Feed Overload
I’m a heavy user and big fan of Bloglines. I use it as my main and only news reader. In addition to the fact that it is web based – which means I can access it from my home and work computer, after their recent data center move and upgrade, their feed update has been really fast. When I publish a post on this blog, it only takes a few minutes before it appears on Bloglines. You can read why I like Bloglines here. But, this is not what this post is about.
No matter what news reader you use, you may end up with many feeds in your subscription list, 100, 200 feeds, maybe more. The question becomes how to manage this list to make your blog/news reading as effective and less time consuming as possible.
Previously I organized my subscriptions into folders. Each folder corresponded to a “topic” or “category”. For example, I placed Oracle related blogs into an Oracle folder, ColdFusion related blogs, into a ColdFusion folder, and so on. Every “topic” had its own folder.
Last weekend, after reading Top 10 tips for effective blog reading, Productivity Tips For Avid Blog Readers and Controlling RSS Overload…Animal House Style, I decided to change the organization of my feeds and the way I read them. Here is how I set up my folders in Bloglines:
- Read Now: All the important feeds that I want to read as soon as they are published.
- My Stuff: Feeds for this blog, OraQA, OraNA and other personal stuff like Bloglines e-mails.
- Daily: Feeds that can wait till the end of the day to be read.
- Weekly: Feeds that can wait till the weekend to be read.
- Probation: Every new subscription goes into this folder for monitoring before I decide to keep it (move it to another folder) or delete it.
- Radar: All my del.icio.us/tag/ and Technorati search subscriptions, just to keep tab on what’s happening on the Net.
So far, it is working. In other words, I am not wasting time reading useless posts and finding more time reading useful posts.
I’m interested to know what your “RSS/ATOM” subscription/reading habit is. How do you organize your feeds? How often do you check your news reader? Do you have an advice you can share with us to make our RSS/ATOM overload more manageable?
Oracle Database 10g XE out of Beta
Justin Kestelyn reports that the free Oracle Database 10g Express Edition is in production now. Woohoo! Thanks Oracle!
Now, waiting for Oracle SQL Developer to graduate 
FeedBurner – Bloglines Problems
It looks like my blog’s feed, as well as OraQA and OraNA feeds are not being polled by Bloglines, and as a result new items have not been updated (in Bloglines only) for the past two or three days. They are all FeedBurner feeds.
If you subscribe to these feeds in Bloglines, you will see a red exclamation mark [!] next to the subscription. It also looks like that I am not the only one noticing this. Feed owners are complaining in the FeedBurner forum. Also check out Darren Rowse post which mentions that FeedBurner claims that the issue is at their end.
This makes me wonder if it is worth it to introduce another POF (Point Of Failure) between my feeds and my readers. But I guess no system is “Unbreakable”.
Update: I contacted Bloglines, here is their reply:
Bloglines has received errors from FeedBurner while attempting to retrieve the feeds in question. FeedBurner is aware of the issue and working to resolve it. We have manually reset the feeds, although this may only temporarily resolve the issue in Bloglines. Subsequent errors may take 24 hours to automatically clear. Thank you for your patience.
Update 2: Looks like the problem is solved. The feeds are normally updated in Bloglines and reported correctly in FeedBurner. Thanks for whoever took care of this issue.
Filed in Interesting Stuff with Comments Off | Tags: aggregator, feedCool SQL Analytic Function: NTILE
The NTILE function divides an ordered partition into buckets and assigns a bucket number to each row in the partition.
The buckets are calculated so that each bucket has exactly the same number of rows assigned to it.
If the number of rows in the partition does not divide evenly into the number of buckets, then the number of rows assigned for each bucket will differ by one at most. The extra rows will be distributed one for each bucket starting from the lowest bucket number.
For example, you want to organize the employees into four buckets: (more…)
Filed in Oracle with 2 Comments | Tags: analytic, sqlMore Oracle Blogs
The number of bloggers blogging about Oracle and related technologies is on the rise. I have recently added the following blogs to OraNA:
- Eric S. Emrick
- Jon Emmons
- Wijaya Kusumo
- Nitai Aventaggiato
- Marcos Campos
- Vadim Bobrov
- Marian Crkon
- Andy Campbell
LOBs Gotcha in ColdFusion
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how to Save/Download files to/from Oracle using ColdFusion. The example I used in the post was about saving Excel files as a BLOB in an Oracle table.
Today, I ran across an issue with file sizes greater than 244 KB. I was testing with a 7 MB Excel file. The file was correctly saved in Oracle and I could see that the BLOB size was indeed 7MB (using dbms_lob.getlength). However, when I tried to download it, it would not download more than 244 KB.
After some research, it turns out that, in the ColdFusion administrator (CFMX V7), if you go to Data Sources under Data & Services and edit the data source you used to retrieve the BLOB, there is a setting under the Advanced Settings to Enable binary large object retrieval (BLOB). In my case, it was unchecked. So, make sure to check this checkbox if you want to return the entire contents of any BLOB column in the database for your data source. If not checked, ColdFusion MX retrieves the amount specified in the BLOB Buffer setting, which, in my case, was 250000 bytes or approximately 244 KB. That explains it!
To summarize, if your application uses BLOBs or CLOBs to store/retrieve data from the database and you do not know (or do not want to enforce) what the maximum size of your BLOB or CLOB data is, make sure to check the Enable binary large object retrieval (BLOB) or Enable long text retrieval (CLOB) settings for your datasource in the ColdFusion administrator.
Filed in ColdFusion, Oracle with 4 Comments | Tags: gotcha, lobSequential GUIDs
Steven Feuerstein has a nice post about Oracle GUIDs. In his latest product named Qute – the Quick Unit Test Engine, Steven uses GUIDs for primary keys.
Steven wrote about how a bug in the Delphi code and the fact that Oracle SYS_GUID function was returning sequentially-incremented values, rather than pseudo-random combinations of characters (in certain circumstances) was causing an error when starting up Qute.
Steven went on to write about what a GUID is, what they are good for, how to format and use them in Oracle PL/SQL and more. Read his full post titled: Watch out for sequential Oracle GUIDs!.
Filed in Oracle with Comments Off | Tags: guidAnother Oracle blogs aggregator
I read that Pete Finnigan has created a new Oracle blogs aggregator. Since some of us are in this “blog aggregation” mood, let me introduce you to my Oracle blogs/news aggregator, OraNA. I have had OraNA up for a while and I have been using it as my Oracle blogs and news source.
Filed in Oracle with 3 Comments | Tags: aggregator, blogWhat’s in a Label
Did you know that any executable statement in your PL/SQL code can be “labeled”. To label a particular section of your code just add < <your_label_name_here>> in front of that section. The label name cannot be more than 30 characters and has to start with a letter. No need to end the label with a semi-colon (;). For example:
YANC – Yet another name change
First, Oracle HTMLDB was renamed to Oracle Application Express. Now, it looks like Oracle Project Raptor is going to be renamed to SQL Developer (Express?), as noticed in Sue Harper’s presentation at ODTUG.
Filed in Oracle with 2 Comments | Tags: application-express, sql-developer
