Amardeep Sidhu's Tech 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 ;) ...

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. ...

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 [sourcecode language=‘css’] tar -xvf rlwrap-0.28.tar.gz [/sourcecode] It will create a directory with the same name. cd to the directory and run [sourcecode language=‘css’] ./configure [/sourcecode] ...

Well, here I am listing down the important tools and utilities I seem to use on the daily basis and without them life on internet & laptop really seems to be stuck, sort of :( 1. Winamp: No need to say anything. Winamp is possibly the best and lightest mp3 (these days videos also) player. Just run Winamp in the system tray and enjoy 2. Winrar: Utility to uncompress compressed files. Earlier winzip was my favorite but recently I swichted to Winrar as Winzip doesn’t support rar format. I am pretty happy using it. ...

I was going through Eddie Awad’s blog. There was one post about an article about NO_DATA_FOUND exception in Oracle. Both the posts you can find here and here. Do read. It is really interesting. Sidhu

There are times when you just can’t do anything, I repeat, you just can’t do anything. In the evening I was working on my laptop and everything was fine. Next day in the morning when I got up, switched on the laptop and clicked on IE icon, it happily gave a beautiful error message “This application failed to start because msvcrl.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem.” So it was the time for Googling about the error. Thank God I had Opera installed. After 2-3 hits I came to know that it was a trojan. Finally, there was one dll which needed to be deleted to get rid of this error message :) But after that there was some problem with IE in opening some of the sites. One option was to upgrade to IE 7 but don’t know why, I havn’t started liking IE 7 yet. So no other option left than restoring windows (I have Windows XP Media Center Edition installed). ...

When I got my Laptop, along with it also got Norton Internet Security and 2 months subscription for updates & all. Whenever I would boot up the laptop Internet Security would open the window for configuration. I kept on cancelling it for 2 weeks or so. But one fine (read not fine :( day I configured it. It was very happy. Said Thank You at the end. But the best was yet to come. After 10-15 days Windows (XP media center is installed on my Laptop) started showing signs of strain ;) It won’t start properly, after saying loading your settings it will stuck. Then I had to kill explorer.exe and start it again. With this also one strange problem that no startup items will be loaded :( I was discussing the same with one of my friend. He said that Norton must be the culprit. So I thought about uninstalling it. When I tried to uninstall it gave some strange error. Anyways it also told about one URL from where one could check details of the error. Finally when the uninstall started it gave one beautiful message “You still have 39 days of subscription left, if you uninstall the product you will not be able to reuse the subscription” :D ...

I was checking Tom Kyte’s blog. It was about an article titled A Note To Employers: 8 Things Intelligent People, Geeks and Nerds Need To Work Happily. Well first of all meaning of all three words from “define: * in Google” 1. Intelligent: having the capacity for thought and reason especially to a high degree 2. Geek: In computers and the Internet, a geekis a person who is inordinately dedicated to and involved with the technologyto the point of sometimes not appearing to be like the rest of us (non-geeks).Being a geek also implies a capability with the technology. ...