This Black Friday I decided to buy some photography-related stuff and among other things was the Wacom Intuos4 tablet. If you ever saw at least one episode of "The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost" you should have noticed that she uses one of those tablets. She even explicitly suggested using a tablet in the "PS - Painting in Photoshop CS5 (part 1)" episode.

So the first question was which model to choose. There are four different sizes available: small, medium (also a wireless model is almost the same size), large and extra large. I've tried to google for recommendations and all I found was people saying that it's basically the matter of personal preferences: if you like to draw on a small area you should look for a smaller one, also the small is better if you are planning to use it in travel. After using it for a while I would add the following criteria:

1. There is a "Lens Cursor" accessory that available for L and XL models only. So if you think you may ever need a digitizer then you should look at those two models.
2. When you use a pen with the tablet by default it maps all screen to the whole tablet area, so for example if you want to use a scrollbar you should slide the pen along the right side of the tablet and to close a window you should tap in the upper left corner (assuming you are working on Mac and have maximized the window size). Even for a medium size tablet that means your hand should cover some significant distance.
3. The small model has only 6 programmable Express Keys while all other models have 8 of them. In fact I did not use those keys much so this difference is probably not that important.

I've already mentioned that the tablet has programmable buttons. It also has a touch ring that has 4 different programmable modes. Besides a pen there is also a mouse that looks like a regular one except that you should use the tablet instead of a mouse pad. Not only you can program any button, but also you can program them for different applications. For example here is a custom radial menu I created that appears if I press one of the pen buttons when I work in Firefox:

Finally I want to warn Mac users that the driver that ships on a CD ROM is very outdated: it is 32-bit version and it has some bug when working with spaces. So you should download the latest driver from http://www.wacom.com/downloads/drivers.php .

Today I tried to import some data into the database. I used dbms_datapump instead of impdp which I usually use for that. Unfortunately I forgot to chgrp oinstall *.dmp, so I've got an obvious error and after an obvious fix I've tried to run the job again... and got ORA-31634: job already exists. I did not want to rename a new job and after a little googling I found this nice blog post: http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-cleanup-orphaned-datapump-jobs.html. So I did like the post says:

> select * from user_datapump_jobs;
JOB_NAME OPERATION JOB_MODE STATE    DEGREE ATTACHED_SESSIONS DATAPUMP_SESSIONS
-------- --------- -------- -------- ------ ----------------- -----------------
MYJOB    IMPORT    SCHEMA   DEFINING      1                 1                 2

I tried:

drop table MYJOB;
purge recyclebin;

and I saw the job was still there. Then I did:

declare
 j number;
begin
 j := dbms_datapump.attach('MYJOB');
 dbms_datapump.stop_job(j);
end;
/

but the job obviously did not want to disappear. I had no idea what else I could do, so... I disconnected from the database. After I connected again the user_datapump_jobs was empty and I was able to import my data! I'm still wondering if it's because the job had attached sessions or it just takes some time to finish a job.

The new and improved fan site dedicated to Summer Glau.

Summer Glau Rules!!!!!!!!!!!!

Summer Glau stopped by the Dragon Con Blood Drive to show her support. This was a charity auction at this years Dragon Con where people could give blood. Dragon Con is not all about the costumes and rubbing elbows with celebrities. The organizers also ensure that ample opportunity is provided to give back to the community by holding one of the largest blood drives in the city. 

Check out this cute video of Summer Glau in which she promotes the Dragon Con Blood Drive.