If you go to Oracle shop you will see that Oracle is selling OpenOffice (under Applications->Oracle Office) .

OpenOffice.org is LGPL licenced, so I wonder What the fuck is Oracle selling?!! And what do they call Oracle Open Office Standard Edition ?

Oracle is also selling the ODF (open document format) plugin for M$ Office (which used to be free) for $90 per user with minimum quantities of 100 .

I don't care what Oracle evil^W plans for all the open source software that they got trough Sun acquisition are. I just hope it all gets fast and successfully forked. Go Maria!

References:

• https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:PROD_HIER_ID:3760753060221631798889
• http://mariadb.com/
• http://ostatic.com/blog/understanding-oracles-odf-plug-in-pricing-what-it-means-for-openoffice-org
• http://www.lockergnome.com/theoracle/2010/04/06/is-oracle-quietly-killing-open-office/

My work contract with InterComponentWare AG has been cancelled as of April 1st 2010. The company has closed its office in Bulgaria and fired more than 60 people. First half in December 2009, the rest at the end of March 2010.

I've worked for ICW for two and a half years, with majority of tasks being on software build management. While I've enjoyed my job, the management in the company has been awful.

Several facts:

• The main investor in ICW is Dietmar Hopp - a SAP AG founder
• ICW used to have about 700 employees worldwide
• The company business model was quite strange - someone was paying money to a large group of individuals doing different tasks with no particular purpose.
• The annual expenses were about 10 times higher than the revenues
• It appeared that no one from the upper management cared to look what was really going on
• Probably one of the companies with the longest start-up period - more than 10 years
• The Bulgarian outsourcing office existed for about 10 years

Other than that:

• Bizarre management decisions were taken all the time
• People were put on positions they were totally inappropriate for
• The information travelled between the departments in a "broken phone" manner and I guess the line was noisiest in the management area where everybody was telling his own fictional story of what was "really" going on

The perspectives for the company does not look good at all to me. Even worse - I see no hope for it. I expect the leftover parts of the boat (headquarters in Walldorf, DE) to be declared "missing" in about two years. That of course if the investors care to take a look at where their money are going.

On the bright side:

• Most of my co-workers have already found a good replacement job. The demand for IT specialists in BG looks quite high
• I guess I have too great enthusiasm to do the stuff in the right way as the above mentioned facts did not succeed to kill it till the end
• This end only came to show us that better opportunities exist

First to note that the Debian version is actually Squeeze/Sid. It is Sid in the pre-release cycle of Squeeze, and the packages in it were up-to date as of Apr 14^th 2010.

An excellent guide for installing Oracle 10gR2 under Debian could be found here: http://linux.togaware.com/survivor/Oracle_10g.html

I've also followed the advices here: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/locutus/install-oracle-10g-on-debian-lenny-27841

Just want to mention several additional things I have faced.

libdb3 is not found in the post Etch Debian releases

So you should take it from Etch repository, or may be from snapshot.debian.net . The togaware guide is probably written for older release of Debian. So if you have other missing packages you might look for them in the previous Debian releases.

Linking problems

I got this:

/var/lib/oracle/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/lib//libagtsh.so: undefined reference to `nnfyboot'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [/var/lib/oracle/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/rdbms/lib/tg4pwd] Error 1

The solution is described here: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=413032&tstart=0 .
It is:

export ORACLE_HOME=/your/oracle/home
cd $ORACLE_HOME/lib
ln -s libclient10.a libagtsh.a
cd $ORACLE_HOME
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib ./bin/genagtsh $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libagtsh.so 1.0

Then click retry in the installer error dialog.

DBCA errors while creating sample database

I've also faced some of these:

BEGIN dbms_olap.validate_dimension('customers_dim','sh',false,true); END;

*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 1
ORA-01578: ORACLE data block corrupted (file # 1, block # 32488)
ORA-01110: data file 1: '/var/lib/oracle/oradata/orcl/system01.dbf'
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_SUMADVISOR", line 1291
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_SUMADVISOR", line 2336
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_SUMMARY", line 401
ORA-06512: at line 1

no rows selected

Dimension created.

