Better access to special characters with AutoHotkey on Windows

EDIT 2020-06-21: I tweaked the layout a bit, and updated screenshot and scripts.

When you're trying to improve your typing skills, there are quite a few things you can do: learning to touchtype, getting an ergonomic / split keyboard, or moving to a better layout than QWERTY. However, if you're like me (small hands, short pinkie), chances are that none of these will be of much help when you have to type a lot of special characters, for example in programming. That's because special characters are typically hard to reach. Most layouts banish them to the edges of town, leaving them almost entirely to the right pinkie and to shift+<number>, which forces your hands to wander very far from the home-row on which your muscle-memory is based.

I'm currently experimenting with a solution to this state of things. Thanks to a wonderful little program called AutoHotkey, you can tweak your keyboard in great ways; what I decided to do was to leverage the largely-unused (but very easy to reach) CapsLock. I basically turned CapsLock into a new meta key (which is not Ctrl, Alt, AltGr, Win or Cmd), allowing me to get a completely blank layer that is independent of any existing key or shortcut. I then associated the most easily-reachable keys to the most common (and hardest to reach with typical layouts) special characters I need.

The result is that, by pressing capslock+<home-row-key>, I now get special characters with less effort and less wandering.

What you see above is the layout I'm currently using. It's not perfect, but the principles are:

• optimize the position of keys I find least-reachable and most-used on a regular layout
• privilege right-hand keys, which are the most natural companions to a left-hand meta
• privilege opening brackets, as editors typically auto-close them
• try to minimize "wandering" of hands from home-row as much as possible

I've also added a numpad on CapsLock+Shift, which is useful on laptop keyboards. Yes, you often have a hardware NumLock mode, but I never use it because I find it risky (if you mistakenly leave it on and the screen locks, good luck typing your password).

NOTE: the ALT+` combo is a "mac-ism" - it's actually AltGR+` on Windows (or Ctrl+Shift+Alt+`). It's the shortcut to prepend to a vowel to get a grave-accented character. I'm Italian, so I use it to type accents on a US keyboard.

I wish someone would come up with a "standard" meta-layout like this, with some real thought to ergonomics and frequencies; then again, programming languages can vary so much (for example there are lots of $ in Perl, but very few in Python) that I guess it would be difficult to appease everyone.

Here is a AutoHotkey script for QWERTY and AutoHotkey script for COLEMAK (that's actually what I use). If you install AutoHotkey, just save the script as AutoHotkey.ahk in the resulting installation folder and it will be automatically executed when you start the program (it can also be run at startup).

If you are on macOS/OSX, things are a bit more awkward; I might cover that in another post at some point, but my solution there relies on a smart external keyboard. Happy hacking!

Django + PostgreSQL + Docker-Compose: a few gotchas

A lot of the tutorials out there make it look like it's trivial to set up a development environment with Django, Postgres and Docker. That never quite matched my experience; you always end up knowing too much about docker, and there are a few gotchas that most people typically fail to mention. The following are a few specifically related to Postgres and Django, which I'm writing here because I tend to forget them every time I start a new project...

A running container is not a running database

Docker-compose will happily report a container as "up" even though it's busy doing init work. With postgres, this means that a container might look "up" when really it's still creating the actual db instance, so app connections might well fail.

A good workaround is to use pg_isready, like this :

#!/usr/bin/env sh

docker-compose up
until pg_isready -d your_pg_db -h your_pg_host \
                 -p your_pg_port -U your_pg_superuser
do
    echo "Waiting for db to be available..."
    sleep 2
done
# now we can do actual work, like db migrations
...

Don't run; exec

A lot of howtos state, more or less, "if you want to run something in an instance, use docker-compose run some_machine some_command". This is misleading. run will create a new ancillary container, which will run in parallel to any other container of the same type that might already be up. If you want to execute an ancillary process inside an already-running container, use docker-compose exec some_machine some_command instead. This will ensure you are "logged on" the running container.

While coding, don't copy; mount

Many will tell you that you need to ensure reproducibility; and as such, your code should be copied or checked out to the instance in Dockerfile, i.e. at build stage. That is a huge drag on development, since you need to rebuild the whole image on every minor change. It is annoying and slow even with multi-stage builds.

Instead, you can mount your actual source directory as a volume, and exploit all the goodies that make development tolerable, like Django's autoreload features. Make your docker-compose.ymllook like this instead:

services:
   your_app_machine:
      volumes:
         - type: bind
           source: /host/location/of/src
           target: /container/location/of/app
   ...

When you want to run tests or go to production, use a second Dockerfile that inherits from the first (with FROM) and actually copies data (or more likely checks it out via git), without the volume definition.

