Where can I find Informix IDS version 10?

Meh.

Informix IDS version 10 is too hard to find on the internet - at least in a legit way. You'll be better off settling for IDS version 11.5. You could opt to go for IBM's time-limited trial or go for the one offered by the IIUG thanks to the info here. (IBM also offers a time unlimited version of IDS Developer Edition version 11.5 so you could go that route as well but I was specifically looking for version 10 and ended up at the post I linked to which is from way back 2006). Unfortunately, you might not be able to easily locate the downloads as per the instructions on that post unless you look harder. Here are some tips:

After creating a free IIUG account, re-validate your email address to allow you download from the Software Downloads sections. How you get there? Simple.

Step 1
First you need to be logged in here: http://www.iiug.org/software/index.html. Even after a successful login, the visual feedback still says otherwise, since the login controls still appears.

Step 2
Click on the Member Area link near the top of the page, underneath the login control which should display a popup with the address: http://www.iiug.org/cgi-bin/member_area.cgi in the location bar.

Step 3
Now click on the Software Download button then follow the steps to re-validate your email address to allow you access to Downloads if you haven't done so already.

Step 4
Once done, clicking on the button once more will present you a list of tools/programs available for download. Please be informed that the downloads are subject to terms which you have to agree to.

As at the time of writing this post the following four items are listed as available for download:

Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) Developer Edition 11.50 xC5 released August 10 for AIX (64 bit), HP (64 bit), Sun Solaris (64 bit), Windows(32 and 64 bit), Linux(32 and 64 bit) and Macintosh (64 bit);
Informix Dynamic Server Open Admin Tool Ver 2.24 released April 2009 (OAT);
AGS Server Studio;
AGS Sentinel;

Enjoy!

Graduate School Admission Tips from the Inside.

This is that time of the year where graduate school admissions are upon us with me being far from ready to take that leap; although I have been nursing the dream of one day getting admitted for a Masters in Computer Science and then a Ph.D, I still think I need to immerse myself more in the industry and of course earn additional money along the way.

I came across this very insightful and candid post by Prof. Amin Vahdat, a CS professor at UC San Diego after stumbling across his blog from a Slashdot link that talks about Facebook's really impressive architecture to handle 300+ million users and counting.

This lead me to check the UCSD CNS web site where I noticed that Matt Welsh, now a Harvard faculty, (a name I vaguely remember to be related to NBIO and SEDA) would be giving a talk in the CNS Lecture Series come January 2010. He also maintains a blog: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/ where he also has a post on How to get into grad school for intending graduate students.

I particularly enjoyed the witty and simply hilarious post he linked to by Prof. Luis von Ahn, Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. My best part:

7. DO mention the name of a professor that you want to work with, but make sure the professor is still alive.

Now that definitely is the type of advisor I'd like to work with, one that wields a seemly boundless sense of humor.

At least both Profs. Amin Vahdat and Matt Welsh are active in the research areas I am interested in: operating systems, distributed computing, concurrency and computer networks but the real challenge is if I can blast through the GRE and bring my research skills up to snuff to earn glowing recommendation letters that are important in getting me into their schools. I've never been a stellar student (although I once came top of my class in nursery school :D) so I'll have to rely on doing insane stuff when I go back into academia for a MSc. I'm thinking of throwing an MSc. in Economics into the mix since I also have a real strong knack for business but haven't quite nailed how I can apply this. I'm vaguely thinking applying distributed computing on some business problem that currently takes requires a lot of resources to complete similar to this but for a truly novel business problem.

Service Unavailable: IIS 6.0 Windows 2003 Server SP2 (64-bit)

I recently got this error on http://ejeboo.com and was a little bit worried since I had no idea how long visitors to the video search site have been experiencing this. I tried to quickly google for the possible cause and resolution while I opened an RDP session to the server to instinctively give IIS (6.0) a reboot.

For whatever reason, the google results that pointed to support.microsoft.com articles that dominated the SERP refused to load fast enough. Anyway, a restart of the World Wide Web Publising and IIS Admin services easily resolved the issue for me.

Funny thing is I never had any such issue with Apache when I used to host the site on a Linux VPS from SliceHost.

Google Minimalist Home Page

TechCrunch has a post on this here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/02/google-fade-homepage/

I happen to have come across one of the iterations of the final minimalist design as captured in the screenshot.

Lighttp

After upgrading my apache2 installation to allow me test a php5 app, I have not been able to get SSL to work! Arggh!!!

Rather than continue to lose time while tinkering with Apache, I got the brilliant idea of trying out Lighttpd and I got up and running in less than 5 mins hurray.

Instructions to install lighttpd with ssl is here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to-install-ssl-lighttpd-https-configuration.html
along with how to generate a self-signed certificate here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-lighttpd-create-self-signed-ssl-certificates.html

Open source rocks!

Google Nigeria Office?

Google appears to be making a go at localizing its content (Google Maps, Apps, etc) for some hard-to-ignore markets in sub-saharan Africa like Nigeria. Nokia Ovi Maps prepare for some serious competition. Free is good!

They have a page here looking for a Business Development Manager and here too but both pages apparently link to the same information only that the latter has a url that is more SEO friendly.

