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

FileMaker Pro is a large player for consumer and small business markets. 4D is another one in that range I think. I believe google uses a customized architecture with many nodes in a huge cluster. I'm pretty sure they didn't just slap a commercial product on top of that. Here's a paper describing the google architecture as it was in the research phase: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html The paper says that it was coded in C and C++. It may not be relevant to its architecture today. Google (and the web) has grown a bit since then In 2003 they released a more current description (available through the wayback machine for free): http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I voted no, but the question of "do I approve of the war" is a pretty general one. I mean, are you asking if we think we should immediately remove our troops? Or whether we think the war should ever have been fought in the first place? As for the latter, I say that we never should have gone into Iraq in the first place. Based on the case that the Bush administration tried to make for the war I was not convinced then, and I demonstrated and wrote to my congressmen and everything. But now that we're there and we busted up the country so bad we've got to do something, I wish I knew what it was, but something to help bring about some form of government acceptable to the Iraqi people. Then we should completely withdraw (unless invited to stay ) and assume relations with the new sovereign Iraq. This issue really gets me mad and it's hard not to go off on a huge rant. The Bush administration is a disgrace.

Here's a link to a page by Microsoft describing the differences: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/products/windows XP pro comes with IIS, a web server, but XP home does not. Also, XP pro allows you to login to a domain, but XP home only allows workgroups. There are some other differences with file sharing, XP pro allows more extensive options than XP home.

Has this issue already been addressed? If you are still having problems logging in and you are sure you have the correct login information then you should PM a mod or admin with your issue. Give them a chance to address your issue in this thread first though. Sometimes the answer is simple enough to deal with in the forums.

Hi MystiK1337, I tried autostitch and it didn't work very well with the images I was using. It did OK, but I just couldn't get product I was happy with. I will say that autostitch is fast and easy though! It's fantastic for an intro-level stitcher. I haven't used it in a while, so maybe it was updated too. My favorite tool so far for panorama stitching is PTAssembler. It's not free, but it's only $30, and it does a great job. Here's one stitch I made from these raw images.

Check out this link for how to boot into safe mode: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

yes, I would highly recommend it. boot into safe mode, hunt down your spyware, and squish it.no guarantees that it will work, but you already tried removing the spyware in regular mode and it didn't work, so give safe mode a try.

Just be warned that if you don't boot into safemode before running your spyware removal tools you might be wasting your time, no matter how many different tools you use!Lemme explain, some spyware loads multiple copies of itself into RAM, so as soon as you close 1 of them down, the remaining one reloads another copy. This is probably why your first attempt to remove did not work. When you boot into safe mode you get a chance to delete all these nasties before they get a chance to load at all, so you have a better shot at squishing them once and for all.

eewww, you've got cooties.What should you do? First, find a tall building...j/kSpyware is insidious. Lemme guess, you're running a Windoze OS? When will they make secure software?<DISCLAIMER>Don't blame me if this screws up your computer</DISCLAIMER>Try booting in safe mode and then run your spyware removal tool. Remove the spyware. Check msconfig startup tab and uncheck any suspicious bootloaders. Scan your add/remove software section for suspicious programs and remove them. If you're familiar with the folders that should exist in your c:\program files folder, look through there and delete the ones that you don't need. Then boot into regular mode and re-run adaware to see if you squashed it.Does that work?If you've got a broadband connection and you've got a Windows OS, you should think about getting a router. It will help protect you from some common attack routes. Get a firewall like ZoneAlarm. Blah blah, some people argue that the best way to avoid spyware on windows is to format and re-install your OS every few months. It's tedious, but it works.

Hey Jesse,I remember your last saga, it was craaazy. I would give you lots of props for getting back into the game so soon. I think a good gauge for knowing when you're ready is if you're not constantly looking for a relationship. It always seems like the best ones come around when you're content with being single. :Pother than that, yeah, take it slow and easy, make sure you're in it for the right reasons. Trust your gut and stay grounded in yourself no matter what you do, then you'll be alright in the end, one way or the other.