It seems that there’s something seriously broken on Debian regarding Tora and Oracle.

To be specific, Debian’s Tora package depends on iODBC, which in turn doesn’t seem to work with Oracle’s Linux client. The resulting situation is that the Oracle’s driver screams this:

1: SQLDriverConnect = [iODBC][Driver Manager]/opt/instantclient_10_2/libsqora.so.10.1: undefined symbol: bcuMsgBoxError (0) SQLSTATE=00000

I’ve traced this to the fact that UnixODBC exposes a bcuMsgBoxError function, which doesn’t seem to exist in iODBC.

Now the question is, can I manually unpin Tora from using iODBC without recompiling it. I’m currently working on finding this out. I hope it works out because I would really love to use Tora on Linux.

Technorati Tags: tora, linux, debian, bcumsgboxerror, problem, oracle

Ha. What a surprise.

A long hawked demo of Steorn’s perpetual motion machine that should have been demonstrated today at London’s Kinetica museum went belly up. Supposedly this is due to:

… some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting…

It’s like watching footages of airplane crashes on YouTube. You know it’s going to end up messy, but you just can’t look the other way.

I wonder what the excuse will be tomorrow.

Update: they have cameras rolling at the Kinetica Museum site now. They are still showing a perpetual stillness device though.

Technorati Tags: steorn, orbo, kinetica, london, perpetual motion, free energy

It seems to me that a gem from the past is becoming ubiquitous again. The technology I’m talking about is geolocation by the client’s IP address. Read on »

Like I mentioned a few days ago, I’m open sourcing some of my pet software projects. The first two are Schmoo and ForesightDB.

Suppose you are an inexperienced Clarify programmer looking to extend the functionality of a load bean. You have changed the JSP page to include some additional text field and want to output a default value from the database, using a new returned CDO from the load bean. Read on »