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

Javascript include redux

Today I had little accident with my ASP.NET project.
I have a master page which includes some javascript files, and several pages derived from this master page. Today, to better organize my code, I created a sub-folder in which I moved some of these pages. After doing that, these pages were no more able to include my javascript files.
After some "googling".
The include line format was this:

src="Scripts/FmMaskStorico.js"

I tried adding the tilde character:

src="~/Scripts/FmMaskStorico.js"

But with no success. It seems that ASP.NET interprets the tilde character only for server controls, while leaving to the browser the handling of script includes like this.
Another option I found was using the syntax :
src="<%=Request.ApplicationPath%>/Scripts/FmMaskStorico.js"
Unfortunately I can't use this option since I create all controls dynamically and it seems that this is not compatible with the <% %> syntax.
Well at the end I resolved deleting the static includes in the master page aspx, substituting them with some
calls to Page.ClientScript.RegisterScriptInclude.
This way I got it.
Phew .....

Privileges to analyze another schema

Yesterday I wrote a small stored procedure to gather statistics for several schemas at a customer's site.
The procedure was very simple, but trying it gaves me error:
ORA-01031 insufficient privileges

I checked that the user I was using had the "analyze any" right. To be sure I granted it again.
But I still got the error.
The database was a 9.2.0.8. Even here Metalink at the rescue, with note 203220.1.
It turned out that there was a bug. The workaround to be applied was quite obvious:
grant select any table to my user.
Not the best from the security point of view, but it fits my needs..
So, once again, thanks Metalink!