This article is really just a quick draft to remind myself of some really interesting new Oracle Database features that I want to further investigate. Very succinctly: Pre Authenticated Request URLs – get a URL that when accessed results in the dataset that is result of a predefined SELECT statement. Anyone who has the URL can get the data – even if the database is in a private network. And because it is a URL that with an HTTP GET can be accessed and returns JSON, even simple web applications can use this. You can limit how long the URL is valid or how often it can be used. See: Documentatio ..read more

Can the power of GPT-4 be leveraged to build a high-performance API? In this article we will instruct GPT-4 to build a high-performance API in GoLang using Protocol Buffers & gRPC.  Table of Contents Introducting Protocol Buffers & gRPC Protocol Buffers: A Schema-Based Language for Structured Data gRPC: Leveraging Protocol Buffers for High-Performance RPC APIs Interacting with GPT-4 Definition of ready Implementing high-performance API using GPT-4 Creating the repository Defining protocol buffers Payments Schema Audit logs schema Building the server Implementing busine ..read more

At the beginning of this month, at AMIS, I attended a Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting about GitHub Copilot, given by one of my colleagues. As we do so often at AMIS, we share knowledge between colleagues, and after this meeting, I became enthusiastic and wanted to try out Github Copilot myself. In this article I share with you the steps I took to get GitHub Copilot working in IntelliJ IDEA and using it with some examples in Java code, following the instructions from “Getting started with GitHub Copilot” [https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/getting-started-with-github-c ..read more

It is tempting to consider the cloud a limitless of resources that are always available to us to provision our services from. However, that is of course too simplistic. The cloud is someone else’s computer. It consists of real hardware, servers, storage components, a lot of network, power and cooling and it lives in a real building with actual people taking care of it. It is optimized, professionalized, consolidated, automated. But not limitless. As we are experiencing very concretely at this very moment. The resource pool of the cloud is exhausted: for several customers we could not create ne ..read more

As reported by Microsoft: “Starting at 01:57 UTC on [Sunday] 21 January 2024, customers using Azure Resource Manager might experience errors when trying to access the Azure Portal, Azure Key Vault and other Microsoft services.“ My initial reaction was: well, that is unfortunate. But the main role of ARM for us is during provisioning of resources or some change in configuration so we do not expect immediate impact on any running applications. Azure’s status page that indicates service health did not report any issues with other services besides the ones mentioned here. That however as misleadi ..read more

Microsoft provided valuable insight into the behind the scenes situation for a global network incident that happened about a year ago. In this article I try to summarize my understanding of the situation – cause and effect. And my conclusion. In short: the cloud is just someone else’s computer, not a magical place where everything is always perfect. Real people manage real software and hardware. And no matter how skilled the people, hardened the processes and optimized the hardware and software, things will go wrong. The blast zone can be very small, hopefully, but sometimes it can be large ..read more

At the beginning of this month, at AMIS, I attended a Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting about GitHub Copilot, given by one of my colleagues. As we do so often at AMIS, we share knowledge between colleagues, and after this meeting, I became enthusiastic and wanted to try out Github Copilot myself. In this article I share with you the steps I took to get GitHub Copilot working in IntelliJ IDEA and using it with some examples in Java code, following the instructions from “Getting started with GitHub Copilot” [https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/getting-started-with-github-c ..read more

Op het eerste gezicht lijkt het alsof koken en softwareontwikkeling twee totaal verschillende werelden zijn. Maar laten we eens dieper graven en ontdekken of er toch verrassende overeenkomsten schuilen tussen deze schijnbaar ongerelateerde disciplines. In dit artikel onderzoeken we de parallellen tussen koken en softwareontwikkeling en onthullen we welke inzichten we kunnen opdoen uit de culinaire wereld. Meesterschap: ken je gereedschappen en ingrediënten In beide domeinen is meesterschap essentieel. Een chef-kok moet vertrouwd zijn met een uitgebreide reeks keukengereedschappen en een scal ..read more

Crank up volume on parts of the audio track in a video: I have an MP4 of an interview and one of the two people talking was not caught well in the audio track and is far too soft spoken. My challenge now: increase the volume of only that speaker. The steps: save audio from MP4 in a separate MP3 file (using VLC) identify the soft parts and amplify the sound in those sections (using Audacity) add the edited MP3 audio track to the MP4 – replacing the original video track (using FFmpeg or with Clideo.com) Open VLC (open source software). Click on Media | Convert / Save Add the mp4 file. Click o ..read more

In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, language models stand at the forefront of technological innovation and ethical debate. Among these, OpenAI’s suite of models, including the renowned GPT-4, have captured public imagination with their remarkable capabilities and widespread applications. These models, characterized by their sophisticated algorithms and extensive training data, offer users unparalleled ease of use and versatility, making them a go-to choice for businesses, researchers, and tech enthusiasts alike. This article aims to explore the contrasting yet complementa ..read more