guylichtman.com

Until recently it was possible to download the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i (aka: Applications 11i) from Oracle Edelivery . I recently noticed that when searching for the E-Business Suite at Edelivery it doesn’t return results for the 11i release. Currently the search results return only the 12.0.4 release. It turns out that it is still possible to download 11i from Edelivery, even though the search results don’t return this release. I had the direct links bookmarked and it looks like they still work. If you need to download Application 11i then it seems that it is still possible by using a direct link and avoiding the search results. Don’t know until when the links will work, but as of this posting the links work fine for me.

For Oracle Applications 11i on Linux use the following: link.

For Oracle Applications 11i on Windows use the following: link.

To use the above links you will first need to login to: Oracle Edelivery. After login you should be able to use the direct links.

I was going over some of the stats of my blog and I noticed I was getting referrals from the NYU Database Systems 06 course page. I was the Teaching Assistant for this course, while I was at NYU. The course page still has a link to a page I put up as part of my TA. All traffic to my NYU homepage today is redirected to this blog, thus I noticed referrals from the course page. Anyway, I had a backup of the course material, which I setup at the time, and I decided to put it up, just in case some one is still looking for it. The TA course material can be accessed at: http://guylichtman.com/db-spring06/db-systems.html. I think it may have some valuable info, such as info on the homework assignments and their solutions.

Well its been a while since I’ve posted something with a technical nature. So, I decided to write about this small php script I’ve been using to get around hosting limitation regarding ssh access. As I’ve encountered some popular shared hosting providers (such as godaddy) do not provide ssh access. I am not sure why this practice is so common. I am assuming it is more of a support issue than security, as it is possible to execute system commands via php.

This leads me to introduce my php virtual shell. It is basically a simple php script which receives input from the user and executes the command and displays the result. The added bonus is that this script also keeps a history of the commands and supports automatic history completion. I love the history and simple command search of modern shells, so I decided to add this to my virtual shell.

I used a javascript auto complete control which I found here . The script basically stores a history of the commands in a file: .vshellhist, and every time the script is executed this file is used to build a javascript array containing all previous commands. From there on, the auto complete control goes into affect. For more details simply look at the code. It is pretty straight forward.

The php code and relevant javascript files can be dowloaded here: php-vshell.zip. To use this script first change the password in the script file. I put the password just for general protection against misuse. I recommend to also change the script file name. Note that the password is kept on file in the clear. For better protection, I would use a form of password authentication which at least keeps the password encrypted on disk. Probably easiest is to use Apache’s authentication mechanism through the use of a .htaccess file. Once the password is set simply upload the php and javascript files (all to the same directory) and start testing out your new shell.

After some time I’ve been browsing blogs through Technorati, I finally decided it’s time for me to open a profile and “claim my blog”. So here is the link to my: Technorati Profile.

Saw an interesting advertisement over the weekend. Turns out that Skype is recruiting developers in Israel. The interesting part about this is that they are recruiting developers for relocation and not to work in Israel. And even more interesting is the target destination for relocation: Estonia or Czech Republic. The ad I saw was published in Yediot Ahronot, the largest newspaper in Israel, and it took up a whole page on the back of the jobs section. From the size and location of the ad, I figure that they are very serious about recruitment in Israel. What I find interesting about all this is that Skype finds it attractive to recruit from Israel for Eastern Europe. Lately, there has been a lot of talk how Israeli companies are migrating parts of their R&D centers out of Israel to reduce development costs, with one of the popular destinations being Eastern Europe. And now I see, that Skype still finds Israeli developers an attractive recruitment target. Gives you something to think about. By the way, from searching the web I couldn’t find any references on Skype’s site or an official job site that Skype are recruiting from Israel for relocation. I did find one additional blog post about this here.

