The Prime Number Few

I was chasing links through Wikipedia the other day, which always leads somewhere interesting.

In this case I fell into the deep waters of linguistics and learned about garden path sentences. They caught my eye in particular because the article includes one of my favourite jokes, albeit with a slightly different construction to my usual one.

"If time flies like an arrow, do fruit flies like a banana?"

Now that I've read a deconstruction of the joke, it seems a little less funny though.

The Three Pillars of Oracle Data Warehousing

Introduction

This is a basic topic for Oracle data warehousing beginners, based on some ideas that I’m hoping will stop buzzing round in my head if I commit them to virtual paper.

There are three Oracle features that provide a foundation for successful data warehousing:

• Partitioning
• Parallelism
• Psummary Tables (the “p” is silent)

Here are the benefits that they bring to the system.

Strange Thing To Carry

My kids (3, 4 & 6) intercepted and detained a pedestrian passing our house the other evening on the grounds that he was in Public Possession of Dogs, and they needed to subject him to the usual line of questioning: "Names?", "Ages?", "Boys or Girls?", "Do they bite?" etc..

Strangely none of them noticed what I saw immediately, which was the holstered handgun on his hip. I'm sure he had a license to do so, but what he was expecting might happen to him in our Nice Suburban Neighborhood is anyone's guess.

On the other hand one of my wife's co-workers reported a sighting of a mountain lion about two miles southeast of us a couple of years ago. I'm inclined to wonder whether *ahem* alcohol was a factor in that case because we're definitely on the wrong side of the city for that kind of wildlife — antelope, deer, foxes and the occasional coyote maybe, but how a lion would pass unnoticed around Colorado Springs from the mountains on the west to the plains on the eastern side is a mystery to me.

However the mountains to the west of us aparantly have the highest density of mountain lions throughout the Rockies, which leads to some basic precautions when hiking with the kids — don't let them straggle or walk too far in front is all it really amounts to. (That link contains other interesting information on bubonic plague, hanta virus, avalanches etc. by the way). Sightings and other less fortunate encounters seem to be pretty common up around Boulder though.

Here's a prime example of the kind of plump, tender morsel that a lion would enjoy most.

It's amazing how fast those legs will carry him if he's told that there's a lion behind him!

Getting the (Sub)Partition Name for a Row

Adapted from a response to a question posted on Oracle-l, here are three methods for finding out what partition or subpartition a table row is stored in, or which partition or subpartition a row will be stored in.

Machine Music

Oooh, this is nice.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5503582578132361295

A Day Without Immigrants

So today is apparantly "A Day Without Immigrants" and I just realised that this means me as well, technically speaking. Does it not seem strange that so immigrants should be held to be the source of so many problems in America, of all countries? And people in the southern border lands appear to be particularly prone to that finger-pointing, when they are living on land that was originally part of a Mexico too weakened by its own war for independence to be able to defend it from the young states to the north.

I'm coming up to the eighth anniversary of my "stepping off the boat" as it were — it's easy to work out as I just add on one year and a couple of days to my wedding anniversary, which is how long it took for my permanent resident visa to come through, plus a couple of weeks to get the last things packed and get a flight. I missed my first wedding anniversary by just five days I think. From the visa (and later job) interview questions I was asked I was apparantly suspected of being an economic migrant, which made the enormous paycut that I took to move from London, UK to Dayton, Ohio rather ironic.

On the other hand, I don't really think of myself as an immigrant. I'm think I'm really someone who is just hanging out here for a while … seeing the sights, doing a bit of shopping, being married, having kids etc.. On the other hand I've only been back to England once in all that time, for my brother's wedding in Cambridge last year. With my parents living in Spain and my parents-in-law living near Rome we tend to pay fleeting visits to Heathrow every now and then just to see if they've finished building it yet (which they haven't) and to stock-up on the few goodies that are available there and not from our local Fine Imported Goods emporium — ie. the commissary at Peterson AFB. They sell Flakes, Crunchies, Milk Chocolate Hobnobs etc, although they fly off the shelves because everyone panic-buys them apparantly.

So anyway I get itchy feet everytime I see Oracle blogsters writing of their travels, and we're regularly overcome by an urge to move back to Europe. Any part of it at all will do. We were recently thwarted in an attempted move to Slovenia or Romania, and now we're trying for Germany. My brother tells me we should be moving to Denmark — in fact a friend of a friend ended up there after some kind of incident involving rowing to Iceland in a replica of a Viking longboat, during which voyage he apparantly had an affair with the wife of the group leader which must have involved either extraordinary levels of discretion or some extraordinarily tense mealtimes — but frankly it's probably Hobson's choice where we land. If the USAF doesn't have positions for a Developmental Engineer at least available then it's not on the list.

So where was I?

Ah yes, the immigrant day thing. Well it turns out that most of my work colleagues will be in a Customer Acceptance Test for most of the day so they wouldn't notice me not being here (here being 1,200 miles from them) anyway. However, I applaud the priniciple and I may go down the Monica's Taco Shop for a breakfast burrito to show support for the cause.