ORA-01033 ORACLE initialization or shutdown in progress

Encountered this issue todya/ The verbiage indicates that Oracle is starting up (or down), but waiting doesn’t work. sqlplus sys/xxxxxxx as sysdba Replace the ‘xxxxxxx’ part with your actual password. If sqlplus command is not found, it’s probably a problem with your environment variables, but that’s another can of worms altogether. Let’s see whether the db can be mounted: SQL> alter database mount; ERROR at line 1: ORA-01100: database already mounted OK, so the database needs to be opened too, whatever that means:

RHEL to CentOS

I installed RHEL today, but to get updates (via yum), a subscription is required. Not CentOS however. Some Google-ing uncovered this article, which pretty much works, except I had to make a few edits here and there. # Remove cached packages yum clean all # Create /root/centos/ mkdir ~/centos && cd ~/centos # Import CentOS's GPG key wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.4/os/i386/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5 rpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5 # Download packages wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.4/os/i386/CentOS/centos-release-5-4.el5.centos.1.i386.rpm wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.4/os/i386/CentOS/centos-release-notes-5.4-4.i386.rpm wget http://mirror.

Eclipse's "Open Resource" in Komodo Edit

The thing I like about Eclipse is its “Open Resource” shortcut. As an IDE, it’s always felt… heavy. I can’t seem to get Mint/Eclipse/PHP Developer Tools to play nice, so I’m trying out this new IDE, Komodo Edit. This doesn’t work so well with CakePHP, but at least there is code completion. Now, on to the good stuff. You can duplicate “Open Resource” by creating a project and defining a shortcut:

DIY-ing a mid range gaming PC

About a year ago, I led myself to believe that I’d find the time to play Fallout 3 on this new gaming PC that I’d build. Here are the parts that I’d picked, with my dear friend Eddie’s help, circa December 2008: Part Price GPU Gainward 4850 512MB 244 CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 474 MotherBoard Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P 0 RAM Corsair PC2-6400 DDR2-800 (2x2GB) 128 HDD WD Caviar Black 640GB 138 Power Supply Vantec 500N ION2+500W 75 Case 3R System K400 59 The total is SGD 1118, excluding an optical drive, monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers.

Debian-based distro adventures

Since my previous post I’ve tried: MEPIS 8; KDE 3, based on Debian 5; Ubuntu 9.04; GNOME 2, based on Debian 5; Linux Mint 7: GNOME 2, based on Ubuntu 9.04; Kubuntu 8.04; KDE 3, based on on Ubuntu 8.04. I’ve compared MEPIS 8 and Ubuntu 9.04, in what was called an unfair comparison by some. I think some of the commenters even indicated that Ubuntu 9.04 would’ve come up tops; I beg to differ.

302 error in CakePHP with SWFUpload

I encountered this issue in a recent project. Basically I use SWFUpload to post files to a CakePHP controller. It worked beautifully, until I removed this one line in beforeFilter(): $this->Auth->allow("swfupload"); I was using the Auth component, and without the line above to allow unauthenticated access to the controller action, then we have a problem. Hope this helps somebody then.