I recently migrated from a homemade website to the drupal content management system (CMS). It has been a great experience thus far. Drupal is feature rich but doesn’t clutter up the interface by default. It's extensibility comes in the form of modules which are written by endusers and enthusiests.
We performed 2 big upgrades to our production Blackboard environment last week. We had been running 7.0 for almost 2 years, but it was time to upgrade to 7.3. The upgrade path was pretty straightforward except for the use of hot fixes in place of the base application pack.
While working in a development environment I came across the need to setup a clustered oracle home (Db_2) on a box with an existing single instance (Db_1). After the cluster ready services (crs) completed and I ran through the db setup I went to run netca to setup the clustered listeners. Unfortunately, the creation of the listener failed with an odd CRS error message.
I ran into a problem while attempting to apply the April 2008 Critical Patch Update. We have a 4 node RAC cluster running 10g R1. I dropped the first node out of the cluster by shutting down the instance on the first node and stopping the node apps using srvctl. The OPatch utility was patched to the requird 1.0.0.0.57 and added to the path.
In the instructions for Oracles January Critical Update database administrators might be surprised to find that downtime is required for their enviornment.
DTS's were so... simple, but with a more robust implementation comes complexity. Using Microsoft’s SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio you can create powerful automated packages known as SSIS packages which have taken the place of the DTS. To get started select new project from the File menu and choose Integrated Services project.
Recently I was working on a project that involved scrubbing data from an oracle instance for a development environment. The data needed to remain intact so that foreign key constraints would be observed, but private information needed to be randomized and/or erased to protect users.
I've made a commitment to start regularly (at least twice a week) posting about something that I have encountered related to IT. As I get used to the idea of blogging about subjects the material will become more involved, but at first I will probably keep the subjects light and introductory in nature.
Pascal, Scheme and Prolog - oh my. The last class in Computer Science at Liberty is Theory of Programming Languages. The professor, Solomon Gifford, is a graduate from Virginia Tech and tried to structure his courses in a similar fashion to that of his alma mater. At Tech, the course requires students to implement an interpreter for 4 different sample languages in 4 different base languages.
I wasn't very impressed with the stands that my local fish store was selling so I started searching online. Several sites sold beautiful solid wood stands in a variety of different styles and colors. I picked out one that I liked best and asked for a quote. The manufacturer said $1600! I decided that I would attempt to make my own...
