Link to Fox News TV-cast

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8XI2Chc6uQ
It's a link to the reel I mentioned in the previous post.

Silly Americans

An interesting reel appeared at youtube.com recently. It's a record from Fox News telecast - a 12 year old girl and a woman are asked about the conflict in the South Osetia. But when they tried to tell the truth about this situation, the presenter said they needed to make a break and after that, when the woman called Georgia and its president, Saakhashvili, an agressor, it turned out that telecast's time was out.
Damn, ok, I understand that the most of americans are brainwashed by mass media (by the way, it reminds me of the Soviet Union, I mean brainwashing), but why do they think they are always right? are they really Gods? Why do they think they can invade Iraq (it's not their territory) and bomb Afghanistan (it's not their territory too, and don't tell me about 9/11, it's all bullshit about Al Qaeda and Ben Laden - dear Americans, spen some time to watch the documentals about Bush and Ben Laden relationship. Actually, there are much more facts about that date)? I even don't talk about Kosovo. But they critisize others when they try to solve their own problems, problems concerning their independence and security.
I can draw a conclusion that either Americans are so stupid to analyze information (yep, it is a bit more difficult than to eat hamburgers and drink coca-cola) either they pretend to be stupid... I hope they just pretend...

CSS positioning (layouts)

Found a nice simple article about CSS positioning today (http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/).
This theme has been a little unclear for me before, especially when I made up complicated jsp-pages. Many thanks to Mike =)

Java -verbose option

I haven't used any specific command-line parameters running java.exe earlier. But yesterday I ran across the problem that concluded in that JBoss loaded the old version of my class file although I had upgraded all *.war and *.ear files to the last version. I was stuck wondering what the quirk it was.

Finally, I decided to find out where that wacky class has been loaded from. Java -verbose option fitted my task perfectly. It forces to display all class loading results in the console. If you get too many results, you can forward all output to some file using OS specific contstructions like this "> out.txt"

To read more about "Class Loading in Java" you can, for example, here

Recompiling Oracle invalid objects or Brainfucking part 2

Finally I cloned the production database (RHEL 4, Oracle 10g 10.2.0.3 64 bit edition) to the test one (Fedora Core 8, Oracle 10g 10.2.0.1 updated to 10.2.0.3). All seemed working: I connected to the database using SQLPlus as sysdba and executed some simple SELECT-queries successfully. But as usual there appeared a new trouble :) - when I tried to connect as any user except sysdba, I got the following messages:

Enter password:
ERROR:
ORA-06553: PLS-801: internal error [56319]


ERROR:
ORA-06553: PLS-801: internal error [56319]


Error accessing package DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO

Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options

The point is that some objects may have an invalid status after a database upgrade, cloning (especially between 32 and 64 bit editions) etc.

As a remedy for this trouble, you should :

1) Shutdown the database (shutdown)
2) Start up the database in upgrade mode (startup upgrade)
3) Execute utlirp.sql script from $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin directory (@?/rdbms/admin/utlirp 0). You should pass the integer parameter to this script - just pass a zero (0). If you are curious enough, look inside the script for the description.
4) As the prompt will say - shutdown the database again
5) Start up the database in a normal mode (startup)
6) Execute utlrp.sql script (@?/rdbms/admin/utlrp)

Game Over :)

Cloning Oracle database

Usually developing a J2EE application (sure, it may be not necessary J2EE, but it is so in my case, so I will consider that) you have several environments - at least they are: Development Environment, Test Environment and Production Environment. Production usually contains the most actual 'runtime' information. As for development and test environments it is usually appreciated they would have actual data too. So it's obvious that you need to clone the production database.
You can do that using:

-'cold' cloning: database must be properly shutted down. Then you just copy all datafiles (+ probably redo logs) using OS means. (full step-by-step tutorial on 'cold' cloning you can find at http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_tips_db_copy.htm)

-'hot' cloning: This method is used when you cannot afford to shutdown the database. You do not have to shutdown the database, but you must switch database to 'backup mode'. I found a nice step-by-step tutorial how to do it: http://www.shutdownabort.com/quickguides/clone_hot.php

The common incorrect method: to do a database clone without shutdown or switching the database to 'backup mode'. I swallowed this bait too for the first time I cloned the database and hope this caution will help somebody :)

