Where I can keep track of the special events (note: these are not “parties” as so many people are misled to believe) at Ascend June 10-14, 2023 – Orlando, FL). To attend one of these events (times are EDT):
You’re either a prospect, customer, or goodwill contact for the host.
You visit the host’s booth at Ascend to pick up whatever is required for entry.
Do not just show up at the event and attempt to “crash” it – just spend your time at a regular #Ascend2023 reception the same evening, and you’ll still get plenty of party time.
Proposal: Alteration to Federal (and State) IRS tax code to allow valuation of individual headcount as intangible assets.
Purpose: Establish a basic value (e.g. $10,000 USD) per full-time or part-time employee to be recorded as an intangible asset on an organization’s balance sheet.
Conditions: Does not differentiate employee headcount by any Title IX categories or payroll expense in calculating base employee value (i.e. a CEO is equal to a mailroom clerk for the purposes of base valuation) Benefit and Risk Analysis:
Does not affect Income Statement (tax revenue) or alter normal payroll-related expenses.
Adds a “book value” for retaining and re-deploying employees for growth and/or surge capacity purposes.
The $10,000 USD valuation represents a basic worth of an individual based upon 50 percent of a federal minimum wage, less indirect and overhead expenses. It represents only a general approximation and is designed to level-out over the payroll headcount population.
Easily auditable as asset valuations (per balance sheet) are routinely audited by financial lenders, IRS, SEC, et.al – reconcilable against required payroll records. (1 SSN/TIN = 1 headcount)
We treat office furniture, computers, and capitalized assets as valuable because they are a measurement of an organization’s overall stability.
Employers who retain headcount, even if relatively idle or unapplied, are recognized financially for higher stability or capacity.
Employee headcount size should be an equal measure of a firm’s size, capacity and potential stability similar to how retaining capital assets and other forms of personal property increase an organization’s “book” value.
Encourages headcount retention, and discourages mass layoffs in favor of seeing longer term strategic investment in assets.
Discourages mass outsourcing of production labor to non-payroll entities by encouraging workforce stability.
Can build-in effective workplace presence conditions to encourage on-site workplace improvement (a person is counted as an asset, if primary work is at an organization’s established work location; work from home, remote work or field workers are not counted as an intangible asset for this recategorization – only work positions given a permanent work locations can be counted.)
Organizations seeking to abuse this policy are effectively self-policed. Inflated headcounts for over-valuation purposes are auditable, and ineffective at influencing Income Statement results (these are non-depreciated intangible assets.)
See-saw hiring and firing is discouraged as temporarily inflating asset valuation is similar to the effect of short-term seasonal location leasing (inflates short-term expenses and is adjusted during balance sheet analysis for purposes of capital valuation).
Existing Generally Accepted Accounting Practices need little to no modification to adopt this revision. The execution is the addition of an Intangible Asset category based upon payroll headcount multiplied by a fixed value (per above suggested $10,000 USD value)
An organization that attempts to abuse this intangible asset category, e.g. hiring 90 percent executive level employees and 10 percent production staff, sees the same value as a 10 percent executive staff with 90 percent production employees, but the effective impact is the high-expense to income ratio of the former versus the latter. (Asset Turnover ratios account for this attempt to circumvent the intent of this revision.)
Where I can keep track of the special events (note: these are not “parties” as so many people are misled to believe) at Ascend June 12-15, 2022 – Las Vegas, NV). To attend one of these events:
You’re either a prospect, customer, or goodwill contact for the host.
You visit the host’s booth at Ascend to pick up whatever is required for entry.
Do not just show up at the event and attempt to “crash” it – just spend your time at a regular #Ascend2022 reception the same evening, and you’ll still get plenty of party time.
As of EBS ICM Application DBA Online Patching ADOP Analyzer version 200.39
ADOP Analyzer was not updated for 19c databases:
Per 19c Database with Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Known Issues & Solutions ( Doc ID 2662860.1 )
Running ADZDDBCC.sql in 19c database is taking time for Section 26.
