Tech Debug

Microsoft Development

lantrix — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:05:41 +0000

I’ve started down the path of Darkness

In December 2011, I went on BizTalk training with @BizTalkBill and I’m now four weeks into the next stage of my career which is being an Microsoft “Integration Specialist”. You won’t find any open source in this realm, no ruby, nothing involving indie developers cracking out code until late at night.

What this change means is getting to know Visual Studio, BizTalk, SQL Server and all things Microsoft. It means using TFS, even though you really want to use Git. It means C# coding when you are familiar with interpreted languages like Perl, PHP and Ruby (I won’t be doing an ASP work).

That means you can expect going forward less posts about Unix, Clearcase (finally!) and Open Source platforms, and more about Microsoft offerings; specifically integration products.

Welcome to 2012.

Git on 10.04 Ubuntu LTS

lantrix — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:51:34 +0000

This is more for me than you, however if you need Git on Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) try this. The commands I ran get the pre-packaged PPA Git working on Ubuntu 10.04:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
sudo aptitude install git

Apple iTMS TV show quality review

lantrix — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 04:18:29 +0000

This is an old review I wrote and never posted, but it’s still relevant today. My conclusion is up to date for 2011.

Having just purchased and watched seasons 1 and 2 of The Tudors from iTunes (I missed them on Showtime), I was searching the net for other peoples thoughts on the quality of these TV shows. One review I came across was from AllForces.com, concering iTunes quality vs Bit Torrent. Since their blog post in 2005, Apple seems to have upped the standard of their TV show offerings.

I’m be the first to admit that I’m an Apple fan, with my Mac laptop the primary downloader of these TV Shows, syncing to my iPhone and also viewing the shows via front row on my Mac Mini. It’s the viewing of these on the Mac Mini I will review.

For the review I was watching iTunes video files using the following:

2009 Model Mac Mini
Sony KDL-46W4500 1080p LCD Television
DVI to HDMI connection from Mac to TV, set at 720p resolution
Apples Front Row for playback, with the TV Shows sourced on a remote Mac Laptop over 54g WiFi

DRM

One of the things All Forces addressed was the DRM vs Bit Torrent downloads. Apple has come a long way since 2005 with their music, having the majority of the catalogue as “iTunes Plus”. This has their musical offerings in 256Kbps DRM free AAC audio. It’s an advancement since 2005, even though others offer better music quality.

There are still DRM restrictions in place for video, and I don’t see this abating any time soon. The TV and Movie industry is a lot less lenient to the removal of Digital Rights Management, and with Blu-ray winning the HD wars we wont see DRM removed from video any time soon.

Video Quality

One of the key points in the review by All Forces in 2005 was the low resolution of the iTunes video files. Quality of the TV episodes have increased since 2005, and Apple seem to be on a winner with H264 encoding. The files for The Tudors video files are 640×360 H264 encoded MPEG4 files, with an average size of 600MBytes per episode.

Pricing

In 2011 I also use an Apple TV. Pricing is a MAJOR sticking point with people using iTunes for TV Shows. In Australia they sell at AUD$2.99, only in standard definition, and only via the iTunes Store. In the US one can purchase HD versions for the same price or SD versions for USD$1.99. It’s ridiculous. You can’t even watch TV shows in Australia on Apple TV. Why?!

Conclusion

The quality of the iTunes show, as seen with The Tudors Season 1 is great. Apple have come a long way over the last 4 years to be able to offer all major TV shows as electronic downloads. Ease of access, and a decent price point makes it viable for consumers to use Apple as their source of entertainment. However, the disparate pricing across markets and the lack of HD shows in some countries is the final blocker to making iTunes your first and only stop for watching TV shows.

The tale of BizTalk & BPMS

lantrix — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:41:28 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything, so here goes. I’m currently working for a client who wants BizTalk installed as an ESB. They don’t know why they want it, they just know that they want it.

Since they are a Microsoft shop it’s an assumption on their behalf, but a good one in this case. They are dealing with external agencies who will submit data on a daily basis to be consumed within the organisation. This is BizTalk’s bread and butter especially in the B2B space. Unfortunately at the moment the client will be accepting data from business partners via manual submission using web forms on Sharepoint 2010.

