A Real Annoyance

The point of this post is getting rid of that annoying incompatibility notice about Real every time an update is made to FireFox. But first, a rant…

I am not a fan of the Real Player to begin with.  I certainly give it credit for being one of the early multimedia players. I also give them credit for being one of the first major abusers of the installation process, changing extension mappings without asking, installing itself as a service when it is only used occasionally, and being really obtuse in how to fix these problems afterward.   When I did PC maintenance service (before the Geek Squad, which people keep reminding me that I thought of four years before they did) I routinely removed the RealPlayer service and was always thanked for speeding up the machine.

I even tried to give the Real Player a second chance when they bought the Napster name. That lasted about 2 minutes past the installation where it still did all the things that annoyed me about the their 1.0 version. The Real Player is not installed on my personal machine. I used to routinely uninstall it from my work machine until my current employer decided to build their compliance training application using it. Which brings me to my point.

After updating the excellent password manager I use (RoboForm), I was once again confronted with this annoying screen.

Real Extension Annoyance
Real Extension Annoyance

My first shot in Google (remove incompatible firefox extension) got me pretty close to a solution with a Mozilla Support thread. The last entry in the thread did the trick for me. In case that link is dead, the entry was:

Ok, run the program “regedit” and goto “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMozillaFirefoxExtensions”

If there is nothing there try “HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMozillaFirefoxExtensions”

There you should see the extension… delete the registry entry.

That worked for me…

The first path worked for me, too, specifically the key {ABDE892B-13A8-4d1b-88E6-365A6E755758}, with the value of “C:Program FilesRealRealPlayerbrowserrecord”

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FastSwap Feature of WebLogic Server 10.3

I’m the first to admit that if you are looking for breaking news, I am not the source. Broken news, maybe…

Anyway, I just noticed the FastSwap feature for WLS 10.3. This allows for updating classes in a running instance without having to do a full redeploy. If you have spent anytime developing WebLogic Portal applications, you know what a boon this is.  Two of the major productivity killers in building  WLP solutions is the time it takes to redeploy the whole portal to test every little change, and eventual Out of Memory errors that will occur with repeated redeployment of the same application.

Turning on the feature is a simple matter of updating weblogic.xml and weblogic-application.xml (see the documentation for the specifics).

One note of caution: This is for development use only. If your deployment processes do not include either deployment plans or environment-specific deployment descriptors, you will need to maintain a local copy outside of your normal source control.

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Patch for WLS 10.0 ORA-00001 Error Messages in Logs

While the message does not impact functionality, if you have to read the logs it becomes tedious to scroll past the following over and over:

<BEA-403302> <An unexpected SQL exception occured java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00001:
unique constraint (PORTAL.PK_LEASE) violated.
java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00001: unique constraint (PORTAL.PK_LEASE) violated
at oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.throwSqlException(DatabaseError.java:112)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer.processError(T4CTTIoer.java:331)

Not to mention how the fun of having every person who hasn’t looked at your application before reporting it as a problem or insisting it is the root of a bug you are chasing (it isn’t).

If you have a support account, you can surpress this with the following WLP 10.2 patch:

VZGR | 9AS6D7D9

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Next Step: Using MySQL on Vista

Once I got MySQL running on Vista, I then needed to manage it. While I ran MySQL from the command line eight years ago, that was, well, eight years ago. I remembered enough to get the server started, set up the root user, and find the databases that are pre-configured. This was enough to get my local version of WordPress running.

To do more interesting things for the casual user, the best tool I ever found is the one made by DBTools. I started using it with version 1.02, and find 3.2.4 just as delightfully simple and feature-rich as my first foray into getting fast results with very little ramp-up back in 2001.

I’m also notoriously cheap, and DBTools has a free version for personal use. Price aside, it is still my preferred tool for basic interaction with MySQL.

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WebLogic Workshop 10.2 Debugging

On a very long, large project where there are multiple portals I will create separate worskpaces for the different portals. Especially when developing shared libraries, to save time in unit testing and debugging. Once in a while, I would get this annoying message about the WebLogic Server not starting within the timeout period. The server does eventually start, but you can’t debug without restarting.

Later in the project I had to run all of the portals in Workshop at once. Being able to debug become the norm, which is really annoying when trying to find bugs in code you have never seen before. I did some digging and found that the timout period was made configurable in an older version of Workshop. Originally, there were several versions of Workshop. Some were versions for specific products, like WebLogic Portal. Then they combined them in all into one. Unfortunately, the ability to configure the timeout was only in the WLP version and did not make it into Workspace Studio (the actual new name for Workshop that no one seems to use).

Long story short (yeah, I know, too late), I got the feature ported forward to 10.2. It is patch WW5U | F21UMQIN. Once the patch is installed, edit workshop.ini and add the following:

-Dweblogic.deployment.timeout=3600000
-Dweblogic.startserver.timeout=3600000
-Dweblogic.stopserver.timeout=3600000

3600000 is number of milliseconds, and is the maximum setting.  You can set it for whatever you want less than that, but why would you?

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