Month: July 2004

Have a look at http://www.no2id.net/content/flash01.html, and indeed the rest of the site. I got to this site after reading an article about the Big Brother awards in the Register.

I hate big government and I really hate them wasting my taxes. Once I have my business built I will buy an island somewhere and tell them all to go play with themselves.

Books

If you want to get anywhere in life read The Magic of Thinking Big. I wish I had read it years ago

Oracle 9iAS and JDeveloper

Don’t bother trying to run anything vaguely useful on the HTTP server that comes with 8i. It won’t run JSP’s with extra stuff in the class path. Won’t compile them, even though, if you create a JSP that dumps the class path your new library is there. Had the same problem with the one that comes with the 9i database as well. Rewrote my JSP as a servlet and it worked in the 9i one, the 8i one couldn’t find the SAX parser, even though it appeared to be in the class path. Basically wasted 2 days of effort, but now I know what all of the properties files are for: nothing.

Finally deployed to 9.0.4 as an EAR file straight out of JDeveloper 10g.

So, don’t bother writing your own classes for the earlier releases of 9iAS. No matter how many wrapper.classpath entries you put in the mutitudinous properties files it won’t work. It doesn’t work with 9.0.4, either, but EAR’s have their own environment settings and will pick things up.

I am being a little harsh here. If you install iAS in its own Oracle Home as a separate product (with the patches), and don’t even try to use the one that is supplied with the database, I have got it working in the past. I think the one supplied with the database is just some old junk that gives you the PL/SQL web thing and you shouldn’t try to do anything too clever with it.

Come back JBOSS, all is forgiven – no, not really, it’s just crap in different ways and you can at least get answers to your questions from Oracle Metalink, which JBOSS don’t do because that would hurt their consulting revenue.

Anyway, I won’t waste my time on the older versions of iAS again.

Still think JDeveloper 10g is pretty good, but 9.0.51 (beta) seems quicker than .52 (production). Don’t ask me, I just have to use the tool. Mind you, this was happening when the Register said there was a DDOS attack going on on t’internet so maybe my machine has a trojan somewhere. I will set NAV running later.

Be careful out there or some other cliche.

I installed a version of PC-Anywhere on my works laptop because I need to administer an old machine. It did warn me that I was installing a version that was incompatible with the version of Windows I was running (XP). I’ve seen this message before with Windows 2k, so I ignored it.

On reboot it blue screened and kept on blue screening.

No panic, started up in Safe mode with the network enabled.

Blue screen

Started up in safe mode without the network enabled.

Selected the System Restore option and asked it to go back to Sunday.

PC anywhere disappeared, I haven’t lost any data files, and it rebooted fine.

For once something works as intended and saved me from myself, well done Microsoft it worked really well.

Of course, on a Linux box, it wouldn’t have screwed around with the network configuration anyway.

Eclipse V3 didn’t do a lot. Could not be bothered wasting a day configuring it, double click on a file and it started up NetBeans because that was the default editor for files with a java extension. Back to JDev 10g. It just works. A downside is that it doesn’t run the 1.4 JDK native but for 99% of us who cares? Unless you are totally obsessed with writing inner classes it probably doesn’t matter.

I also like the feature where you can select a block of code that you know needs a try/catch block, right click and select surround with try/catch and it knows which exceptions are being thrown so it creates all of the catch’s for you (not a punctuation error, think about it). Also, type sop<ctrl-Enter> and it will expand to System.out.println() and drop your cursor in the middle of the (). You can also define your own shortcuts and browse the predefined ones. Another thing it supports is dragging (move) and ctrl-dragging (copy) of selected text, which netbeans didn’t get.

I really like the JSP editing and integration into the runnable OC4J container, which is a mouse click away.

The only issue with JDeveloper is that you should pay for it if you are using it in a team: the technet licence is for single-use, single download, so maybe you’d be better using Eclipse. If you are and Oracle shop doing Java in the database it’s a no brainer.

Wracking my brain to remember how to load resources independent of absolute paths etc. Found http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javaqa/2003-08/01-qa-0808-property.html, which explains it very well. You need ClassLoader.getResourceAsStream. If you arle using your class inside a JSP beware that you need to get the class loader that loaded the same class. JSP’s have a different SystemClassLoader so they can be reloaded on demand.

I have managed to get rid of the JDev clutter. Dock everything to the centre of the left and it creates a nice tabbed group for everything so you haven’t got millions of tiny unreadable windows.

Imported Comments:

autoversicherung

last few days our group held a similar talk about this topic and you point out something we haven’t covered yet, appreciate that.

– Kris

Twice this useless IDE didn’t save the file I was working on, even though I pressed ^S and exited it. Nor did it warn me I had unsaved changes.

Switching to Eclipse.

Still using Oracel JDeveloper for Oracle-specific things, particularly Java in the database, but I don’t like all of the clutter.

Quoting from this site:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has stumped up $44.7m to fund research into tackling tuberculosis (TB) – the leading cause of death among HIV-positive people. The cash will be used to formulate strategies to control TB in areas of high HIV infection rates.

Well done Bill.

Spent the day evaluating Oracle Repository. I quite like it, as far as it goes. I’m busy preparing a powerpoint so I can share my conclusions with the rest if the company.

It isn’t as good as some products (but is better than PVCS) but to be honest, if you’re an Oracle partner or have a site licence, you should consider it .

I used dimensions (made by merant) and it had a kind of workflow in it that sort of made sense. But the Oracle one just allows you to do version control and create folders which are themselves subject to version control, which I quite like.

The only annoying thing is that you have to turn version control on and then grant it to yourself which is really annoying; but then you only have to do it once.

One irritating thing is that it doesn’t have the ability to embed version numbers into files out of the box. In its current form you have to buy an Oracle Consulting Option to add this facility, which is a pain.

Think about it:

All your life you’ve let other people’s envy and stupidity hold you back because you let yourself believe them.

You are the victim of friendly fire – you are constantly firing on yourself.

I had a whole song about this going through my head this morning and didn’t write it down – bah!