-oriented development), less formal styles based around wikis (agile coding). Another one that I haven't seen given a name, is what I think of as comic-based communication.If you grew up with comic books, fingers poised next to "continued on 3rd page", John Russellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17089970732272081637noreply@blogger.com0
You've Got to Fight for Your Invoker's Rights
This post is about a PL/SQL feature that doesn't get enough respect, "invoker's rights".First off, what's its real name? Depending on the source, you'll see the feature name spelled "invoker's rights", "invokers' rights", or "invoker rights". That makes a difference -- you'll get different results in Google depending on what combination of singular, plural, and possessive you use. And to be John Russellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17089970732272081637noreply@blogger.com0
Oracle PeopleSoft hosted docs
Just in time for the new year! The Oracle PeopleSoft group now have their docs on Oracle.com in HTML format, hooked up to a Tahiti search:Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Hosted PeopleBooksJohn Russellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17089970732272081637noreply@blogger.com0
Coding Horror: Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive
You've probably heard both sides of this argument: throw hardware at performance problems, no no, improve the code. Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror comes down on the "more hardware" side in this post:Coding Horror: Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are ExpensiveUsually I agree with Jeff, but I John Russellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17089970732272081637noreply@blogger.com2