Angus Thinks

  • 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 🙂

  • Poetry and RFC968

    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc968.txt

    An RFC in rhyme 🙂

    See also the complete collection of April 1st RFCs (at wikipedia)

  • Crash with WSMethodInvocationInvoke and malformed XML

    I’ve been doing some stuff recently with XMLRPC for both SQLEditor and an unannounced new product.

    One of the key parts of XMLRPC in cocoa is the Apple web services Core. It provides almost everything you need to use web services.

    However I did discover one oddity that led to some puzzelment

    As part of my development I’d written a test server in php which operates a few simple functions that the client can try. This means that I can simulate various commands and cause intentional failures to see what happens. I also have a php client to check the server independently.

    I had been making alterations to check a particular function in the client worked correctly. It was a new function that provided an array of values that could be placed into a menu on the client. The idea seemed sounds, the design had been worked out and new functionality had been added to both client and server. The server seemed to work fine with its test client and I was ready to try my main client application.

    Unfortunately it either crashed or generated an exception on every call to WSMethodInvocationInvoke. Initally I assumed that it was a bug with my client application, perhaps I’d passed in the wrong arguments or made a mistake in setting up the context for the call.

    However after some testing of various possibilities I discovered what seems to be the actual cause.

    One of the included php files contained an extra new line character at the top before the doctype.

    Removing this extra new line solved the problem
    (presumably because it was now valid XML).

    Moral of this story:

    XMLRPC implementations and XML parsers are not always very forgiving of whitespace at the top.

    Interestingly, the xml parser in camino doesn’t like xml files with extra lines at the top either.

    I’m still looking to see if there is some setting that can be changed to make the parser more forgiving, or to pre-process the xml first.

    (I’ll be reporting this issue as soon as I can produce a suitable test case)

  • PSpell in debian with PHP

    The default debian stable packages for php4 don’t seem to include pspell. I’ve been looking at using the AJAX spell checker in something, but then I realized that it wouldn’t work, at least not with my current server setup.

    http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg00064.html

  • Scrap Metal

    As it stands, the only value the Titan TTC-K8ATB/825/SC holds is as scrap metal waiting to be recycled.

    There’s nothing quite like paid shills for writing reviews, but that obviously didn’t happen here 🙂

    I often find really critical reviews to be more interesting than positive ones.

    (From FrostyTech via the inquirer)

  • Disney animation

    I was just looking today at Disney DVDs when I made a curious discovery and an odd realization.

    You CANNOT currently buy most of the main animated feature films AT ALL on dvd. They are simply not available. In some cases films may not be released until 2007 or 2011, in other words years away.

    The realization was that there may be children who will never see classic disney films, because they are neither being shown in the cinemas or available on DVD.

    It also made me realize that I’ve only seen a fraction of the Disney animated movies. I think this is mainly because the others were not available easily (or at all)

    Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why Disney isn’t doing very well financially.

    An obvious rule of commerce: If it’s not on sale your customers can’t buy it.

  • PHP, trim and the non breaking space

    An odd thing occurred today, I was trying to do trim($string) on a string in php, but I kept getting strings back that appeared to have a space at the beginning, the exact thing that trim is supposed to remove. I carefully checked and the space was definitely found when I copied the result out to TextWrangler. Finally I tried substr($string,1) and then I got the answer, the new string started nbsp; the string I was trimming had  , a non-breaking space at the beginning, which trim doesn’t remove. A quick switch to str_replace and now my string doesn’t have a space at the beginning. 🙂

  • Natwest Business Breakfast

    It’s taken me a while to write about it, but last week, Natwest in Edinburgh held a really great session for business banking customers. A breakfast and two seminars. Starting at 8am they gave an excellent breakfast and then went on to give two really interesting talks for people starting or running businesses.

    It made me feel really positive and gave me an opportunity to hand out my new business cards, as well as meet people in a similar situation to myself.

  • SQLEditor 1.1b3 & softpedia

    Today I released SQLEditor 1.1b3. I think this could very well be the last beta version before 1.1 final release.
    My first minor point release application!! (x.1)

    Originally I hadn’t intended to update all of the websites today, but they discovered it automatically so I uploaded the details onto the others so that everything was consistent.

    However one thing really stood out today: Softpedia. The people at Softpedia not only grabbed all of the details, they also created some screen shots and gave me a nice “No Spyware, adware or viruses certified” logo. And it wasn’t just a quick screen shot either, they must have spent some time using the application as can be seen on the screenshot page.

    I was amazed 🙂

    Obviously I should have some screenshots of my own to distribute and they should arrive with the new manual, but still, I was really suprised by this.

    And very grateful.