Amardeep Sidhu's Oracle blog

The very first question that may come to your mind is: what the heck this “OC” is ? Well if PC stands for Personal Computer then OC stands for Office Computer The story behind all this is:

One of my friend (He is working in a non-IT company) called me and asked how to burn a PC so that it no more works Why ? because the PC they are given is too slow & old and thats the only way they can get a new one. I thought for a while and 1 or 2 ideas came to my mind. But to dig into little more details I called my friend Vaibhav ( The guy I call to “discuss” and “know more about” all the techie things) He gave some really nice ideas. Combining all the thoughts, here is the summary of all the methods that you can use

1. Water the motherboard: Add a bit of salt to water, fill a syringe and use it to spread water on the motherboard before booting. It will blow the motherboard.
2. Stop processor’s fan: One more thing put something in the processer’s fan to stop it so that processor gets heated and it stops but here chances are more that the system will shutdown or restart.
3. Break pin(s) of processor: Another interesting and simple thing that you can do is, break one or more pins of processor and put it back in the slot.
4. Remove one or more ICs: Another thing that you can do is remove one or more ICs from the board. As the board is already so clumsy, nobody can see that anything has been removed from there.
5. Use Pencil: Use a carbon pencil and rub it on the golden plating of RAM slots, any ICs near CPU or BIOS. Its gonna spoil that
6. Cut some wire: A very simple method you can use is that cut some wires or data cables in such a way that nobody can see it

One update from comments posted by Vaibhav: Most of u might not know abt the voltage selector switch at the back of the SMPS in the CPU tower. It is there to select between 110V(american) and 230V(indian). The trick is to just switch it to 110V The SMPS has no protection of over voltage at this high level and will burn instantly.

Advantages:
-No need to open PC
-No Smoke or sparks
-Nothing can be found on u if checked(like syringe, screw driver or wire cutter)
-Instant
-One Second Job
-Can be done again and again if system repaired

Disadvantages:
-Replacing SMPS makes the system operational

Well, few things you can try if you too have an old computer in the office. Best of OC Burning

Sidhu

Well, a really old post on Google groups (uesnet:comp.databases.oracle.server). Someone posted a thread about Tom Kyte and then people responded with their thoughts (perfectly as expected). Read it here.

Sidhu

If you are crazy@*nix, 2 really interesting posts about run levels in *nix

• No runlevels??
• What is the use of runlevels?

Sidhu

Sometimes, while installing Linux, installing LILO/GRUB to MBR makes you run into loads of issues, one of the most popular being that after reboot you are not able to boot into either of the OS There is a way to use NTLDR to boot Linux, this way the MBR remains untouched and if you don’t want to see the Linux option, what you need to do is, edit your boot.ini and your are done.

For this while installing GRUB, install it to the partition where you are installing Linux, instead of MBR. Now after rebooting, Linux will not boot as the partition on which you installed GRUB is not active. What actually we will do is, copy first 512 bytes of the partition where GRUB is installed, make a bin file, copy it to C drive and add the path of the same to boot.ini. So now, when you select Linux from the list of options displayed, NTLDR will call GRUB and then GRUB will boot Linux, just like normal.

There is a small utility called bootpart that does this all for us. Here is the direct link. Extract it and go to command prompt.

C:\bootpart>dir

Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 08E8-E412

Directory of C:\bootpart

05/05/2007  04:19 PM              .
05/05/2007  04:19 PM              ..
08/01/2005  02:26 AM              32bits
08/01/2005  02:06 AM            44,544 bootpart.exe
08/01/2005  02:06 AM            12,055 bootpart.txt
08/01/2005  02:06 AM               119 bootpart.url
08/01/2005  02:06 AM               383 file_id.diz
4 File(s)         57,101 bytes
3 Dir(s)   4,188,106,752 bytes free

C:\bootpart>

Run bootpart, it will show all the partitions on the disk like

C:\bootpart>bootpart
Boot Partition 2.60 for WinNT/2K/XP (c)1995-2005 G. Vollant (info@winimage.com)
WEB : http://www.winimage.com and http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm
Add partition in the Windows NT/2000/XP Multi-boot loader
Run "bootpart /?" for more information

Physical number of disk 0 : 282d282d
0 : C:* type=7  (HPFS/NTFS), size= 25599546 KB, Lba Pos=63
1 : C:  type=c  (Win95 Fat32 LBA), size= 11751547 KB, Lba Pos=208828935
2 : C:  type=d7 , size= 1052257 KB, Lba Pos=232332030
3 : C:  type=f  (Win95 XInt 13 extended), size= 78814890 KB, Lba Pos=51199155
4 : C:  type=7   (HPFS/NTFS), size= 25607578 KB, Lba Pos=51199218
5 : C:  type=5   (Extended), size= 35736592 KB, Lba Pos=102414375
6 : C:  type=7    (HPFS/NTFS), size= 35736561 KB, Lba Pos=102414438
7 : C:  type=5    (Extended), size= 15366172 KB, Lba Pos=173887560
8 : C:  type=83     (Linux native), size= 15366141 KB, Lba Pos=173887623
9 : C:  type=5     (Extended), size= 2104515 KB, Lba Pos=204619905
10 : C:  type=82      (Linux swap), size= 2104483 KB, Lba Pos=204619968

Now the one at 8th number is my native Linux partition. Now run bootpart 8 c:\linux.bin (Here 8 is my Linux partition number and linux.bin is the name of the file which it will create in C drive) It automatically adds the entry to boot.ini So now you are ready to go. Just reboot and you will see 2 options there. Windows & Linux

Happy NTLDR’ing…

Sidhu

Found a very interesting article on Dizwell’s blog. It was about keeping history of the SQL commands in SQL Plus on Linux. It is almost very simple. Just need to download a small utility called rlwrap from here. Its a tar.gz file. Download it, un-tar using

tar -xvf rlwrap-0.28.tar.gz

It will create a directory with the same name. cd to the directory and run

./configure

Now do

make install

(I was logged in as oracle user, then did su, but it gave some errors, finally I logged in as root and it worked fine)

Now what is left to be done is make an alias for sqlplus as

alias sqlplus='rlwrap sqlplus'

Using up/down arrows, commands can be scrolled up and down just like windows. Have a look at full article here.

Cheers

Sidhu