Peter Khos

Hi there,It's been busy. I couldn't even made it to OOW this year (even though I was given the approval to attend). I looked at the various draft post that I have had (never did get a chance to finish) over the last 12 months, it has been horrendous. Anyhow, just wanted to put in a couple of points re: $700b bailout asked by the Bush Administration. Wow! $700b! That's more than the GDP (GrossPeter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com1

I read in my newspaper that Randy Pausch has passed away yesterday from pancreatic cancer which he has been battling for many months. He was a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and in Sept 2007, he gave a "final lecture" to over 400 students at the University.A "Final Lecture" is an academic traditional which say that if you know that you have a few months to live (Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com2

Wow! Time flies. It's been six months since I last posted. I had no intention of leaving the blogging world that long but the days, weeks and months sure went by fast. We are now heading into the later part of the year and OOW is only less than 3 months away with its early bird dateline of July 18th.It has been a very busy six months for me with numerous challenges in the new position. Our Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

It's Day 3 of our Order Management implementation (Oracle E-Business Suite) weekend. The team started on Friday and we expect to have the business folks in this afternoon to do validation and verification. There is a whole bunch of IT, business and of course, our implementation partner working really, really hard to ensure that the implementation goes well. It is complicated by the fact that Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

So, the recent Blog Tag should be almost over by now and the debate over whether one should or should not participate is over. It's interesting to see how a simple thing like this can become such a sticky point for a number of folks. Jake K obviously didn't expect such a reaction to starting the blog tag.For me, it's an exercise in team building. I find that folks tend to work and get along Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com3

Apparently the blog tagging thing is still going strong. Doug Burns tagged me early this week. Thanks Doug, now I got two problems: a) figure out 8 things that people don't generally know about me and b) figure 8 other bloggers to tag. You can see Howard Rogers' comments to this blog tagging at the above mentioned Doug Burns' blog entry. I don't agree with Howard's comments but he has every Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com3

I hoped that 2007 has been good to you all both in your professional and personal lives. 2007 has been eventful and lots of stuff happening. We are now almost just 2 years away from the 2010 Olympics (Feb 2010) and construction of the various venues and transportation systems are chugging along full steam. In my own suburb, Richmond, we have the Canada Line (a light rail system linking the Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com1

With the recent "can of worms" that Jake blogged about on his Blog, I thought that Mary Ann Davidson kind of hit it on the nail when she blogged about "Disclosure".I've blogged about this previously but thought that it is worth mentioning again.Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

Today is Blog Action Day where each blogger is to blog about the environment related to their topic/theme.I am in IT so what can I blog about which would be relevant. Well, I recently attended Gartner Symposium ITxpo where "Green IT" is a key theme for the Symposium and Gartner expects this to be an ongoing theme for the IT industry for the next 3 to 5 years.Michael Dell as one of the keynote Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

Sorry about the lack of updates but been busy with the Gartner Symposium. Last evening (Tuesday), it was the "Attendee Appreciation Event" which was held at Disney's Animal Kingdom where the park was partially opened for the attendees to partake. Obviously the event was "pitiful" compared to Oracle OpenWorld where last year, Oracle had Elton John as the headliner and Billy Joel for this year's Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

Here I am at the Gartner 2007 IT/Expo Symposium in Orlando, Florida. This is my first Gartner Symposium and I'm struck by the age of the attendees who would be in the older group. This is not surprising as Gartner is geared towards the CIOs and IT Excutives/Managers group but it was something that stood out where you don't see a lot of the younger folks (under 30). The weather is hot and muggyPeter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

Most of the news last week in Canada has been on the fact that the Canadian dollar is almost at par with the US dollar. The last time that it was at par was in 1976 (more than 30 years ago). What is so special about it? Well, depending on which perspective you are coming from, there are ramifications. For example, as a consumer there are savings to be had depending on what products are being Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com2

I found this news very interesting indeed. The latest supercomputer is here and it is not controlled by government or private agencies. Instead, it is under the control of (most likely) criminals and the question being asked is "what do they planned to do with it?"It's scary but just imagine the possibilities and none of them are good at all. I think it might be prudent for the white hats to Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

Blogger seems to have lost the last entry that I posted earlier this week. I didn't check and now I can't even remembered what it was that I posted about.Anyhow, there was a number of stuff to post but I thought I would focus on a current technology issue that we are facing with our Oracle E-Business project. Our test lab has been running some performance scripts on our E-Business test Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com2

Some of the recently added postings caught my interest and I thought I should point them out in the event that you might not have seen them.Coskan's post on recovery, "When you lose your controlfile backups". This would be a good interview question.Tanel Poder's posts on "Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Part 1 and Part 2".Laurent Schneider on "Cascade Delete".Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

It looks like I won't be attending this year's OOW as my role within my organization has changed. One of the other managers will attend instead. Darn! I might end up going to Orlando for the annual Gartner Symposium instead so if any of you readers are planning to attend, drop me a line and maybe we can organize for a meetup.Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

So, Monster.com (one of the world's biggest online job seekers site) suffered a huge security breach. Now what? I've registered with Monster years ago (around 2000) but have never gotten any responses from them over the years other than notifications from alert agents that I'd set up years ago.Obviously like everything else, if someone from Monster.com or other company contact you regarding Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

Recently I attended a half-day 11g launch locally in Vancouver where the local Oracle office invited a couple of Oracle Directors from San Francisco to talk about 11g. Obviously there are too many 11g features to talk about so a few were highlighted and it dawned on me that a number of these highlighted features requires additional licenses on top of the usual RDBMS Enterprise Edition. A way toPeter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com1

It has been a blast for me, taking two complete weeks off work and with "limited" access to the Internet although I have my Blackberry. I came back to over 2000 email messages in my work inbox with around 440 of them being meaningful, the rest were either alerts or notification messages.I'm now busy trying to catch up on news (the pile of newspaper) and also what is happening in the Oracle Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com0

You know with the recent revamping of the Oracle ACE program and the recent spat between a couple of well-known individuals in the Oracle community and subsequent related blog entries in the Oracle Blogsphere, I wonder where these two individuals fit within the Oracle ACE program. A quick check to the Oracle ACE site reveals that one of the individual is already an Oracle ACE but not the other.Peter Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14068944101291927006noreply@blogger.com6