Kwatog & Co

SBL-EIM-00205: Failed to load the application dictionary

admin — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:55:02 +0000

If you hit the error in the title, the best thing to investigate this is by looking at the log file. In my case, I found the log below.

Error SBL-EIM-00205: Missing temporary column for S_EVT_FUL_REQ.X_SR_ID from

That gave me an idea that there could something amiss in the data dictionary. Hat tip to my Siebel Consultant friends for pointing me to the data dictionary cache files to begin with.

So this is what we did.

Try the following to resolve the issue:
1) Reapply latest changes in the table
2) Delete diccache.dat and eimcolrelcache.dat file from SiebSrvr\Bin directory.
3) Restart Siebel
4) Try running the EIM job again

Some Thoughts

I couldn’t have find the cause of this if I did not ask somebody. That’s why it comes handy if you have the Siebel Administrators as your friend.

No thanks to the Siebel Bookshelf.

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B31104_02/books/ImpAppsDB2390/ImpAppsDB2390_MigratDataUsEIM14.html

Expect Debug Mode Enable/Disable

admin — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:03:39 +0000

If you want to debug your expect program, just add the code below at the very top of your program.
#!/usr/bin/expect -d
Notice the -d at the end of the line. That puts the expect in debug mode. Also, take note that your expect program may be in another path. The code above is just an example.

Side Story

One of the previous developer forget to remove the -d parameter. So when the expect program runs in production, the log is too big. When the issue was raised to me, I didn’t have a clue. I’m not an Linux expert anyway. I just got lucky that I noticed that parameter on first line.

HDC Galaxy S3 EX / Star B92m Singapore Review

admin — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:19:20 +0000

After my Samsung Galaxy S2 met a terrible accident, I was on a hunt for a replacement. Galaxy Note 2 was the frontrunner but due to its size, price and weight, I needed some serious and compelling reasons beyond its magic wand (stylus) to convince me. And then later, I realized I needed a dual-sim phone. That’s where the HDC Galaxy S3 EX came into the picture. I bought one and I’ll be giving sharing my experience with it.

The Star B92m/HDC Galaxy S3 EX Specification

CPU	MT6577 Dual Core 1.0GHz GPU: PowerVR SGX 531
OS	Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) Language: English, Italian, French. Spanish, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, German, Indonesian, Chinese, Turkish, Portuguese, Malay, others
Memory	RAM: 1GB / ROM: 2.5GB Micro SD Memory Card (TF-Card), MAX support 32GB
Size	138 x 70 x 9 mm
Weight	180 g
Screen	4.7 inch IPS Capacitive Multi-touch Screen HD resolution (1280 x 720 pixels) 16 million colors
Network	GSM + WCDMA (Dual SIM) GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz WCDMA 850/2100MHz
Color	Black
GPS	Built In GPS & A-GPS
Connection	Bluetooth with EDR & A2DP Wi-Fi : IEEE 802.11 b/g micro USB 2.0
Camera	Dual Camera Back 12.0 megapixel with Auto Focus and LED Flash Front 1.3 megapixel Supports recording of video
Radio	FM
Video	AVI , MP4 , FLV , 3GP , MOV , ASF , MPEG , RMVB , etc.
Audio	MP3 , AAC , WAV , etc. / 3.5 mm Audio Jack
Special functions	Gravity Sensor, Proximity Sensor, Light Sensor, FM Radio, Wifi, GPS, Multi-touch Capacitive Screen, Dual SIM, Schedule Power On/Off
Battery and Accessories	- Li-ion battery 2000 mAh - Earphone / 3.5 mm Audio Jack - USB Cable - Charger
Price	Click the link below.

The Real Samsung Galaxy S3 and the HDC Galaxy S3 EX KIRF

Here’s my take on the individual functions

Overall Performance
To be honest, I never expected so much with MediaTek SoC. This device is my first mobile phone equipped with it. But then, it was a pleasant surprise to realize that MTK6577 is really a very capable processor and deserves some respect on its own right. After rooting my phone and installing Nova launcher, it now performs even better than my Galaxy S2. Navigation is fast and the response is quick. It’s still on ICS now so I imagine performance will be even betteronce I install the buttery smooth Jelly Bean.

