Amardeep Sidhu's Tech blog

One of my friend today asked me about removing Linux partitions & GRUB (from a dual boot system) and return back to windows alone. Removing Linux involves just formatting/removing the partitions. Now to remove GRUB either do fdisk /mbr from a Windows 98 bootable CD or do fixmbr after booting into repair mode with Windows XP CD. But if you have none then to remove GRUB you will need some utility like this one and if you reboot before doing that it might make GRUB unable to boot into Windows. It will get stuck at GRUB> prompt only. So there is an option: to manually boot the OS you want (ie Windows). A quick search gave link to this thread. It involves few commands on the GRUB prompt: ...

Since long time i have been struggling to learn CSS and make my website look great. The efforts did succeed but not in a way i wanted. After playing with CSS for few months i finally switched to Joomla and yes, in a week my website looks pretty cool. CSS automated ;) . Joomla installation is pretty next-next job. Then play around a bit and you are done. Next game is to choose a nice looking template according to your taste and addition of few extensions to make yours tasks easier. (Wordpress & Joomla rock because of these free extensions). So after long time i feel satisfied with the way my website looks. Here are the screenshots of the old and present new look for archives ;) ...

A small post to let everybody know that I am alive ;) . Few weeks back, in office we were looking at one procedure which was supposed to do a lot but if executed it finished in a sec (or less ;) ). I started looking into it and just opened the procedure and started scrolling to find that the last line of the very first cursor read: where 1=2; Wonderful ! ...

Okay, so kids have stopped crying as they got some milk from their mommy: forums are better now (than when came back after an upgrade). There are reasons that it takes time for the things to be smooth. Fine. But what drives me mad is the way Oracle handled this and now ? The font size and those bloody bullets on left side which tell you if you have read the post before ? Please let me know if someone can interpret what those bullets tell and can read the forum without doing Ctrl + in Mozilla/Chrome and suffering from reading everything in large font size in IE 6 ? ...

Well, as everybody has seen, last week they have again upgraded the OTN forums. And sadly it has been handled in a very poor manner. End result is that it is running terribly slow and throwing some errors many times. In my office, i cant even open it properly may be its too heavy or some issue with the internet. Also there has been lots of hues and cries about the new point system and all. That in my opinion is fine except that speed at which forums are running should be fine. ...

My company uses Lotus Notes for email and Sametime connect as messenger for all the internal communication. Both are stupid applications and are a big resource hogs. Most of the systems are P IV with 512 MB RAM. You just run Lotus and Sametime 7 and it eats up everything. The system moves like a 386 based machine. Moreover, i was looking for Lotus short cuts today and found that there is no short cut in Lotus for Send/Receive mail. ...

I was just wondering what kind of maintenance OTN forums are undergoing ? It is 2nd day today and still not available. I checked it yesterday morning and now today morning still under maintenance. Is another new design on the way ? ;) What you say ! Just noticed that there is an announcement about the maintenance in Community Feedback forum. Due to maintenance, forums.oracle.com will be in read-only mode between 6pm PT, Aug. 8 and 6pm PT, Aug 10. Search will still be available during that time. ...

Last week i had a chance to conduct my life’s first interview. The guy was a DBA with 2 years of experience and it was supposed to be a telephonic call. I checked out his CV and wrote down around 8 questions on a paper, just to make sure that i myself don’t get confused during the interview ;) . So i called him in the evening and started with introduction and his present job profile. Then i started with the questions from the projects he had done. He was confident about the stuff he was handling and replied all the questions honestly, saying NO at points where he didn’t know or was not involved in something. One of such thing was testing the backups. He said there is no testing done as such. ...

I don’t know a bit about Apache HTTP server but faced one issue in office…so thought about writing it here ;) We are having a 3 tier setup where Oracle Application Server 10g was there on AIX 5.3. It runs Apache HTTP server and we needed to access the files outside DocumentRoot. A bit of googling revealed that we could use Alias for that. Basically we need to add the following small piece of text to httpd.conf file: ...

Our application (3 tier, Front end Forms10g and back end 10gR2) provides user with a front end to refresh the mviews. That form has 2 columns showing mview name and the comment against it. Recently i saw that while opening this front end ORA-01403 NO DATA FOUND was being raised. I opened the fmb and found that it was populating comments from DBA_TAB_COMMENTS. In 10g the comments against mviews are stored in DBA_MVIEW_COMMENTS unlike till 9i where it was in ALL_TAB_COMMENTS. So there was a little modification required. ...