Angus Thinks

Month: February 2006

  • SQLEditor, Intel and No January Posts

    Unfortunately I didn’t manage to make a single post to this site during January. Then suddenly I made several posts today.

    Why?

    The main reason is that I’ve been hard at work producing a Universal Binary version of SQLEditor. Which offers not only performance improvements but is actually required to use SQLEditor on intel mac hardware at all. (This is because SQLEditor uses both Java and compiled Objective C).

    The good news is that it’s pretty much ready so after the next round of beta testing version 1.2 should be released. Hopefully before the end of February, but possibly at the beginning of March.

  • The Name Game

    When I first read this I genuinely thought it was a joke, but as far as I can tell it’s absolutely genuine, the companies involved really did change their names. Some of them had to have new names; obviously if you demerge from another company you need to be called something new, but others had perfectly good names that they changed. Much of it makes no sense at all!


    Salon: The Name Game

  • More on Disney DVD releases

    Scottie (who knows far more about films than I will probably ever know) was kind enough to offer a carefully considered response to my post on Disney DVDs which due to some stupidity on my part was lost. Here it is:

    It is quite simple really, by placing them on monotorium (or back “into the vault”) from time to time they can be repromoted after the 6-10 years.. with all new restorations and whatnot. They are usually on the market for a good 12 months prior to being discontinued. And about thirty major titles have made an appearance in some form on DVD before being put back.

    You’re not missing too much wrt Disney Animation – The best are Dumbo (recently released on DVD), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – been back in the vault for nearly four years. Bambi, Pinocchio, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin – should be available if you look hard and Tarzan (which would be a modern classic, if it weren’t for Rosie O’Donnell and the pointless musical interlude halfway through) – have a rummage on online shops.

    Fantasia is in another class, and unavailable for nearly five years. (as soon as it’s announced again, you can bet your ass I’ll have it.)

    And of course the Pixar films, of which The Incredibles is by far the best and easiest to obtain.

    eBay is your friend, but be warned about bootlegs – especially early DVD stuff like The Little Mermaid, due for re-release in 2006, along with The Jungle Book and Lady and the Tramp.

    Best,

    Scott

    (Sorry for the inexcusable delay in uploading this)

  • Searching for an Oracle

    Recently I’ve been trying to set up a box to run Oracle again. There are enough SQLEditor users that Oracle support is important.

    Fortunately Oracle have several downloads that can be used, there is a developer license for 10g and various chargeable options. However the option that is most interesting is Oracle Express. This is a cut down version of Oracle that has some limitations in maximum performance, but otherwise works the same as the regular version. For my purposes it’s perfect, since I’m not actually doing any data processing at all, maximum performance is irrelevant.

    So the next step was to download and install a copy.

    First I had to select windows or linux. Obviously a difficult choice, so I avoided it and downloaded both just in case.

    Next I looked around for a suitable machine to run this database on. Oracle 10g does run on macs, but no word of Intel mac support, so my Imac is out (directly at least).

    My next thought was a virtual machine on my Intel Imac ‘aslund’. Qemu runs windows really quite well and it runs linux perfectly well too. Unfortunately despite several hours playing around with settings I couldn’t get anything that would run fast enough and I couldn’t seem to get Oracle to run properly at all. I suspect that either I didn’t get one of the settings right, or there is some other problem somewhere.

    Next I thought about ‘cetaganda’, which is my windows box. This meets the minimum requirements of 256MB ram, and has both windows and linux. No worries there.

    Unfortunately it was debian linux and this requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After some thought I realized that Centos is a clone of Red Hat and so should work just as well. Which is probably would, if only my machine had enough memory. Unfortunately this machine was built to a (small) budget and has integrated graphics. The integrated graphics use memory from the main system for graphics, which reduces it from a nominal 256MB to only about 218 MB. 218MB isn’t enough for Oracle apparently and it complained.

    Next step, the windows download (lucky I got them both before).

    Windows XP sees the installer, unfortunately the same problem: not enough memory. (Although oddly the release notes mention this being a problem that has been fixed).

    Next I may consider my iBook ‘Komarr’, however that will be annoying, because when I tried it before, it was slow.

    The best plan may be to add more memory to cetaganda and run it that way.

  • 3g umts router

    A Review of the
    Cisco-Linksys & Vodafone 3G/UMTS Wireless LAN Router

    It’s a 3g router, so now you can connect a small network to the internet anywhere you can get vodafone 3g connectivity.

    Total price = 150 GBP + about 50 GBP/month which allows 1GB.

    It’s hideously expensive still but if you need this kind of thing you can now get it 🙂