While wide screen formats are good for movies or images shot this way, they suck for the regular daily work in front of the monitor. Text is written from up to down and this is the direction that we need more room into while working.

I got a display with a rotating stand recently and I could say that I love working on it rotated. It is not even a widescreen, but a 19" 1280x1024 (4:3 format). 1024x1280 is just a lot better. The programs that I use most just rock in this direction. E.g. the terminal window, the web browser, the mail client, the document editor and the PDF reader.

Try it this way, you will also love it.

Several notes:

• I mostly use maximized windows and change between the applications with a keyboard shortcut. If I had a really large display (30"+) with sufficient resolution I might have made different working habits. E.g. to use a vertically tiled windows or even windows scattered all around.

• How do you "graphic people" feel about using a screen which is higher than wider ?

• I'm not quite sure if the wide formats are actually better for multimedia. If I recall correctly they replaced the standard one (4:3) because the human eyes have more peripheral vision in this direction. This, by itself alone, is not convincing enough for me. First we use a limited part of our peripheral vision anyway, and have plenty of advance in each direction, and second is the complete lack of neck movement a good thing for anyone ?!

• Too bad if you have a wide screen laptop. In this case I could just recommend trying to get most use of the limited vertical space. E.g. try moving your task bar on the side of your screen and learn the shortcuts for the full screen mode of the applications that you use.

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

Тази година видях Щъркел на 7^ми Март. Не ми се е случвало толкова рано да го видя като че ли. Обикновенно си влача мартениците до края на Април че и до Май.
Проблема ми сега е къде да ги закача. Няма цъфнали дървета, още по-малко пък и плодни ..

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 ? ...