Via: http://www.informationnigeria.org/

Java ME Development Tips

I've been fooling around lately with developing an app or two for my Nokia E71 using Java. I've since found out that with enough dedication one could develop the common most kind of apps using not only Java ME but also Flash Lite and Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) in addition to the seemly daunting Symbian C++ option.

To get started with the tools needed to do Java ME development, there is a nice list of tools that you need to download here: Java ME S60 Wiki. The tools are most geared towards developers that plan on doing their development primarily on Windows using Eclipse as their IDE of choice. I currently run Windows XP on my Mac using VirtualBox.

Step 1
I installed two JDKs: JDK 1.6 and JDK 1.5 because the third tool mentioned in step 3: Nokia SymbianOS/S60 SDK for Java which I had downloaded a long time ago was the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 edition and it somehow has a dependency on the version 1.5 JDK. I suppose the current version S60 5th Edition SDK should not require having to install two separate JDKs.

Step 2
I downloaded the Java ME SDK. Perhaps I'll try doing Java ME development on my Mac directly since Sun now offers the Java ME SDK (formerly the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CLDC) for the Mac OS and post the results here.

Step 3
I installed Nokia SymbianOS/S60 SDK for Java specifically the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 edition. You can go ahead and download more recent S60 5th Edition SDK here.

Step 4
Although, you should do just fine if you follow the steps outlined at the Wiki, I decided to do mine slightly differently since the Eclipse 3.2.2 version that was used is slightly dated -- the Eclipse Foundation has already released three additional versions since Eclipse 3.2.x (Callisto): Eclipse 3.3 (Europa), Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) and Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo).

So I downloaded instead Eclipse Pulsar which is based off Galileo and was designed specifically for mobile app development. The good thing about doing this is that you get to avoid downloading the EclipseME plugin for Eclipse since this is already bundled with Pulsar.

Step 5
No-op.


Step 6
You could choose to skip this step altogether as it merely provides you with a local copy of the Java ME documentation.

Now you are all set for a 'hello world'!


Some additional gems I came across while searching:
http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Code_snippets_table_for_common_use_cases
A nice page of code snippets hosted on Forum Nokia's wiki for many of the common use cases that noobs to mobile development would like to learn about.


http://efforts.embedded.ufcg.edu.br/
A site chuck full of neat tutorials on getting started with WRT, Flash Lite, Java ME and a few other mobile development platforms.
I particularly loved this example on Accessing RESTful WebServices with JavaScript which IMHO was well written with a nicely done Javascript client, diagrams and a nice server-side implementation in PHP and Grails. I especially liked the easy to follow code of the Grails script which is a nice primer into how easy Ruby on Rails development must be.


http://wiki.kunerilite.net/index.php?title=KuneriLite_Introduction
I also came across kunerilite for turbo-charging Flash Lite apps. Pretty neat eh?

Removing ^M in text files under Linux

As per this ASCII table the carriage return or the character ^M is listed as:

CR ^M 13 0D carriage return

^M can either be expressed in decimal or base 10 (n₁₀) as: 13;
in hexadecimal or base 16 (n₁₆) as: 0D;
or in octal or base 8 (n₈) as: 015.

The conversion: 015₈ = 0₈ 1₈ 5₈ = 0x8² + 1x8¹ + 5x8⁰ = 0 + 8 + 5 = 13₁₀

Here's a neat little tip for mass removal of the annoying presence of ^M in text files that were edited on a Windows computer in Linux using Perl:

perl -pi -e "s/\015//g" index.html

or even better:

perl -pi -e "s/\015//g" folder/*.*

removes it completely from all text files in the folder.

Upgrading Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) Subversion from 1.4.6 to 1.6

I am working on a project where I needed to update the current code to the latest via:

svn update

but instead encountered this error: "svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'; please get a newer Subversion client".

It seemed that my svn client which Ubuntu 8.04 claimed to be the most recent version is actually an old hag. I had to do more than a handful of Google queries to finally land the instructions I needed to get this to work.

Hop on over to https://launchpad.net/~anders-kaseorg/+archive/subversion-1.6 click on "Technical details about this PPA" and choose your Ubuntu version in the select list that appears.

Add the entry "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/subversion-1.6/ubuntu hardy main" to your sources.list via:

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/subversion-1.6/ubuntu hardy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

You might need to perform that action while logged in as root (sudo -s) or by prefixing the command with sudo" or you'll get a "permission denied".

Once you are done, perform:

sudo apt-get update

and:

apt-get install subversion

which should list your subversion libraries/client as marked for upgrading.

YMMV

Here's a piece of information that is glaringly missing in Ribbit's FAQ which I stumbled upon after a number of Google keyword mojos:

Inbound SMS features are not yet supported. It is planned for a future release, but there is no published timeline. Outbound SMS can only be sent to a valid mobile number/account at this time.

culled from the developer forum.

I found this out after attempting to fund my developer account and claiming my $25 credit to allow me test inbound sms to no avail. Apparently, you can only send sms to an actual mobile phone in the US but not to Ribbit's US-issued purpose number. By attempting to fund I mean that I tried with more than one credit card, severally, but with no luck so I put in a support ticket and got my account credited with the $25 all the same.

3G Service Where I Live?

I got home today and saw the "3G" icon on my Nokia E71.
Hmm, I'll see how this goes.

I can't believe I haven't blogged in as much as year!!!