NZOUG 2013 Conference: Agenda online - register while Earlybird Pricing still here!

The New Zealand Oracle Users Group - NZOUG Conference 2013 is open for registrations and Earlybird pricing is still available! The agenda is now available.

NZOUG 2013 is being held in Wellington at the iconic Te Papa Museum on the beautiful waterfront on the 18th and 19th of March, with an additional Workshop Day on the 20th March.

The conference will see a wealth of brilliant speakers from around the world, including Tom Kyte, Graham Wood, Andrew Holdsworth, John Schiff and Nadia Bendjedou and of course top speakers from Middle Earth (NZ) as well. Tom, Andrew and Graham will be presenting their Real World Performance show, which will be a highlight of the conference.

Topics being covered cross a wide range of Oracle solutions, with tracks for Development, DBA, Cloud Computing, Oracle E-Business Suite, a full dedicated JD Edwards Day, Fusion Applications, EPM/BI, Middleware, Management, Infrastructure, Security, Hardware and Professional Development.

I'll be co-presenting one paper on utilizing the Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, tips, tricks and a demo, not too much this time around so that I can head along to as many of the other presentations as I can. Drop me an email if you want to catch up at the conference!

So, if you're around New Zealand in mid-March, perhaps following on from the NZ - England Cricket Test, and if you like getting out and networking often with fun consequences, then make sure you come to the New Zealand Oracle event of the year, not to be missed!

Catch ya!

Gareth

This is a post from Gareth's blog at http://garethroberts.blogspot.com

References

• NZOUG
• NZOUG2013
• NZOUG on Twitter, conference hashtag #NZOUG2013
• NZOUG on LinkedIn

My Oracle Support - Metalink to MOS survey results

Ouch! Metalink to My Oracle Support Survey Report.

Revisited: Search Engine Plugins for Firefox to get directly to specific Oracle Patches, MOS Notes, Bugs

Revisited: Following the upgrade from Metalink to My Oracle Support (MOS) I've updated the Note and Bug search engines (files oranote.xml and orabug.xml) per my prior post.

Revisited again 30-NOV-2010: Following the ARU change I've updated the Patch search engine (file orapatch.xml) per my prior post.

Navigate directly to a specific Oracle Patch, MOS/Metalink Note or Bug, speeding things up & sidestep that Flash! You gotta know the Patch/Note/Bug number you wanna get to:

• OraPatch: Javascript Install or grab the XML file.
• OraNote: Javascript Install or grab the XML file.
• OraBug: Javascript Install or grab the XML file.

Catch ya!
Gareth
This is a post from Gareth's blog at http://garethroberts.blogspot.com

 

Related Posts

• Search Engine Plugins for Firefox to get directly to specific Oracle Patches, Metalink Notes, Bugs
• Bye Bye Metalink, Hello MOS - My Oracle Support. Fingers crossed for continued HTML content!
• Firefox with eBusiness Suite: Oracle JInitiator Plugin does not start - always get "must install plugin", Vista, Patch 5397653
• Enhancing the Oracle eBusiness Suite 11i/12 Homepage Menu via Firefox, Greasemonkey, XPath, Javascript & DOM: aka Foxiness Menus

 

Bye Bye Metalink, Hello MOS - My Oracle Support. Fingers crossed for continued HTML content!

Disclaimer: This page may become out of date very quickly!

Only a couple of days of Metalink access left, with the change over to full My Oracle Support due on Friday - 6 November 09.

For me this is a somewhat sad occasion. Metalink has been around for such a long time, and has been a great companion, it will be a shame to see it go.

We now herald in the era of MOS (My Oracle Support). And of course, with any shiny new thing, there have been discussions and more discussions. With that debate there has been some good feedback, some negative. To be honest I'm a bit nervous about this change. I'd be keen to know why the APEX interface of Metalink is on the out, when APEX was just brought in for the latest Oracle Store, and with some very sexy functionality on the horizon. The answer is sure to be a double edged sword ;-)

At the end of the day MOS as I've seen so far just doesn't tick all the boxes for me. That will hopefully change. Hopefully soon. My biggest gripe of course would be Flash versus HTML. Given Oracle's current catchphrase "Open. Complete. Integrated." I'd have thought Flash would be a little further down the list than HTML for many of the MOS components. One issue related to this can be summed up by the following screenshot. The eagle-eyed amongst you will spot the problem in the following picture:

… with the issue being the Firefox "Find" not finding "Font" when it was present many times on the MOS search results presented. A bit of a hassle that something I use regularly ain't gonna work. Guess I'll need to have two sessions up, one Flash, one HTML.

