The other week I talked to an Oracle support guy on the phone#

Fri Oct 4 13:43:02 2002

• The other week I talked to an Oracle support guy on the phone. He was smart. We agreed that the configuration we're using is unsupported by Oracle (third-party Apache modules in their web server), but that it probably should work anyway, and he gave us a reasonable workaround. Then we spent a few minutes talking about the suboptimality involved in trying to force-fit a strictly hierarchical model of the world onto a real world which is not even vaguely hierarchical, which is a subject on which I have fairly strong opinions.

• Today I get this error message.

  An error was encountered while loading page. Failed to initialize configuration parameter ApacheMainServer.. Error in the input config file. Attribute KeepAlive is a single value attribute.

How can the same company have smart tech support people like that and apparently moronic programmers? Which input config file? There are only about eight of the things - and in all cases where the word KeepAlive is used in any of them, it is indeed followed by a single value.