Nutella: I think we both missed an entire season. It is quite cold here. I don't know if this means we will have a mild winter (I hope so) or a cold winter. In any case, I need to buy a coat.
I have a love hate relationship with Oracle. Basically, I love to hate it. I think they make an incredible database, and I have no problems using it. Unfortunately, everything gets complicated when it comes to Oracle. For instance, I wanted to grab some data from another database to use on my local instance. I did an export over the network, which worked fine. Unfortunately, the data wouldn't all import. Apparently the data in the tables doesn't match the constraints, i.e. there are null values in not null columns! How could that possible happen? I have no idea. I decided to disable the constraints and try again. I now get messages saying that it can't modify a view. It turns out the tables were actually materialized view (aka snapshots). I had to turn them into tables and the re-import the data. Finally, after about 2 hours (the datafile is 1.6gb) I got the data imported. I should have just pulled it into MySQL.
I'll probably be spending the next few weeks wading through data hell trying to get two systems to match up. I've been doing a little work with our backup group on reporting and will probably take a more active role. We use a product called BackupReport from Bocada. It isn't a bad product per-se, but it does a lot of things wrong. The idea of the product is that it combines information from several different backup systems. In our case, netbackup and Tivoli Storage Manager. While it does pull data into one schema, the semantics of some of the fields are different based upon the product. This means I will probably treat it as a raw data source and have to extract a set of usable data. it also needs the ability to roll up data over time. There is no reason whatsoever to have 5gig of backup data.
On a more interesting note, I found a good searchable site for information on ANSI lisp. This lead me to the (read-line) function which reads a line into a string. The common extension which splits a string into a list of strings should make the rest of what I want to do relatively easy. Maybe this weekend I will work on HTTP and URL parsing code.
On a more physical projects note, I will probably work on the condo this weekend. I've painted everything but the bathrooms and may try to get one painted this weekend. I also want to build a frame for my TV. I recently got a plasma tv which is hanging over the fireplace. Our place was built in 1922 and rehabbed in 2002 keeping the vintage feel. I think a nice wood frame that matches the trim would really help to make the TV look better.