Fortunately, it seems an HTML interface will still be available according to Note 841061.1, with limited functionality including SR Management? BUT WAIT ... while I was writing this post I got another MOS related announcement... No SR Management??? Hmm, this is specific to "On Demand" functionality. Fingers crossed for SR Management through the HTML only interface!

The HTML option will not support the following On Demand functionality:

• Service Request management
• Change Request Management
• Viewing performance reports

And there are some other little things that will probably come out in the wash, like email notifications no longer linking directly to an SR:

Prior:

New:

Oh, and of course, let's hope the powers that be manage to keep the gremlins away...

Exception Gremlin:

I/O Gremlin:

Error 1088 Gremlin:

Internal Gremlin:

Well ... I guess we'll find out where we stand in a couple of days!

Catch ya!
Gareth
This is a post from Gareth's blog at http://garethroberts.blogspot.com

References

• APEX Statement of Direction
• Support Blog

Related Posts

• Openworld 2009 Wrapup
• Oracle EBS Release 12.1 Released: Top 8 New ATG Features
• A Look Ahead to 2009 - Oracle eBusiness Suite and Happy New Year!

HTML Formatting issues in EBS R12 XML Publisher Remittance Advice Emails aka. Use Inline CSS Styles in BIP

Apologies for the cryptic title on this one. The issue is a simple but subtle one ... and if you're not an eBusiness Suite customer, but interested in the BIP HTML formatting part, please read on as the discussion may be relevant.

In the Oracle eBusiness Suite Release 12 there is an out-of-the-box solution for sending Payables Remitttance Advice notices via Email. The program is "Send Separate Remittance Advices" and is integrated into the Payments Process. The standard solution utilizes XML Publisher under the covers, but (at the time of writing) has been coded to force HTML output for the Email content and uses its own delivery mechanism, rather than a more flexible bursting one that could attach PDFs to emails. Now, this means there are a couple of limitations with the output format for these Remittance Advice notices:

1. The out-of-the-box HTML generated by XML / BI Publisher uses CSS Stylesheets as opposed to Inline CSS. This causes formatting issues with some specific Email Clients (such as GMail) as described by this "old" but still relevent post. This is the main focus of this article and I'll give details of a workaround.
2. The use of HTML means from a document printing perspective a pixel-perfect format is tough to achieve.
3. Images e.g. Company Logos, need to be referenced in the HTML and hence need to be publicly accessible on a web server. This also means that when Supplier's receive the Remittance Advice emails will probably not have the images displayed by default and they'll get the "some pictures have been blocked to help prevent the sender from identifying your computer ... click here to download images" or similar spam/tracking warnings.

So the out-of-the-box solution has these gotcha's until such time as it uses a "fixed-format", "all content embedded in email" delivery method such as attaching a PDF to the email with the advice details...

BUT WAIT, there may be workarounds.

For Issue 1. we can tell XML / BI Publisher to embed Inline CSS rather than CSS Stylesheets using the following undocumented XML Publisher configuration. Place the following configuration in the xdo.cfg file and put it in eBusiness Suite $XDO_TOP/resource directory. Usual caveats apply; please test this before rolling to Production. Also be aware that this may affect all HTML output, with output file sizes likely to increase.

<config version="1.0.0"  xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/oxp/config/">
   <properties>
    <!-- html-css-embedding valid values  embed-to-element | embed-to-header | externalize -->
       <property  name="html-css-embedding">embed-to-element</property>
   </properties>
</config>

For Issue 2. one trick is to place your formatting inside a Table and fix the width / height to that which you require. This may take a smidgen of tweaking, but at least you can get something that looks and prints nicely.

For Issue 3 ... well, I'm still working that one - no workaround from Support yet to embed the images in the HTML. Will keep you posted. UPDATE: Enhancement request (ER) Bug 9834226 has been raised for the issue of inability to embed images in Remittance Advice.

Hope this helps.

Catch ya!
Gareth
This is a post from Gareth's blog at http://garethroberts.blogspot.com

References

• HTML emails vs Gmail, Yahoo & Hotmail
• Oracle Forums Thread HTML Format via Email

Related Posts

• Would the REAL Excel please stand up?!
• BI / XML Publisher 5.4pt start-indent problems in XSL-FO blocks on EBS Check Format recursive template
• Revisited: Changing the default layout format between RTF/PDF/Excel for BI / XML Publisher 11i Concurrent Requests: Patches 5612820, 7627832 here now!

Would the REAL Excel please stand up?!

One of the considerations of using Microsoft Excel is the underlying format of the data you're looking at.