WiFi
The WiFi works well, an wifi-b of the bygone era. It was able to detect and connect to my Wireless-N router in no time, though. However, I think it is having problem when the router is a bit far. When I say far, I mean around 15 meters away from the router with doors and concrete walls in between. It can detect and connect to the router but the connection randomly drops.

I didn’t get encounter that in all my other devices. Maybe it’s a bit early to make conclusions so I’ll do further tests later. I’d like to emphasize that the phone can connect but there are random resets of connection.

I also encounter this on our office WiFi. It’s not a big issue yet since it is able to reconnect rather quickly. Actually, I think it just shows the actual and real time connection status. Other phones may still be showing some connection when in reality, it is already dropped.

Bluetooth
It works flawlessly. I was able to connect to my Creative bluetooth speakers without problems and nor any noticeable difference in sounds. If anything, the sound in the bluetooth speaker is even better with its sub-woofer. It works as expected and does the job really well.

Display
This 4.7 IPS 720p SuperLCD is just crisp and gorgeous. I was initially concerned about the high resolution not being able to be driven well by a rather dated graphics processor. However, it actually turned really well. I tried to use the GS2 again and the resolution looked awful. I played Subway Surfer with no stuttering observed. I haven’t used it for more graphics intensive games yet, though.

As for the color, I think is a bit washed just like in HTC One X. It doesn’t compare to Samsung Galaxy S2′s SuperAMOLED which has more vivid colors and darker black.

HD videos runs well as well as HD YouTube videos. Honestly, I don’t have real complaints about it. I love it.

I’m also not sure if it is really a gorilla glass as claimed in the ads. I don’t want to try to scratch so I have installed a screen protector(comes in the package) on it.

Battery
This phone has an enormous 2000mAh battery. It partly explains the added heft. At the same time, it also means it can last longer. In the past week that I was using this, I’m getting an average of 11 hrs of use time. Last Tuesday, it even lasted for almost 16hours with normal use. That’s enough time to last a workday plus more.

For comparison’s sake, my GS2 only lasts 6hours max. At around 4hours, I already need to plug the device into the charger. That doesn’t happen with the B92m.

And what’s more? I have a spare battery that came wth the package. Sweet!

Camera
The HDC Galaxy S3 EX camera is good but not exactly great. It is advertised as 12mp but we cannot independently confirm that despite what Antutu says. The reason being is that reports say MTK6577 can only handle up to 8mp. While the it may be true that the sensor is capable in capturing 12mp images, the SoC limit may resample the image and then another software upsampling happens to make resize it to 12mp. It’s a pure speculation on my part so, I don’t really know.

On the quality of the output, it’s not as sharp as I wanted. Any change on the default settings results to a different color output(i. e, yellow becomes a bit pale when you change the output settings from 12mp to 8mp.

It won’t be able to hold a candle if compared to HTC OneX but I can say the image output is on par with the Samsung Galaxy S2. One thing hat it does stand out over GS2 is the speed on which you can take photos. It’s not as fast as the OneX but it blows GS2 over the water. Dare I say that its camera is faster than the iPhone5.

However, we have to remind ourselves that regardless of the claims on on he sensor, it is still a smartphone. It’s not like it would replace our real cameras but I think it is good to enough.

Here are some shots.

HDC Galaxy S3 EX Sample Indoor Shot

HDC Galaxy S3 EX Sample Outdoor Shot

HDC Galaxy S3 EX Sample Shot

HDC Galaxy S3 EX Sample Flower Shot

GPS
This is one of the biggest blot on this phone. GPS simply doesn’t work. There are fixes available from xda, though. So if you need GPS(I really need), you’ll have to root the device and apply the fixes.

I haven’t fixed mine yet. I’ll do it over the weekend.

Call Quality
A few minutes after inserting the SIM and powering up the phone, an office colleagues called. It was an unexpected call and I didn’t know what to expect. I was surprised with the call quality. It is on par with the branded phones. Nothing special but it’s not like we’re expecting hifi stereo sound there.

