Carl Backstrom's Blog

So I made it back after a long Thanksgiving weekend but with one missing piece of equipment my cellphone.

It's not a huge issue as it would seem as I had a spare laying about I just needed a new SIM chip and was good to go. But now I'm in the market for one of those fancy smart phones, thanks to the timely posting from Scott http://spendolini.blogspot.com/2006/11/can-someone-please-put-smart-in_28.html

I won't be getting a Motorola Q, but I would like to hear peoples opinions on other smart phones, I'm partial to Nokia but it doesn't need to be.

Features I'm looking for

1. bluetooth


2. megapixel camera


3. expandable memory


4. full qwerty keyboard (slide out would be awesome)


5. mobile java compatible


6. wifi (can give or take)

Oh and if it makes a difference I'll be buying straight from the manufacturer so I don't do through the whole locked phone debacle as I blogged about here, gotta watch that stress level :)

If anybody has strong opinion (good or bad) on a smart phone that has most of these features I'd greatly appreciate hearing about them in the blog comments.

Thanks in advance.

Customized report templates are one of the often overlooked tools in Application Express. While most people are happy with just the standard report templates with minor changes. But in some cases a standard report won't do the trick as in this post here were the poster wanted to show information on 50 different columns , one record at a time.

One solution I've used before is to provide a customized named row template, as in this example here http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:108

While this solution shows a simple layout very complex layouts can be created with fully customizable HTML / CSS / IMAGES and using the conditional row display logic differences based on data returned can provide even another level of customization.

Not an Oracle or APEX post what so ever. But have you ever seen a better example of a dog who knows to the core that they are in 'SO MUCH' trouble? I mean look she's even trying to smile!

This posting is also good example of being stuck an airport in a holiday rush, delayed by fog and learning how to link blogger and flikr together. Both services I highly recommend.

Steven Karam has provided a PDF of his Oracle World presentation Putting the Express Back Into Oracle Application Express with AJAX. It's a very well written and easy to understand introduction into using some of the built in AJAX functionality in APEX. Plus I gotta love the shout out I get at the end ;).
Take some time to dig around his blog a bit more as well he has quite a few tips and tricks in there. The generating XML post is very nice and something I've been working with lately.

While I'm not a big fan of Flash it is used on quite a few sites on the web, since I use Linux pretty much all the time though I'm stuck with older versions of the Flash plugin but today Adobe released another beta of the Flash 9 plugin for Linux.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Here is a preview of long promised Sticky Hide Show Region code example. The installable code example will be found on the Oracle Application Express Sample Code page in the next day or two.

For some reason people when writing javascript always seem to do 2 things that just drive me nuts!

One they camel case some html attributes like onChange , onClick .onMouseOver all html elements and attributes should be in lowercase

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_elements.asp


http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.2

And they prepend their function with javascript: which is only useful in very few cases
http://jibbering.com/faq/#FAQ4_24

So you get this awful monstrosity that looks like onClick="javascript:doSomething()" when the proper way is to write it onclick="doSomething()"

I'll agree that it isn't a huge deal in most cases but there is a right and wrong way to do somethings and wish people would do it the right way, oh well I guess thats why they call it a Pet Peeve.

A very nice well written article on typography


Since a large percentage of Application Express applications deal with displaying text data a bit of understanding on how to visually format even just the text goes along way.

A non Oracle post but sometimes people just send you the coolest stuff.  Kris Rice ,of SQL Developer fame, sent me this link which is very cool video of a car trip from LA to NYC edited down to 4 minutes.

While I'm not a big fan of the soundtrack I absolutely respect the stop in Vegas !

http://www.autoblog.com/2006/11/03/video-from-l-a-to-n-y-in-under-4-minutes/

There is a really nice demo here of using Application Express and Oracle Spatial here, http://www.oracle.com/technology/sample_code/products/mapviewer/index.html

Being an old GIS person myself , thats right a bachelors degree in
Geography can get you just about anywhere ;), I always like seeing new
ways of building maps and querying geographic data.

Beyond that this application shows one of the real powerful concepts of
Application Express, since it's tied closely to the Oracle database
with minimal effort it is very easy to build applications that take advantage of the
features of the database Spatial / Intermedia / Oracle Text / XMLDB to name some of my favorites.



Update : The link to the files seems to be broken I shot off an email to the file owner and hopefully it will get fixed quickly.


The link issue has been fixed.