Areas of Interest, as counted by my cat
This is exactly what I needed to know:
Installing Oracle 10g r2 on Solaris 5.11 is painless except before
you ./runInstaller you have to edit the ./install/oraparam.ini and
change line 42 to something like:Solaris=5.8,5.9,5.10,5.11
Then it will pass the first check and continue with install.
Time for a round-up of the Free and/or Open Source tools I've been using on my work laptop.
1. Eclipse 3.3 (IDE, Java and generic)
I've been dipping into various versions of Eclipse for Java
development for years. Its plugin architecture is brilliant (see
below). Out of the box it handles Java development as sweetly as any
"Professional" edition out there. It also has a built-in editor for Ant
build files (an XML dialect) which I'm finding particularly handy right
now. One feature I really appreciate is the ability to create a
"generic" project that basically just lists all the files in a
directory, regardless of what type of file they are. Very handy for my
current work which involves a series of versioned directories
containing various flavors of text files. Which brings me to:
"Afae" stands for "Another Freebooter's All-purpose Editor". It
doesn't appear to be under active development and has stalled at
version 0.9, but don't let that stop you from using it. It adds a TextMate-flavored
text editor to Eclipse that allows me to edit .sh, .bat, .sql, and
other types of files in syntax-colored goodness. It has a bunch of
other features that I'm not using (such as a "post to blog" button on
the toolbar?) but I've found the text editing to be solid.
3. DiffMerge
I've mentioned this before.
Since then it is up to version 3.1 but it is still free, and although
other file comparison tools probably have more features, I've grown to
like this one.
4. AstroGrep
I have long ago given up on making Windows Search
find anything on my file system. How I long for the File Manager applet
in FoxPro for DOS 2.0. That thing was fast. AstroGrep is a GREP utility
for Windows, with a simple UI on top. It's fast, and I can search the
contents of text file with regular expressions. On my latest project I have found it invaluable.
Not wanting L to get all the fun, I’ve posted a new article on the Spacefold article libary:
Microsoft Excel gave L a good one yesterday:
What happens if you press “Cancel”?
DiffMerge is a tool recently made freely available from SourceGear. If you are not a programmer then you probably have no need of this, but if you do find yourself needing to compare two different versions of source files, then I recommend this tool
I used WinMerge for a while, but the other day I needed to do the file comparison thing and I found that on my laptop, not only had I not installed WinMerge, I didn’t have an installer conveniently located in my c:\downloads folder either.
Since I regularly read Eric Sink’s Blog, I knew about DiffMerge, and so I gave it a try.
It’s excellent. It blows WinMerge out of the water. Recommended.
Editor’s Note, August 2020: Actually, I’ve ended up using both WinMerge and DIffMerge over the years. Perhaps WinMerge more. I would like to take back what I said here – they are both excellent tools and WinMerge perhaps has the edge but DiffMerge I still found handy for quick comparisons.
No, not viruses. I mean, what do you do when the software you depend on stops working? For example, today Outlook 2003 just refused to send mail to our SMTP mail server. It would say “timeout, server not responding” or some such. Oh, and there was a nasty Hex number associated with the message that you’d think would help when you google it, but no. No good advice from the Goog. Instead, just stupid stuff I’d already tried, like “change the ports” or “delete the account configuration and re-enter the authentication details”, and the old chestnut, “reboot your computer and see if the problem goes away”.
I even got onto a web chat session with my ISP support dude, who said *he* had no problem sending and receiving email from that account.
Only one thing worked. I set up my email account in Mozilla Thunderbird. It send test messages flawlessly. Then I went back to Outlook. Still no joy sending outgoing mail. That’s when I said it, “OK. I guess I’m switching to Thunderbird for my email from now on, then *sigh*.”
Next time I pushed send/receive in Outlook, it worked.
I’m happy to know that Visual Studio .NET 2008 (“Orcas”) is going have the HTML designer from Expression Web built-in. It’s much better than the editor in VS 2005.
Unfortunately my copy of Expression Web appears to be missing the third checkbox in the CSS options dialog, shown below:
Can anyone tell me where to find it?
This used to be a series of blog posts but now it is a shared Google Doc.
Link: I hate knobs
I’ve never really been happy with how checkbox controls look when contained in Grid columns, displaying logical values. Lately I’ve been using the method described below.
Given a table with a logical column such as:
create cursor FILMLIST values ( VIEWED L, TITLE C(50) )
I use an expression for the grid column instead of referencing the table column name directly:
Alignment=2-(Middle Center) ControlSource = iif(FILMLIST.VIEWED,"ü"," ") FontName=Wingdings FontSize=11 ReadOnly=TRUE
The default textbox control in the column will display the logical value as a tick mark (the WingDings character for ü):
This is all you need to do for a read-only column. For my users, I make the column editable by adding some code to the textbox’s .DblClick() event:
replace FILMLIST.VIEWED with !nvl(FILMLIST.VIEWED,.F.) this.Refresh()
This toggles the logical flag when the user double-clicks the mouse in the column – and handles possible NULL values as well.
As an exercise for the student, try adding support for toggling the flag using the keyboard SPACE bar.
Scene: Driving home in the car. We are having a discussion about the sad state of Project Management.
Me: You know, people in general can be divided into two groups: Those that accept and take responsibility, and those who actively work to avoid it.
L: Well, I think there are indeed two types of people in the world: those who like to divide people into two groups, and those that don’t.
Me: [thinking]
Me: People can be divided into two groups: Those that do not understand recursion, and those that like to divide the remainder into two groups: Those that do not understand recursion; and those that like to divide the remainder into two groups: Those that…
L: Shut up.
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