Summary
The HDC Galaxy S3 EX is a very capable phone and a polished clone of the real Samsung Galaxy S3. It is not for everybody but if you need a dual-sim phone, then this phone is for you. It has an almost stock Android on it. The phone costs a third but almost as capable of the real thing. Buying this clone phone will be worth every penny.

This phone serves me well on my daily tasks. Since it has Android on it, it can do what most of the other smartphones can do. In some cases, I’m sure this phone excels. Even now with my Samsung Galaxy S2 back to life, I’m still using the b92m as my main phone. That’s primarily because of the battery life, the 720p screen and most importantly, the dual-sim capability. Sad to say, the GS2 is now my spare phone regardless of how I loved it.

How To Get Version of HP-UX

admin — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 03:35:02 +0000

In case you wonder what version of HP-UX you are running, the command to use is uname. Here’s the syntax.
uname -r
The output will be something like this
B.11.31

You can also play around with other parameters like -s
uname -s
Output would be
HP-UX

As always, check the manual for this command to the other options.
man uname

WordPress Media Upload Failure [SOLVED]

admin — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:33:57 +0000

The other day, I’ve been pulling my hair because suddenly, the media upload on WordPress is not working properly on one of my servers. I’m sure this kind of problem happened to me before. For this time, I traced back what I did the previous days to identify the possible cause of problem.

Based on my log, I only did two things as listed below.

Upgrade WordPress to 3.5
Upgrade MySQL to 5.5 (see instructions here

I initially suspected it was a problem brought by WP 3.5 with their brand spanking new media upload module. But endless googling says otherwise. It must be an access rights problem.

Symptoms and Problems

To be clear, there are three different symptoms that I see on the websites loaded into this server.

A website cannot create the folder (wp-content/uploads/2013/01). I created the folders but the problem stays.
Another site says “Unable to move image.jpg to wp-content/uploads/2012/01″
One website asks for FTP credentials when trying upgrade WordPress. It should be automatic.

By now, I’m pretty sure that I’m dealing with an access rights problem. So I started troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting

Check File/Folder Owners – Since I run suPHP, I have different users for every group of websites. I made sure that all the folders are owned by the respective users. Even after doing that, the problem still persists.
Check /tmp folder access – I made sure that all my suPHP users have access to this folder. they all have. I remove the access and the error message is now different. So I put back the access rights again Symptom #2 came back. That means Apache can upload the file but just can’t transfer it to the destination folder.
Who is writing the file – This is where things get interesting. Remember I use suPHP? Files must be written by the suPHP users and not apache. So what I did was chmod wp-content/uploads/2013/ and wp-content/uploads/2013/01 to 777 (write accessible to the world) and then tried to upload a file. IT WORKED! I checked the owner of the file and found out that it was apache and not the suPHP user. So there must be something wrong on my server.
Check if suPHP is running – As it turns out, suPHP is not running. I still don’t know when it started but somehow, it does not work. How I manage to bring it back will be for another post.

The Solution

In the end, the root cause is that suPHP is not running on my server. That means it is the apache user that is actually running on all those sites. Since the files and folders are owned by different users, apache cannot write into those folders. It also cannot create folders.
Once I sorted out the problem with suPHP, re-ran chown on all the folders just to make sure that all files and folders are owned by the correct user. I also put back the correct folder rights(755) on wp-content/uploads/2013/ and wp-content/uploads/2013/01 folders so that it won’t be writeable by the world.

Add Admin Rights to Existing User in CentOS/Linux

admin — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 10:15:14 +0000

One of the important things to do in setting up a VPS or any Linux webserver is to NOT use the root user after the initial setup. The reason is obvious, root is so powerful. When connecting remotely to our server from a not-so-secure internet connection, a small mistake would mean your root password can be viewed by unscrupulous people. To work around it, we need to create a user that can act as administrators. For linux, particularly RedHat based Fedora and CentOS, it is called sudoers.