And this repeated for the following statements also:

BEGIN dbms_olap.validate_dimension('products_dim','sh',false,true); END;
BEGIN dbms_olap.validate_dimension('times_dim','sh',false,true); END;
BEGIN dbms_olap.validate_dimension('channels_dim','sh',false,true); END;
BEGIN dbms_olap.validate_dimension('promotions_dim','sh',false,true); END;

I've just clicked ignore for these.

Failed to auto-start Oracle Net Listene using /ade/vikrkuma_new/oracle/bin/tnslsnr

There is a hardcoded path in bin/dbstart. Search for ade/vikrkuma_new there and change the line to:

ORACLE_HOME_LISTNER=$ORACLE_HOME

Тази събота и неделя пак се занимавах с пролетно почистване около блока. Неделята беше дъждовна и можах да посвърша малко работа чак привечер.

Докато валеше, реших да свърша едно добро дело - като за цветница, и да накажа лумпените, които паркират върху зелените площи до блока и ги съсипват. Потърсих в нета на кой телефон да се обадя и попаднах на:

02/9875555 - Столичен инспекторат

Съобщих им за неправилно паркиралите автомобили и дежурния ме убеди че ще изпрати инспектор. Обясниха ми, че нямало да дойде паяк да ги вдига. За съжаление до вечерта не видях да има някакъв ефект - нито колите бяха преместени, нито имаше някакви фишове лепнати на предните им стъкла.

Проблема с паркирането

5, 10 или 20 паяка не могат да решат нищо в милионен град. Предложението ми е да копираме западния модел и да пуснем инспектори в града. Един единствен човек ще бъде ефективен колкото няколко паяка. Ходи, пише си фишчета и евентуално щрака с фотоапарата. При сегашния начин на паркиране ще има малко ходене, много писане и много пари събрани от глоби. Броят на инспекторите може да бъде достатъчно висок за да се покрие града изцяло. Те сами ще си изкарват заплатите и ще ни учат на ред. А ще има и нови работни места.

За гражданското общество

Време е пак да откраднем от западния модел и да почнем да се самоконтролираме. Ние трябва да съощаваме за всякакви нередности които ни вълнуват. И в последствие да контролираме дали са взети адекватни мерки от страна на съответните органи. По няколко граждански репортажа от хора с камерки и малко подкрепа от медиите и службите ще бъдат притиснати да си вършат работата.

Кога възрастните хора се отказаха да учат младите на култура ? Кога спряха да им правят забележки ? И тяхната култура ли изчезна изведнъж ? Или страхът в следствие на анархията и безнаказаността в последните години ги обезвери ?

Мисля че възрастните трябва да дават пример на младите. Не помня кога за последно съм видял някой да се наведе и да вземе чужд боклук от земята и да го изхвърли в коша. Не помня и кога съм видял някой да прави забележка на друг, че си изхвърля боклука на земята, или прави нещо нередно. Не помня някога да съм видял някой да вземе изпражненията на кучето си и да ги изхвърли в коша ..

Въпреки отиващата си зима и пролетното почистване на зелените площи около блока (през целия уикенд!) кантара твърдо върви нагоре.
Нов личен рекорд - 84.2 кг !

Поздрав - Ша-Ша - Няма да Ядеш

I've just tried to watch an embedded youtube video and the flash reported an error.
Going to the http://www.youtube site reveals the friendly:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

Today we were working with a partner company on a common project. I was sitting behind a colleague's back when he wrote a message to me with several notes and sent it. He used an email at Gmail and sent it to my mail which was also at Gmail.

When I got in my office his mail was not in my inbox. I just asked him to verify he did hit the Send button and he confirmed that the message was in his Sent folder.

At this point I suspect the Gmail IMAP service which I was using with Kmail. Logging in via the web interface gave me no different results.

My colleague confirmed my address was correct by sending it to me. I even wrote this one liner to verify the address was spelled correctly with e.g. no Cyrillic symbols in it:

perl -we 'my $a="deliank\@gmail.com"; my @a=split("", $a); print($_ . " - " . ord($_), "\n") foreach @a;'
d - 100
e - 101
l - 108
i - 105
a - 97
n - 110
k - 107
@ - 64
g - 103
m - 109
a - 97
i - 105
l - 108
. - 46
c - 99
o - 111
m - 109

A minute later he decided to forward the message once again. No success this time too. He also suggested to try searching for the message in my Spam folder at which I replied s.t. like:

You must be kidding me. From Gmail to Gmail in Spam ?! You've made a big amateurs out of Google ...