At least once we get BizTalk in, we can show them how then next phase of operations can automate a number of external business interactions.

One of the other benefits of BizTalk, acting as an Enterprise Service Bus, is for facilitating communications between isolated systems and applications – allowing one to avoid point to point design when applications integrate.

So the client is, without understanding it, thinking of implementing the start of Service Orientated Architecture.

The only thing that’s disappointing is this: they understand that BizTalk can orchestrate Business processes across systems, but they still don’t think of their IT system(s) as one entire Business Process Management System (BPMS). They have 5 standalone applications at launch, and are aiming to bring on board and integrate up to 15 separate business applications – most of which will be new.

They talk ITIL, Agile, methodology, and “Frameworks” – but still practice waterfall project management and don’t understand the lifecycle of a true BPMS.

In the end IT delivers not for themselves, but for the Business. The core functions of the Business is what IT is there to facilitate and support. Business and IT departments need to be engaged and working to together right from the start, hopefully with key minds that are visionary enough to deliver a BPMS to support the process of the Business!

ChongQing Hotpot (Video)

lantrix — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 07:18:31 +0000

My first movie done completely on the iPhone4 using iMovie.
这个重庆火锅。

Updated: IM Status Applescript

lantrix — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 13:35:13 +0000

I previously published an Applescript I use to immediately update Adium, Skype, iChat status messages.
I’ve recently changed it to allow more than three options (a limitation in the Applescript Display Dialog method).

Find a copy below:

– IMStatus
– version 2.0, Lantrix (http://techdebug.com)
– idea conceived from script by Jason Kenison “theWebGuy” Blog at:
– http://www.jasonkenison.com/blog.html?id=22

(*
Copyright (c) 2008, TechDebug.com

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR
ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
*)

– Display Dialog
set imState to {“Available”, “Away”, “Meeting”, “Do not Disturb”}
choose from list imState with prompt “Choose the Status…” default items “Available” OK button name “Set” cancel button name “Cancel”
set imState to result as string

–Check App Status, to only act on apps if running
tell application “System Events” to set AdiumIsRunning to (count of (every process whose name is “Adium”)) > 0
tell application “System Events” to set iChatIsRunning to (count of (every process whose name is “iChat”)) > 0
tell application “System Events” to set SkypeIsRunning to (count of (every process whose name is “Skype”)) > 0

if imState is “Do not Disturb” then
– DND
– Adium (works with 1.2+ as per http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/AppleScript_Support_1.2 documentation)
if AdiumIsRunning then
tell application “Adium” to go away with message “Do Not Disturb”
end if
– iChat
if iChatIsRunning then
tell application “iChat”
set status to away
set status message to “Do Not Disturb”
end tell
end if
– Skype
if SkypeIsRunning then
tell application “Skype”
send command “SET USERSTATUS DND” script name “IMStatus”
send command “SET PROFILE MOOD_TEXT Do Not Disturb – Can’t take your call – Maybe Chat?” script name “IMStatus”
end tell
end if
else if imState is “Meeting” then
– Meeting
– Adium (works with 1.2+ as per http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/AppleScript_Support_1.2 documentation)
if AdiumIsRunning then
tell application “Adium” to go away with message “In Meeting”
end if
– iChat
if iChatIsRunning then
tell application “iChat”
set status to away
set status message to “In Meeting”
end tell
end if
– Skype
if SkypeIsRunning then
tell application “Skype”
send command “SET USERSTATUS DND” script name “IMStatus”
send command “SET PROFILE MOOD_TEXT In Meeting” script name “IMStatus”
end tell
end if
else if imState is “Away” then
– Away
– Adium (works with 1.2+ as per http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/AppleScript_Support_1.2 documentation)
if AdiumIsRunning then
tell application “Adium” to go away
end if
– iChat
if iChatIsRunning then
tell application “iChat”
set status to away
end tell
end if
– Skype
if SkypeIsRunning then
tell application “Skype”
send command “SET USERSTATUS AWAY” script name “My Script”
end tell
end if
else if imState is “Available” then
– Available
– Adium (works with 1.2+ as per http://trac.adiumx.com/wiki/AppleScript_Support_1.2 documentation)
if AdiumIsRunning then
tell application “Adium” to go available
end if
– iChat
if iChatIsRunning then
tell application “iChat”
set status to available
set status message to “”
end tell
end if
– Skype
if SkypeIsRunning then
tell application “Skype”
send command “SET USERSTATUS ONLINE” script name “My Script”
send command “SET PROFILE MOOD_TEXT” script name “IMStatus”
end tell
end if
end if

How to try Linux

lantrix — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:27:13 +0000

Download and try the following OS, and give it a go. I’m actually using Ubuntu to host this website and a number of other clients sites, although I’m using the 10.04 LTS edition. LTS editions have longer lifecycles, which saves you having to rebuild your server so often – and patches are supplied for the life of the edition.

