Now I Really Do Feel Old

I was listening to "Hard Attack" channel 27 on Sirius satellite radio this morning on my way to the bus stop. Then the guy comes on and says they're about to play some classic metal from a long time ago, and then they play Vote With A Bullet by Corrosion of Conformity.

I start thinking to myself, "c'mon, it wasn't that long ago!" I remember borrowing that CD from Greg Miller like it was yesterday. I must have listened to it a thousand times before begrudgingly giving it back to its rightful owner. But that wasn't yesterday, it was when we were in high school in the early 90's. In fact, that was way back when people borrowed CD's from friends instead of "sharing" them as mp3's over peer-to-peer networks. Since Greg wanted his back, I actually went out and bought my own -- how many high school kids do that anymore? Holy crap, I AM OLD!

Oracle on Windows Authentication Woes (And Solutions)

For my current project, I need to have my own development Oracle instance. Instead of carving out space on one of the servers, I figured it's a good time to just bite the bullet and install Oracle XE on my desktop (Windows XP). For the most part, it has been a fairly painless experience.

Except that several times already, when trying to run imports or simply connecting via SQL-Plus, I get the following crap:

C:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\BIN>sqlplus XXXXXX/XXXXX

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Mon Mar 17 08:50:29 2008

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

ERROR:
ORA-12638: Credential retrieval failed

The first time it happened, I simply restarted the OracelServiceXE and OracleXETNSListener services. Then it happened again today, and restarting services had no effect. And I am NOT rebooting my whole machine just to get Oracle to work.

But thanks to someone named "babu george" on this forum, I fixed the issue quite simply by getting rid of NTS authentication.

In your sqlnet.ora file, simply comment out the (NTS) line and create a new line with (NONE) in place of (NTS).

#SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES = (NTS)
SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES = (NONE)

Alas, don't get me started on how much I love Windows.

Trashy Yet Effective Oracle Trick

I need to post this so I can remember it next time I screw up...

I was running an Oracle import (imp) on my local Oracle 10g XE instance today, and realized I did it incorrectly and imported everything into the SYSTEM schema. Oh crap, I can't just wipe everything out, it's my SYSTEM schema! I need surgical precision to only remove the crap and leave all the Oracle stuff unscathed.

I could go through and drop each table I created, but there were hundreds.

Then, like a tornado in a trailerpark, it hit me. An idea that walks the fine line between genius and insanity. All the new table names started with a common prefix, which for sake of discussion I will call "BLAH_". So in Squirrel I run the following query:

select 'drop table system.' || table_name || ';' from all_tables where owner = 'SYSTEM' and table_name like 'BLAH_%'

Then cut and paste the results back into the Squirrel query runner and run the results as a script.

I'm sure there's an "official" way to accomplish the same thing, but screw that, this was extremely quick and kind of fun.

Trashy yet effective.

Whores, Spitzer, Swallows

I don't usually dive into politics on here, but everyone loves a good high profile prostitution sting....

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With Gov. Spitzer, a.k.a. Client #9, getting busted using the services of a high class prostitution ring, some serious questions need to be answered. I'm not talking about the normal political crap like will he be impeached?, will he resign?, will he be arrested?, will other high-profile clients be outed?, etc. I'm mean questions like, what is the difference between a high priced hooker and a regular street hooker, anyways?

Really, they both take money from strangers and then slide down the dudes' meat-poles. They collect more DNA samples in a day than the CSI folks collect all year. That's a nasty, filthy whore, whether it costs $50 or $5000.

So what does the extra cash buy?

• Is there such a thing as a higher class of venereal disease?
  
• Does draining your man-goo feel better when you also drain your bank account?
  
• Is it somehow less disgusting to think a thousand rich dudes impaled the whore with their man-swords, as opposed to a thousand regular dudes?
  
• Do they share a glass of champagne with you after the deed, instead of hitting the crack pipe and watching Jerry Springer?
• Do you get a souvenir hat or t-shirt or something? Like when you ride a roller coaster and they snap your picture coming down the big drop off?
  

Hindsight being 20/20 and all, I'm guessing the soon-to-be-former-governor of New York is probably thinking a 6 pack of Corona, a bottle of hand lotion, and some adult pay-per-view might have been the safer choice for a night out on the town.