Plastic toys I miss...

This was my second Cobra, sold it in 2006 :-( sniff...
(I still have my first Cobra, but its very much in kit-form and its still in SA)

I miss it the most when I see open top cabrio's moseying around on sunny Friday afternoons.
In the last year I owned it, I only managed to do about 500kms in the whole year. Mostly because I couldn't strap my daughter's car seat in, (no safety belts), and therefore couldn't drop her off at day care on the way to work.

A pocket rocket in a straight line due to the limited slip diff, the handling left a lot to be desired in the curves. The tyre rubber compound was fairly hard, which meant they lasted quite a long time, but stopping the brute in an emergency was best not attempted.

Specs: Chevy 350ci, Muncie 4 spd cog swapper, Jaguar LSD and suspension all round.

Updated ways to skin a cat

As luck would have it, I was prompted to look at an old blog entry of mine (June 2006) at a previous employer.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Barry Chase has updated the PLSQL FTP Solution in the interim.

Thanks for the heads-up and the credit, Barry :-)

Doublespeak

Calvinia* is fairly bilingual for a 3,5 yo, we speak English at home (mostly) and she learns Dutch at daycare.
While grammar is hardly any toddler's strong point, we occasionally hear yoda-esque phrasing like: "Worms are not just yellow, pink they are".


* A nickname, she reminds me a lot of Calvin from my favourite comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.

The future's so bright

Ghosts wear sunglasses.

At least they do according to my 3,5 year old as she ambles around going woooo-oooo-ooo in shades.

Many ways to skin a cat

At a previous employer, I posted thusly:
Implementing an FTP server in PL/SQL

More recently I was involved in an upgrade project (Oracle 817 to Oracle10g, WinNT/Win2K to Win2k3 plus new servers, new network).
Before the upgrade there was a daily batch file process to fetch files from a remote ftp server. As far as we know, there were never any problems with this process.

After the upgrade, the process would intermittently fail with a dropped connection, regardless of when the process was run.

I had been contemplating implementing the process in Oracle to gain control over which files had been fetched and where necessary, restart the process.
A colleague of mine had been trying various FTP tools without much success, which prompted me to take another look at my favourite ftp tool WinSCP.

As it turns out, it is now possible, using the newer versions, to automate WinSCP activities with scripts. WinSCP's return codes integrate better with DOS batch files, unlike the native Windows ftp client.
Add to this WinSCP's ability to reconnect after a connection failure and you have a fairly robust means of fetching files via a scheduled task.

My implementation now uses WinSCP v4 in a DOS batch file to fetch all available files from the remote server, then delete the originals only if the fetch was completely successful.