Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

Wow, has it really been fourteen years since I started PeteFinnigan.com Limited? - Time has gone so fast and business is getting better and better. We have great customers, great Oracle Security trainings and consulting projects meeting new people and we love passing on knowledge. We also have great customers of our software PFCLScan - our database security scanner for Oracle and also PFCLObfuscate our product to help people protect their PL/SQL.

We have a number of new products in the wings most notably PFCLATK our audit trail toolkit - More on this soon in this blog, I promise!!!. We have some customers implementing PFCLATK already and we would really like to get a couple more customers to implement and test it with us. As I said more details on this great new audit trail toolkit soon but if you are interested to test let me know.

I hope that visitors to our company website PeteFinnigan.com have also noticed that the home page style has somewhat changed. Thanks to Kariba Web Design in Harrogate here in the UK. They have designed a new look for us based on initial designs by me. They provided a HTML5, JavaScript and CSS set of samples styles and we have converted that to fit the main site code structure. The home page and a few other static pages have been live for a few weeks but the blog has only just gone live this week on the new style and design. The blog was a big effort to shoehorn a new modern HTML5 / CSS design into GreyMatter which we have used for many years. Greymatter was one of the first blog software packages from 2001 (written initially by Noah Grey) and then in the early years modded and updated by people like FlippedCracker, Linear, Hazelorb and others. Then around 11 - 12 years ago myself, Coldstone and Carlos Phelps took the reigns and updated and released a number of new versions. The last official version was 1.8.2 in May 2008 BUT... I also created after that (September 2009) a version 1.8.3 that included some new bug fixes and some new features BUT by that time no one was interested in Greymatter blogging anymore and only one or two people tested 1.8.3.

As part of re-learning the templates and some other features to update to our new website design I have also made a couple of small changes to the Greymatter blog code to remove the matrix calendar and include inline links of the current months posts and also to add HTML titles from the blog itself. This will be added to a new Greymatter 1.8.4 version. If anyone is interested in 1.8.4 then please let me know BUT there will not be an upgrade script from 1.8.2 as it is just not worth it as there are so few people using it now. That said I do get people from time to time asking if they can have 1.8.3. Version 1.8.3 has over 60 changes to the code base of 1.8.2 and also some structural changes to the storage.

The main site still has quite a few pages in the old style and indeed I captured a screen shot of the old front page and saved this to the design page for posterity and also you will notice that the new logo is a caricature of me from the old site!! The remaining pages but probably not the forum will be updated to the new style as soon as possible - Maybe the forum if I can find a way to do it without major effort.

There may also be a 1.9 or possibly version 2.0 of Greymatter Blog coming soon at least in this blog. I want to add some features to my blog that do not exist in 1.8.2 or earlier; these changes will likely not be fully integrated in Perl and may be add-ons in php. After all back in 2002-2005 that is how most of the mods for 1.2 were done!!

Welcome to the new look blog and also now watch out for new blog posts on Oracle Security; I have a backlog of things to write about now so a few posts are coming.