Beyond GeekerDome

Ok, so I saw last week that Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 was out, so I had to download it and run it.

So far, the only plugin that I run that's compatible is ScribeFire.

However, I had to have it. I'm loving it (why, I really don't know), and I'm running it. I'm sure that once my plugins all get compatible, my performance and reliability will go into the tank, but for now, it's all good.

I'm not sure what I did to it, but I currently have broken my SQLDeveloper installation and I"m running JDev in its place. Big, Fat, and sassy. But for some reason, I've got to have it.

iTunes isn't cool enough. Never will be. Has to be foobar2000. Of course, this means that I end up dorking around with m4p files and converting them to mp3, even though I actually own all of the files. This has somehow led to having about 4 copies of every music file that I have, all in different formats.

Which leads us to an awesome file system reporting and cleanup tool -- WinDirStat. This thing totally rocks.

Found out today that I can script the conversion of Word Documents into pdf format by using OpenOffice and some Visual Basic macros. That's going to lead to some file cleanup projects, soon.....

Picasa has let to some awesome photo file processing....and saving extra backups. And of course the Gimp is AWESOME!!! Hmmm....wish I had more RAM about now....


Looks like I've got my system pretty well pegged, time to start digging in to editing all those home videos that have been piling up for years.

Time for a few new hard drives, and some extra drives for backup....

I wonder why I can't seem to get my car washed?

Where is my drive?

Ok, so I got mbldr going, rebooted, and everything worked great.

I went into Disk Management, from Computer Management on XP, formatted the Linux Partition to NTFS (a shame, but I was happy it worked), gave it a drive letter and migrated a bunch of files over there. Everything was working great.

Until I rebooted and the drive went away. Ok, Don't Panic, but WHERE IS MY DRIVE?

I went into Disk Management again, went to give the partition a drive letter -- and couldn't.

Don't Panic. Don't Panic.......

After some research and a couple of really uneasy days wondering if my backups REALLY had all of my files.....

I realized that when I ran mbldr, I had checked (or it had defaulted -- not really sure) a checkbox that said "Hide all other Primary Partitions." Well, that should be easy enough to fix, right?

Wrong.

.....Disk Management won't "Unhide" a Partition. Seriously, Windows is pathetic.

Anyways, after some research, I got ahold of EASEUS (I tried the free version), and "unhid" the Partition.

Amazingly enough, it mapped to the drive I wanted again, and we're back in business.

Sweet. Problem solved......for today.

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Grub Scrub -- Replacing a GRUB Boot Loader

I had installed Linux (Ubuntu, Christian Edition) as a dual boot on my laptop at work. I wasn't really "supposed to" but hey, I'm a Developer, right?

However, I've been running short on hard drive space lately. I'd say that it's because of my huge folder full of MP3's, but I'm not supposed to have that on my work machine, either (at least I do legally own them all).

When I initially wiped the partition that Linux was on, I lost the GRUB boot loader that had been installed. I had to re-install Linux to be able to boot Windows. For quite a while, I left it that way because I just didn't care enough to fix it. I researched, and it looked like the only way to fix this was to use the Windows Repair/Rescue disc to fix the boot loader. Having had to do a Windows rescue before, I was not looking forward to the process. Also, I was going to have to actually find the disc.....whew, way too much work.

And then a couple of days ago, it hit me "Duh. Load a different Boot Loader," So, I went in search of one and found one. Master Boot Loader (mbldr) was just the ticket. It let me back up my old boot settings to a file, then create a new boot loader. It let me specify the order that the partitions would boot, so that I can now actually boot straight to Windows. It even let me name the OS that was loading. I couldn't resist and renamed "Windows XP" to "This Machine will Self-Destruct in 5 Seconds." Heehee.

Now I can format the old Linux partition as just another NTFS drive (pathetic, I know) and boot only to Windows XP. It's an absolute shame to take Linux off, but this is my work machine, and Linux isn't really supposed to be on it. Besides, I needed space for all of the personal files that aren't supposed to be on my machine. :)

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SQLDeveloper 1.5.1

It's Rockin' Awesome.

I went to the ODTUG presentations that Sue Harper did on SQLDeveloper and was very impressed with some of the features that I didn't know about and also the stuff that is on its way.

When she showed how to import data from Excel (ok, it is broken in the current patch, but it rocks) and then showed the Normalize feature, I was blown away.

Combine that with the upcoming (unofficial) Data ing tool (which I've been previewing/using in the JDeveloper 11g technical preview), and I'm ready to throw away Designer. No offense, but currently, we use Designer for very little. I've built separate scripts to take care of building audit columns. I need to build a script that will build a Journal table and then I'll be done with Designer forever, since we were really only using it for ing and the auditing/journaling API's that id built.