Know your tools

This is not really specific to docker! Master your tools in depth, it will help. I honestly didn't know that JetBrains PyCharm can now configure the interpreter running in a Docker container as the main one for the project, which makes a lot of things easier (debugging, REPL etc). Extremely helpful!

Announcing the AutoEPM Patch Tracker

UPDATE: This service has been discontinued; this post is left as historical reference. If you need this sort of thing, contact me on LinkedIn.

With the recent release of EPM 11.2, I thought it would be a good time to make public a tool I've built and used "behind the scenes" for quite some time, the AutoEPM Patch Tracker.

It's a patch tracker focused on EPM products, automatically aggregating updates and pointing to readmes, hopefully a bit faster to peruse than My Oracle Support. It also recommends Critical Product Updates that can be applied to the EPM stack, and the most common "standard" updates (only for 11.1.2.4 at the moment). With a free account via LinkedIn sign-on, all lists can be downloaded in CSV, JSON, and XML (Atom).

It's only a small showcase of what we can do at AutoEPM by Targlet. If you'd like to find out how to integrate this level of automation and intelligence to your EPM enviroments, feel free to reach out! I'll be at OpenWorld London next week as well, always happy to have a chat.

Oracle Hyperion EPM 11.2 - first impressions

Last month, Oracle finally released the long-awaited on-premises release of EPM 11.2, rumoured to be the last hurrah for the venerable suite. After a couple of test installations, I have a few thoughts from an infrastructure perspective.

First, the bad news:

• This is very much a .0 release, in many ways the first since 11.1.2.0 (the last time so much of the infrastructure had substantially changed). It is rough in quite a few places, and configuration is not for the faint of heart.
• I have encountered what, to me, looks like a blocking bug in multi-server configurations. I filed a support request with Oracle and will see how it goes. At the moment I simply wouldn't be able to recommend it in situations where high-availability is necessary.
• Even after configuration, it is harder to operate by non-techies than in the past. Even the "start" and "stop" links provided, which used to be ok for single-machine use at least, are not sufficient anymore - some extra scripting will be necessary to make it useable even in the most basic scenarios.
• Documentation has not fully caught up with 12c, particularly in the area of additional configuration tasks for Financial Close Manager (which was already pretty lacking). Some of the additions, to deal with the now-necessary Repository Creation Utility, are ambiguous.
• Weblogic seems hungrier for memory than in previous releases. This might be due to 12c, or to the fact that it's now using Java 8 under the hood - I had already measured an increase in this area when replacing Java 6 with 7 on 11.1.2.4.
• Essbase seems to have been shipped almost unmodified from the latest 11.1.2.4 version. Among other things, this makes it currently impossible to do a full-SSL configuration if Essbase is in the picture. It's disappointing, particularly considering how Essbase customers are typically among the few who often require fully-encrypted solutions.
• The documentation seems to state that running any "Configure Database" task more than once will end in failure. I suspect this is true only for certain components, but I have not had the time yet to explore this area. This makes it even harder than before to migrate databases after configuration, so make sure you take design choices that will stand the test of time.
• EPMA lives! Well, not really - the product is gone, but somehow it's still avilable in the Provisioning screen and you can assign roles for it. 🤷🏻‍♂️
• This is the end of the line for IIS stalwarts. Using IIS as front-end webserver will simply not work (according to docs).
• It's not particularly clear whether Oracle 18c and 19c are officially supported as database. In practice they seem to work (after all, they are really 12.2.0.2 and .03 rebranded), but it would be nice if the matrix was clarified.

But there are also some good news!

• The products themselves are basically the same, with the occasional extra feature. Users shouldn't need any substantial retraining, with the notable exception of any EPMA or Interactive Reporting power-users still around.
• The 12c stack, in theory, unlocks a number of attractive possibilities for system administrators and implementors - containers, no-downtime patching, and so on. It will take some time to fully unpack how EPM can take advantage of these goodies.
• Recent Windows Server releases are supported.
• In my test, everything seems to work even with the free editions or Oracle and SQLServer (XE 18c and Express 2017), which is nice for consultants and other professionals.
• Both 12c and Java 8 support modern crypto standards, which should make things less awkward when risk-assessing and pentesting.
• Java 8 brings a lot of improvements to the language and the ecosystem. Whole classes of problems have been removed (MaxPermGen, anyone?), which should make services more reliable and performant. Custom integrations will also be easier and faster to develop and run.

In the past, I would have expected such a release to be followed by a quick stream of fixes, necessary to make it actually fit for production use. We will have to see if it is going to be the case here, considering how long it took to debut and the overall tone of the Oracle roadmap (mostly cloud-focused). Should Oracle really commit to improving the on-premise, this release would soon prove itself as a substantial improvement over 11.1.2.4.

If you'd like to know more and discuss your options in the EPM space, make sure to get in touch with us.