Ubuntu Linux v10.10

Ubuntu is a Linux 2.6 based Operating system, and is, simple and well supported with “Graphical based” installers and tools.

A good introductory read is the “New to Ubuntu” guide.

After this, you can download and install Ubuntu:

Download “Desktop CD” installation files.
Follow the installation details for a Graphical Install
Introduce yourself to the Operating system.

Other books on the OS are:

Airport Extreme

lantrix — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:21:10 +0000

What a difference a new router makes.

I’ve been using the old Apple Airport extreme, 2nd generation, for about 8 years now. It’s been rock solid, and provided wireless access almost 24×7 for the whole 8 years.

Lately, things have been getting flakey. Trying to control my Mac Mini Boxee on the TV was laggy – and remoting to other desktops flaky. So today, I purchased an upgrade.

I was looking at the Cisco/Linksys offerings as I use a few at work, but when using a NAS device I would have had to reformat my existing HFS+ drives. I compared the Linksys E3000 model with the new Airport Extreme, and for $50 more, it seemed the Airport just fitted right in to my mac network. Well of course it would, Apples for Apples. The last thing to convince me was the 4.5 out of 5 star rating for the Airport extreme on the Apple Store – and a review from SmallNetBuilder.

Here I am – first blog post on the new wireless network. Simultaneous dual band speeeeeed.

It was simple to setup. Plugin, configure with the Apple Airport Utility (the CD has both Mac and PC versions included) and then I plugged in my Hard Drive. It gets shared, and used across all the Macs.

Check out the speed differences, before and after:

Old Airport photo courtesy me-pawel
New Airport photo courtesy of Bj

MacBook vs. MacBookPro

lantrix — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 06:35:05 +0000

Does CPU speed matter for gaming on a Mac Laptop?

The difference between, for example, 2.4 Ghz and 2.6 Ghz will be negligible when running the games. What will contribute to the smoothness and quality of the games the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and to an extent bus speed, CPU cache and RAM.

When it comes to RAM, the more the merrier – to avoid the Hard Drive being used to swap applications when your memory is full. Get as much RAM as you can afford.

Consider the current models of a MacBook vs. a MacBookPro – they both have similar specifications on the CPUS.

The 13″ MacBook has 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache
The 13″ MacBookPro has a 2.4GHz or 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache
The 15″ MacBookPros have 2.4GHz, 2.53GHz or 2.66GHz Intel Core i5/i7 processors with 3MB and 4MB shared L3 cache respectively.

The i5 and i7 CPUs are the next in an architectural line of mobile CPUs from Intel, so it’s not the “Ghz” that’s going to improve your gaming – it’s having the later generation CPUs. In the CPU arena, the 13″ Pro/Non-Pro models are the same – but the 15″ Pro models are clearly in front.

Now consider the Graphics Processor, the real workhorse in modern 3D gaming. The current models as shown:

The 13″ MacBook has NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM ***shared with main memory***
The 13″ MacBookPro has NVIDIA GeForce 320M with 256MB DDR3 SDRAM ***shared with main memory***
The 15″ MacBookPro has TWO GPU devices: Intel HD Graphics with 256MB DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory, and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics processor with 256MB GDDR3 memory and automatic graphics switching

In all cases, there is a GPU sharing Main Memory. These are much faster than the Graphics of yesteryear, but sharing the main memory means using some of your 2GB or 4GB of RAM. Games will play and look acceptable, but the framerate wont be the best you can get.

Where the laptop will shine, is with the dedicated NVIDIA GeForce GT chips. They have dedicated DDR3 memory allocated to them, designed to do one thing only – fast 3D.

