Today, my wife Jasmine, my son George and I welcomed Julie, the latest addition to the Awad family. Jasmine gave birth to Julie, a beautiful 8.2 lbs baby girl, at 10:41 AM (PST) on September 26, 2006. Both mom and baby are doing fine. As a result of this life changing event, I have taken […]

Did you know that you cannot use a bind variable if it has a specific name? And did you know that column names in your tables can be as cryptic as !@#$%^?

Invalid bind variable name

SQL reserved words cannot be used as bind variables. For example:

SQL> var to number; SQL> var from number; […]

I’m late, but as the saying goes, better late than never. I just signed up for Oracle OpenWorld 2006 and purchased the airline ticket last Friday. I will be attending only the Oracle Develop part of it though. I will be flying from PDX to SFO on October 22nd and flying back on the 25th.

I […]

I used Grazr to build the following nifty little widget to display a “live” list of all the blogs and news sources that are aggregated by OraNA.

In addition to its really cool AJAX look and feel, this Grazr OPML viewer/reader has some nice features like:

Different viewing options: three pane view, a slider view and a […]

In Oracle, NULL does not equal NULL:

EDDIE@XE> SELECT ‘hi there’ 2 FROM DUAL 3 WHERE NULL = NULL;

no rows selected

But sometimes, if not most of the times, you do want the condition NULL = NULL to return true. For example:

[…]

When was the last time you did not use a computer for one full day? My last time was yesterday and it was not because I was on vacation. Yesterday, I was in the Northwest Oracle Users Group (NWOUG) 2006 Fall Conference.

I attended six 45-minute presentations. The sessions that were interesting and that I liked […]

Database Best Practices (tags: oracle database bestpractices) Advanced SQL Injection in Oracle Databases This […]

Steven Feuerstein, the Oracle PL/SQL guru and author of many PL/SQL books, has a goal: to meet with president Bush. To that end, Steven has started a new blog titled: “Meet with Me, Mr. President!”. He describes his new blog as one that:

will chronicle my efforts to meet with President Bush, to take […]

I stumbled upon this website which has the following interesting screencasts demonstrating the use of a penetration testing tool for Linux:

Tunneling Exploit WEP Cracking Spoof attack Client side attack

(IE may not display the screencasts correctly. Best viewed in Firefox)

It also has this interesting, and rather disturbing, animated GIF image:

click to see it in action

And finally, a web page […]

In Windows, there is this handy “Send To” option when you right click on a file or folder in Windows Explorer. In case you do not know, you can add more “places” to the list of where you can send a file or a folder to. Here is how you can do that.