Sudoers (/etc/sudoers) allows delegation of roles and permissions for users or groups without sharing the root password. To add/del/edit the sudoers, connect as root and then run visudo.

[root]# visudo

Append the following
userid ALL=(ALL) ALL

example:
kwatog ALL=(ALL) ALL

Once logged-in into the ssh, you can run the command below to gain root access.
[kwatog]# sudo -s

References:

http://daddy-linux.blogspot.sg/2012/02/creating-super-user-with-root-rights.html

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-sudo-allows-people-in-group-admin/

Excel Date To String Formula

admin — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 08:08:41 +0000

Of some of the important commands in excel that I use often, I always tend to forget the syntax for converting date cell into a string/text. So here it is, I’m logging it again so that I can easily find the syntax.

Syntax:
=TEXT(cell id,"format")

Here’s the sample:
=TEXT(A1,"DD/MM/YYYY hh:mm:ss")

Output

uses vba format

cp -f not working? check alias

admin — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 15:55:26 +0000

Every wonder why somehow in CentOS, you cannot overwrite files with the cp command even with the -f option? The man page clear shows the -f will force the overwriting of the files and yet it keeps on asking if you want to overwrite the file. As it turns out, the problem lies on the fact that there’s an alias defined for cp. It was added by default to prevent newbies like me to overwrite files important system files.

In my case, here are the aliases.
[kwatog@vps ~]# alias alias cp='cp -i' alias l.='ls -d .* --color=tty' alias ll='ls -l --color=tty' alias ls='ls --color=tty' alias mv='mv -i' alias rm='rm -i' alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only --read-alias --show-dot --show-tilde'

As you see, the cp command is added with -i parameter which means you’ll need confirmations in case you’ll be overwriting files or folders. As a workaround, you can remove the alias by invoking the following commands.

unalias cp

source:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1225602

Write SQLPlus Output to Local

admin — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 10:26:22 +0000

The most common method of writing into a file is via UTL_FILE. However, this package cannot direct the output to your local folder. That means you have to create a logical directory in the db server and get the physical file from there.

But by using DBMS_OUTPUT together with other sql*plus settings and spool mechanism, we can write the output into a local client file. Here’s how I do it.
SET SERVEROUTPUT ON SET FEEDBACK OFF SET DEFINE OFF SET LINESIZE 1000 SET PAGESIZE 0


spool c:\sample.xml

DECLARE

   CURSOR c_data IS

   SELECT 'The Quick Brown Fox' content_line

   FROM  dual;
   l_content_line VARCHAR2(1000) := '';

BEGIN

   DBMS_OUTPUT.ENABLE;

   l_content_line := '';

   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(l_content_line);

   l_content_line := '';

   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(l_content_line);    
   FOR c IN c_data

   LOOP

   l_content_line := c.content_line;

   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(l_content_line);

   END LOOP;

   l_content_line := '';

   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(l_content_line);

END;

/

SPOOL OFF

I’d like to emphasize again that this may be just one of the ways of doing this. I know it works because I used it extensively. I just needed to write it down because of several instansces lately when I was tutoring new staffs.

Cloud3K $6 1GB VPS

admin — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 14:48:16 +0000

RockMyWeb’s subsidiary Cloud3K is offering $6 unmanaged VPS on RockMyWeb’s 6th anniversary. It so happened that I’m actually looking for an affordable VPS host so I signed up with them. I already started moving some of my sites there including this site. That means I had to follow the instructions in my LAMP Installation post.

Anyway, here’s what you’ll supposed to get for your $6.

RAM : 1GB
Disk : 50GB
Bandwidth : 2TB
CPUs : 4

Take note that I chose the semi-annual billing so I’m really diving into it. Hopefully I won’t regret it. JaguarPC, my current hosting provider, has been very reliable. However, I’m already outgrowing my VPS there and upgrading it makes the VPS too expensive.

By the way, it must be noted that Cloud3K is not actually a cloud hosting like the Amazon or Azure. Instead they have a mirror server such that if your physical server fails, requests are redirected to the backup server. Hopefully we don’t come to a point where we need those failover servers.