My recommendation:
If you are on a budget – a MacBook or a 13″ MacBookPro will have to do.
However if you can afford it, and want to game – a 15″ MacBookPro with a dedicated GPU will play your games as smooth as any current generation laptop can. You can’t go wrong with the larger screen either.

MAMP vhost and WordPress

lantrix — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:30:27 +0000

I’ve setup MAMP to do some local web development on my MacBookPro, and the XDebug plugin is awesome for stepping through PHP code.

However, I had a problem with MAMP and a vhost I setup for local development. The wordpress front page and /wp-admin/ worked but any sub pages, etc. failed to load. When trying to access a WordPress page at url http://site.local/music/ The error in the apache logs was:


[error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist: /Users/lantrix/devel_projects/vhosts/site.local/music

I had made sure that mod_rewrite was enabled as mentioned by Samuel B over at the WordPress support forums. I had also ensured I had updated the permalinks in the local WordPress install, thus writing out a .htaccess for the rewrites. Still no luck.

Then I remembered, one needs to tell Apache that a directory outside the webserver root /Applications/MAMP/htdocs, in this case my vhost path of /Users/lantrix/devel_projects/vhosts/site.local, needs to have an AllowOverride so the .htaccess WordPress has placed can be used. This in combination with the apache Options directive to FollowSynLinks as mentioned by Mark at the support forums worked for me. No more 404 errors!

Below is my working vhost configuration at the bottom of my MAMP apache config file /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf. It works for me, but YMMV:



NameVirtualHost *



        DocumentRoot “/Users/lantrix/devel_projects/vhosts/site.local”

        ServerName site.local

        ServerAlias http://www.site.local

        DirectoryIndex index.php index.html





        AllowOverride All

        Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks

        Order allow,deny

        Allow from all

Whyday comes and goes

lantrix — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 03:00:29 +0000

A Ruby

If you’re a tech head, and you’ve been around Object Orientated languages – then you’ve surely heard of Ruby.

I’ve been around people who are passionate about Ruby, but never caught the bug. What I did do whilst others were programming away, was read about ruby. One day whilst reading I came across the name of an online persona Why the lucky stiff, also known as _why.

_why

Whilst _why was/is considered a prolific and influential programmer of Ruby, what was fascinating was his disappearance. In August 2009, he withdrew from “public” life – specifically all his online presence was deleted. He closed up his blog, twitter account and github account. Plenty of people have ensured his code and writing not only live on but continue, and you can read more of his eccentric writings at his estate.

However, my interest here is his book: Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby

Some have innocuously declared the 19th of August as “Why Day“. What better way to celebrate knowledge than to start reading a book, and why not read the guide book itself?! I’m just a regular old person, so far unaware of Ruby and its

Exponential World

lantrix — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:28:34 +0000

We ARE living in exponential times, as this video clearly documents.

I first saw this video at Eastman’s Genealogy website.

Original research of the figure and facts is by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman.

Clearcase 7.1.x install on Solaris X64/x86

lantrix — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:58:20 +0000

I’ve been struggling to install the beast that is Clearcase 7.1.1 on a proof of concept server.
In this case the server is a Solaris 10 64bit install running on VMware Fusion 3.

One of the initial mistakes I made was to try and run the installation from a network mount. DON’T. Solaris must block the execution of code on some types of removable drives, which in this case was a VMWare Fusion shared folder.

A second thing that is not clear in the README files: Clearcase 7.1.1 on Solaris x86 does NOT support the GUI installation. Therefore, for me as much as any readers of this blog, I’ll document the steps to kick off a fresh/silent installation.

The install will be/have:

A local install
Clearcase Atria Licencing, local
IBM Installation Manager installed first
ClearCase installed second

Download your entitled product for Solaris X86, for CC7.1.1 which is:
- CZ9XKML
- IBM Rational ClearCase V7.1.1 Solaris x86 Platform Edition Multilingual
If you need an evaluation copy, they are also available.
Copy the archive to your server, and extract it. I’ll use /var/ccinstall for my install source, but adjust as required:
```
mkdir -p /var/ccinstall
cp -p CZ9XKML.zip /var/ccinstall
cd /var/ccinstall
unzip CZ9XKML.zip
cd disk1
```
Follow the IBM documented steps for preparing a silent install. For my steps the dir /var/ccinstall/disk1 will be esd_image_root.

