But, I do know that if you put Townes Van Zandt into Pandora, you will get a damn good radio station to drink whisky to

You can even skip the whisky,it’s that good

Now as you were

So ends Bachelor Week 2009.  Cherie has been out of town for a week now, attending to Josh and Erin’s wedding.  I’ve kept myself occupied with puppies and crab fishing.  The weather has been fairly decent, up until yesterday when the rain started coming down around noon and didn’t ever really stop. 
However, it feels like most of my time is being taken up by work these days.  I’m working on a project that requires a separate database, so I’ve been looking into using PostgreSQL.  I’m really enjoying working with it so far; the syntax and style has some similarities with Oracle and I like the MVCC locking model that it uses (I’m not a big fan of the hard row-locks/table-locks that the various MySQL engines use). 

UPDATE: I began writing this post shortly before shit hit the fan.  Published for historical purposes

Last time we left off where we phpize the oci8 package.  Now we’re going to compile and install it

At this point, you’ll probably want to set some environment variables in bash.  There’s some debate about whether you need to set the $ORACLE_HOME or not, or whether you should put environment variables in /etc/profile or a script in /etc/profile.d.   I’m not going to get into that debate but if you have a preference or concern then be my guest.  For all others:
root@sonicroot@sonic:/opt/oracle/src/oci8-1.3.4# cd /etc/profile.d/
root@sonic:/etc/profile.d# vi oracle.sh
and put this in the file:

Code:

This will setup the oracle environment variables every time someone logs in.  For now, you can either setup these variables by hand at the commandline or make this script executable and run it with sh ./oracle.sh

EDIT: I’ve become hopelessly lazy with this guide and so I’m just going to cut it sort and sweet.  Basically the problem I had was that I could get the PHP CLI to connect to the oracle server but I couldn’t get the Apache instance to access Oracle. Solution?  Go to /etc/apache2 and edit the envvars file.  Enter the following lines:

Code:

I’ll give you some references.  First, is the how-to in the Ubuntu forums.  It was what I basically followed for compiling oci,etc.

Ubuntu OCI guide

Next is a site I found useful, though it is focusing on OCI and Ruby.  I believe it tipped me off to the Apache variables fix I just showed you.
Ruby and OCI

There you go.  Leave a comment if you have more questions

Another busy couple of months.  Since it’s not cold anymore, I decided to change the blog theme to something less ‘icy/cold’.  Not crazy about it yet, but it might grow on me.  Had a good time with my parents, who came down for my birthday and spent a long weekend here.  Actually ended up getting a lot of stuff done with the house

• Moved the shower head that was mounted where a bathtub faucet would go (still haven’t been able to figure that one out yet…)
• Ran some new RG-6 coax through the house.  I was suffering some pretty bad internet performance with the old RG-59 that the house was wired with.  Now I can get all the lulz
• Put a light in the fan in the upstairs-front-porch.

My parents also bought us some porch furniture and a little outside garden shed for…the garden stuff.  It will at least be good as an interim solution ’till the actual shed is constructed.  My dad and I debated buying a shed vs. building one and we both agreed that it will probably be easier to build one from scratch then figure out how to move pre-built parts from the front to the back yard.  One downside of the house is that the property ‘funnels’ from the street to the back, instead of being straight parallel lines.  So walking on the side of the house from the front to the back your path becomes narrower.  This fact will pose yet more interesting engineering problems when I throw together a privacy fence this year

The next big home improvement project I want to tackle is the yard.  It’s pretty much an overgrown mess.  There’s about a 4 sq ft patch of grass in the back yard (and fairly sparse at that) and the rest is either loose soil or covered in weeds.  Further complicating things is the invasive tree species Cinnamomum camphora, which has a nasty habit of sprouting up all over the damned yard and killing everything.  Since the camphor tree is about the size of the house, it’s something I’ll have to live with in the front yard.  However, I might go medieval on one in the back yard when i put up a new fence.

In other exciting news, we ended up getting a puppy, which we have named Greta.  Though I lovingly refer to her as “The Great Satan” in no small part due to her love of chewing everything (including me and our other dog Otis).  WARNING: Adorable puppy pictures after the break

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First off, I have no idea what is in the stimulus bill.  I’ve heard wildly varying accounts, mostly from the Drudge Report, about mice in California and Tax Credits for illegal immigrants.  Since the final version isn’t finished yet, I’m not going to dig too deeply.  I did find this easily accessible text of the house bill.

I did find, through the graces of the Washington Post, this wonderful little video that a spokesman for Congressmen Eric Cantor sent to a reporter in response to his overlord’s position on the stimulus bill.  It may be safe to say ‘ex-spokesman’ at this point.