Merino–Possum, New Zealand
I have just received a gift of a 60% Merino Wool and 40% Possum Fur hat and scarf. These can be found at The Tin Shed where there are hundreds of similar Kiwi items for sale (think sheep). The hat and scarf were manufactured by Weft Knitting Co Ltd (warning: not a real web site, full of Flash content).
Both items are a lovely snug and warm fit and are soft enough to be worn against bare skin. If previous purchases are anything to go by, these will last for years to come.
New web site online
It's Saturday afternoon and I have been working out-of-hours on production databases. Over the last couple of days I have been migrating the www.ewan.cc web site from a mixture of hand-edited HTML, SHTML, JSPs, Servlets, PHP and CGI, into a new Drupal 6 system. Well, here it is! Please comment! The old system will eventually go online at [URL to be decided] and please report any broken links.
World IPv6 Day
On the 8th June 2011 the World IPv6 Day begins. Many major organisations will be taking part by enabling IPv6 on their main URLs for one day. Octave Computing Limited will be taking part. In fact we have been IPv6-connected on all services since our domain was registered. We welcome any progress towards restoring the end-to-end connectivity that made the Internet into what it was.
Sun's direction becoming clearer
Oracle has filed suit against Google with regards to Google's use of Java in Android mobile devices. In other news, Oracle has cut-off OpenSolaris. Oracle has also been shutting down
Free Sat-Nav now available for Nokia E71
Google street view covers 95% of UK
Google have updated their street view software to cover 95% of the UK. To give it a try, visit maps.google.com with Javascript enabled, search for your location, then drag the little orange man (at the top of the left-hand zoom bar) onto the map or zoom all the way in. Streets that are navigable will be shown in blue.
Oracle and Sun
We are keeping a close eye of some important technologies in the wake of the Sun Microsystems takeover by Oracle. It is interesting to see what will happen to Java, Open Office and Open Solaris.
Free Sat-Nav for your mobile phone
Nokia Ovi Maps has been offered for free with certain handsets since January 2010. We will update you when this offer is extended to the older enterprise smart phones.
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 cluster-enabled dbconsole
You may have a small RAC database that is managed with the dbconsole rather than the grid. The documentation states that the console must be started manually on the applicable cluster node(s) whenever it is required. Couldn't the CRS cluster start and stop the dbconsole automatically?
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 new feature: server pools
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 has a new feature named server pools. If a database is created as a policy managed RAC database then policy will dictate where the database instances are placed in the cluster rather than which instances were created on which node at creation time.
Take a cluster of three nodes.