Kick off the install:


/var/ccinstall/disk1/InstallerImage_*/install \
--launcher.ini \
/var/ccinstall/disk1/InstallerImage_*/silent-install.ini \
-silent \
-input clearcase_response_sol_x86.xml \
-log silentinstall.log

If you want to also show the progress, include the switch -showVerboseProgress

At this point kick back and make a few coffees.
Enjoy.

How to try OpenBSD

lantrix — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:22:06 +0000

Download and try the following OS, and give it a go.

OpenBSD v4.7

OpenBSD is a multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system, and is fast, simple to install and secure “out of the box”.

A good introductory book for OpenBSD is the “OpenBSD Command Line Companion” by Jacek Artymiak. It walks you through an install and an intro to OpenBSD.

Other books on the OS are:

Mantra: backup backup backup backup

lantrix — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:21 +0000

Someone sent me an email which asked what to do since:

one of my external hard drives, the one with EVERYTHING I REALLY, REALLY WANT on it has died

Fixed iChat AV thru OpenBSD PF Firewall

lantrix — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:41:08 +0000

This has been bugging me for ages, but the fix is so simple.
I use OpenBSD for my router, and have PF (Packet Filter) running the firewall and NAT rules.

I have previously setup the port forwarding, etc. according to Apple, but never could get a successful connection using video or audio (or screen sharing).

After reading a post on the OpenBSD misc mailing list I went back and read the OpenBSD 4.5 pf.conf man page.

There is a section of the man page that states (my emphasis):

fragment reassemble
Using scrub rules, fragments can be reassembled by normalization.
In this case, fragments are buffered until they form a complete
packet, and only the completed packet is passed on to the filter.
The advantage is that filter rules have to deal only with complete
packets, and can ignore fragments. The drawback of caching frag-
ments is the additional memory cost. But the full reassembly
method is the only method that currently works with NAT. This is
the default behavior of a scrub rule if no fragmentation modifier
is supplied.

My scrub settings were such that I was filtering not complete packets, but fragments. The moment I changed the scrub settings to this:


scrub in on $ext_if all fragment reassemble

All worked perfect. I can initiate iChat calls and receive them too. Desktop sharing now works as well. All using Google talk (jabber) in iChat.

Note that in OpenBSD 4.6 or current there have been PF changes, so the wording of the scrub rule may be different. Always read the pf.conf man page for the release you are on.

Clone a part of an SVN repository in git

lantrix — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:03:18 +0000

I was trying to clone my wordpress plugin from the wordpress svn repo using git-svn. I had no luck for about the past 8 weeks, with this problem:

Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/lantrix/tweet/.git/
Using higher level of URL: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/tweet => http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org

And it would proceed to hit up the entire wordpress repo.
After reading a possible solution on Charlie’s Old blog, I stubmled across a newer way to do this.

As of v1.6.4 of git, you can now use a –no-minimize-url when doing a git-svn clone. This makes git clone only the part of the repo you want; and the added bonus is you can get all your tags and branches.

Here is how I did it:

It still took a while to parse all the SVN history, and now of course this stands out in the git-svn doco

The authors.txt file just mapped my svn users to git user/email pair, e.g.:

lantrix = Lantrix 
plugin-master = none 
(no author) = none

You will probably want to have a look at these set of scripts. Have a read of NothingMuch’s perl blog for extra steps and details on extra svn conversion scripts.

Git branch name in your bash prompt

lantrix — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:51:35 +0000

Here is a quick way to show the current git branch when you are in a repository directory. Place this in your .bashrc or .bash_profile:

I’ve also customised the PS1 to show user/host/path.

You should probably setup git bash completion as well. This can be done by sourcing the bash completion script that is available in the git source code as shown (change path to where you place script):

Have fun.

