This post is probably not what you’d expect. But our time-tracker service Tempo has some great charting capabilities. Behold, the effects of a recent virus (of which I will spare you the horrific details) on my productivity:

Above is the Heads-Up-Display, at the top of the main screen. It reads pretty easily – my productivity was sent to bed!

Check out the utilization chart, which is a bit more instructive as to what happened, and when. That’s accessible by clicking the productivity percentage number box in the HUD, or just pulling it up from the Charts tab:

Brutal.

Utilization is a measurement concept in Tempo that is supposed to give you a ballpark idea how much of your time is accounted for, compared to how much time is generally available in a work-day. So, for every day in a report, the par for the day is considered to be 7 to 9 hours (which is a pretty common length for a workday), and that’s the horizontal, light-blue bar going across the graph between 7 and 9 on the Y-axis. The bars then show us a visual comparison of our utilization for the time periods. If I were to expand the date range enough, these would be grouped by week, then by month. Here’s what my utilization looks like since Nov 1st, 2008, until now:

So 2008 was a pretty productive year for us here at Zetetic. I can’t really go through it all right here and right now, but we’re quite excited about the new year, improvements we’ll be making to our existing products, and the new products and services we’re currently building.

And with that I’m going back to bed. Offers to send me comfort whisky, cheese burgers and nurses will not be turned away outright.

I guess it kinda makes sense that Tetris could interrupt the brain from developing PTSD, it definitely interrupted my childhood for a few solid months at a time: (h/t Tim F.)

These results support Holmes’s theory that Tetris can help to prevent PTSD flashbacks by occupying the brain’s energies during the narrow time window when traumatic memories are consolidated. …snip…

But EMDR is only used to treat PTSD and there are several ways of doing that. Holmes’s goal is more proactive – she wants to find ways of preventing the symptoms from appearing in the first place. There are a few potential options for doing that, from drugs to psychotherapy, but few can be delivered so quickly or cheaply as a quick game of Tetris on a handheld machine. The game has another big advantage in that it affects a person’s reactions to an event but not their actual memories of it – Holmes notes that they would feel relief, but their ability to, say, testify in court wouldn’t be diminished.

Yes, I just downloaded the version that’s available in the App Store. What an easy preventative to make available for people — pretty much everyone has a cell phone, especially troops in combat. Doesn’t take much processing power or graphics to run Tetris!

In the environment of one of our clients, we use Oracle’s Application Express product quite heavily for their identity and access reporting — we’ve got five full blown apps running in that framework at this point. Once in a while we hit a snag in development of an application and post the solution here.

Imagine you’ve got this asset management application for a very large organization, called Conglomo, which has thousands of franchises all over the world. The application holds files that users can see in a portal app. Basically, you upload files, you assign them to organizations (franchises, districts, regions, &c.) and users, and when a user logs in, she can see the files assigned to her or to any orgs in her hierarchy. From there you have a management screen for files, that is basically a report listing them out, and giving you some filters to narrow it down. Say you want to see all files linked to a particular org. The piece of data you need is really the org’s unique ID number, but users need a real way to search for a franchise named “Jack’s Conglomo Outlets Inc,” perhaps and in particular, the one in Bakersfield, California. They don’t want to have to look for org # 5003886, they don’t even know the number.

Well, the ready made Popoup Key LOV form element is just the thing. You drop in some SQL to generate the LOV, and voila you get a nice searchable list. Using a query in this way you can easily concatenate a bunch of fields about the organizations so that when the use is searching for a particular dealer, they have other factors to look at besides the name (and many of them are named quite similarly):

select 
 id || '-> ' || arnumber ||' '|| name ||' ('|| division ||' '|| type || ')' as d, 
 id as r
from   organization
order by 1

This gives us a Popup Key LOV that looks like this:

When you select an org, the form element drops the display name into that disabled text area, and in a hidden element it drops the key’s value:

<input type="hidden" name="p_t05" value="105" id="P5_ORG_HIDDENVALUE">

So in APEX-land, when we make a report, it’s nothing like what you see in other frameworks, really. We just have one big query that draws up our table. So when we add a new element above, we need to amend the WHERE clause on our query to include that criteria if it was specified. Here’s an example of what I mean:

SELECT
  f.id,
  f.title,
  f.description,
  f.file_name,
  to_char(f.created_at, 'dd-MON-yyyy HH:MM AM') as created_at
FROM 
  naap_files f 
WHERE

...SNIP...

AND ( :P5_ORG IS NULL OR f.id IN (
    SELECT nof.file_id FROM organization_files_join_table nof
    WHERE nof.organization_id = :P5_ORG
  )
)

So, in this simple case, we’ll get all files if :P5_ORG IS NULL (that’s our Popup Key LOV element in our form). If it’s not null, we limit the list of files to those that are listed in the join table as belonging to the specified Org ID number.

And this really works out great until you need to clear the field because you’re no longer interested in files belonging to Org 105. In the image above you can see a “Clear this field” link in the popup. That’s actually the null option in the elements configuration, you can see it here:

When you click the null option, “Clear this field,” you’ll see the disabled text element get cleared. However, it isn’t really NULL that is sent back up to the host when you submit the form next. The hidden field we saw before is actually set to the string 'undefined'.

<input type="hidden" name="p_t05" value="undefined" id="P5_ORG_HIDDENVALUE">

So, when you submit the form, you’re not sending an empty string, which APEX just turns into a NULL value, you’re literally getting the string undefined, which your query then binds as the org id number! And then no rows come back! FAIL! This may be fixed in later versions of APEX (we’re working in 3.0x), but I did some digging and it doesn’t look like it.

