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The OSP Expo is this week.  If you’re in the Bay Area, you should attend.  I’m sure you’ll learn a lot of stuff.

If you are a Lode Data customer, I’m sure you noticed that we haven’t done a major release for the Drafting Assistant in a while.  Instead, we’ve done a bunch of minor releases.  I this this strategy has worked out well.  It allows us to get new releases out the door quicker.

If you read this blog, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I haven’t posted anything about the changes to the Drafting Assistant since 5.71.  I thought I’d do that today.  Here are some of the new features put in since 5.71.

1. The ISP Equipment Report has been updated.  The new report has more options.
2. There’s a new Excel report for shelves.  You can run this report from the Shelf Face Page.
3. Placing your cursor over a port in the Shelf Face Page will cause a tool tip to appear.  This tool tip will contain the name of the port.
4. The Port Trace Text Report has been updated.  It now uses Excel.
5. The Fiber Trace Text Report has been updated.  It also now uses Excel.
6. Maps should load faster in the newest version.
7. You can now attach pictures to splice enclosures.
8. The Fiber Cable Drafting Dialog now keeps track of the number of homes passed.  This is useful in FTTH design.
9. To get a quick summary for fiber cables, you can run the Fiber Cable Report.
10. Datablocks can be filled in automatically if they are attached to fiber cables.  Here a list of the information that can be entered automatically:  tick marks, cable name, and cable length.
11. The batch plotting routine can now output to .dwg.
12. When outputting to .dwg, you have the option of converting the custom fiber cable objects to polylines.
13. In the Break Fiber Cable Dialog, the fibers that have already been broken at least once will appear in bold text.

Of course, this is only a partial list of what has changed since 5.71.  For the complete list, please look at the What’s New.

Here’s a simple procedure to change a user’s password in Oracle.

1. Log into Oracle as sys.
2. Run the following command.
1. alter user USER_NAME identified by NEW_PASSWORD;

In the command, you need to replace USER_NAME with the user whose password you want to change. You also need to change NEW_PASSWORD to the user’s new password.

You can run this procedure from any machine. You only need to run this command once (you don’t need to run it on every machine the user accesses).

Here’s a tip for those of you using my Oracle backup batch file. If you have WinZip Pro 11.1, you can automatically zip your backup files. Here’s what you need to do. First, you need to download and install the Command Line Support Add-On for WinZip. Next, you need to alter the batch file. Specifically, you need to add the following four lines to the end of the batch file:

1. “c:\program files\winzip\wzzip” FM_%date:~-4,4%_%date:~-10,2%_%date:~-7,2%.zip FM_%date:~-4,4%_%date:~-10,2%_%date:~-7,2%.dmp
2. If ErrorLevel 1 Goto Exit
3. del FM_%date:~-4,4%_%date:~-10,2%_%date:~-7,2%.dmp
4. :Exit

Notes:

1. This script assumes you installed WinZip in its default location. If you installed it somewhere else, you need to alter line 1 to point to the correct directory.
2. Each of the four commands must be located on a separate line in the batch file. In particular, be careful with line 1. This blog post shows the command on three consecutive lines. This is not what you want in your batch file. That line must not have any carriage returns in the middle. The entire command must be located on one line.
3. Apparently, WordPress does something funny with quotation marks. If you copy and paste line 1 from this post into a batch file, you need to delete and retype the two sets of quotation marks in the command.

We’ll be going to the OSP Expo next month.  We’ve gone to this show a few times before.  It hasn’t always been the best show for us, but we’re hoping it will be better this time.  This year FTTH seems to be the focus of the show.  Given the success we’ve had with our Fiber Module software, we hope that the OSP Expo will be a show where we can find new customers for the product.  At least that’s the idea.

The expo is being held in San Jose (right next to where I grew up).  If you’re in the area, and you’re interested in designing and documenting FTTH networks (or any other type of fiber optic network), be sure to go to the show and stop by our booth (#217).

Here’s a procedure to have Windows create an Oracle dmp file every day. This procedure works for Windows XP. If you’re running a different version of Windows, it shouldn’t be hard to modify this procedure for your needs. Anyways, here’s the procedure.

First, create a directory to contain the backup files. In that directory, create a batch file called Backup.bat. For those of you who don’t know, a batch file is just a text file with a file extension of .bat. Put the following line in Backup.bat.

exp system/PASSWORD full = yes buffer = 4096 file = FM_%date:~-4,4%_%date:~-10,2%_%date:~-7,2%.dmp

In that line, you need to replace PASSWORD with the password for system. Now, open the Control Panel. Go to Scheduled Tasks. Select Add Scheduled Task. Click on Browse… Find and select Backup.bat. Select Daily. Now you need to decide when the backup file will be created. I suggest entering a time at night, when no one is doing anything in your database. Once that’s done, enter an administrator user name and password.

That’s it!

FYI: This procedure creates a backup for the default Oracle database. If you have more than one database on your computer, you need to make sure the default database is set to the correct database. You can set / see which database is the default by going into the registry (using regedit), and looking under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> ORACLE -> KEY_ORACLE_HOME -> ORACLE_SID (where ORACLE_HOME is the Oracle home for the database).

They’re coming.  They promise 100x faster seek times compared to hard disks, and lower power usage, among other things.  Actually, you can buy them now.  In fact, I bought one.  I got it with a Dell Latitude notebook.  It’s the 32 GB Sandisk drive.  I wanted to see how the Fiber Module would run on a SSD.  The verdict?  Pretty good, but not revolutionary.  The thing is, the transfer speeds for SSDs aren’t any better than hard disks.  So there’s no benefit on that side of the performance equation.  Well, that’s true right now.  In the future, that may change.  Anyways,  I’m guessing I saw about a 20%-30% increase in performance.  Like I said, pretty good, but not revolutionary.  There’s supposed to be a new generation of SSDs coming soon.  Hopefully, in a couple of months.  We’ll see if these drives can provide a better performance boost.

This year the SCTE and NXTcomm happened on the same week.  For those of you who don’t know, the SCTE is a cable tv expo while NXTcomm is an expo for the telephone companies.  According to a poll conducted by Light Reading, attendance at NXTcomm was way below expectations.  On the other hand, the SCTE experienced a 6 percent gain in attendance.  Ha ha.

We had another great show.  We even had a pretty good turnout on the final day of the show.  That’s pretty rare.  These days everyone is so busy.  Its very hard for people to be able to get three days off to go to a convention.

Here’s a pictures of the new version of the Fiber Viewer. The program is still in development, but I think its coming along nicely.

In the picture you can see a map of the outside plant, the inside of a headend, and a trace report for a port in the headend. In the upper-left hand corner of the display, there are three tabs. Each tab represents one drawing. In the picture, the first tab is for the map, the second tab is for the inside plant, and the third tab is for the report. The tab that’s highlighted has the input focus, so when you click on something or pan around, the drawing for that tab responds to your input. In the picture, the head end tab is highlighted, so if you use the mouse to pan around, you will be able to move around the headend.

Hear it comes!  The biggest week of the year for my company.  The week of the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo.  It’s in Orlando this year.  If you’re going, you should definitely come by our booth (# 1341).

One month ago, at the Cable Show 2007, there was a lot of talk about business services.  It can be very profitable.  But it needs to be done right.  Just remember, if you want to do business services, you’re probably going to need to manage a good deal of fiber.  In other words, you need our product, the Fiber Module.  You can see this product, in action, at the SCTE.

See you there!