Before running report set parameter _px_cdb_view_enabled to false . alter session set “_px_cdb_view_enabled”=false ;
This is run both as part of 12.2 upgrade steps, and whenever you log an SR for ATG/ICM.
Work-around – add the “ALTER SESSION” command towards the top of the ADZDDBCC.sql – otherwise, on a 19c database, you’ll discover that when the dependency check portion runs, which looks like: SELECT col.owner, col.table_name, col.column_name, col.data_type_owner, col.data_type FROM dba_tables tab, dba_tab_columns col WHERE tab.owner IN (SELECT oracle_username FROM fnd_oracle_userid WHERE read_only_flag IN (‘A’, ‘B’, ‘E’, ‘U’)) AND col.owner = tab.owner AND col.table_name = tab.table_name AND col.data_type_owner NOT IN (‘APPS_NE’, ‘SYS’, ‘MDSYS’, ‘SYSTEM’) AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM SYSTEM.fnd_oracle_userid fou, fnd_product_installations fpi, ad_obsolete_objects aoo WHERE fpi.application_id = aoo.application_id AND fou.oracle_id = fpi.oracle_id AND fou.oracle_username = tab.owner AND aoo.object_name = tab.table_name AND aoo.object_type = ‘TABLE’) AND EXISTS (SELECT NULL FROM fnd_oracle_userid au, dba_users du WHERE au.oracle_username = du.username AND au.read_only_flag = ‘U’ AND du.editions_enabled = ‘Y’) <snip>
on 19c databases, you start seeing PX queue waits for every row fetch.
Adding the alter session avoids the queue/dequeue process occurring.
James Lui 2022 OATUG President OATUG Board of Directors
CVE-2021-44228 Advisory for Oracle E-Business Suite (Apache log4j Vulnerabilities) (Doc ID 2827804.1)
Applicability: Those who have either upgraded their 12.2 AD/TXK to either Delta.12/13 generally in preparation toward compatibility with 19c database upgrades, or have continuous patching policy promoting that component upgrade.
Prior AD/TXK releases did not employ the JNDI supporting log4j code.
The existing work-around fix, which later will be packaged in the next release of AD/TXK with the newer version of the log4j library that does not have the vulnerability, is quite simple. The instructions are to delete the vulnerable JndiLookup.class from the archive log4j_core.jar in which it was deployed.f
This file exists in two places: $COMMON_TOP for runtime use, and $FND_TOP, the patched staging version copied to $COMMON_TOP.
Please remember you need to fix both your Run and Patch filesystems, so you can run the fix once for each.
This is a scripted re-packaging of the steps outlined in the above MOS Doc ID 2827804.1 – modify to suit your particular installation and platform:
!/bin/ksh
Fix log4j vulnerability in AD/TXK.Delta.12/13
echo "\n Fix log4j vulnerability in AD/TXK.Delta.12/13 \n" echo "CVE-2021-44228 Advisory for Oracle E-Business Suite (Apache log4j Vulnerabilities) (Doc ID 2827804.1) \n" export jars="$FND_TOP/java/3rdparty/stdalone/log4j_core.jar $COMMON_TOP/java/lib/log4j_core.jar" echo "\nCurrent copies of log4j_core.jar:\n" for jar in $jars ;do ls -l $jar ;done echo "\nBackup the existing log4j_core.jar in FND_TOP\n" mv $FND_TOP/java/3rdparty/stdalone/log4j_core.jar $FND_TOP/java/3rdparty/stdalone/log4j_core.jar.bak cp $FND_TOP/java/3rdparty/stdalone/log4j_core.jar.bak $FND_TOP/java/3rdparty/stdalone/log4j_core.jar echo "\nDeleting JndiLookup.class from Jar archives\n" for jar in $jars ;do zip -d $jar org/apache/logging/log4j/core/lookup/JndiLookup.class ;done echo "\nVerify that size is smaller and dates are newer\n" for jar in $jars ;do ls -l $jar ;done echo "\nVerify that JndiLookup.class is no longer found in jars (0 files) :\n" for jar in $jars ;do unzip -l -q $jar org/apache/logging/log4j/core/lookup/JndiLookup.class ;done echo "\nNow bounce the MT services - adstpall.sh adstrtal.sh " cd $ADMIN_SCRIPTS_HOME
For those with WebLogic based apps (Primavera, SOA Suite, etc.) this is the applicable MOS Doc for those: Security Alert CVE-2021-44228 / CVE-2021-45046 Patch Availability Document for Oracle Fusion Middleware (Doc ID 2827793.1)
Evaluation of Log4j Use
The system classpath (CLASSPATH) is displayed during WebLogic Server startup by the startWebLogic script. It is also viewable in the DOMAIN_HOME/servers/[servername]/logs/[servername].out file.