It also inspired me. Between APEX and SQLDeveloper, there is NO reason to create data and maintain business-critical in Excel. Now, Excel becomes just another output method in my opinion. And Word -- seriously, I'm blown away that anyone would store data in Word. Word is a great Word Processor, not a data storage system.

I love that Code Templates and configurable Tab sizes are available in the newer versions of SQLDeveloper. Those were among my two biggest complaints about a year ago. Petty, I know, but Code Templates are such a huge time-saver. I mean, there are certain things you do as a developer thousands of times in your career. If you hand-type them every time, then you are 1) Dumb, and 2) Going to forget something and build a bug.

Saw a meteor on Sunday

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=3496031

It was way cool.

Firefox 3, Release Candidate 1

So far, I like it. Before I installed it, I uninstalled all of my other Firefox installations. Both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, beta 5 were unstable, but I think part of it is my fault for having them both installed.

I am, however, having trouble with certificates on one of our development we sites. With version 2, it would let me 'allow' the site, but with 3, it blocks me entirely.

tikiwiki on Oracle -- part 13.5

This is a bunch of garbage. They say you can install TikiWiki on Oracle, but I don't see how their install scripts have ever run. They use reserved words extensively as column names, and a bunch of syntax that isn't even supported.

I've been searching for other wikis that will install on Oracle (without re-writing the dumb thing) and so far, not much luck.

Here's the deal. Why is oracle hosting their wiki on wetpaint.com? Kinda makes me think that there is not a very good fit of 'Oracle' products to do the job.

tikiwiki on Oracle -- part 13

Just got back from vacation and started playing with this again. I've been having PHP trouble. When I uninstalled EasyPHP, it didn't clean up the registry correctly and so PHP scripts weren't running right. It also left registry entries for the old version of Apache, even though it had been uninstalled.

I also had problems with the database setup scripts. I had to strip them of the ' " ' character, as it was loading all object names with ' " ' at the front and back.

So, I dropped the user, cleaned out the EasyPHP stuff that I can find, re-installed the database objects, and have uninstalled everything else.

Here we go....

tikiwiki on Oracle -- continued

Hey, someone commented. I'm all excited now.

This morning, I uninstalled Apache and EasyPHP. This also broke my previous lame attempt at installing the Zend Core, so I had to uninstall that.

I was worried that my APEX interface to XE had tapped into one of the Apache installations and was using it as its server. No problem, though, as it had installed with the database web server and was unaffected by all of the uninstalling.

Re-installed Apache 2.2.8. I got a syntax error on line 86 of in http.conf file. Since I don't know what LoadModule anon_auth_module modules/mod_auth_anon.so does, I commented it out.

Now I'm having a problem with something blocking port 80. Probably either something in the firewall here, or one of my virus scanners, filters, etc., so, since this is just a proof of concept anyways, I tried port 88. Apache started.

I re-installed the Zend Core as well, using the new Apache server.

Hmmm...now what?

Tikiwiki on an Oracle Database?

I love Wikis. They rock. I use tiddlywiki for ad-hoc note-taking and for a journal file. In combination with Keybreeze, I can make a journal entry almost as fast as I have the thought.

But, I'm an Oracle database programmer. I work in a place with a documentation problem. To me one of the big obstacles with documentation is Word. As a Developer, the thought Process is something like this:

• I need to document that.
• Open Word
• Where is that documentation template that we agreed on in our Programming Standards.
• What was I doing?
• Oh screw it.

So, I've given myself the challenge of trying to convince management here that a wiki could help with the documentation. The benefits being:

• Consistent, clean output.
• Backup -- happens with the database.
• Fast, simple formatting.
• Easy to get to -- it's just a URL.

Here is what I'm looking at for the initial Proof of Concept:

• Oracle XE on my laptop.
• Tikiwiki
• Oracle's endorsed PHP Zend [NOTE: I forgot -- I have EasyPHP installed from a former attempt -- I'll use that for the proof of concept.]
  
• Apache, of course.

So far, I downloaded Oracle XE -- it went off without a hitch. Very impressive, Oracle. Thank you.

Then, I ran the tiki database install script just to see if it would go. It wants to throw indexes on some of the LOB objects, which isn't supported (at least on XE). I'm worried that may be a problem down the road, but we'll see. I don't know that an Oracle index would really do any good on a LOB, though, since you are probably looking for something in the middle of the LOB, which wouldn't use the index anyways. We'll have to see if it totally messes up searches.

Now, I need to install the PHP and configure Apache. Yuck.

Firefox 3 beta

I'm testing Firefox 3 beta 5. So Far, I'm impressed. Holy crap, this things a screamer. Memory doesn't seem bad, either.