Last year's secret santa

I will admit not the most exciting of posts but still worthy nonetheless. If for nothing else but its timing. As christmas is fast approaching I thought back to what was going on in work this time last year.

Forget about what I was working on. I can't remember. However it does bring to mind the mug I use every day in work and the story behind it. 

It was purchased for me by a work colleague last Christmas as  part of a secret santa event.

Everyone in the office was given the name of another office member and they had to buy them a mug. The catch was that whatever mug you received was to be yours to drink or of for the whole of the next year.  Needless to say this had a huge impact when making the decision on what to buy your fellow work buddies.

There was only one rule.  It could not be offensive.

Not that we are prudish here in the support department. Only that we sometimes have visitors to the office who may take offense at the sight of someone guzzling from a phallus shaped tea container at  9:30 in the morning.

Anyway here are the resulting mugs. Mine that I am still using today one year on.

To be fair however the one that I purchased for my colleague started giving off  toxic fumes that had a smell of paint stripper to them whenever the mug was filled with boiling water.

 The mug I received. A ray gun. Everyone

 here knows that I am a bit of a Sci-fi geek so I was easy to choose for.

This is the mug I got for my 40 year old female colleague in return.

We had quite a few laughs watching her drink from it for a few days

before she was finally overcome by the toxic fumes and it was cast into the back of the tea cupboard where it remains to this day.  

Review: CloudHQ Its time to get your house in order.

I'm sure there are plenty of people out there like me with cloud storage fragmented across multiple services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Onedrive.  Today I decided to find a solution to migrate or at least sync between them all. After researching whats out there I have decided on keeping the other services instead of just using one cloud storage to rule them all! My preference was for Google Drive however I realized that some of the apps I use have great Dropbox support and people who I share with during my workday also use things a variety of different sources. So I have found a way that I can keep all my current cloud offerings and even encourages me to sign up for more!

CloudHQ makes it simple to keep all my cloud storage sources in sync and allows me to have the flexibility of using a plethora of providers and unlocks a world of third party apps that are now at my fingertips.

I signed up for a free trial by simply downloading the app from the chrome web store but you can just as easily sign up by visiting their  website. 

From here you can select the services you want to sync. For me it was Dropbox, Google Drive, Onedrive and Evernote. It also has a good offering of others that im not currently using such as Basecamp, SugarSync, Box and salesforce.

You can decide on two way or one way synchronization. I choose to replicate all of my accounts so I can have total freedom to choose what services I use.

You also have the choice to convert any documents into Google Docs gdoc format when syncing. You can choose to sync all or specific folders from each account.

Once you are set up and running your first sync will take place.

The chrome extension is great and gives you an in browser pop up of you sync status.

I had a good look around and this was by far the best service of its kind out there. It is just so compatible with so many services that I cannot fault it. 

Key features are 

• • Manage all of your cloud storage accounts from a single interface.
  • 100% Web based
  • • No extra installer to put an icon in your sys tray and add an extra 5 minutes of startup time to your computer.
    • Ideal for linux users
  • Can share files with whoever you work with using their preferred storage solution
  • Combine as many free storage providers as you can get your hands on into one place
  • webdav also available.

There is a free plan that you can use to see the benefits and they offer various pain plans for additional functionality. 

Install sqlplus instant client on debian

I have  often had to install the sqlplus instant client on debian based systems. Below I am sharing how I last went about this on Ubuntu 13.04 but the guide should be solid on other debian based distros.

SQLPLUS install Ubuntu 13.04 64 Bit

First download the package "alien from the ubuntu repos. This will allow you to install rpm packages on debian based systems.

sudo apt-get install alien

Next head on over to the Oracle site and download the instant client packages listed below, you can download then all if you want but these 3 will give you the basics.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxx86-64soft-092277.html

Once that is done, go to your download folder and execute the following:

sudo alien -i oracle-instantclient12.1-basic*.rpm

sudo alien -i oracle-instantclient12.1-sqlplus*.rpm

sudo alien -i oracle-instantclient12.1-devel*.rpm

sudo apt-get install libaio1

sudo touch /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf

sudo ldconfig

Now make sure everything is working by trying to establish an sqlplus session by building the TNS entry as below.

Notice that the command for using sqlplus is sqlplus64 as this is a 64bit install.

sqlplus64 username/password@//dbhost:1521/SID

Thats it, you should be done.

But thats never the case is it :)

You will now find that you get the error
sqlplus64: error while loading shared libraries: libsqlplus.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

when you try to run it.

This is due to you having to set the LD_LIBRARY path variable to point at the required lib folder below.

/usr/lib/oracle/12.1/client64/lib/libsqlplus.so

To fix this issue add these system variables with the following commands:

touch ~/.bash_profile
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/oracle/12.1/client64/lib/" >> ~/.bash_profile
. ~/.bash_profile

Now when you run sqlplus64 you should be good to go.

If you want to create a tnsnames.ora that oracle will use to store TNS entries then create your tnsnames.ora file where you want it and reference it as an environment variable by adding the following to the ~/.profile file with the following commands.

echo "export TNS_ADMIN=~/yourPathToFolderContainingTnsnames.ora" >> ~/.bash_profile
. ~/.bash_profilevel*.rpm

sudo apt-get install libaio1

sudo touch /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf

sudo ldconfig
touch ~/.bash_profile
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/oracle/12.1/client64/lib/" >> ~/.bash_profile
. ~/.bash_profile