I was quite amused when only the second message arrived several hours later and it was indeed in the Spam folder !

Up-to this point I had confidence in Google's services. From now on, I don't.

I've been following Australian Open recently and watched the coverage of the semifinal between Murray and Cilic today. At the same time I thought what will happen in the other semifinal between Federer and Tsonga tomorrow.

At this level most of the matches are won by the player psychology. Not by his tennis skills. Sure the skills play a role when the time comes to hit certain trick shot, or to catch a tough ball. But the outcome comes from what happens in players' minds.

All this mental pressure. All these guys being so serious. Is it for the money ? Is it for the glory ? Is it for the victory ? Sure its different for each player but in the end it's just a game.

When I thought about all this a curious question came to my mind.

Hey Roger, what if I give you the tournament prize before it starts ? I would just ask you to play for fun. To show us the best of your bag of tricks.

How do you think, will we enjoy the game more ? Will Federer still be able to win ? ...

java.net.SocketException: Network is unreachable

I hit this about a week ago . First time I saw it was on my office desktop running Debian unstable. Since I was not doing too much Java on it I decided it was a problem with JConsole. I nearly lost a bet out of this:

I was pretty sure JConsole was able to attach to local processes even when they were started without any JMX options enabled. Borislav Tonchev was pretty sure it wasn't. I quickly wrote a Java class with its main method sleeping for 100 seconds and tried to attach to its process. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do so. At that point Borislav walked away with 10 bucks coming out of my pocket.

I was curious enough to check this stuff and at first appeared that Java didn't like the bsdgroups option my ext3 /tmp file system was mounted with. Trying the same thing on my home PC, with bsdgroups disabled showed this java.net.SocketException: Network is unreachable. At this point I was starting to loose ground. I decided to check the docs ( http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/management/jconsole.html ) and they confirmed my point. I checked the documented behavior in a JVM running inside an Windows XP installation I have ( VirtualBox image for the corporate stuff in the office ) and Borislav unhappily brought my money back.

At this point I decided the exception under Debian was caused by a bug in JConsole - probably it was not maintained too much in recent releases as a similar tool appeared - VisualVM.

Several days after this long background, on Saturday, I've also hit the same exception on a production server running Tomcat. Pretty damn strange. I was not able to figure it out immediately. The actual problem was introduced in Debian in the beginning of December last year, with the netbase package setting:

# cat /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf
net.ipv6.bindv6only=1

This did not showed up on the server immediately, since the netbase upgrade did not apply the new setting. The exception appeared after a restart almost two months after the upgrade.

The workaround is to set the above to "0" as it was before, or to add the option -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true to each Java process you start. I prefer the former as I did not want to configure every Java program (e.g. I use azureus/vuze) manually.

More information could be found in Debian bug #560044

Scroll-Lock key

Recently I've noticed my Scroll-Lock key was not working under X. I needed it to stop screen updates in monitoring programs like top or htop. It was working perfectly under the standard virtual consoles and judging by this post, it probably worked with konsole with versions of KDE older than 4. So I started digging to see what was going on.

At first it seemed the Scroll-Lock key was not picked at all. I was used to its light being toggled each time I pressed it. But may be some time around the upgrade to KDE4 I noticed the light being used to display the usage of alternate keymap ( EN and BG in my case ). So I did not trust the lamp and looked whether the key was actually reporting any key presses. First I looked at various console key dumpers with no great success under X and then discovered the xev program (part of x11-utils in Debian). Running xev showed me the key was working perfectly fine. So what was wrong ? Why did top ignored it under X and picked it up under the vconsoles ? I thought that the key was actually being handled by the ncurses library. So something must have stood in the way. Did konsole or KDE caught it before being send to ncurses ? In order to eliminate konsole and KDE I've started the Xserver without window manager with only xterm running ( ran xinit ). The behavior was the same under xterm. And xev would not have been able to catch it if this was the case. I was not that sure ncurses handled the key anymore and started looking elsewhere. It appeared my expected Scroll-Lock behavior was a feature of the Linux vconsoles and handled by their in-kernel code.

So no Scroll-Lock for the terminal emulators under X. Anyway, Ctrl+S (stop scrolling) and Ctrl+Q (resume it) work just fine so no real need for Scroll-Lock. Sure Scroll-Lock could be mapped to do the job, but this would be a custom solution and getting used to it would not be of much use across machines I don't maintain.

