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Last year, I was laid off on November 1st, and it took me a week or so to get my journal moved and re-established. If you belong to the mailing list, you can read the archives here. |
My self-assigned work task for the day was to set up an ODBC connection to the Oracle database I'll be using for testing this project, and then begin writing the code that will talk to the database. It turned out that setting up the connection took most of the day.
It should have been easy. Microsoft's ODBC Oracle drivers are installed with C++, and my friend Becky, who set up the test database for me, had sent me all the information about it. I fired up the Control Panel and the ODBC Manager. I told it I wanted a new connection. I selected the Microsoft Oracle driver, and it showed me a screen where I could enter the connection information.
Okay, that's the box where I put in my user name... I don't enter the password here... I consulted the help files, and remembered from my last ODBC experience years ago that the Data Source Name (DSN) is the name I'll use to connect to the database, and the Description is whatever I want it to be. But where did I enter this port number Becky had given me? Or the server name? Where did I enter the SID, and what the heck was a SID, anyway?
It shouldn't have been this difficult. We have an entire staff of Oracle programmers, after all. Surely they should have known how to do this. I called on Becky - and Steve, who hangs out in our office all the time anyway - to help me.
Becky wasn't sure, but promised to look into it. She came up with a CD-ROM of Oracle Developer 6.0. "Don't install the whole thing," she told me, "but there's some stuff in the Custom Install section for ODBC." That sounded promising.
First of all, let me just say that it was among the worst installer packages I've ever encountered. I won't get into it. It was just bad. Oh, and it crashed if you tried to uninstall anything, so I'm going to have to clean out my files by hand after this. And the kicker was, none of the files I installed seemed to work. Steve came and looked over my shoulder and offered the opinion that what I'd installed wasn't what I needed to use.
Steve was of the opinion that I needed to install the latest drivers from Oracle's website. While he stood behind me with arms akimbo, I went and found them, agreed not to use my database for purposes of mass destruction (we got a good laugh out of that - just what add-on driver do you need to get in order to produce weapons of mass destruction?) and downloaded the self-extracting file. I extracted it.
The self-extracting file unzipped a package that required Oracle to be installed before we could use it. And I know that the whole reason for ODBC is so you don't have to install the whole database in order to talk to them. So that was no good.
I gave up and went to lunch. I ranted and raved for a while, then went back to my desk to pound on my computer for a while.
Steve eventually came back and thought we should try the Microsoft driver again - he thought all that stuff I hadn't known what to do with should be combined into a single string which would tell the driver how to connect. That seemed reasonable, but no one seemed to know how to format that string. (With a whole staff of Oracle programmers! Of course, they have cute little tools that automatically go out and find the databases they want, so they don't have to know how to make the strings.) We played with it for a while, trying various combinations of things. (One of the few good things about having installed small pieces of Oracle Developer was that there was a built-in tool for testing ODBC connections.)
Eventually, Becky told me to look for a specific file on my hard drive. I fired up the file-find, and sure enough, I had three copies. Becky talked me through making changes to two of the files - the files were sortof a brute-force method of forcing the ODBC drivers to know where the server was. And voila! I was connected. This finally happened around two in the afternoon.
I spent the rest of the day asking Steve and Becky for help with SQL, which I also haven't touched in years. I have to confess, by this time my temper was fraying from the frustration, and I wasn't very nice. I was grumpy at Becky, and downright surly at Steve. Steve is fidgety and doesn't like to listen very closely, so I had to keep snapping at him to put down the damn slinky (we keep toys in our office; what can I say?) and listen to me.
Am I an idiot, or what? Being grumpy at the very people who were trying to help me... I owe some apologies.
Someone is screwing around with my chair at work. For the last three mornings, I've come in to find it messed up: Set to the shortest possible height (I keep it fairly high, considering how short I am), the backrest angle changed dramatically... This morning the seat tilt had been turned off, which really annoyed me, because it took me days to get it exactly where I wanted it.
I'm trying to figure out if it's someone actually sitting at my desk (which the IT staff do sometimes) or if it's someone's idea of a practical joke. I used to think it was the cleaning crew, but they don't come in on Thursdays. Hmph.
I am so ready for the weekend...
Word of the Day: akimbo - having the hand on the hip and the elbow turned outward; set in a bent position (usu. applies to arm position)
News of the Weird: When Pigs Fly
-- On October 17, a pig flew on board a six-hour US Airways flight -- sitting on the floor of the first row of first class. The airline is embarassed and says it will never happen again.
The pig's traveling companions convinced the airline that the pig was a "therapeutic companion pet," like a guide dog for the blind.
According to an internal airline report, the animal got out-of-hand upon arrival in Seattle. It went running through the plane squealing and tried to get into the cockpit.
- nothing
Current Projects:
- jingle-bell stocking
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