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Oracle Database 10g Express Edition

wow, the free Oracle starter database version - called Express Edition - has reached production state! In my opinion it has never been easier to get an working Oracle database installed on Linux. The download is just 220 MB large and you won`t belief it - it comes as an RPM package! Hey, and it already includes a nice web interface, which makes it easy to create small database driven web applications:

Oracle Express Edition - Web-Interface

You can find more information on the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition homepage.

Finally there is also a new version (1.3.21) of TOra - Toolkit For Oracle which also works quite well with the Express Edition. You can download TOra from tora.sf.net

[Update 05. Apr 2011: Please see also my new post: Oracle Database 11.2 Express Edition Beta]

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22C3 is coming up

Wow, the end of 2005 is coming, so - same procedure as every year :-D
In my case that will be the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress. Just finished booking the train ticket and hotel.

22C3 Logo

The line-up of interesting talks is quite overwhelming this year. There are a lot of talks about buffer overflows and related topics - I am very curious about new approaches and developments concerning that craftwork...

The degree of collateral damage for this years congress will also be very amusing :-D. Last year we got a mass defacement for over 18.000 websites. Well nothing spectacular, but it hit the news and makes up the reputation...

If you are interested in digital life and/or computer security you may want to check out the 22C3 webblog or the schedule.

You also attend the 22C3? If you like get in touch with me... I am always happy to meet new and interesting people.

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Creating Windows EXE-Files under Linux

Sometimes a cross-compile environment can be very handy. Sam Lantinga form the libsdl.org project made a shell script (build-cross.sh) that makes it very easy to setup an GCC cross-compile environment for MinGW.

I used the follwing changes for the script:

  • GCC_VERSION=3.4.2-20040916-1
  • BINUTILS=binutils-2.15.91-20040904-1
  • MINGW=mingw-runtime-3.3
  • W32API=w32api-2.5

The EXE-files are a little bit large in size, but when you strip them the size is reduced drastically.

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OC4J JSP Profiling with JProbe

I have done some Profiling with JProbe - hey I didn't know that you can download a Freeware Edition from Quest.

To get it working with Oracle OC4J 10g (Version 10.1.3) I used the following configuration:

  • Application Server Type: Other Server
  • Server Directory: toplevel directory where you installed OC4J (<install -dir>)
  • Server Class: oracle.oc4j.loader.boot.BootStrap
  • Class Path: <install -dir>/j2ee/home/oc4j.jar
  • Java Executable: /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.2_09/bin/java
  • Java Options: -DORACLE_HOME=<install -dir>
  • Working Directory: <install -dir>
  • Server Class Arguments: -config <install -dir>/j2ee/home/config/server.xml

I hope that helps to get you started with profiling. It is always a cool thing to see where the performance bottlenecks are buried inside of some piece of software. Sometimes some "improvements" make it worse when seeking to make it better :-D.

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Having Fun with Bugs

Ups :-)
It is a little bit embarrassing, but software bugs can also happen to me. Bugs in web applications can lead to something like that showing up in search engine results:

error message in search engine

That error message was caused by an flaw on how I handled the
input from the HTTP Accept-Language line, if it was missing my code run into the above error.

So, that example proves one thing - it is very hard to review and audit your own code for flaws and security holes.