sandbox

Um, nevermind, I just figured it out. Here's how you do it (Although I've done my best to present an accurate procedure, I can't guarantee this will work for everyone. Messing around with your environmental variables is not for the weak, proceed with caution): 1) Prepare your mind for information that should be used once and then quickly discarded. Otherwise the following information may stick to your brain and take up valuable space. You are warned. 2) Install the oracle instant client. I don't know why...I kinda wish I did. You probably can get away with installing just the basic package. Unzip the files to a directory, and then copy the path of this directory to the clipboard. 3) Add this directory to the PATH environmental variable. To do this, right click on My Computer, go to the Advanced tab, and click 'Environment Variables'. Under System variables, find 'Path'. Select it, and click edit. ctrl-v to paste the directory into the string, and say OK. e.g.: Before: %SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;C:\Program Files\ATI Technologies\ATI Control Panel; After: %SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;C:\Program Files\ATI Technologies\ATI Control Panel;C:\instantclient; 4) In the same window, under 'User variables for ...', Click the New button. Call the variable 'TNS_ADMIN'. ctrl-v to paste the directory path into the 'variable value' field. Say OK, and close out the 'My Computer' properties windows. 5) Create a file called 'TNSNAMES.ORA' in your instant client installation directory. In this file designate the connection parameters for your database. Mine looked something like this: DB_ALIAS = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = ip.add.re.ss)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = orcl) (SERVER = DEDICATED) ) )replace the DB_ALIAS, ip.add.re.ss, port, and SID with your settings. If you don't know what any of this means, good for you, you'll live longer. 6) Reset your computer, fire up Toad, and then open a new connection. You should see DB_ALIAS as an option under the database field. Set your username and password, hit connect, and you should be in business. I guess Toad looks in certain places for the drivers and configuration files it needs to connect to oracle. Setting the environmental variables tells Toad where to look. If you had a local install of Oracle I imagine you could fire up Toad and all the files it needed would already be in the right place, but you can follow these steps instead. Woot!

I just asked a database question, and this question is similar but it has no answer, so I'm going to answer it even though it's over a year old...DBVisualizer is an excellent free tool for this. You can view your tables, data, execute queries, and more. It was also able to draw my database schema (entity relationship diagram) with no problems. I think it can connect to many different types of databases. You just have to find the right driver for the particular database you want to connect to. For oracle I had good luck using the 'thin' drivers.If you want to go corporate then I hear ERWin is one of the industry leaders, but their package costs a few thousand bucks.

Hey gang, long time no see, my bad! Anyway, I got me a question. Does anybody know how to connect to a remote oracle database using toad? When I read the docs for toad I get the impression that I have to have a local oracle installation in order to use toad, but that just seems silly.I guess I'm stuck at the point of trying to figure out how to tell toad where to look for all of the configuration information it needs for the connection if I don't have any "Oracle Home" directories.:crosses fingers:Peace!

I heard that as the sun expands and starts to expel more gas the earth could actually be pushed farther out in its orbit because of increasing pressure from the stellar wind. This might protect the earth for a while longer from the sun because it won't get swallowed up as quickly. Does anyone know more about this?ciroxyz, you should start a new thread if you want to get those questions answered, otherwise you'll hijack this one. I'd be interested to see your thread!

I don't know about you folks but for some reason I always thought a parsec was a fictional unit of distance. I thought it was something like warp speed or 'stun mode' on a phaser. I never knew that it is actually the oldest and most widely used unit to describe distances on astronomical scales. The newspapers and popular magazines use the unit of a light year (the distance light travels in a year) because it is easier to understand what it is. Astronomers use distance measurements in units of parsecs to calibrate other techniques, like red-shift. The word parsec comes from the phrase, "parallax of one arc second". The closer an object is to the earth and the sun, the greater the observed angle between them. As you move farther away the earth and the sun appear to get closer together. This isn't a very good description of parallax, but hopefully it is clear. The closest star is about 4 light years away, a little more than a parsec!

I'm not sure how I feel about cloning people on purpose, but nature has been doing it for a long time. Monozygotic twins are genetic clones of each other and they seem to get along ok. Is anyone a twin? Do you feel like you are 1 soul in two bodies?

I don't know what the specs were on the first computer I used, but I remember that we had to check it out from the school library because we didn't think we needed one to use all the time. This was back in 1985. There was this one game that I played, I can't remember the name of it, but it was a DnD type game and I had to hit some key on the keyboard over and over again to get enough gold and xp to progress in the game. Of course I had to start over in the game every time we checked out the computer but I didn't care, I was in elementary school at the time.

Yes, that's right. After the domain name comes the slash and then the path to the file (index.html, cows/mypics.html, etc.). You got it.

I had a miniserver setup with IIS, and let's just say that I soon received a rootkit and I will never use IIS again. Perhaps someone more knowledgable can discuss the relative security profiles of IIS vs. Apache and how much work has to go into "securing" the installation.

ooh, I like the issue of tides. It's related to all kinds of phenomena that we can observe. Like, did you know that the tidal friction between the moon and the earth is the reason why the moon's rotation around the earth happens in the same amount of time as it takes for the moon to spin once on its axis? In other words, tides can explain why we only see one side of the moon from earth, and the other side is always facing away from us. Other bodies in close orbits around much larger objects (i.e. Jupiter's moons) also tend to be phase locked in some way. The earth and venus are not because they are too far away from the sun. Mercury is locked into a 3:2 spin:orbit ratio, not 1:1 like the moon and the earth, but I'm not sure why exactly. Also, the tides are largely responsible for the moon slowly drifting further away from the earth, something like 2 or 3 cm per year. This has been going on for a long time, and you can see from the fossil record that the tides used to come much closer together. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moonrec.html I don't understand much of the math and physics behind orbital mechanics, but it sure is cool.

I don't buy this. Have you heard of the downing street memos and the office of special plans in the pentagon? Look them up. The administration made a concerted effort to make the intelligence fit their burning desire to invade Iraq. Then they used the CIA as their scapegoat. D. Cheney was at the CIA daily in the leading up to war. I think he was putting a lot of pressure on them to produce something that made Iraq look like more of a threat than it really was.

Yeah, it's supposed to pop up calculator. It comes up after the pop up does it's thing, so if ie crashed in the middle of it that's probably why you didn't see it.

Disabling active scripting will disable javascript. I'm not sure exactly what the difference is between the two. You can see the 'Active scripting' option in the 'custom level' area of the security tab in internet options: It's the top one in this image. Just set it to 'Disable' Notice from BuffaloHELP: Edited as reported.

Oh, it's STILL so much fun to bash internet explorer. I have to say that some web pages work better in IE than other browsers, and it's less likely to crash or hang than FF, but at least FF users don't have to deal with this latest flavor of remote code execution!! http://forums.xisto.com/topic/30380-latest-ie-exploit-does-anyone-still-use-this-browser/

For Internet Explorer users, please note that there is a new exploit in the wild that is capable of compromising a fully patched and updated WinXP machine: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/HP-TouchPad-Needs-68-Weeks-for-Additional-Shipments-142584 Microsoft has not released a fix yet. From the article: Firefox and other alternative web browsers are not affected. You would have to be tricked into going to a malicious website to have any chance of being affected by this one, so most folks are probably safe anyway, but I thought I would let everybody know. For the curious, here's a proof of concept site that launches MScalculator when you visit their web page. Scary! http://www.computerterrorism.com/research/ie/poc.htm