Review the following to determine the impact and considerations for all Oracle products, which may be using these or different Log4j jar files:
Doc ID 2827611.1 Apache Log4j Security Alert CVE-2021-44228 Products and Versions
WebLogic Server Installed Log4j Files
Apache Log4j version 2 is not used in default Oracle WebLogic Server installations or configurations. However, the Oracle WebLogic Server home contains vulnerable Log4j version 2 jars.
The version 2 jar files are in the ORACLE_HOME/oracle_common/modules/thirdparty directory for each version are:
12.2.1.3.0: log4j-1.2.17.jar 12.2.1.4.0: log4j-2.11.1.jar 14.1.1.0.0: log4j-core-2.11.1.jar and log4j-api-2.11.0.jar
Patch Availability for Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Fusion Middleware
The patching requirements from addressing CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046 are listed below with patch links for all versions under error correction support.
The patch has a prerequisite of the WebLogic Server PSU for Oct 2021:
WLS Release
Required Patches (Apply the WLS PSU and then the CVE Overlay)
14.1.1.0.0
WLS PATCH SET UPDATE 14.1.1.0.210930 (Patch 33416881) + WLS OVERLAY PATCH FOR 14.1.1.0.0 OCT 2021 PSU (Patch 33671996) for CVE-2021-44228,CVE-2021-45046
12.2.1.4.0
WLS PATCH SET UPDATE 12.2.1.4.210930 (Patch 33416868) + WLS OVERLAY PATCH FOR 12.2.1.4.0 OCT 2021 PSU (Patch 33671996) for CVE-2021-44228,CVE-2021-45046
12.2.1.3.0
WLS PATCH SET UPDATE 12.2.1.3.210929 (Patch 33412599) + WLS OVERLAY PATCH FOR 12.2.1.3.0 OCT 2021 PSU (Patch 33671996) for CVE-2021-44228,CVE-2021-45046
New EBS AMS Plugin Homepage Screenshot 13c 13.1.1.1.0
Key Features (very similar to 13.1.1.1.0):
System Management
Oracle Application Management Pack provides monitoring alerts and notifications for Oracle Application Framework, Concurrent Processing, Forms services, concurrent managers and requests, Oracle Workflow services, Oracle Database, and middle tier/web servers.
Standardize monitoring settings across your Oracle E-Business Suite environments by utilizing templates to initially specify the monitoring settings and apply those to your monitored targets. You can save, edit, and apply these templates across one or more targets. A monitoring template is specified for a particular target type and can only be applied to targets of the same type.
Use the Concurrent Processing dashboard for a complete picture of concurrent processing on your Oracle E-Business Suite system of both current activities as well as usage statistics. Add concurrent programs and managers as user-defined targets and the system will collect metrics on activity and usage for them.
Configuration Management
Oracle Application Management Pack collects and stores the technology configurations of Oracle E-Business Suite to help centralize monitoring and tracking of changes to Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack configurations including host configuration, database configuration, middleware configuration, patches applied, key profile option changes, versions of technology components, and custom object changes.