Lets say you're viewing output from an Oracle eBusiness Suite concurrent request, and Excel is automatically opened like here (SYLK) and here (BI Publisher). These solutions pose a couple of questions:

• How do you know what the real underlying format is for the Excel file opened?
• What are the implications of the underlying format?

A "true" Excel workbook format is a binary format. When you view concurrent request output in EXCEL format from BI Publisher then the output is actually XHTML. If a file with .xls suffix is in XHTML format and you do a blind "save" on the file, then you wouldn't know otherwise. Other formats (SYLK, CSV, etc) prompt you with "File.xls may contain features that are not compatible with XXX format. Do you want to keep the workbook in this format." Another alternative I use to identify the format and more often to change the contents without the subtleties of Excel mangling coming into play is to use a non mangling text editor with hex/binary file editing capabilities, my preferred tool is the fantastic free PSPad. As soon as I open the file the format is obvious.

Can the underlying XHTML format cause a problem?

At this stage I haven't identified any issues, but the question has already been asked. I generally don't like to take chances when an easy workaround is available so my advice is:

Use "File, Save As" functionality and save as type "Microsoft Office Excel Workbook *.xls" whenever you're not 100% sure of your underlying Excel file format.

When you do a file save as, the format that Excel thinks the file will be defaulted in the "save as type" field. So then you'll know!

PS. If anyone has any specific isses with the XHTML output from BI Publisher I'd be keen to hear.

PPS. "True" Excel templates are supposed to be coming to the eBusiness Suite BI Publisher sometime soon ... Tim any update?

PPPS. If anyone knows a CSV editor that doesn't mangle the contents (e.g. dates, number formats) like Excel but has functionality similar then I'd also love to hear!

XLite outgoing calls via 2Talk get error 408 with Zone Alarm

A week or two back I signed up at New Zealand's 2talk on the free plan to try out some funky VOIP services ... you get a free New Zealand "mobile" phone and fax number and a range of services, voice mail, call forwarding, fax mailbox etc, I'm planning to use it next time I'm on holiday/business to avoid exorbitant roaming charges. Tried out the call forwarding to my mobile, worked fine.

Just tried to call out from my laptop with X-Lite and the call didn't initiate, just got error "request timeout" and a pretty female voice saying "the other party is busy" or something like that.
I switched on the XLite diagnostic log and saw:

[07-07-22]21:07:03.059 | Info | RESIP:DUM | "Got: SipResp: 408 tid=blahblah cseq=INVITE / 1 from(wire)" | 
[07-07-22]21:07:03.060 | Info | RESIP:DUM | "Failure:  error response: SipResp: 408 tid=blahblah cseq=INVITE / 1 from(wire)" |  

Quick surf identified Zone Alarm as the culprit blocking port 5060. I couldn't work out quickly how to setup my Zone Alarm (free version) to open port 5060, so here's an alternative.
Instead of opening port 5060, you can add the 2talk server to your trusted zone.
If you make a "failed" call then open up the ZoneAlarm Control Center, click Alerts and Logs, you'll see a Blocked (under Action Taken) Incoming (under Direction) with a source IP something like 202.180.xxx.yyy :5060. Right click on that line and choose Add to Zone: Trusted.
Note that making this change allows whatever your trusted zone settings are to/from the 2talk server. And 2talk may have more servers or change them, so you may need to do this again.

Voila... outgoing calls should now work.

Quick Search to Oracle Metalink

If you're a regular Oracle Metalink user, its a must to get Metalink Search in an ideal place in the browser. This page has the instructions and you can find out more about the solution at the OracleAppsLab blog page. Credit to the creators!

User Interface Design - take a closer look

I recently had an excruciating experience with an airline website ... I got a flight booked in the end, so much for the "3 easy steps" but perhaps their developers should have taken a good look at this excellent document by Yahoo! Senior Principal Designer Luke Wroblewski. Oh, and perhaps some pre-release testing would have helped?

Freeview TV via wok without the black bars anyone?

Well, it's definitely an active time for TV ... and the internet, for a bit of fun here's my New Zealand twist on some of it.

On May the 2nd we had the Freeview launch, only problem is you should spend about $700 for an accredited setup ... not including your time to arrange getting the set-top box, dish setup. Hey, why would u go bleeding-edge and spend that up front capex $$ when u can ring up and get Sky digital for $99 and Start Up $47.73 per month - with a whole bunch of additional channels and upgrade capabilities available now? I may be biased since I already have Sky.

Still, my DIY tendencies and attractions to "free" stuff are making me very itchy to try Freeview out. Now, where did I put that spare wok.