Problems sending an actual NULL value for a select list or some other multi-select element in APEX are nothing new, basically the value that is actually sent is '%null%', even though you specify nothing at all. There are a few workaround, but I usually drop an application computation into each of my apps that zaps these guys and terms them into actual NULL values. I found this solution somewhere inside the APEX forum, I didn’t come up with it myself, but it’s pretty much SOP for anyone doing this kinda work, a PL/SQL block that is run On Submit After Computations and Validation:

BEGIN
    FOR rItem IN
      ( SELECT ITEM_NAME
         FROM APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_ITEMS
         WHERE APPLICATION_ID   = TO_NUMBER(:APP_ID)
           AND PAGE_ID          = TO_NUMBER(:APP_PAGE_ID)
           AND LOV_DISPLAY_NULL = 'Yes'
           AND LOV_DEFINITION   IS NOT NULL
           AND LOV_NULL_VALUE   IS NULL
      )
    LOOP
        IF V(rItem.ITEM_NAME) = '%null' || '%'
        THEN
            Apex_Util.set_session_state(rItem.ITEM_NAME, NULL);
        END IF;
    END LOOP;
END;

Since we have this in place, we can just update this bad boy to zap ‘undefined’ values as easily:

BEGIN
    FOR rItem IN
      ( SELECT ITEM_NAME
         FROM APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_ITEMS
         WHERE APPLICATION_ID   = TO_NUMBER(:APP_ID)
           AND PAGE_ID          = TO_NUMBER(:APP_PAGE_ID)
           AND LOV_DISPLAY_NULL = 'Yes'
           AND LOV_DEFINITION   IS NOT NULL
           AND LOV_NULL_VALUE   IS NULL
      )
    LOOP
        IF (V(rItem.ITEM_NAME) = '%null' || '%') OR (V(rItem.ITEM_NAME) = 'undefined')
        THEN
            Apex_Util.set_session_state(rItem.ITEM_NAME, NULL);
        END IF;
    END LOOP;
END;

It’s a little odd that even in this fairly recent version of APEX you still have to jump a hoop or two to handle null value submissions, and even weirder that you get '%null%' in some cases and 'undefined' in others. Any web framework has to deal with this kinda thing, but a little consistency would be nice. Hope this is a good primer and introduction to the problem if you’re new to APEX. Although, I have to say that aside from a few weird quirks like this, APEX is absolutely awesome for a situation in which you need to throw together a webapp in a client’s environment and they aren’t interested in any “risky” new fangeled technology like Rails!

It’s hard to convince large companies to work with emerging platforms. There is always a perception of risk that makes tried-and-true platforms like Oracle APEX attractive. I still sometimes yearn to have used Rails for one of these projects, but honestly I can throw together these applications MUCH faster and with way less overhead. I may not have quite the flexibility I get with Rails, but this is all really PL/SQL running on a giant modified mod_plsql, and you can do all kinds of crazy stuff in PL/SQL.

I’ve responded to so many of these requests by email that it’s probably time to put up a reference for folks who’re looking for some answers.

Palm Strip has been a pretty popular and highly secure password manager for the Palm OS that Stephen built a while ago and released as open source. You can read more background on it over here. Due to the decline in the Palm platform over the last few years, we’re no longer supporting the program. Just as many of our users are migrating to other platforms, so are we. We decided to go with the iPhone platform first, and we hope to have the first version ready by the end of this month. It sports a fully encrypted database layer and the interface is coming along nicely.

As part of our effort to help our users migrate to the new platform, and to assist those users who can’t wait or are choosing to migrate to other platforms, we’re working on an exporter that will rip through the encrypted Palm Strip database (*.pdb) files and generate a file that you could use to migrate to another system. Needless to say, this isn’t ready yet, but it will be available by the time we’ve got our initial version out in the iTunes App Store.

Current options for exporting your data from the old Palm databases are fairly limited. Dave Dribin put together an excellent program called perl-strip a while back and a supporting Perl module. This provides you with an avenue if you’re technically inclined.

It is possible to run Strip on your desktop computer using an emulator:

1. Get the emulator software by signing up for the developer program at Access Inc
2. Download the PalmOS ROMs from your own device to the emulator (the safest approach). Alternatively you could try to grab ROMs at this link. Caveat emptor – we can’t vouch for their authenticity.
3. Use the emulator to open up your backed up copies of the Strip databases

For those asking about whether the next version of Strip will be open source – yes and no. We are believers in open-source technology and the benefits it provides to security software in particular, so our data encryption layer is being made available as open source software for peer review. The rest of the source of the iPhone application will be private, and we will charge a modest fee for the software.

Please don’t hesitate to leave comments or to write us at support AT zetetic.net with any questions!

There was a really quite interesting discussion over on Hacker News in response to an Ask HN query, “AWS or dedicated server?” over the last 24 hours. We haven’t made the jump to Amazon’s platform here at Zetetic, but I’d be lying if I said we haven’t been mulling it over. New year, time to revisit some of these questions.

Happy new year, by the way!

Totally off topic: I had intended to leave comments open on our recent post Ranting Considered Useful, and was wondering the other day why we saw none despite the surprising amount of traffic. This would be a PEBCAK error. The moment’s passed, but I have opened up the comments there for anybody who wants to respond.