Letters with accent / Букви с ударения

While I was at the keyboard stuff I decided to look at other related things that interested me. One of them was writing letters with accents. In my native language this is often necessary since there are words/conjunctions with the same spelling and the accent is the only way to distinguish them. E.g.

па̀ра / пара̀

Note that in order to see letters with accents your screen font should also support it.

When I searched the web I first found solutions with custom keymap definitions. I've looked at them, and they were supposed to either replace or complement the definitions in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ ( part of xkb-data in Debian ). Looking at the default definitions supplied with xkb-data revealed that the "Bulgaria - Traditional phonetic" mapping I used already had what I needed. The accents were mapped to the "/" (slash) key in Level3. So e.g. writing an "а̀" was just a matter of typing "а" followed by RAlt+/. The Right alt key was mapped to the so called ISO_Level3_Shift .

The U0300 unicode symbol is representing ACUTE accent. This is the kind of accent that is used in the Bulgarian language. There is also a mirror variant of the accent - GRAVE accent. It is represented by the U0301 unicode symbol. Here is an example:

а̀ѐѝо̀у̀ъ̀ю̀я̀
а́е́и́о́у́ъ́ю́я́

See the references section near the end of document for the full list of unicode symbol tables.

All symbols you can type with your current keyboard configuration

Just to clarify things for those of you who do not know about the different levels:

• Level 1 is a key typed alone
• Level 2 is a Shift+key
• Level 3 is RAlt+key (assuming your Level3 modifier is RAlt)
• Level 4 is RAlt+Shift+key

A useful command to get your current key mappings is xmodmap. E.g.

xmodmap
xmodmap -pke

On the desktop in the office I use the following keyboard configuration:

setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us,bg -variant altgr-intl,phonetic

executed via KDE's "System settings"->"Personal"->"Regional & Language"->"Keyboard layout".

In order to get a visual representation of the keys in the the different levels and groups the xkbprint command could be used.

In my case I have two different groups (us and bg) and each of them has four different levels. By default the xkbprint command prints 2 levels - the one specified by the -ll parameter (or 1 if it is missing) and the next one.

xkbprint -eps -color -lg 1 -ll 1 -lc en_US -nokc $DISPLAY -o xkbprint-lg1_ll1.eps

This command produces a postscript file which I have cropped below:

When the symbols in the two levels are the same only one symbol is printed on a key (I guess xkbprint does not makes a difference between lower and upper case letter). When there is a difference the symbol for level 1 is printed on the bottom part of the key and the one from level 2 on the upper part.

Let us see levels 3 and 4 in the US group too:

xkbprint -eps -color -lg 1 -ll 3 -lc en_US -nokc $DISPLAY -o xkbprint-lg1_ll3.eps

Remember that level 3 is when you hold ISO_Level3_Shift ( RAlt by default ), and level 4 is when you hold ISO_Level3_Shift + Shift. The merged labels in the image above are:

• left and right single quote mark - on keys 9 and 0 in level 3
• left and right double quote mark - on keys with the square brackets in level 4

So what we see is that we have access to various special chars that might have ever been a key or a two away from you without you ever knowing it.

Let us also see the other group that I have configured.

xkbprint -eps -color -lg 2 -ll 1 -lc en_US -nokc $DISPLAY -o xkbprint-lg2_ll1.eps

Unfortunately I did not find an easy way to print the symbols in the BG group via xkbprint. Their names are showed instead. These names are defined in the /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h file, which is included in x11proto-core-dev.

And here go levels 3 and 4 in the BG group:

xkbprint -eps -color -lg 2 -ll 3 -lc en_US -nokc $DISPLAY -o xkbprint-lg2_ll3.eps

Note that I have cropped the images above, in order them to be readable on normal screens. You can execute the specified commands yourself and take a look at the PostScript files directly to get the rest of the picture.

The characters which names are showed as U0XXX, where X is any hexadecimal digit, represent a Unicode symbol.

References:

1. http://unicode.org/charts/ - Unicode Character Code Charts
2. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0300.pdf - Combining Dicritical Marks code chart
3. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0400.pdf - Cyrillic code chart
4. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf - Layout control
5. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf - Miscellaneous technical symbols code chart