As a contractor I often have to fill in and sign various contract agreements. These are usually tens of pages in length, and while I only have to sign one page, I still must scan in and send back each and every page, even the untouched ones. It would help if a PDF with form filling abilities was supplied, but hey, that’s only rarely the case. This is how I do it.

Running a business, I like to keep a small stock of spare printer ink cartridges, so I usually have a couple of spare colour and a couple of black ones, just in case. However, after a recent cartridge change, one black and one colour at the same time, the printer has suddenly stopped working. This was after about a month of perfect usage, not immediately after the change. The printer is an HP Photosmart 2610 All in one - and now, it’s an HP Photo-not-very-smart-at-all 2610 none in one!

I think this topic has the longest title of all my postings! Never mind. Have you ever started Thunderbird fetching your emails, and encountered a pop-up message that starts off by saying “The message could not be filtered for folder ‘whatever’ because writing to folder failed”? Read on for the cure. Credit: go here - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=931303 - then scroll down to Comment 39. A gentleman by the name of Craig Lassen deserves all the kudos for this fix.

This post has also been categorised under “rants and raves” as you will see below! Oracle 10g was the first time that proxy users could be used easily from SQL. Prior to that only Java and/or OCI programs could use them. They’ve been around since 8i, but not (well) documented. Want to know more? Read on…. A Bit of Background Many years ago, a software company I worked in - as a DBA - was taken over and we inherited a system (no names - you will see why later) which allowed numerous users the ability to use the system, and some of them got to create documents from within the application.

Registration is Suspended - For Now This blog post applied to my Wordpress blog, of which, this is a migrated copy. It no longer applies, but I’ve left it here for old time sake! Until further notice, subscribing to this blog, by self-registration, has been suspended. I can and will subscribe you on request - but see below for terms and conditions. While, I was on holiday for a couple of weeks, over 4,000 spam users “registered” and I spent a lot of time devoted to cleaning up the mess.

This post is from 2013 when Internet Explorer was [still] a thing. I rather suspect nobody uses IE any more! Are you forced to use Internet Explorer at work? Are you, like me, forced to use an old, insecure, broken version of IE at work, because it’s the Government Standard version? And are you, like me, unable to upload evidence files to My Oracle Support? You need to go to Tools, then Internet Options.

Firefox starts off ok, but soon starts running slower and slower, until it eventually starts to time out on connecting to some pages. The error messages is “the server took too long to respond” however, Firefox might be telling porkies. If you attempt to access the same URL in Opera, Chrome or, if you must, Internet Explorer, you may find that it is responding quite happily and speedily, while another try in Firefox takes ages to connect or fail again.

In the old days of exp/imp doing a Transportable Tablespace export/import was relatively simple - unless you had Spatial data, in which case, it wasn’t. Then we got hold of expdp/impdp and it became “different”. It now seems that in order to do a Transportable Tablespace import with impdp, you don’t tell it to do one! Confused? In the old days, you told both exp and imp which tablespaces you were transporting using the TRANSPORT_TABLESPACE and TABLESPACES parameters to exp, and the same with imp.

WARNING - If you are easily offended, I would advise that you do not read any further. You have been advised, proceed at your own risk and don’t bother to complain, because if you do, I will most likely delete your comments. I have the power! As I write this, the temperature outside is minus 60C - minus 76F in old money, or American degrees - but then again, I am about 36,000 feet up and still have three hours to go until Manchester.

As a Raspberry Pi user, I figured I needed a USB hub to allow me to connect stuff (that’s a technical term by the way) to my Pi without overloading the two on board USB ports as these are limited to a maximum of 100 mA each. I purchased a cheap 7 port externally powered hub and it arrived by next day delivery. The USB 2.0 specification says that anything advertising compliance should, amongst other things be able to supply 500 mA minimum on each and every port while externally powered and should not feed any power back to the computer via the USB interconnect cable - that’s the one between the computer and the hub.

I’m trapped on a plane for four and a bit hours and your bloody child has been screaming it’s head off for most of the way. There’s little chance of me being able to sleep at all on this flight but somehow that’s ok with you because “she’s only 18 months old.” Do you think that I, and the other passengers around you, think that that is an acceptable reason for suffering 4 and a bit hours of continual screaming?

This “story” is doing the rounds on email at the moment, but it made me laugh. Grumpy old sod that I am! ;-) Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. The woman apologised and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.” The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today.

If you install 10g and 11g on the same server, which one do you wish to supply the executables for “oraenv”? If you install 10g first and allow 11g to overwrite the files in /usr/local/bin when you run “root.sh” then when you eventually call oraenv to set a 10g environment, you get a warning that “$ORACLE_HOME/bin/orabase” cannot be found. If you allow the 10g files to overwrite the 11g ones, you don’t set ORACLE_BASE.