Compare configurations between two or more Oracle E-Business Suite systems directly or by comparing configuration snapshots taken at different time intervals.
Configuration templates help to standardize the configuration standards across the company and reduce the configuration drift between various Oracle E-Business Suite instances.
Administrators can track changes by setting up notifications when any unauthorized changes occur to technology stack configurations.
Compliance Management
Compliance framework integration allows you to ensure your Oracle E-Business Suite is compliant with your IT audit requirements, as well as industry and regulatory requirements. Compliance Management dashboards show trends and compliance violations. Proactive, real-time compliance monitoring can significantly reduce the operational risk to business.
Change Management
Change Approval Framework
All changes made with Oracle-delivered patches or customizations in Change Management are processed through a change approval mechanism. A multi-level, hierarchical list of approvers can be set up for each Oracle E-Business Suite target. Auditors can review the change requests as welll as the approvals.
Patch Management
Patch recommendations for Oracle E-Business Suite application products and the technology stack components are made for specific Oracle E-Business target instances to help reduce or eliminate the research work by administrators. These patch recommendations help to ensure all Oracle E-Business Suite systems are current with Oracle-recommended patches. You can deploy database and WLS patches by creating Oracle Enterprise Manager patch plans directly from the patch recommendations user interface.
Using the Patch Management dashboard, you can manage all patching activities of your Oracle E-Business Suite instances and view patch worker logs. Patch Manager simplifies the online patching process and reduces human intervention to a great extent, eliminating the need for continuous monitoring of the patching process.
Patch Manager makes it easier for administrators to check for prerequisite patches and to download the patches in offline mode or directly from My Oracle Support.
Customization Management
Create and deploy custom packages across Oracle E-Business Suite instances similar to Oracle-delivered patches. Customization Manager can help ensure all customizations follow Oracle development standards and/or user-defined customization standards specific to your IT organization. Easily integrate Customization Manager with any third-party source code version control software. This feature also supports the creation of National Language Support (NLS) patches. Customization Manager can discover customizations within your Oracle E-Business Suite systems and provide detailed reports online or in a spreadsheet format. This helps your organization keep track of the inventory of customizations and use the data for further analysis.
Cloning
Automated Cloning allows you to clone your Oracle E-Business Suite applications for testing, training, or development purposes, leveraging the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Provisioning Framework. A step-by-step interview guides an administrator through the cloning process and facilitates scheduling of Oracle E-Business Suite instance. Administrators can modify the standard cloning procedure to include pre- or post-custom steps, seamlessly automating their cloning process from beginning to end.
Instance Administration
Administrators can use the Instance Administration user interface when adding and removing (scale in and scale out) application services, application nodes, and managed servers.
I was kind of shocked with the proliferation of teachers now using Google Classroom to conduct classes, that the documentation for the Quiz sections of the Classwork assignments is quite insufficient (or presumes you’re an IT geek like me, and can just figure out what programming is available to you.)
The example situation is given by this Blog entry related to Google Classroom and students’ answers being marked Incorrect because on Short Text responses, every answer is matched as a “literal” string – that is, upper and lowercase letters MATTER (a lot!)
Link to: Student’s answers were marked wrongly in a short answer quiz by Google Forms.
The odd thing is while Google provided a solution for simple e-mail address validation, and various numerical responses, it’s been horrible at dealing with text answers.
The answer is in the 3rd category of Response Validation: Regular Expressions. RegEx’s are commonly used in programming languages and OS shells (like Linux, Unix, HPUX, etc.) since when scripting various commands, we often need to parse parameters and do things with various input like file directory listings, and long lists of things separated by some arbitrary character (like a comma or a vertical bar character.)
Thus here in my example, dealing with a student who was marked with Incorrect answers simply because they didn’t provide the exact case required by the 3 answer versions entered by the instructor (e.g. “Any Dog”, “any dog”, “ANY DOG”) – and the student typed “Any dog” and got it marked Incorrect.
