Adobe, Quit Being Annoying by Asking Me to Upgrade to No End!

Obviously, the "Do not remind me about this update" check box doesn't work as I've clicked it for about a year now and it keeps coming back to harass me into upgrading Flash.

Adobe Flash remains the number one app that causes my MacBook fan to spin up whenever I open up certain Flash sites in Firefox. Adobe, fix your act!

Yahoo Mail 404

Today, I tried to check my Yahoo! mail account from my Acer Aspire One and this is what I got:

Not sure if this was a temporary change but http://mail.yahoo.com/ gave a benign not found error when I tried. I visited the Yahoo! homepage then accessed my mail from there instead. Reloading the URL worked afterwards.

If this change is permanent, them it might not be unconnected to Yahoo!'s recent hiring of Marissa Mayer from Google. They might want more users to hit the Yahoo! homepage rather than bypass it to read emails on their free account as that is what I mostly use them for these days. The more eyeballs that hit the homepage the higher their income from ads running on the Yahoo! network.

Working with IBM DB2 Express 10.1

IBM's DB2 database is not like any of the other RDBMS products I've used in the past.
It's a monster.

I'll try to relive some of the things I've learnt while trying to find my way around it for the past 2 days now.

I strongly recommend reading the DB2 documentation thoroughly when you run into a snag as it will immensely help you in crafting the right blend of keywords to use when searching for a quick solution. At the very least, you should read this page table space design which is a nice intro on the design philosophy used by DB2. A lot of DB2 documentation will refer to the terms you'll learn from that page so it is important you understand them.


While doing a database import:
db2 -stvf C:\Code\BOT.ddl > C:\Code\BOT.log | more

I got bitten by a silly block commenting mistake described in this question.
I was using "/*" and  "*/" which sometimes worked but most of the time didn't. It often failed with:

SQL0104N An unexpected token "*/" was found following "BEGIN-OF-
STATEMENT".
Expected tokens may include: "". SQLSTATE=42601
 

The fix is to use a pair of "(=" and "=)" block comment delimiters since the SQL block that I intended to comment out was being executed from the Command Line Processor (CLP).

Link to the very well written DB2 documentation regarding CLP options is here.

Installing the 64-bit JDK 6 an Ubuntu 11.04 Slice

After reading the instructions here and here, below are the steps of what I did to get the 64-bit version of JDK 6 installed on a 256MB VPS from Slicehost running Ubuntu 11.04 (aka Natty).

 NOTE: You will need to first of all download the x64 binary using a browser that supports cookies in order to correctly accept the Oracle terms of use before the download can commence.

 $ wget http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/6u31-b04/jdk-6u31-linux-x64.bin
 $ chmod u+x jdk-6u31-linux-x64.bin
 $ ./jdk-6u31-linux-x64.bin [Press 'Enter' when installation completes]
 $ sudo mv ./jdk1.6.0_31 /usr/lib/jvm/
 $ sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0_31/bin/java" 1
 $ sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javac" "javac" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0_31/bin/javac" 1
 $ sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javaws" "javaws" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0_31/bin/javaws" 1
 $ sudo update-alternatives --config java