Then there was a bit of noise, definitely noise, coz that's what we're gonna face over the next number of years, when TV3 started broadcasting in widescreen on 11 April. Always a good source of info: geekzone. Expect more when TVNZ switches on July 31st. Maybe it's about time I switched my aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 ... me no complain about a couple of black bars on the Simpsons as long as Dancing with the Stars is okay ;-)

From an internet perspective but with a slant on TV there was the announcement of an undersea cable between Asia and the US which is great news. What sparked my interest in this was the statement

...capacity of up to 1.92 terabits per second ... the new system can support 130,000 high definition television signals simultaneously...

Hmmm. should be able to get a few more concurrent signals than that, isn't HDTV about 55Mbps? It'd be a bit of a bummer if everyone in Asia started watching US HDTV at the same time ey? Also begs the question: what is high definition and what is high quality? The likes of Joost look fantastic, but the mainstream progress towards low end quality data must be a real bugbare for those at the high end. Compare MP3 vs CD (or higher quality) music. Compare "High Quality" internet TV vs. DVD or HDTV.

Give me Burger Fuel over MacDonalds any day of the week.

Thick Database? Intelligent more like it.

Just stumbled onto some excellent papers regarding architectural considerations in today's jumble of technologies. Interesting to see the reference to APEX - Oracle HTML DB in the Thick Database paper. Great that Paul added the examples of relative efforts/time/lines of code there! Nice work.

Dulcian Papers - Thick Database

One thing I'd be keen to see is APEX vs. Thick Database application examples in terms of effort... okay I hear the "but APEX ain't following the guidelines". Nevertheless if a technology works for you, use it!

Also I threw together a table with additional "minutes per line of code" columns just for fun ;-)

		Mins per line of code Database	Mins per line of code Java
Case 1	Conventional development	n/a	1.44
Case 1	Thick database development	4.80	0.80
Case 2	Conventional development	2.40	3.60
Case 2	Thick database development	3.60	3.60
Case 3	Conventional development	2.09	4.43
Case 3	Thick database development	1.23	3.43

Any opinions appreciated.

Bring on the Information Age!

I've recently been dabbling with a variety of concepts and IT ideals - Web 2.0, Web Standards, XML, SaaS etc. and today while reading an Patrick Wolf's APEX blog I found my way to the Yahoo Pipes site. From a very quick glance, this site embodies the real sort of power some of the advances in web technologies provide. The featured pipe at the time was Apartment Near Something, attractive given my kiwi-driven occasional interest in property investment although unusable given my New Zealand location! From my perspective this sort of thing is getting closer to my real world expectation of the "Information Age".  I remember reading an opinion recently that after the stockmarket tech bubble and crash we have moved from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, but I don't think we're quite there yet ... getting closer though especially if when enabling technologies such as these become common.

Blogging via Email

Given the pressures we all have on our time, its often tough to use products and services to their maximum advantages. I thought I'd try out the blogging via email option at blogger.com and see what it looks like on the other end!

Do you have an IP addressed assigned?

In one of my earlier posts, I rehashed a couple of terms that I'd heard at a recent event Digital Immigrant vs Digital Native. After having a conversion with one of my colleagues about the expansion of phone numbers due to the increase in VoIP technology, and the limits in the range of IP Address, we came to the conclusion that there will be a way to determine whether one is a Digital Immigrant or Native: Digital Natives will have an "IP address" assigned to them at birth! With the advent and intersection of mobile devices, GPS, Google Maps and the inevitable tracking application that ensues, will we be referring to the flashing little red dot friends on our mobile device screens as Jane Doe or 141.146.8.66.x? Food for thought.

Digital Immigrant or Digital Native?

Given my work and experience in technology, I often find that many people around me very much lack confidence when it comes to technology. I recently attended an event presented by the Unlimited Potential organization www.up.org.nz where Paul Reynolds introduced the question of people being Digital Immigrants or Digital Natives. This was an interesting concept for me to consider, especially given my 2 year old sons interest in any of my "toys" ... any time I bring out the laptop, cellphone, camera, video camera, PS2 it ain't gonna be me that ends up playing with it! Now, present a bunch of new digital gadgets for a group of adults, and I may be wrong but I'm sure you'd find a definite feeling of unease and much less compulsion to grab the stuff and have a play! This translates somewhat to what I see in business; people are very hands off, and will often asks questions and seek confirmation before trying something out. The thing I find about technology in relation to all this is that someone has to jump in and give it a go, someone has to become the expert. At the end of the day digital just means 0's and 1's and either something will work or it won't ... so give it a try! We can help our children be the digital natives by ensuring that they are immersed and confident with digital "stuff" by becoming more experienced Digital Immigrants ourselves. PS. Guys ... especially those with kids, this is an excuse to buy those toys! Just make sure you buy two ;-)