Our company was using Rational Clearcase for version control about 6 years ago. The developers decided it was way to clunky, error prone and WAY too expensive. We introduced CVS and it has been working fine for a few years now. CVS is widely known, stable and simple. I looked into using SVN a few years ago but the …

For those people out there designing user interfaces, web frontends or anything else displayed on a screen: About 8% of all males are color blind. This could mean that because of a simple color choice, 8% of your target audience (customers) could have serious difficulty in using your design. 5% of all males can't …

Just found this funny page where you can take a Programmer Personality Check. My programmer personality type is DHTB, which is explained as follows: _ You're a Doer. You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the …

If your are "fortunate" enough to have to delete a lot of file from a directory on a Unix system, you are likely to encounter the "Parameter List Too Long" problem. This problem is caused by Unix trying to replace the "*" you just used by all names in the directory. This list is then …

Just now, I was listening to the Java Posse podcast about the ab5k screenlet framework for Java, and I am finally convinced that software developers are a bunch of crazy, unrealistic, memory-hungry, cpu cycle stealers and by lack of normal people telling them otherwise are proud of it, too. The problem? Look at this …

Yesterday a collegue of mine discovered a very ugly problem when storing BigDecimals from a Java 1.5 program into an Oracle 10g database. Not by experience, but by reading the article at http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t88158.html. We had not encountered the problem ourselves, but when passing the dredded 12500000 …

If your administration is as good as anybodies, you are bound to loose the not-so-frequently used password for the SYS and SYSTEM users of oracle. Here are a few ways I found to re-set those passwords: Method 1: SQLPLUS (Tested on AIX Oracle 9.2.0.1.0) Log into the database server as a user belonging to 'dba' [unix ] …

Today, a collegue of mine had a really strange nullpointer problem trying to call a stored procedure in an Oracle 10 database using iBATIS Java 2.2.0. What she had was a normal JavaBean, like so: package com.rolfje.foo public class BarBean { private String barName; private Long barId; ... setters/getters here ... } A …

Because the update process of my old site was much more hassle than typing a post, I noticed that my blog was better maintained than my site. Therefore I have decided to redirect traffic to my domain (rolfje.com) to my blog. You can still find the original content of www.rolfje.com at http://www.xs4all.nl/~rrolfje/. To …

Does Oracle complain about not being able to drop a table for a currently connected user, but you are sure you disconnected? Do the sessions "hang" in "inactive" state? Just log on as system, and execute the following query: SELECT 'ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION ''' || sid || ',' || serial# || '''; --', …