I’m known to have a set of headphones glued to my head while working.  Sadly on a daily basis I find myself blowing my ears out when I hit a tab in VMWare and the PC speaker beep goes off.  Luckily I found this command to disable that from happening ever again:

$ echo "blacklist pcspkr"|sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

I’ve added that to all my VM templates so hopefully I’ll save my hearing from now on.  Pretty sad that this is my only blog post this year.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working with Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) lately and I’m putting together some walkthroughs / tips and tricks on working with the product.  I’ll start with a quick and short one today.  Sometimes DBA’s get wild hairs, I think its in their nature, the just decide they want to rename a database and tell all the developers that they need to make updates to their code / jdbc data sources to reflect that.  Inside an OIM deploy with OC4J there are two files you need to change to make this happen.  They are:

• <OH>/j2ee/<oim container>/config/data-sources.xml (2 places)
• <OIM HOME>/xellerate/config/xlconfig.xml (1 place)

If you search for ‘jdbc:oracle’ in each of the files you should be able to find these references pretty quickly.  These are also the places you need to modify things if you are migrating into a RAC environment or if your IP address / hostname / port change on the database.

Hopefully I’ll have something with more meet to post this weekend.

Click this link. That is all.

Well, part of starting Ora-Click I wanted to start a series of blogs covering the top 5 articles of the week. Due to some technical difficulties I’m a week late, but I promise to make it extra extra interesting. So without further ado here are the top 5.

1. The big story of the week wasn’t Jakes post on the “8 Things” but actually the User Your Nose to Install an Oracle Database article. Some people claim that Oracle software is among the hardest to install. I tend to agree many of the earlier releases (<8) were a pain in the butt, but Oracle’s come a long way since then. Just to prove it Howard posted a link showing exactly how easy it is. I would love to link to it, but as I’ll discuss later Howard has shut down his blog until the “8 Things” craze slows down. When he gets back to earth the article can be found here.
2. The second article covers the new fixes and features of the latest mix.oracle.com release. I’m proud to be member 41 on the site and really think its a great way to get open and honest customer feedback. As the site grows there’s definitely some new features that need to be added to help manage consuming all the new content but knowing the AppsLab guys they’re already working on it. I would love to see Oracle open up the source to mix, as suggested by Jake here. I know that Anthony and Rich are overloaded fixing bugs and working on new features, it would be great to have the Oracle (more…)

Let the barrage of OpenWorld begin. Between two internal preparation meeting tomorrow, finalizing my slides tonight, and other various activities getting ready, the Oracle World barrage has begun. I’m sure many people have seen that I’m speaking this year, and for my first year presenting I’m going to be pretty busy. I have 4 official presentations and I’m hoping to get a fifth with the Unconference event going on. I’m going to try and spend a good chunk of my time in sessions. This is a really exciting year with all the 11g Application Server things being demoed and I can finally start talking about all the cool stuff I’ve been building in the beta period. If you want to meet up give me a ring during the week, my cell number is over in the right or feel free to come and heckle me at one of my sessions.

I’m also planning on attending the Ace Dinner, AppsLab Get Meetup, and Oracle Blogger Meetup. I’m hoping to chronicle the debauchery of the week via all my feeds, here, on twitter, and through flickr. I can’t wait to see everyone there!

As many of you know, I’m a car guy just as much as I am a technology guy. Back in 98 I had a full pc in my car playing Mp3s with a 20×2 LCD touch screen and I’ve already proven I ran replace my keys with RFID, so needless to say I love the convergence of technology and automobiles. But this one actually scares me. This week OnStar (the GM in vehicle cell service) announced that they’ve paired with law enforcement to slow down your vehicle if it’s stolen or involved in a high speed chase.

http://jalopnik.com/cars/gadgets/onstar-unveils-new-stolen-vehicle-slowdown-system-308640.php

While initially it sounds cool and helps to ensure your car doesn’t end up upside down or in a guard rail during a chase, what worries me is the system itself.  Every OnStar vehicle is essentially equipped with a cell phone that has access to the onboard ECM, PCM, etc.  The last gen GM vehicles were supposed to be highly secured so that no one except GM could tune them.  Well the codes were cracked within a couple months and the aftermarket tuners are off and running.  I can just envision this system being cracked and having thousands  of GM vehicles disabled on our freeways during rush hour.  I’m sure OnStar has spent millions on their design to make sure this doesn’t happen, but as we know, don’t tell a geek he can’t do something because he’ll throw your millions in code out the window with a simple embarrassing back door.

