06.05.01

Spent the last two days almost exclusively at work trying to get Oracle to install on a Solaris8 box. After wrestling with this and not getting anywhere, I discovered that, out of the box, Oracle 8.1.7 is not exactly compatible with Solaris8. Solaris2.6, Solaris7, yes. 8, no. Hrmph… I’m sure I’m just missing a patch from Oracle or something. Instead of trying to hunt down the incompatibility (it has something to do with shared memory- and yes, I did re-tune the Solaris kernel to support Oracle), I decided to try and install Oracle 8.1.5 (I happened to have the CD in my cube, so why not?) 8.1.5 installed flawlessly! The database initialized and came right on line! So, I figured since that went so well, that I would just try and upgrade to 8.1.6 (so we get all the extra nifty little tools!)
06.03.01
Ronan and Keenan had a doctor’s appointment on Friday that didn’t exactly go as well as I had hoped. Before Ronan was born, the ultrasounds showed signs of fluid in one of his kidneys. We had hoped that it would go away (as did the doctors) but it seems to have gotten worse. On a scale from one to five, five being the worst, one of his kidneys is a two and the other a four. We now have appointments next week at Children’s Hospital to see a specialist and have both boys checked. They call it some sort of urinary-kidney-reflux thing. I can only hope that the doctors at Children’s can resolve this easily.

With all the attention on the twins lately, I decided I needed to spend some one on one time with Logan. We did a bit of running around saturday (including picking up a new futon for the basement- I threw out all the old furniture when we had the carpet replaced…oh yeah, I guess I’ve forgotten to mention that the carpet looks great! what a difference!) …anyway, we went to the movies and saw Shrek. Technically superior animation, a nice little storyline, and a whole lot of belly laughs! We had a great time! I think this is a movie that I will want to own when it comes out. Some of the humor was definitely geared towards adults and yes, it was obvious at times, but I can’t remember the last time we laughed so much at a movie!

So I have finally found a possible replacement for my beloved Newton. The HP 360LX that I bought off of Ebay arrived late last week and I have been playing with it ever since! First impressions: The keyboard is much better than I thought it would be- still it is a bit cramped, but it is manageable. The screen resolution is nice and crisp, making it easy to read documents and the paper-white backlight is amazingly bright! WindowsCE 2.0 isn’t all that bad. The latest ActiveSync product from micro$oft is very nice and syncs effortlessly with my windoze box at home. The machine can be a bit sluggish at times and I have managed to lock it up once or twice (or three times) but that was mainly due to not RTFM first. Go figure. At one point, I did manage to actually delete everything I had stored in it by mistyping a response to a boot message. The pcmcia slot is really nice, unfortunately, you need to be connected to the AC adapter to utilize it without sucking your batteries dry. I have already taken advantage of the compact flash slot -I found a forty-eight meg CF at Target’s for $42.50! Quite a nice price! So I snagged it and upped the ram in the HP to a total of 56 meg. Not bad for a handheld! First thing I installed on it: MicroEmacs for SH3. It’s nice, but not quite as robust as I would like. General Paranoyaxc Software have a great page with all sorts of gnu stuff for CE (including Perl and Gnu Emacs!!!) I’ve downloaded the files, and played a bit, but I think I will need to manually edit the registries to get the software to work. (but it will be worth it!) The next step, after I’ve gotten a bit more comfortable with the unit, I want to attempt load Linux on it! Of course I wanted to utilize a BSD (NetBSD has a port for SH3, but it is a very early attempt, and quite frankly, I think I have a better shot at getting Linux to load at this point.) I’ll keep you posted on that one.