One more typical way to prevent this is specifying in the Quiz preamble the exact format responses you want as an instructor for the short answers. For example, “Please enter all short answers in lowercase letters only, with no leading or trailing space or tab characters.”
But a more practical way is exercising that Regular Expression engine that’s built into Google Forms.
My example question wanting a response from the student like “inner core” (preferably providing a graphic picture of the planet’s layers and just labeling them A/B/C/D/E would have been simpler, but maybe I’m testing vocabulary at this point.)
Selecting the Response Validation type “Regular expression” and using “Matches” the pattern: “^[A-Z]” is interepreted as meaning, “if the Short answer text contains any uppercase letters from A to Z” then display the warning text “Please use all lowercase answers only!” – and do not accept the answer, as submitted.
Regular Expressions can get really complicated, but if you think of them as basically describing what’s in a string of text and matching it as either TRUE or FALSE (and preferably keeping your Answer expectations limited unless you happen to be teaching a course in OS-level scripting, in which case, go ahead and get as complicated as you’d like…) I think you’ll find your student’s will be gently guided into providing the answers in the form you were thinking of when you prepared the Quiz.
And isn’t that what this was all about in the first place?
Here’s a link to a more thorough (and lengthy, and complicated) discussion of the power of Google Forms using Regular Expressions:
COVID California (c) 26-JUL-2020 Lyrics/Guitars: James Lui Backing Track: By Bojo of Guitarbackingtrack.com Bass, Drum, Rhythm Gtr, Keys LED Lighting by FretZealot All rights reserved.
Westbound on the 15 Leaving Vegas behind Plexiglas on the tables Buffets politely declined Up ahead in the distance An agricultural stop But instead of looking for fruits Thermographic cameras pop
Checking out at TJ’s Got my cauliflower rice Karen comes in screaming No masks, freedom and vice Seems like peace and quiet Are so far away Yet only six months have passed Since I heard them say
Welcome to our COVID California Such a lovely place, A chaotic space Masking it up in our COVID California Any time of year, You’re not welcome here
Facebook’s full of bullies Twitter’s gone insane Newsom’s got himself a recall Garcetti’s in his own lane Health officials calling it quits They can’t stand the heat Hoping for some better stats But Rona’s got us beat
Keeping socially distanced Working from home all the time Try to vacation out of the State Find a 2 week mountain to climb The health commissioners All showed us the way We ignored all the warning signs Just to hear them say
Welcome to post COVID California Such a lovely place, An infected trace Masking it up in post COVID California Any time of year, we’re infectious here
Silicon Valley’s tripping Last year was so nice “We are all just prisoners here Of our own device” Bears, coyotes and cougars Have replaced the police Nature’s just taking back it’s land And we’re just here on lease
Is there a new vaccine Can there be a cure Acoording to the internet You can never be sure Here in the Golden State You get what you receive You can check out any time you like But you can never leave”
Remember that editioning support introduced the concept of stub objects – those that point to the “real” version of the object when multiple editions are present (which is pretty much all the time in 12.2).
This is why the synonym for an object like APPS.FND_USER points to a current editioned object named APPLSYS.FND_USER#, which may exist in different forms in multiple editions.
The trouble is when you perform a simple grant DDL:
SQL> grant SELECT on APPS.FND_USER to XXCUSTOM;
Even if you have the whole middle-tier services down, or follow the instructions in Granting Privileges On An Object May Cause Invalidations (Doc ID 1987947.1) if you then check your usual source for invalid objects (such as using $AD_TOP/sql/adutlrcmp.sql) you’ll be blessed with hundreds and perhaps thousands of invalid stubs, all of which need to be re-compiled lest you start receiving the dreaded ORA-04062: signature of package “APPS.FND_GLOBAL” has been changed (meaning it was automatically re-compiled while in-use by another process), or ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump (something was valid, but a bunch of dependent stub objects no longer are valid.)