If anyone at GM is listening I’d be more than happy spending a weekend looking through the code making sure there aren’t any issues

Well, as many of you know, Dan Norris and I used to work together at ITC. He decided to go join some company known for handing out mints that tend to appear in peculiar places. In his post today he linked to the new site I’ve been working on. It’s obviously not live, but I linked in the blog section tonight. I still have some work to do on the templates in both the blog and wiki sections, some organization of the wiki, a couple entries in the FAQ, and a digg style rating system for users. I’ve worked out all my kinks with Amazon’s S3 service for the torrent downloads, now I’m in the process of uploading the initial VMs.

The first ones to be released will be a generic Oracle Enterprise Linux Update 5 VM with all the pre-configuration completed for database and application server installs. Next up will be a Portal 10.1.4 / BI 10.1.2.2.0 vm, an 11g database vm, and then hopefully Dan’s RAC vms.  The IdM VMs will come after that.  I’ve also had offers from Mark and John @ Rittmanmead.com for some of their BI and Data Warehousing VMs, hopefully I can catch up with them for dinner before the BIWA summit.

I’ve been busy with a whole bunch of client stuff lately, when Dan left ITC he also left me with a pretty healthy pipeline to deliver to, and I had already been booked for a client through the end of the year. (BTW, any Fusion Middleware guys need a job?) Needless to say, I’ve been a little busy lately and the horrible hotel upload speeds haven’t helped the situation in pushing things to Amazon.

So for now, go ahead, start using it. Tell me whats good, whats bad, what works, what doesn’t work, and I’ll do my best to keep on top of things. The OracleVMs.com project forum (http://www.oraclevms.com/forums/project.php?projectid=8) is the best place to log bugs, issues and feature requests. Feel free to start putting them there and I’ll slot them into the release cycle.

Is anyone else disappointed that there is a two way password hash for the Oracle Community from Leveragesoft (http://oracleopenworldconnect07.leveragesoftware.com)? I would tend to bet that there is actually no hash at all and its just plain text in a database somewhere.

It kills me how many companies still run the risk of plain text passwords in the database.  How many times have you had your credit card company read you your personalized pin back to you.  That should never happen, they should have to put it into an application and it matches the one was hash in the database or LDAP server.  I’d be happy to help them encryption or federation or any of the billions of solutions to the problem.

BTW- Whatever Dan Norris posts on this, it was my point first that brought this up.

I’m just going to post this up here because this is something I do all the time and for some reason it will never stick in my head. The idea is that I have a server root that I want to forward to another URL with mod_rewrite. Yeah, I know, I could just write it in mod_alias or a quick meta tag or JavaScript or whatever, but I live the clean mod_rewrite solution that I can bake right into a httpd.conf or .htaccess file. So here is it, whenever you want to forward something like: http:///www.mywebsite.com to http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal here it is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal [R,L]

OK, enough, done…night.

PS- As you can tell I’m a bit frustrated with myself over this one. It’s only about the 100th time I’ve done something like this and I can never remember the syntax.

Wow, just wow has its been incredibly busy lately.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be bouncing coast to coast every weekend.  This week I’m at Redwood Shores working with the new 11g FMW Beta.  I seriously underestimated the size of this release, just about everything is getting turned on its head for the better.  Thats about all I can say about it…

I got word on Friday that my info has finally been added to the list of Oracle Regional Directors (http://www.oracle.com/technology/community/ofm_directors/index.html#Topper).  I feel honored to be part of the group and can’t wait to start fulfilling all the requirements around it.

Next week I’m in Daytona for the Kaleidescope Conference speaking on IDM, AJAX and WS-Security.  These are the same presentations I did at Collaborate last month and got some decent reviews (also the same ones posted on this site if you can’t make it to the conference).  On a side note, in the spirit of Daytona Dan Norris and myself are planning on renting motorcycles one of the nights we are there.  If anyone else wants to join in the fun let me know, I think the cost for the day was between $100 – $150.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking about starting a website that would link technical people together.  There are a lot of great traveling consultants that are in a different city every week with a lot of Oracle product knowledge that you might not even know are working at the place next door.  Does anyone think building a site around linking technical people up for dinner in an area would be a good idea?  It would be something along with the lines of LinkedIn and It’s Just Lunch.  I’m just thinking out loud, its been something thats been in the back of my head for a while and keeps popping up as I’ve been flying around lately.