Installing Fedora Core 8 on Linux or Brainfucking part 1

There appeared a need to install Oracle Database 10g several days ago. All i had was Fedora Core 8 with a command line interface.
As a decent person I started with http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/smiley_10gdb_install.html. But it turned out this manual is not enough because FC is not supported by Oracle.
Also I read from oracle forums that installing Oracle DB on FC8 "is a real pain". Although I decided not to give up, but to try to get the target.
Firstly, I followed the intructions from http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/11g/OracleDB11gR1InstallationOnFedora7.php:
1) Unzipped "linux_11gR1_database.zip"
2) Changed kernel parameters:
a) created a file "/etc/sysctl.conf":

 kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
# semaphores: semmsl, semmns, semopm, semmni
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000
net.core.rmem_default=4194304
net.core.rmem_max=4194304
net.core.wmem_default=262144
net.core.wmem_max=262144

b)executed "/sbin/sysctl -p" to apply changes immediately

3)added the following lines to the /etc/security/limits.conf file:
oracle              soft    nproc   2047
oracle              hard    nproc   16384
oracle              soft    nofile  1024
oracle              hard    nofile  65536

4) added the following line to the /etc/pam.d/login file:

session    required     /lib/security/pam_limits.so
session    required     pam_limits.so

5) disabled secure linux by editing the /etc/selinux/config file:
SELINUX=disabled

6) installed the following packages:
rpm -Uvh binutils-2.*
rpm -Uvh elfutils-libelf-0.*
rpm -Uvh glibc-2.*
rpm -Uvh glibc-common-2.*
rpm -Uvh libgcc-4.*
rpm -Uvh libstdc++-4.*
rpm -Uvh make-3.*
rpm -Uvh elfutils-libelf-devel-0.*
rpm -Uvh glibc-devel-2.*
rpm -Uvh gcc-4.*
rpm -Uvh gcc-c++-4.*
rpm -Uvh libstdc++-devel-4.*
rpm -Uvh unixODBC-2.*

yum install libaio libaio-devel
yum install unixODBC-devel
yum install sysstat

7) created necessary users and groups:
groupadd oinstall
groupadd dba
useradd -g oinstall -G dba,oracle
passwd oracle

8) created the directories in which the Oracle software will be installed:
mkdir -p /hdd1/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1
chown -R oracle:oinstall /hdd1
chmod -R 775 /hdd1


9) edited the /etc/redhat-release file replacing the current release information (Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)) with the following:
redhat release 5

10) logged in as the oracle user and added the following lines at the end of the .bash_profile file:
# Oracle Settings
TMP=/tmp; export TMP
TMPDIR=$TMP; export TMPDIR

ORACLE_HOSTNAME=HIDServer; export ORACLE_HOSTNAME
ORACLE_BASE=/hdd1/oracle; export ORACLE_BASE
ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/10.2.0.1/db_1; export ORACLE_HOME
ORACLE_SID=O10GSID; export ORACLE_SID
ORACLE_TERM=xterm; export ORACLE_TERM
PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH; export PATH
PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH; export PATH

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:/lib:/usr/lib; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
CLASSPATH=$ORACLE_HOME/JRE:$ORACLE_HOME/jlib:$ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/jlib; export CLASSPATH

if [ $USER = "oracle" ]; then
if [ $SHELL = "/bin/ksh" ]; then
ulimit -p 16384
ulimit -n 65536
else
ulimit -u 16384 -n 65536
fi
fi

Now according to that tutorial oracle should be installed successfully, but new troubles appeared as it turned out.

Trouble #1: Runnning ./runInstaller, I got such exception:

Preparing to launch Oracle Universal Installer from
/tmp/OraInstall2005-08-30_10-54-49PM. Please wait
...[oracle@localdomain database]$ Exception in thread "main"
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError:
/tmp/OraInstall2005-08-30_10-54-49PM/jre/1.4.2/lib/i386/libawt.so:
libXp.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(Unknown Source)
at sun.security.action.LoadLibraryAction.run(Unknown Source)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at sun.awt.NativeLibLoader.loadLibraries(Unknown Source)
at sun.awt.DebugHelper.(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Component.(Unknown Source)

Having spent some browsing forums I got the solution - all you need to install libXp:
yum install libXp

Retrying to run installer I got:
Trouble #2: I got the error message something like 'Unable to open display'.
Browsing forums again (forums rule the world :)), I read that X Windows System is needed to be installed, so I did it: X-Server + GUI Gnome
But! There is one small thing - you need to switch to "runlevel 5". You can do this by "telinit 5" [or: "init 3"]

Ok, I got the GUI interface - tried to run damned installer again.
WTF?! This time error message was more informative:
 xcb_xlib.c:50: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion 'c->xlib.lock' failed.

gtg - to be continued :)