I’ve been planning to get a decent and comprehensive set of certifications for my skills for a while now. However, I’ve never worked at an employer which would support me in getting certified.

I’m glad to say that my current employer is very different in those terms, and is readily supporting me in my certification plan.

To that name, on November 24th, I’ve received my first certification, IBM’s test 255, Developing With IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software V6.

Woot for me!

Technorati Tags: ibm, rad, websphere, certification, ibm255, 255, prometric

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

After more than two years of working with Siemens, I have decided that there is nothing holding me there any more.

What was once an interesting job filled with opportunities to learn new things has quickly become a quagmire of all-nighters, piss poor code and people who just didn’t care. So I stopped caring, my performance suffered and I figured that it’s better to call it quits while I was ahead.

I’ve been taking some time off for the last couple of weeks. I’ve finalized my paperwork with Siemens and have already made arrangements for my next job. I’ll be working in the banking industry. While I can’t really share more info than that right now, I can say that I have seen these people use some fun Java technologies.

Namely, I’ve seen Maven, Spring, Hibernate, Jetty, Jasper Reports and various others used in a live system. Can’t really say I know what the system does, but the sheer amount of technology involved sounds promising

Technorati Tags: quitting, quit job, leaving, siemens, croatia, job, office, work conditions

This is what pulling an all-nighter looks like, kids.

It’s you, versus the problem, versus an almost unlimited supply of coffee.

This coffee machine gave up. It’s display reads “Hot drinks unavailable.”

I’m still working.

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