What I’ve discovered in 12.2.6, with an 11.2.0.4 DB, even if you issue the DDL commands in a proper patching cycle, you still get thousands of invalid stubs. So, really there’s only one solution – use the new API (introduced in patch 19674458:R12.AD.C) and present generally after AD.Delta.6
Syntax:
————
ad_zd.grant_privs(
X_PERMISSIONS in varchar2, /* comma-seperated permission list */
X_OBJECT_NAME in varchar2, /* name of APPS object or APPS synonym */
X_GRANTEE in varchar2, /* grantee schema or role */
X_OPTIONS in varchar2 default NULL); /* grant options, example: ‘WITH
GRANT OPTION’ */
Where I can keep track of the special events (note: these are not “parties” as so many people are misled to believe) at Collaborate (April 7-11, 2019 – San Antonio, TX). To attend one of these events:
You’re either a prospect, customer, or goodwill contact for the host.
You visit the host’s booth at Collaborate in order to pick up whatever is required for entry.
Do not just show up at the event and attempt to “crash” it – just spend your time at a regular #C19TX reception the same evening and you’ll still get plenty of party time.
OAUG Build A Bike Charity Event, Sun 12:45-3:00p, CC 3rd Fl Stars At Night Ballroom
Used without express permission from windowsinstructed.com
In a 2014 VoucherCloud.net (a coupon website) survey of the non-technical U.S. general public:
11% believed HTML wss a sexually-transmitted disease
51% believed a stormy weather condition would affect their access to the Cloud
27% thought a gigabyte was a common insect in South America
18% thought Blu-ray was a marine animal
23% thought an MP3 was a Star Wars robot
12% thought USB is the acronym for a European country
42% said they believed a motherboard was “the deck of a cruise ship”
77% could not identify what SEO means
15% say software is comffortable clothing
However, 61% of the 2,392 respondents (18 and older) all thought it was important to have a good knowledge of technology.
That explains why in ZDNet’s Oracle’s Next Chapter: The Autonomous Database and the DBA (https://www.zdnet.com/article/oracles-next-chapter-the-autonomous-database-and-the-dba/) takes a bit of chewing to understand that when a vendor says “you’ll save $250K by moving to the Cloud,” that’s akin to someone saying, “You’ll save $40,000 by not buying a car, but renting it at $40/day from Hertz/Avis/Thrifty/Dollar.”
Well, yes, but not quite. Rental agencies have those add-ons such as a Collision Damage Waiver, which can be thought of as the same as that 15% mandatory support fee needed on top of the core/sizing/machine-size fee, providing coverage in case something goes awry (or buggy, or BSOD’s for no known reason.)
And simply, if you stop paying, you don’t have a car/database/middleware/website. If you do decide to opt for the rent-to-own option, just like the ubiquitous furniture rentals used by many seasoned relocation workers, doing so does cost much more than buying the furniture outright (but you don’t have to move it, and you get to turn it in, and trade-up or down when you wish, subject to the terms of your rental agreement.)
[Terms are important, as you will notice in the new Cloud On-Premise agreement, it does have a 4-year minimum term – similar to a limited term car lease. And it comes with an early termination cost. And similarly it has “limited mileage” conditions, which if you go over your CPU/sizing/feature limits, you’ll simply be billed extra for that. Convenience has costs.]
An autonomous database at this stage is similar to self-driving cars – given super-precise limitations, on a controlled environment, with well-defined conditions, yes, the Optimizer stays within the lanes and keeps the database engine humming along. Whence the odd situation is encountered, back to the driver/DBA to figure out what to-do and what went wrong.
If you Care a Little More, Things Happen. Bees can be dangerous. Always wear protective clothing when approaching or dealing with bees. Do not approach or handle bees without proper instruction and training.
Thoughts from James H. Lui 
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