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Frikkie in Irak

Frikkie is 'n huur soldaat en besluit om aan te sluit by die American Marines in Irak. En een dag is hy afgesonder van die res en 3 Irakse soldate keer hom vas op 'n sand duin en hy besef hy sal moet 'n plan maak hier.

Create a bootable USB stick in Linux

Here is how to quickly create a bootable USB stick using just the standard commands on the Linux command line: We use the dd command and write the .iso file directly to the root of the USB stick.

Controlling the Bull in Software Development

It's nearly 35 years now that I have been in the software production and integration business and as an IT consultant, I have witnessed the inner workings of many types of businesses that claim to run their businesses with the aid of software and teams that do software development and integration into the business. I am still regularly surprised how so many businesses, including some of the most venerable banks and public organizations that are accountable to tax-payers, haphazardly fail to deliver functional software solutions that serve the business in this day and age, when we already have so much cumulative experience to learn from.

Coding Rules

A Collection of Coding Rules gathered over the years...

In the words of Suzi Quatro, Wernher von Braun may have been "a f@#king Nazi", but he did have a point: How often have you not tested something because there was a prevailing opinion of "What could possibly go wrong?", or "Of course it will work!".

How to drop all tables in a MySQL database

... without destroying the database.

If a tree falls in a forest...

Bishop Berkeley espoused the school of thought called Idealism, which went along the lines of: "To be, is to be perceived". One fyne day he dreamt the following conundrum up: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" The implication is that if no one perceives the event, not only does the tree not make a sound, but the tree does not even exist.

This is, of course, a load of old rubbish. The good Bishop can't do me for defamation since he ceased being perceived in 1753. Had he lived in today's more cynical world, he may well have come up with more relevent thought-experiments to illustrate the philosophy of Idealism, thus:

AVI to DVD conversion

Directly Burn DVD's from .avi files

Here is a quick and simple-to-use utility to convert an AVI file to the weird intermediate files and to then write them all to a DVD. It is called avi2dvd and is written in BASH-shell. It is unlikely to run on Windows.

More about it here at https://sourceforge.net/projects/avi2dvd

How to Dedupe a table in MySQL

A quick and dirty way of stripping duplicate records out of a MySQL table!, if your table has no indexes or constraints.

Getting Oracle's SQLPlus Client to run on Linux

If you are running a Linux version that does not support RPM packages and you need to install Oracle's sqlplus client, you have two options to install it:

Oracle DBMS_PIPE - why you should abandon it

A classical method of getting Oracle-based processes communicating with the outside world is by using the DBMS_PIPE package: Typically, we write to a pipe from an Oracle PL/SQL-based process, and then we continuously run an asynchronous Oracle PL/SQL process which reads the pipe and processes what it reads. A common use of DBMS_PIPE is for debugging, logging and launching external processes.

Oracle External Procedures

It is possible to call O/S commands or third-party programs from within SQL or PL/SQL with external procedures. Let's build and install an External Procedure on an Oracle Database Server and see how we can call an O/S-level host command from within SQL code to do anything. No, actually, let's not. It is dangerous. Think of an ExtProc as a root kit for Oracle...

Oracle server construction guide on Linux

A step-by-step construction guide to install and configure a Linux server from scratch and how to then install the Oracle 10g RDBMS on it.

Product Quickcode Generator

How to generate your own Base36 Quickcode sequence using the SHA2 hash

Run this process for a few hours and you too can have your very own unique sequence of millions of unique Quickcodes that will keep your inventory management system well-fed for life.

String-Matching help for SQL Server

The task of matching strings between heterogeneous systems, especially that of matching personal or company names or addresses, is not easy with SQL Server's limited set of built-in string SQL functions. Here is a C# CLR-Assembly (with source code) for SQL Server with some advanced string-handling functions that may help:

LTrim - like Oracle's LTRIM function.
InitCap - like Oracle's INITCAP function
FlattenCharSet - Replace western characters with diacritics with best-choice, non-diacritic characters
StripPunctuationMarks - Remove all punctiation marks from the given string.

Unix Utilies for Windows

If you still have an old version of Windows floating about from before the days that MS conceded that the Windows O/S should be built on the Linux O/S, and you want to do anything vaguely sophisticated in the brain-dead command line shell of Windows (a.k.a. the DOS prompt), then you need a collection of commonly used UNIX utilities that can run under Windows. You should first ask yourself why you are running an outdated and unsafe version of Windows, but that is another story...

The Cats' Bill of Rights

1. Humans shall make no law respecting an establishment of boundaries or prohibiting the free exercise therein, or abridging the freedom of access, or the right to peaceful assembly.
In other words:
The cat is entitled to go outside any time s/he wants.