You may not even notice, but… I’ve changed the display of the main page slightly. In the past it was displaying the past 7 entries, regardless of when they were entered. I’ve changed that to display the lasy 7 days’ worth of entries.

The upside is that you can actually view a weeks’ worth of activity at once, instead of having to go to the archive pages. The downside is that I can’t get Movable Type to display the entries for just 1 category. So you’ll get all of the Links, Oracle stuff, and other pages that I post here.

Today’s Friday Five:

1. As a child, who was your favorite superhero/heroine? Why?

Hmmm… Superman. I remember running around the house with a towel pinned around my neck as a cape.

2. What was one thing you always wanted as a child but never got?

It’s an odd answer, but… Everything. I think that my parents did a great job filtering out enough stuff to keep me from being a completely spoiled brat.

3. What’s the furthest from home you’ve been?

Paris, France. I was there for an Oracle Openworld conference in 1996. It was a lot of fun, but would have been better if I’d spoken more than 5 words of French.

Maybe that’s why I can’t stand the French.

4. What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to learn but haven’t yet?

A musical instrument, be it piano, guitar, or harmonica. The only thing I can play is the radio.

5. What are your plans for the weekend?

We’re all going to Tuscaloosa tonight for the first Alabama Gymnastics home meet. Tomorrow we’ll be celebrating Caleb’s second birthday with family.

New Things

Well, Laurie, you shamed me into action.

I worked (wirelessly, of course) through ER tonight, and constructed two new pages for Caleb and Brandon.

The boy’s photos are now current through June 2002. Hopefully I can get into gear and actually post photos I’ve taken since clanMcGraw.com came online.

Ever heard the phrase, “Once on the lips, forever on the hips”? People usually use it as motivation while they’re dieting. I think we need a new phrase today: “Once on the lips, forever on tips.”

Fingertips, that is. Let me explain.

A conversation at work today brought up all of the old newsgroup posts available for searching via Google. It started me thinking about all of the posts that I’ve made to various usenet groups over the years.

So I did a little investigative work, and found what I believe to be my very first Internet Post. I’m not going to post a link to it here, but it was made on November 5, 1991, to the comp.virus newsgroup. It had to do with some Clipper demo disks that were advertised on TV. Apparently they were infected with the Form virus when they went out the door.

It was pretty scary looking back into time like that. Just remember - every word that goes out into usenet (and probably the rest of cyberspace) can eventually be retrieved by a few keystrokes.

Give it a shot - head on out to Google and perform a search on the very first email address that you ever had. It might be… enlightening.

Note to self: Try this at home. It would be very nice to have inexpensive Linux RAC setup to play with.

I’m sitting on the couch with Amanda.

She’s watching the Bachelorette, and I’m surfing the web, wirelessly.

According to UPS, my Linksys WAP11a is waiting for me when I get home.

Thanks a lot, Amazon, for taking * 9 DAYS * to get it to me.

If you’re technically inclined, I’ve activated the Oracle link to the left. Not much there now, but hopefully it will grow.

Lately I’d been reading on ORACLE-L about how a TNSNAMES.ORA file in the same directory as a binary will be used by that binary, instead of the default TNSNAMES.ORA in the $TNS_ADMIN directory.

So Monday I’m having a problem with resolving a database alias in Solaris 8. I made some changes to the tnsnames.ora file, but they were not showing up. Remembering the tip listed above, I scoured my directories for a rogue tnsnames.ora file. I didn’t find one.

There was no rhyme or reason to what was going on. Then I remembered that I had some places some Net8 files in the /var/opt/oracle directory - the directory where the oratab file is created in Solaris - for some clustering issues. I looked in that directory, and lo and behold, there was a rogue tnsnames.ora file. I deleted it and created a symbolic link back to the $TNS_ADMIN/tnsnames.ora file. Bingo! Everything started resolving correctly.

Some later investigation showed that I did not have my $TNS_ADMIN environment variable set to $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin. I guess that it’s not set automatically by executing the oraenv shell command that sets other Oracle environment variables. And when it is not set, apparently Oracle looks in /var/opt/oracle for Net8 files first.

Very Interesting. It took me an hour to track down.