Category: Uncategorized

Quoting from this site:

In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.

Imagine a world where everyone is the victim of an illusion. Where the apparent separation of subject and object, of self and other, is simply not real.

Instead, everyone clings to the illusion because of fear and ignorance, which is in turn masked by hatred.

Imagine that you can see through to the underlying, empty unity of it all.

There is no distance then.

There is no other to hate or be hated by.

Neither is there an other to love. Just the vast beauty of the present moment. Even when you pick your nose and are so bored you could scream.

If only you could see it all properly.

It also occurred to me recently (or resurfaced more likely) that if you are the product of your actions (which is what Karma means, it’s nothing to do with punishment) then the other person that injures you is simply your actions from some time ago ripening into something from a seed you planted. How can you hate them? What’s the point? This doesn’t mean that bad people shouldn’t be punished: it’s still their karma after all.

Actually “deserve” is an interesting word: it comes from Latin and means “from service”. So perhaps it is more like Karma than you’d think.

To date I have had my nose broken twice and been hit over the head by a baseball bat. I’ve also had long periods of black depression. I hope I haven’t planted too many more bad seeds.

I am hurrying to plant a lot of good ones as fast as possible.

Back to the techie crap now.

It’s nearly midnight and I’m a little wired, to be honest. Just discovered that one of Rosie’s friends has cancer. I didn’t know what to say but did my best to show some loving kindness. Ultimately that’s all you can do.

Struggling with motivation at work, but doing a lot of paddling when I’m not working on my business. Langollen paddling good, the recent rain is probably annoying a lot of people but it suits me; warm rivers with water in them. Lots of fun without the unpleasant trauma of winter freezing your parts off.

I’ve been working on spinning anti-clockwise in the wave at the bottom, not something I’ve ever been able to do easily. Discovered that I need some speed and to turn my head to make it go. I can now hold my position in the wave and go back and forth along it. One of the tricks is to keep your weight forward all the time and use paddle strokes in front of you to turn.

I’ve been working on clockwise spins not using the paddle, except to start them off, just moving my weight around and switching edges, throwing the kayak across at the front by using my legs. This is coming on too; I’m also beginning to lose my fear of double pumping the boat on its edge which means that cartwheeling shouldn’t be too far away. Lots of objectives achieved with a little help from Matt Cooke the other week. Remember the mantra: turn your head and the kayak follows. Sometimes I need to follow my own advice.

My laptop stopped working (not the work one, my personal one). I sent it back under warranty to find out something rather weird: it had two 512MB chips fitted but one wasn’t working. It had only ever reported 512MB anyway, which is what I ordered in the first place. I paid for another 512MB to replace the chip that was now stopping it working and hopefully they will send it back after fitting it. The original chip must never have worked but only stopped the laptop going a couple of days ago. I don’t get it but I’ll at least have a 1GB machine.

Kind of winding down for my holidays even though I have a week left before they start.

Rosie and the kids have been away on guide camp all week. The house has been a bit weird. I’ve been living off ready meals and fruit as agreed with Rosie because I knew I couldn’t be arsed cooking. Still having a problem with chocolate, particularly in the afternoons when the boredom really starts to kick in. I’m a professional, it doesn’t stop me getting the job done but it’s been hard going without the family to get back to.

I got a call from Oracle asking me why I had downloaded their new 10g database. I was unintentionally rude to the lady calling – I just said straight off the cuff so I can evaluate it, why d’you think? I am a little embarassed by being so blunt but the sheer oddness of the question caught me off guard. I’m downloading it so I can make a big database to help Santa and the pixies build a high-availability RAC system to monitor the bad kids 24/7/365; I’m downloading it because I like watching IE download 300MB files and give up just before the end; I’m downloading it because I love you. In fact, I’m going to set up a server at home with 10g and the application server so I can look at doing some work with Workflow and the new Application Faces stuff they were trumpeting in the last edition of the Oracle magazine. To be honest the database is almost irrelevant but I think it best to use the latest version so support can’t come out with the usual BS about upgrading if you have a problem.

On the big download thing; one of the guys recommended some download manager software GetRight. Have a look on download.com. Seems quite good but they won’t pay for it so I will have to be mildly dishonest about shareware again. I don’t like doing that and will pay for my home machines but work can pay for their own. This software inserts itself seamlessly in between IE and the download site and then allows the whole pause/resume/etc. thing to happen. A must with these big files from Oracle.

Oracle workflow (continuing on from an earlier blog) still won’t install: it started whining about the absence of an 8i DLL, which is weird because I was attempting to install into a 9i database. I think it’s probably because I told it to install locally so it’s trying to use the bequeath (sic?) interface instead of SQL*Net and has maybe picked up an 8i version of SQL*Plus from the path. I’ll use this as a treat to help me with my boredom tomorrow (today now, it’s 12:02). Yes, installing workflow is a treat; it’s hard not to cry, isn’t it?

