As some of you may already know, I found myself involved in a somewhat consensual relationship with a boat.  I used ’somewhat consensual’ there, because everyone understands sexual innuendo, truly making it the lowest form of wit; also, it seems to aptly describe a situation in which I owned a boat that utterly refused to go into the water.  It’s like going to a harem and ending up hanging curtains and fixing plumbing; it’s not like you can ask for the money back (Or can you? I’m only halfway through this.  I’ll let you know what I find out).

So anyways the boat.  It was a 27ft Bayliner US Yachts, from ‘81 I believe.  It had been blown up in a cove by a tropical storm, but was apparently fine.  It was here that I made a critical misjudgment.  See, the Florida Wildlife Commission had a problem with this boat being all beached up in the woods as such, and was real specific about getting it the hell outta there before they did and sent you the bill.  So, I’ve got this guy telling me:
a) he’s got a boat
b) it needs a little work (But it sails!)
c) it’s free.
d) It’s in the woods, but it can be gotten out

Do you see what I missed?  It’s the part where I ask myself “Why isn’t the boat out already if it’s so easy to get out?" 

Answer: It’s not easy at all.

What followed was an exercise in futility and madness; the fellow who had ‘given’ me the boat was apparently a fine connoisseur of cursed, godforsaken watercraft of all sorts.  I honestly believe on the three attempts to move the boat, more time was spent fixing the boat we were using than getting the other boat out of the woods.

And that’s nothing to say of the locals

So, the boat, with all of the good intentions, was cut like the loss that it was.  It’s a shame really, but it was in no shape to be salvaged by me.  Perhaps it has found itself a better home in fairer seas.

I, however, think it’s still stuck up in that Goddammed cove.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years everyone, I’ll be here all night. Drink specials between 5-8

Okay, so the new B2Evo looks totally different then the old one.  They’ve implemented a new fangled ‘widget’ system, and it’s going to take a little bit to get it back to the way it was

Stupid upgrade

SRSLY GUYS!

Man, I’m terrible with the blogging.  Basically I’ve been working, dealing with boats (more on that later), and other nonsense.  But for now we have a wonderful how-to guide for something that took me FOREVER to work right on my box.  Oracle doesn’t officially support Ubuntu, and there’s quite a bit of half working solutions out there, and virtually none for making sure your mod-php-apache scripts will run correctly.  This will hopefully fix that.

My setup involved a rather plain Intrepid box, VPN into my work to access Oracle databases and SVN, and a local Apache webserver to use the SVN checkout.  I won’t cover VPN, as the new Network Manager for Intrepid makes using pptp VPN a lot easier to setup.  Also this is NOT a guide about how to install oracle on your Ubuntu box.  I don’t have any requirement for that at the moment and there seems to be several good guides out there that will likely apply to Intrepid.

Also, this guide is no more then a combination of several guides plus my own contributions. Credit will be given here:

First login as a root user using sudo

user@sonic:~$ sudo -i

Install a few necessary packages.  The OCI module will have to be built from sources in PECL so we’ll need a couple of build packages:

root@sonic:~# apt-get install apache2
root@sonic:~# apt-get install php5-common php5 php5-dev libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cli
root@sonic:~# apt-get install build-essential php-pear libaio1

Some guides say you need to install libaio-dev.  If you have problems, then do it.
Next we’re going to download some stuff from Oracle.  I use Intrepid x64, so I went here.  You’ll want to grab at least the basic_client and the SDK.  I grabbed the sql plus libraries as well; seriously, you don’t use sqldeveloper for your db scripting do you?

The latest version of the client as of this writing is 11.1.0.7.0. Create a directory /opt/oracle and move all the zip files there and then run this command:

root@sonic:/opt/oracle# unzip \*.zip

You’ll get a fancy directory called instantclient_11_1 and you’ll rename it to instantclient.  Go into that directory and make some symbolic links:

root@sonic:/opt/oracle/instantclient# ln -s libclntsh.so.11.1 libclntsh.so
root@sonic:/opt/oracle/instantclient# ln -s libocci.so.11.1 libocci.so

So we’re down to the business of compiling the php oci module.  Run mkdir /opt/oracle/src, cd to the directory you just created, and then:

root@sonic:/opt/oracle/src# pecl download oci8
root@sonic:/opt/oracle/src# tar xvf oci8-1.3.4.tgz

root@sonic:/opt/oracle/src# cd oci8-1.3.4

root@sonic:/opt/oracle/src/oci8-1.3.4# phpize


That’s pretty good for now.  The next installment we’ll make the oci8 extension, set environment variables, and test that everything works