Excel – Determining worksheet cell references

lantrix — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:55:10 +0000

Worksheet names in Excel Cells

If you are working in Excel, and you want to show the worksheet name in a Cell on that worksheet, you can use the CELL function to do so.
By default the CELL function will return the current document name, if used with the filename info_type:

=CELL("filename")

This provides a full path to the spreadsheet, with the worksheet of the current Cell at the end, e.g:

C:\folder\[myfile.xls]Sheet1

You can easily get just the worksheet name by using the FIND and MID functions to do the hard work. You need to find the location of the last square bracket, and find achieves this as shown:
=FIND("]",CELL("filename"))

This would return the position of the last bracket. In this case it is at position 22 of the text that CELL(“filename”) returns. The MID function can extract text starting at a location for n length, where n is an arbitrary number. So we would combine MID, FIND and CELL functions to return just the worksheet name like this:

=MID(CELL("filename"),FIND("]",CELL("filename"))+1,255)

The reason we add a +1 is because we want to start extracting the text one character AFTER the right square bracket, e.g. at the start of the Worksheet name. Our result is:

Sheet1

Worksheet names from another Worksheet

So far so good, and how is this any different than any other blog post or forum post on the net explaining this? So far it’s not, but here comes the fun part.

What if you have multiple Worksheets, and you do this:

Have a cell with content, Sheet1!B2
Sheet1!B2 displays the content of OtherSheet!H5, i.e.:
```
=OtherSheet!H5
```
You want Sheet1!B1 to display the worksheet name where the CONTENT of Sheet1!B2 comes from.

You could try using the MID/FIND/CELL function combination to try this. In Sheet1!B1 you would enter:

=MID(CELL("filename",B2),FIND("]",CELL("filename",B2))+1,255)

However this would yield the worksheet name of B2 itself, not the worksheet where you are taking your content from:

Sheet1

Not what we wanted. Somehow you need to get the Value of the formula used =OtherSheet!H5 and look up the worksheet name for OtherSheet!H5

The Solution

To do this you ware going to need to do two things:

Make a new function to display the formula, sans the equal sign
Make your CELL function use the result of your function to lookup the filename info_type

We can use the Excel VB Editor to create a new function, and call it GetLocation:


Function GetLocation(Cell As Range) As String
   GetLocation = Mid(Cell.Formula, 2)
End Function

But we can’t just use GetLocation to directly feed the CELL function. We need to use another handy function INDIRECT. This allows us to return the result of the GetLocation function as a Reference. This then allows the CELL function to evaluate the filename/Worksheet details for the destination cell in the other worksheet:

=MID(CELL("filename",INDIRECT(GetLocation(B2))),FIND("]",CELL("filename",INDIRECT(GetLocation(B2))))+1,256)

This now provides the Worksheet name of the cell that Sheet1!B1 is using to get it’s content from which is OtherSheet!H5:

OtherSheet

This is very handy when you need to show on a master worksheet which other worksheet your data is actually coming from. Windows Excel only, not Mac I’m afraid – until they bring back VB. Enjoy!

BOE XIR2 cmsdbsetup failure on Oracle10g

lantrix — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:00:54 +0000

If you use Unix, and need to migrate your Business objects CMS from one database to another database, you will probably use the cmsdbsetup.sh script. This script migrates and manages your database connection in a Unix environment using Business Objects Enterprise (BOE).

In my case I am Using Solaris 9, and have Oracle 10g databases and client files for use by BOE.

When running the cmsdbsetup.sh script you get the following error pertaining to clntsh:

           Business Objects 

Current CMS Data Source: DBNAME 

err: Error: Failed to get cluster name. 
err: Error description: Unable to load clntsh 

select (Select a Data Source) 
reinitialize (Recreate the current Data Source) 
copy (Copy data from another Data Source) 
changecluster (Change current cluster name) 
selectaudit (Select an Auditing Data Source) 

[select(6)/reinitialize(5)/copy(4)/changecluster(3)/selectaudit(2)/back(1)/quit(0)] 
----------------------------------------------------------

This error “Unable to load clntsh” refers to the libclntsh.so library used by the Oracle client. Since BOE runs as 32bit, the 32bit Oracle client libraries should be accessible by the user running BOE.

If you are running a 64 bit Unix and a 64bit Oracle install check that the environment for the user running BOE (user that will run the CMS) has the 32bit libraries in the path:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/lib:$ORACLE_HOME/lib32

Then check that either the user is a member of the Oracle dba Unix group or everyone has permissions to access the 32bit libraries under Oracle 10g:

su - oracle
chmod o+rx $ORACLE_HOME/lib32/*

Feel free to leave any comments if you need help with this.