I have been to my fair share of festivals where it has rained non-stop. The worst one had to be Phish's festival Coventry. There it rained for at least 3 straight days. Peoples cars were getting stuck in the parking lots and people were camping in what looked like rice fields. The worst part of the whole thing was all of the mud and the horrible bathrooms, along with no showers. I am happy to not have to deal with all of that at this festival.

If you are not as lucky as me, then you can stream the shows at Iclips.net .

To get dialup networking setup in my Mac OSX I followed the following steps

1. On the Treo I turned went to Bluetooth and turned it on, making sure that Dial-up Networking has been turned on.
2. Turned on Bluetooth on Mac
3. Selected Setup Bluetooth device.
4. Selected Moble Phone and paired the device.
5. When Moble Phone Setup came up I selected the following settings:

   Vendor: Generic
   Model: GPRS (GSM/3G)
   APN: <blank>
   CID: 1
   

6. For my phone number, passowrd, and account I provided the following:

   phone number: <blank>
   account: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
   password: CINGULAR1
   

I just got my daughter a new cellphone for her birthday. Now since I had to sign up for a 2 year contract to get the Alltel special deal, I figured I need to get some insurance on that bad boy. Now I did not get the insurance because my daughter is irresponsible with the stuff we get her. Actually she is great with taking care of her stuff, especially her electronics. She has the Playstation Portable, a Ipod Suffle, and many other portable devices. She rarely has a issue with them, but I would hate for a unforeseen accident to kill her cellphone and I had no insurance on it.

If that happened I would have one of two options.

1. Buy her a new cellphone at retail cost. :(
2. Not get her a new cellphone, and just eat the 2 year contract cost :(

Well after just one month of having the phone, the insurance is going to pay for itself. Maddie was out with some family at the Zoo and someone accidentally spilled some water on her purse. The cellphone and her digital camera got soaked. The camera came out ok, but the phone is now acting kinda strange. The cellphone battery does not hold a charge, and she can not really use the phone. She is now distraught, in that she feels that she has done something wrong. I am just happy that the first insurance claim to get her a new phone will be because of someone else. I mean it is not like she jumped into the pool with the phone in her pocket.

What I find funny is that in a month she did some serious texting.

Messages
Text Incoming 921
Text Outgoing 1071

It might just be me, but I just find setting up Oracle products to be a big old pain in the ass. Now don’t get me wrong, I do think that Oracle tries to use Industry Standards with there products. They try to make there tools work with as many things as they can, and I thank them for that. But when it comes to setting up and configuring there products, it can be a huge nightmare.

I was recently in the process of setting up the Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) to work with Shibboleth 2.0 and pass parameters to the Oc4j client. I figured that this would be a easy process since OHS is really just Apache 2.0 that uses some Oracle Plugins to communicate to Oc4j. The setup really resembles the Apache/Tomcat configuration using AJP/1.3 to handle communication between the Apache and Tomcat servers. I was even more optimistic about the this configuration because Oracle based there Apache/Oc4j connector on AJP. Well after about a week, and a useless support ticket to Oracle I got the system setup.

First I had a difficult time deciding which product to download and install. Oracle has so many options, and they like to just package up multiple installations for you at one time. I have installed to Oracle Deployment Packages for 10.1.3.1 which included the OHS and Oc4j servers, the Oracle Identity Management Infrastructure so I could do Oracle Identity Federation, and the Oracle Companion CD. Since each install was different I had to try out each one, and different settings. I found out that I had installed the OHS multiple times along with multiple versions of Oc4j. I would install a package, then realize that there were dependent software that would need to be installed. All this did for me was create a ton of frustration. Along with that, there is no way to install the software without using the GUI installer. I just hate that.

After spending a week trying to get a proof of concept up and working, I finally did it. I am happy with my results, but not happy with the fact that I had to install everything under the sun just to get a handle on what Oracle might be doing. Also I hate the fact that Oracle’s documentation never tells you about dependencies when you are looking at setting up one of there products.

To make things even worse, at one point I ran into a road block on how to not send specific URL requests to the Oc4j server. In Tomcat you would just do a JkUnMount and enter in your filter. Oracle on the other hand did not incorporate this functionality with there implementation. They have mapped the JkMount filter to Oc4jMount but left out the other one. When I filled out a metalink ticket to see if the experts could help me, they seemed to just see the fact that I was trying to use Shibboleth and told me that they do not support that. All I really wanted to know was how to exclude a path with a filter. They were no help at all, and just pushed me off. Thank god for some excellent system administrators who helped me fix the issue.

In my opinion Oracle needs to get with the game plan and either provide better technical support for web products. This is especially true if they are going to continue to buy up every web system that they come across. Oracle seems to be great at helping you configure there products to work with there products. When it comes to helping your organization integrate anything else with a Oracle product, you are out on a limb. This can be frustrating when they are using products like Apache as there HTTP core and just put a layer on it and package it up as there own.

I was messing around with my Mac computer tonight and discovered that my Boot Camp installation of Windows XP was not working. I was trying to boot up into my Windows XP installation and it continued to fail for me. I could get to the installation thorough Parallels, but that was it. I figured that if there was no way for me to access my Windows installation was through Parallels I might as well reinstall Windows in a Parallels Virtual Machine.

I started the installation, then realized that I did not have my Windows Product Key. Since I did not have a easy way to contact technical support I decided to do a little Google research. I found that I could retrieve the Windows Product Key from another installation of Windows XP by using RockXP 4.0 Beta .

RockXP is a cool little utility that will scan your installation and display your Microsoft Product Keys for you. In about 5 minutes I got my product key and wrote it down in a flash. I then ran over to my Mac and entered the Product Key that was given to me. With a skeptical click of the next button, I was relieved to see that the key was accepted. Thank god for the web and cool utilities like this, that has saved my another sleepless night wondering how I am going to get my computer fixed.

UPDATE: While this product did return the product key that I needed, it might have also introduced some viruses on the system in which it was installed. Be careful when using this software because of viruses. I would only use it as a last resort.