Archive for the ‘Working’ Category

What’s Simeon been up to?

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Well thanks for asking. But only because you asked, I’ll give you the short answer, because trust me, I know your busy, and I really appreciate you dropping by.

So we flew from New Zealand to Peoria, Illinois, USA, landed in some of the colder weather they have had. Not the coldest, but an aeroplane did slide off the end of the runway and go into the ditch on the morning of our arrival. Our bags also were “delayed’

Our temporary housing is in a not so nice B grade apartment complex, we can hear the people above’s every move, even their talking at times, but not what they are saying. Also noted on that, was that from the hallway you can hear everything that anybody on the floor is saying. Interesting experience there.

We looked at a few houses, not many to rent in the area’s we wanted to live. There are quite a few houses for sale, but we are not ready to commit that much to this location (yet). So we are renting a house bigger than we need, but it’s nice, and a nice area with a nice school.

The kids started school on Thursday last week, which was as good for them as Michaela. There was a little bit of cabin fever going on.

We have been shopping for lots of house hold things, spending large amounts in shops to find specials on the next day or two. Slightly maddening, and yes some places will retrospectively give discounts, but not all. Really it’s just annoying to be spending so much money in a short time period, and knowing you can’t get the best time to buy discounts…

Which bring us to the Social Security Number, which we needed to wait before applying, which means three weeks into the adventure we/I don’t have it yet, but nearly everything needs/wants it. Which means important things have to wait. So frustrating.

Oh, and things are beyond crazy busy at work.. and there is so much US HR paperwork to compete, and it’s all made harder by the fact I’m not stationed at a Trimble location.

It can only get better.

Our team got called Death Eaters

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

One of our regular management people (that comes over from the US) came into the office today, purposely not wearing black, and informed our team of this, that she was not going to be dragged down by us Death Eaters.

Hmmm, if that’s not a warning shot over the bow, I’m not sure what is. Quick team huddle later, we are now positive outwards, as we don’t want to be that team that always complains, and everything is always going wrong.

Not a very good label to be stuck with.

But never mind, everything’s still full-on chaos on the inside, what management does not like knowing will now stop hurting us…..

Remote connection to Oracle 10g Express via ODBC

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

For some strange reason the Oracle 10g Express installation will not run the configuration web client for me but it works all fine for the testing folks. But it installs happily in a virtual PC, and it runs/configures just fine.

Now to connect from my PC I need some client stuff. On the Oracle 10g Express page it has a client download, which you would think would do the business. But does not. The current approach in the office is to install the complete Express server and just ignore the server parts. That idea stinks, so with some help from a co-worker I got the correct option work.

Install the Instant Client, for ODBC (god bless VB6.0 applications) you need to:

  1. Download the Instant Client Package – Basic and Instant Client Package – ODBC
  2. unzip them to C:\Oracle\ and the will make a instantclient_10_2 subdirectory. The resulting directory C:\Oracle\instantclient_10_2 will be referred to as <dir> from now on.
  3. run <dir>\odbc_install.exe
  4. create a file in <dir> called tnsnames.ora with the contents
    Name Of TNS =
    (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = your_server_name)(PORT = 1521))
    (CONNECT_DATA =
    (SERVER = DEDICATED)
    (SERVICE_NAME = XE)
    )
    )
    replacing your_server_name with the name/ip address of you remote server. You can name you TNS with a sensible name by replacing Name Of TNS
  5. Add <dir> to the PATH environment variable
  6. Add new environment variable TNS_ADMIN with value <dir>
  7. Now you can use the Data Source (ODBC) tool to setup the DSN like via the Oracle in instantclient 10_2 Driver

Done!

Updated: Changed the naming the TNS part to be correct.

Machine Re-pave done!

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Well the IS part of re-installing the operating system part has. Only took three goes. Something funny made it fail the first time. The second time my primary disk was named F: not C: so IS scripts didn’t work to well. Third time success!

Some of the things I’m doing differently this no. For starters I’m avoiding installing anything I can avoid.

One of those things was ScrewTurn Wiki, I had been running the Desktop Edition, and the team have been using it, so it’s now on the build machine, via IIS. Issues that needed solving:

  • Repairing .Net Framework 2.0 after installing IIS 5.1 – MS KB555583
  • Give <MachineName>\ASPNET modify privilege to the Wiki folder

Changed from using a *cough* borrowed version of CASE Studio 2 Lite to using the freeware Toad Data Modeler. Same program, same issues, but legit!

Plenty more tools I have not installed yet that I will have to, but the aim is to keep the machine fast and responsive as long as possible.

7 Days short of 1 Year….

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Well as I was told almost a year ago, “you will forget your security badge one day” when going to get a coffee from the other building… and today was that day… I had been so proud of not having forgotten it (solved by me always wearing my badge on a lanyard), I had just assumed I was wearing it. I was shocked when I found I wasn’t.

On the plus side that means I’ve been here mostly 1 year! Time fly when your having fun.