Went to a business meeting on Wednesday. A breath of fresh air. Stuart told me to keep the dream alive and I am.

Still waiting for the guy from Oracle to reply to my calls about the consulting option to sort out the version numbers in Oracle Repository. Will probably have a go myself if he doesn’t get his finger out.

It’s now over a year since I was made redundant: rejoice! I would never have started my business or on the road to financial freedom if it hadn’t happened. One of the people at Adis left for a better job recently and I wanted to give them a bell to say good luck but they won’t return my calls because they are afraid of me talking them into something. This makes me sad. They obviously don’t know me at all.

Bless

Joy!

When you invoke the workflow configuration assistant as supplied with 2.6 you get:

Exception in thread “mai” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: WfFrame
        at WorkflowCA.main(Compiled Code)

Good, innit? You can also run the assistant by going to <oracle_home>wfinstall and running wfinstall.bat (unix peeps change as necessary).

I went to the top workflow directory looked for .jar files. Found them in javaoracleappsfndwfjar. Aha, says I, let’s put these in the class path. I took a copy of wfinstall, renamed it to mywf.bat and changed it thusly:

rem Oracle Workflow install script
rem Make sure all arguments are assigned or java will hang
setlocal
set classpath=;D:Program FilesOraclejre1.1.7librt.jar;D:Program FilesOraclejre1.1.7libi18n.jar;d:ora9iwfinstallWorkflowCA.jar;d:ora9ijlibewt-3_3_6.jar;d:ora9ijlibshare-1_0_8.jar;d:ora9ijlibswingall-1_1_1.jar;
set classpath=%classpath%;D:ora9iwfjavaoracleappsfndwfjarfndbalishare.jar
set classpath=%classpath%;D:ora9iwfjavaoracleappsfndwfjarfndewt.jar
set classpath=%classpath%;D:ora9iwfjavaoracleappsfndwfjarfndswing.jar
set classpath=%classpath%;D:ora9iwfjavaoracleappsfndwfjarwfapi.jar
set classpath=%classpath%;D:ora9iwfjavaoracleappsfndwfjarwffrm.jar
set classpath=%classpath%;D:ora9iwfjavaoracleappsfndwfjarwfjava.jar
set classpath=%classpath%;D:ora9iwfjavaoracleappsfndwfjarwfmon.jar
“D:Program FilesOraclejre1.1.7binjre” -classpath  “%classpath%” WorkflowCA /wfdir D:ora9iwf /orahome d:ora9i  /wintz “GMT Standard Time” /systemroot “C:WINDOWS”

(you’ll have to join some of the lines and change directories as needed yourself).

This appears to work but I haven’t yet had time to run it to the end.

Why doesn’t the Oracle Installer create this batch file properly? It can’t have been tested, or worked!

New info 06-AUG:

Workflow 2.6 needs to be installed into an 8i home. It seems to install OK into a 9i database from an 8i home. Once you have installed the 8i client and then installed WF into there it works first time without having to mess with the wfinst.bat file.

I suppose beggars can’t be choosers but in Rational Rose and all of the books the swim lanes go down the page, not across, which means that you can get a lot more on a page. Makes me think that they cribbed the tool from Designer, which did swim lanes across as well. I know it sounds pedantic but it’s non-standard, and that irritates me. An option to switch orientation would be nice.

It doesn’t like duplicated names across diagrams and expects you to reuse objects. This is good, excellent in fact, but dragging and dropping doesn’t seem to work in the case of object flows. The only way I’ve found to include them is to right click and select add to diagram, which is not the most intuative thing I’ve ever come across.

You can’t rename diagrams, you can rename anything else. This means that calling your diagram, say, create asset, means that you can’t have a process called create asset. The only way round this is to shut JDeveloper down and rename or delete the diagram file. Irritating and unnecessary.

Before I realised that I could drag and drop swim lanes onto diagrams I tried to create swim lanes with the same name and it didn’t like this either. Why does it matter if you have a duplicated swim lane name? That said, maybe the non-informative message could just suggest you drag the one you’ve already defined.

I think the duplication check could do with some common-sense rules applying and more helpful error messages.

I have raised this in a Metalink enhancement request but am not holding my breath.

We used workflow to manage creating documents and wanted to be able to create management reports on top of it. I remember having to create some horrible views to allow you to work out where you were in the workflow and what step was next so you could report on it.

It’s just occurred to me that you could have had a parameter on the notifications called something like LAST_NOTIFICATION, which we set to a constant value with the notification name as it passes through. Could also have one with something that does the integration with the stages in the reports we spent all of that time over etc.

I will try it on the prototype I’m building. Should make integration much simpler.

We’ll see …

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.