Launch chrome on a windows remote desktop

At work we often need to connect remotely to customer machine to give support. On one of this machines we share a single windows user, which can be connected on several remote desktop session at the same time.

In this situation it could happen that you double click the chrome icon on the desktop and nothing happens.

I tried to search the internet about this problem and find this (useful) link

The problem depends on the fact that we are using the same profile data on several sessions (more or less) and the solution is to launch chrome with several command line parameters.

So I have putted this line:

chrome.exe --user-data-dir=%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\%CLIENTNAME%

in a .bat file and created a shortcut on the desktop for it.

Hope it can be useful to someone else!

Oracle error ORA-04023

ORA-04023: Object could not be validated or authorized

This error suddendly showed up this week at work, while a collegue of mine was working on one of our dev databases. It was raised during a view compilation.

Since the view was joining tables and/or views from a couple of different schemas I checked the related grants and they were all ok.

Not finding any clues I searched metalink, and quickly discovered the doc. id 1610514.1 whose title is, meaningfully:

"Ora-04023 Reported while Accessing Valid Objects"

It states that the cause is:

This is issue is due to a timestamp inconsistency in the data dictionary. This timestamp inconsistency will lead to the problem when we populate the relevant cached objects and later try to select from the affected views

Nothing is told about the root cause of this problem, but at least it was a known one..

To solve the doc prescribes to run (as SYS) the script

utldtchk.sql

from the admin folder. This script extract objects affected by this "timestamp inconsistency".

Recompiling all of them eventually solved the problem.

New life for my TF201 tablet

Back in 2011 I bought this ASUS TF201 transformer prime tablet. I had no specific need for it. I just wanted to have an experience with this "new" (at that time) gadget. I was also fascinated by the attachable keyboard. Actually I have never used it that much. Recently I had the opportunity to travel abroad, and bringing it with me seemed a good idea. I switched it on but I realized it was far too slow for any use.

Moreover the obsolete Android version (4.1) prevented me from installing any dev utilities, like Termux. Browsing the internet I stumbled upon this page which shows a (not easy) path for upgrade this tablet to a more recent Android version. I am not an expert of flashing roms, but I did understand that there was the risk to permanently damage ("brick" as they say) the tablet. After a brief thinking with myself I decided to take the risk, since I saw no utility in leaving the tablet in its current state.

I started following the instructions but, at a point I was lost. The tablet does not boot anymore. The only access was from the apx mode. I was desperate, I thought I have broken it. After days and days of blog post reading and googling, I realized that I have not read carefully the initial prerequisites of the guide: the bootloader had to be version 10.4.2.18 I overlooked this, (it is written in a very very smal fonts on the screen) and that was the problem!

So I found the official (the last released) Android update from Asus site. It is a zip file. I had to figure out how to give it to TWRP recovery. The first attempt failed. The zip file contains another zip. The last zip has to be extracted. I putted it on a sd micro card and this time TWRP was able to flash it. The tablet rebooted with the original, now updated, Android version. At this point I restarted the guide, and finally I was able to finish and now my tablet is more has Android 7. With all the advices of the guide, it is now very usable, and I am planning to use it in my next trip to Paris.

This took me several days and evenings of work, but now my tablet enjoys a brand new life! Thanks a lot to the poster of the guide! And shame to Asus! This ought to be an official update!

Postgresql & Oracle

I've developed (together with two colleagues) a win32 application framework (a kind of ERP) which was named "Ouverture". It is heavily based on Oracle (stored procedure, temporary tables, view (very complex ones)).
I'll blog about this product later. For now I would like to recap my findings in the, it seems, not so explored area of "link between Postgresql and Oracle".
My company asked me to investigate the possibility of querying the Oracle tables, used by Ouverture, from a Postgresql database (pg from here on). Please note that the link should go strictly this way, not from Oracle to Pg.
I started searching the net and found, for my surprise, that there is no *built in* support in pg for linking an external database but there is a "contrib" project called dbi_link (). Knowing nothing about pg, perl and DBI I've started studying this package. First thing that I noticed was that there is very low activity about it: last available version is from year 2007 and there is very low activity on forums. I've also contacted the dbi-link author, Dave Fetter, but he doesn't seem much willing to help me .... maybe he is too busy.
See next posts (I don't like long posts :-)) to see my dbi-link experience...
See you

Les Miserables

I've started reading The Miserables by Victor Hugo. As I started I was a little skeptic
but I rapidly turned to enthusiastic.
It is a strange reading, sometimes painful (like some Puccini or Verdi opera's libretto). Most ofter it's a pleasure. I know nothing about Hugo, I don't like reading
critical essays (or simply book introductions) before reading the book itself.
Maybe I'll read after. For now it is amazing how Hugo seems to trying to keep together a strong religiosity with the admiration for the french revolution ... also it is amazing how much mental prejudices he had , unconsciounsly (does this word exist in english ?) ....
a lesson for today and for every time ... we all have mental blindnesses, we simply can't see them, no matter how "open minded" we are (or claim to be) ..

Borges, Bacon and Oracle

Today a colleague of mine called me to watch a strange problem. A Delphi written program refused, on his pc, to connect to an Oracle instance giving the error:
"ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified".
I checked the connection string and it seemed correct. I tried connecting with tnsping and then with sqlplus and they all succeed.
Then I checked the same program on my pc, and there it worked. At that moment a bell rang in my head. I came back at my colleague's desk and looked at the folder name in which the program was stored. It was "Jobtime WF (exe)".
It seems that Oracle OCI doesn't like path with parenthesis. Changing the folder name fixed the error.
I had already met this error in year 2000, when I started working with Oracle, but from then I forgot it. This kind of thing happened to me quite often.
I mean I often feel that some technical detail become new just because I forgot it.
It always reminds to me a quote used by epigraph by Borges, at the beginning of "El Aleph":

Salomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an immagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

Back from Sicily!

We have been in Sicily the last week of June.
We started from Palermo and then moved to the beautiful "Riserva dello Zingaro" regional park.
After that we have spent three days in Favignana. We have been also to Erice, Segesta, Mozia and, finally, Selinunte.
I have just published on picasaweb a first album of photographs. This is the first time I use this feature and I must admit that ... it's funny !
Bye
PS
Oops I forgot the album link, here it is:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Nicola.Farina64/2008JuneSicily