Lately I’ve been building a “HTPC”, or media PC if you want. A mini-ITX system designed to replace my aging XBMC XBox, which though works perfectly, alas can not handle HD content.
While waiting for the parts to arrive, I tried getting a borken screened Acer laptop working as a media center. Installed Ubuntu 9.10 and XBMC just to check if it could do the job. It couldn’t – it keeps switching off by itself, even after vacuuming it good. Not to mention the fullscreen display was SLOOOOOOOw.
AFTER I got the media-PC up and running pretty much flawlessly through HDMI, I noticed something wierd: there was a redness, a reddish hue (double to pick up googlers) in the picture. Strange. Didn’t think much about it, but tried everything on the samsung controls to correct this, and also Windows calibration. No go.
Some googling later, I found some people with the same symptoms on cnet.
Didn’t really relate it to my problem, as I’ve not used the VGA por…. Wait a minute! I did the exact same thing earlier – Ubuntu through VGA?
As of yet I haven’t bothered to replace the TV (or try a different cable), as the VGA output of my HTPC gives an excellent picture in full HD.
I’ve sent a mail to Samsung support, and they said what I expected: try a different HDMI cable, and try to reset the TV (Hold “Exit” for 15 seconds).
So take this cautionary advice: stay away from the VGA port on your Samsung LCD TV. It may just be that some connection in the HDMI ports are fried when you plug in the VGA connector.
Oracle. A pain in the arse. Had to recently create an app that would run on scheduling a couple of times a day. OK, fine. Installed Oracle11 Express Client (it’s fucking huge!) – worked fine on my dev machine. On production- not so much. The app complained it needed a newer version of the oracle libs.
Anyway, at least I got the connection working by copying the following DLLs to the app directory:
oraociei1.dll, mfc71.dll, msvcr71.dll, oci.dll, ocijdbc11.dll, ociw32.dll, orannzsbb11.dll, oraocci11.dll
Probably not all needed, but better safe than sorry. Oracle error messages can not help themselves, or anyone else, out of a wet paper bag.
Now the dreaded ORA-12154 tnsnames.ora error message. Google around and you’ll find heaps of unsolved answers. OK, figure out I need to add an environment variable
(Control Panel -> System -> Advanced Settings -> Environment Variables)
Add TNS_ADMIN and set this to the full path to the location of tnsnames.ora – e.g. C:\oracle\tns
OK, test on production – works fine. Add all this to the scheduler.
Check back half a day later – see that Oracle cannot find tnsnames.ora – sigh – what now?
Turns out, and I blame Oracle, that it doesn’t use TNS_ADMIN if the app is started from a different path (the scheduler’s)
OK. Google more. Fuck tnsnames.ora and I put everything in the connection string itself:
string _cnx = String.Format("Data Source=(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP) (HOST={0}) (PORT={1}) (CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME={2})));User Id={3};Password={4};", DBHOST, PORTNUMBER, SERVICENAME, USER, PASSWORD);
And it finally works from anywhere. Fuck you, Oracle.
Looking for a fast, non-bloated (but still powerful!) and easily integrated logging library for your .net projects?
The Object Guy’s .Net Logging Framework is my preference.
Check it out, it’s free only $5. I had it going in no time. And if I can, anyone can.
This little trick worked pretty good in my case (Opera 10, IE8)
$('#frameid').contents().find('html').html('Your content');
It can ofcourse be used to get contents as well.
Doing some webscraping involving some tricky asp.net stuff (__EVENTVALIDATION anyone?), got recommended a superb app called Fiddler2 – it’s highly recommended for sniffing HTTP traffic!
