RZN's Rambles

If you’ve tried to download Oracle 10g express database (or any oracle rpm) from their website using wget, you’ve probably hit a bit of a brick wall that looks like an oracle login page. Then, when you try to wget using the link to the rpm you’ve also been unsuccessful.  So, Here’s...

Having a ball playing around with the just-released GoogleCL tool, which offers command line access to Google Calendar, contacts, Docs, Picasa, Blogger, and YouTube. With Python-based GoogleCL installed, you can do things such as list today’s events on your GCal right in the terminal, like so: $...

Even as Hollywood continues to pull in huge profits from its existing business model, the lure of even greater riches inspires the relentless pursuit of filesharing-related platforms such as The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and more recently, Newzbin. The studios hope that one day sharing will be crushed and...

I find that whenever I get a large data file from somewhere (i.e. extract some data from a database, crawl some sites and dump the data in a file) I always need to do just that little bit of extra processing before I can actually use it. This processing is always just non-trivial enough and I do it just...

Back when I did phone support, many moons ago – I did receive some calls like this from people who had unplugged their mouse, or inserted their pre-paid internet card into their floppy drive.

FREE FALL: World champion freediver Guillaume – Does a very special dive at Dean’s Blue Hole, the deepest blue hole in the world filmed entirely on breath held by the french champion, Julie Gautier.

Hi-Tec has come up with a brilliantly successful viral campaign featuring a group of people supposedly running on water. The video suggests the sport is called Liquid Mountaineering and shows a few chaps running on water for several metres at a time before falling in. So far the video has been viewed...

Tonight I was setting up subversion and websvn on a small CentOS VPS and I came across an issue where, after commit to a change my WebSVN interface would break, complaining “svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL”. There was also a permission denied error mixed in there, which immediately...

Code names have been around for a long time. Remember the Manhattan project in the 1940s? That turned out to be the atomic bomb. Thankfully, not all code names hide such sinister projects. Code names can be about secrecy, but when it comes to software development, it’s usually not so much about secrecy...

So i’ve got an APC40 which is pretty fucking cool for throwing around tracks samples and anything else audio into your mixes. The only thing that could make it better, is adding a touchscreen element to it which is then programable and configurable. The solution for this previously has been the...