Excellent collection of quotes on programming.

Caveat: This thread can be very addictive…

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58640/great-programming-quotes

Its almost impossible to select a favourite from this list- but if I had to name one- this would probably be the one

It works on my machine - anonymous programmer..

Its not always your site says anything to you

But mine did…It said ‘XDB’.

It was my grails application.This is the login window Firefox showed be gleefully with the message

The site says XDB

IE played dumb(er) - It too presented a login screen - but had a simpler message

XDB

I was in the process of trying a few things in Grails - making those cool domain classes and controllers when it happened. It was working a few minutes ago and then boom !!! it stopped.
And since I am so new to Grails- I thought maybe I had messed up something.

Surprisingly google didn’t get many results either.

Anyway it was enough to tell me the problem was with Oracle

And since I was at that time creating a new Oracle Database on my laptop- <snap> that made perfect sense. (Though I was simply creating a new database instance and not fiddling with the one that my app was using)

Once I stopped and restarted all the Oracle listeners -the problem went away.

So moral of the story ? If the site says XDB- restart your Oracle instance.

There may be more elegent solutions out there- but this is what worked for me

Today I bid farewell to  Windows Vista. And hello Ubuntu !!!

Well not exactly… I still have Vista as a dual- boot option.But I don’t see myself logging in to Vista any time soon.

For some reason the CD I created after downloading it from Ubuntu downloads site - didn’t work.So crazy as it sounds- I requested a CD to be snail-mailed to me.

It came soon- even though they warned me that it could be ‘months’ before I get it.

I decided not to wipe out Vista and installed Ubuntu on ‘top of’ the Windows.

The installation was quite smooth. I used the instructions posted here

My first reaction after I booted into ubuntu was- Cool !!!  This is fast !!!

My wife was not so impressed though she was relieved that her favourite application i.e. (not Internet Explorer) Firefox works

But when I showed her how to get to Sudoku from Applications>Games - she was actually pleased

I spent rest of the day installing my suite of applications and tools- Apache, Tomcat, Php, MySql , Java, Groovy ,Grails,Spring,Hibernate,Eclipse,ant

Most of the applications - I was able to install from the System>Administration>Synaptic Package manager

(One piece of advice- when in Synaptic package manager- do not use quick search to search for  applications- use the Search button instead.)

All in all - it was a smooth and a very satisfying experience.

Sorry Amit- I know you love windows. But sometimes  you gotta shut the window and open the door to get the fresh air in