Two new domains: switchbl8.rocks

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Oct 292015
 

Yesterday my server, or to be exact: my domain, was unavailable. I completely missed the expiration emails I received, and did not renew the domain on time. That results in the domain being put in quarantine. But I choose DirectNIC for a reason: they are professional and they are quick. So after contacting them and explaining the situation, paying the neccessary fees and boom….within two hours (including the email exchange and lifting the quarantine status and paying for the whole shebang) my domain is back up again.

Thank you DirectNIC. I’ll be more careful next time (next year!).

In the meantime, when the stress levels were at a peak, I bought two other domains, so now you can reach me on switchbl8.com and switchbl8.rocks (!) as well.

StarCraft II – new player

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Oct 252015
 

This week I bought StarCraft II: The Complete Edition. Did some campaign in Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm, had an Archon session with my colleague, and today I finally won a 1VAI game, albeit a “very easy” one. But that’s my level at the moment.

To get better, I need to practice. A lot. It’s not like Diablo3 in which your heroes get more powerful by getting better gear, it is me that has to improve. What do I need to build. When do I need to build it. When can I attack. What do I do when I am under attack. And most of all, I need to do that by keyboard preferably, not by clicking around in the build menus.

For now I like the Zerg the most, but I’m warned that it is a difficult race to deal with. One of the advantages is that the larvae can mutate into just about anything, but overall Zerg needs a lot of (micro)managing.

So….practice, practice, practice. And set realistic goals. Play 5 times per day is realistic. Win 5 times a day is not.

Update: just had another win. Ultralisks are nice creatures.

Acting like you are from Oracle

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Sep 102015
 

The default Oracle 12c database installation (that a lot of developers will use without going into the advanced setup) is a bit strict. For instance you can’t just create users that don’t comply to the user naming policies. But what about “sys” or “system”? They don’t comply either!

Add the following to your script:

alter session set "_ORACLE_SCRIPT"=true;

Things should work now. Basically you’re acting like you’re an Oracle supplied script now. And we know the rules don’t apply to Oracle, right?

Bedankt Team BRT (Dutch)

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Aug 282015
 

Bedankt collega’s van team BRT voor de vier leuke maanden bij het Kadaster (Apeldoorn). En heel erg bedankt voor deze leuke en lekkere geste! We houden contact.

image

 Posted by at 11:18

Ubuntu open files limit

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Aug 262015
 

With ulimit -n you can see what the maximum number of open files can be. As superuser you can change that -per session- with the ulimit command, but an ordinary user can not do that. Therefore, you need to change the /etc/security/limits.conf file. For instance:

* soft nofile 10000
* hard nofile 10000

Meaning that the hard and soft limit are now increased to 10000. I didn’t know that this does not change the limits for the superuser. The asterisk (*) is not intended to change superuser limits. Instead, repeat both lines, changing the asterisk to the word root. You might need a reboot for that, but that’s all.

I needed this for Neo4j and was surprised to see that normal users could have more open files than the superuser. No more, I say, no more!

Windows 10 and the XBox One

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Jul 302015
 

Today (well, technically yesterday) was the release day of Windows 10. I could have waited until Windows update would pick it up, but I forced it by downloading the Windows upgrade tool by Microsoft. The upgrade itself takes some time to complete, please be patient. On my laptop the process was smooth, and after a couple of restarts I was greeted with “Welcome back Reginald”. Nice touch Microsoft.

As far as looks go, nothing much changed since Windows 8.1 except for the start menu that made its comeback. In a good way. I like it.

Windows 10 also makes it possible to stream your gaming from the XBox One to your PC. And it works like a charm. Good work guys!

photo_2015-07-29_23-29-04

 Posted by at 00:16

Lists as tables in Oracle

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Jul 242015
 

While searching for a way to find records in a table that best match what I’m looking for, I just discovered (Google is your friend) Oracle’s sys.odcinumberlist and sys.odcivarchar2list. Very nice functions to create in-memory tables.

SQL> select * from table(sys.odcivarchar2list('a',null,'b','c'));

COLUMN_VALUE
--------------
a

b
c

Never too old to learn new tricks….

XBox One gaming

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May 242015
 

Early this month I bought an XBox One. Basically to play the updated version of Diablo 3, since the XBox 360 version is “old” and won’t be updated anymore. A big sum of money, just to play one game, but I thought it was worth it. And….judging by my playtime on the PC (practically zero) it is.

Recently I bought Destiny (a game by Bungie) as well. Wow. What a beautiful game, but for a longtime PC gamer, doing FPS-like stuff on the controller is hard. Very hard. But still the game is playable, so I’m progressing albeit it slowly.
It’s quite different from what I ever played. Gear has levels (its levels up), so as you progress, your same gear can get better stats or abilities! Very nice. No need to trade in that trustworthy gun 🙂
Bungie seems to have cancelled the crossplatform gaming, but even without that, it’s a brilliant game. There’s a trial, so why not check that out?

Destiny | Official Site

WildFly console and NVidia

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Mar 312015
 

You know how internet surfing works. You read something, click on some links, and finally you don’t even know where you came from. Anyways. That made me try WildFly, the AS formerly known as JBoss AS.

And you know the drill. Download zipfile, unpack, goto bin folder and start. Browse to localhost/something.

Can’t find the console. Well shit.

Do you have an NVidia videocard in your system, and did you install all the drivers and stuff? You probably have NVidia Networks Service as one of you running processes. Kill it. Now restart WildFly and browse to the console.

You’re welcome.

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