From the monthly archives:

March 2007

Windows remote control

March 3, 2007

It helps to be able to remote control another computer - for example if you need to install or fix something on your parents/family/friends computer and you cannot travel to their location.
One-Click VNC makes it easy.
Essentially, the person that is doing the controlling:

If you are using a router with your internet connection you need to [...]

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Burning DVDs with K3B

March 3, 2007

K3B is a Linux CD/DVD burning application. I was recently using it to burn a DVD ISO image onto a DVD+RW disk, when I came across this error:
/dev/hdd: unable to proceed with recording: unable to unmount
Fatal error at startup: Device or resource busy
Unable to eject media.

This error hadn’t occurred the first time I burnt the [...]

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Recovering disk space from Oracle

March 3, 2007

Where has the disk space gone
To find out which tables are the biggest you can run this query:
SELECT
owner, segment_name, segment_type, tablespace_name,
SUM (BYTES / 1024 / 1024) sizemb
FROM dba_segments
GROUP BY owner, segment_name, segment_type, tablespace_name
ORDER BY sizemb DESC

Recovering disk space
Most of the following was learned from this forum post. As tables grow, it [...]

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Making an ISO file from a DVD

March 3, 2007

Its really easy to convert a DVD or CD into an ISO file. Its really fast too (10MB/s or 5 mins for 3.6GB).
Use the dd command to create an ISO image:
dd if=/dev/dvd of=/tmp/mydvd.iso
Now, if you want to access the contents of this ISO image you can mount it and access it like a normal DVD [...]

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SYSDATE manipulation

March 3, 2007

I quite often work with database rows that contain audit information which includes the last modified time. Oracle allows SYSDATE addition so that you can add or subtract a number of days (or fraction of days):
select SYSDATE-1 from dual;
would return the current time minus 24 hours. So, if you are in the process of [...]

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Copy and Paste

March 3, 2007

Copy and pasting code is a sure sign of a problem that you don’t want to have. If you are a development team manager or team leader, then I suggest you set up PMD reports across your code and make use of the Copy/Paste Detector.
Adding these reports to your Maven 2 build is [...]

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