I upgraded the wordpress engine I use for blogging today. So I am now up to date. I decided to upgrade while I was searching for plugins and I encountered some that didn’t support my wordpress version. Overall upgrade was extremely simple. All I had to do is upload the wordpress zip file, extract it and then navigate to the upgarde.php link. Everything went smoothly, so I am happy. Now I can start playing with some cool plugins….

I came across rlwrap, while searching on how to enable history for sqlplus on linux. It turns out that sqlplus does not support command line history on linux. This fact itself I found surprising. I was sure all this time that I had some configuration problem with sqlplus on linux, but it turns out that sqlplus simply doesn’t support command line history on linux. I found rlwrap to be an excellent option for providing command line history for tools such as sqlplus. It not only supports the up arrow for history, but also supports the backwards search option using Ctrl+r. Additionally, the tool support completion suggestions either based upon the names of files or using a list of words found in a file. While using rlwrap with sqlplus, for example, I can create a file with a list of the table names I use, and then when by pressing tab receive completion suggestions (based on typed prefix) for possible table names.

rlwrap is very easy to use. You simply prefix the command you want to use with rlwrap. For example: rlwrap sqlplus

I was very impressed with this tool, so I also installed rlwrap on cygwin. For some reason on cygwin I needed to set the environment variable: RLWRAP_HOME to get the command history to work. I simply set this variable to point to a directory named .rlwrap in my home directory and then everything worked great.

I really liked the completion option via a file with completion suggestions. What I did find missing was a way to add context sensitivity to these suggestions. Adding an easy (and the emphasize here is on easy) option to customize the suggestions based on the context of the line would be a big functional boost for me. Possible options for specifying such context sensitivity might be via regular expression matching or executing some kind of script action. Bash has support for “Programmable Completion” and it might be possible to take some concepts from there.

Welcome to my first ‘main’ wordpress post. I call this a main post, as I also setup a secondary section which is dedicated for ‘Fun’ posts. I’ll go over the various customizations I did to get this blog up and running. I like to keep track of these kind of small technical tweakings and I thought it will be nice to start out with a post about the blog itself. I’ll keep it short and try to focus on the non trivial parts as overall setting up a blog is considered basic these days.

Well, as a start I am using wordpress as the blogging engine. This was easy to setup as my hosting provider (godaddy) has a pre-configured one-click setup process. The next challenge was to customize wordpress to a satisfactory level. I started out by search for a more interesting template than the provided default. I came across the MisyLook template. I liked this template but I decided to change it a little.

First off I wanted to remove the header in each section stating by who is the post. As currently I am the only one posting I find this unnecessary. I did a quick look at the html and php of template and found that the following line was responsible for the “by …” text: by <?php the_author_posts_link() ?>. So all that was required was to remove this line. A simple sed command on the relevant files was sufficient:

sed -i 's/by <?php the_author_posts_link() ?>//g' *.php

Next, I wanted to separate between posts which are more fun oriented (these will hopefully include pictures and videos from experiences in life) and regular ramblings, which will probably be more tech oriented. I decided to add an additional page which will basically display the ‘Fun’ oriented posts. I created a custom category page, which is basically a copy of the index page and named it: categeroy-2.php. This page is displayed every time the ‘Fun’ category is chosen, according to the resolve preferences of wordpress (more about this here). I also wanted to add a tab to the top navigation for the ‘Fun’ category. I did this by simply modifying the template header file and adding the following after the home tab list item:

<li <?php if(is_category('Fun')){echo 'class="current_page_item"';}?>><a href="<?php bloginfo('siteurl'); ?>/category/fun/" title="Home">Fun</a> </li>

Finally, I don’t want to display the ‘Fun’ posts on the main page so I added a conditional in The Loop of index.php to only display posts that aren’t part of the ‘Fun’ category. First I fetch the Fun category id:

$funid = get_cat_ID('Fun');

Then I can use the following conditional:

<?php if ( !in_category($funid)) : //only post non fun posts ?>

Well, that’s pretty much it. Now I have my blog setup and all that is left to do is to actually start blogging….