Technical

APEX nightmare – 1

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I hate to do this particular project which was done in APEX.

I recommended it to move to any web based platform. Since it is working there for more than few years now, hesitance in migration.

"Right tool for the Right Job"


Though you can open beer bottle with chainsaw, you can’t continue to use it every time you want to open bottles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew2LO_uLbKw

Imagine a Chainsaw hanging in your fridge door. :P Same way, you do not try cutting log/wood with Swiss Army Knife. It is simply not worth the time and effort.

You can apply this in software development also. There are certain tools used strictly for certain jobs only. If you try to combine stuff and use one tool for everything, it will be messy.

I’m going to write my nightmare experience with this APEX platform.

To start with here is my first …

I have to create a new page in APEX, so I’ve decided to copy it from an existing page, so that most of the common functions remain unchanged.

But to my bad, the new page copied from an existing page, is missing the left-hand side navigation.

I have no idea, where the navigation goes or coming from! :(

If I’m missing something big time, please let me know!!

Technical

Could not load file or assembly ‘‘ or one of its dependencies. There is not enough space on the disk

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We got the following error in one of our application server nodes.

Could not load file or assembly '' or one of its dependencies. There is not enough space on the disk (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070070)

At first, (as the error explains) when I checked the disk space, it was very less. It was less than 500 MB. All the applications from that app. server node throwing the similar error. Then I referred this and free some space. It looked fine. Now the free space was around 3 GB. Then notified client.

After sometime, got an angry email from Client saying the problem still exists. When I checked again, the same problem persists. Funny thing is, this time, only one application is throwing the error. Other applications from the same node worked fine. Only diff. between those application is the .NET framework. The free space is still the same (around 3 GB).

This time, cleared all the applications under <.NET Framework Folder>\Temporary ASP.NET Files. It worked again.

Still I couldn’t relate the fix I did, to the error message received.

Photography

UAE National Day 2012

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UAE National Day 2012

On a cold evening walked from Emirates Palace hotel till Marina Mall to take some photos. Somehow, Rasena and kids co-operated. I miss Nikon D600 for this a lot.

 

It was a blooper taking photos of fireworks. Actually the first day fireworks on one side. So the second day, thinking the fireworks will be on the other side of corniche, we walked a lot towards Emirates palace.

 

Bang!! They put the fireworks on the same side. I had to zoom and cover it. Will post some fireworks photos soon.

 

Technical

Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012

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Hi,

Started using Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 from today. Its the MSDN subscription release.

Installed on my office PC. The upgrade option from Windows 7 was not successful.

Had to overwrite Windows 7. I really felt some serious improvement in the operating system. You can expect a series of post on these two topics.

Going to attend the Metro App. development Boot camp next week in Dubai.

 

Usually I wait for around 2 minutes to boot into Windows 7 at home. Today it just booted within few seconds. Awesome. It was never like this before.

 

Initially struggled a lot to navigate through. Some of the short cuts of traditional windows remains the same. like

  1. Alt + Tab
  2. Alt + F4
  3. Alt + [Space] (only in Desktop mode)

 

Found hard to close any application. Either u can use Alt + F4 or drag from the top of any app. and drop in the bottom of the screen.

Browsing experience is so far good. Liked the metro style apps.

 

“You have no choice. you will be using this in another few months, for sure.”

 

See you in another post.

 

Technical

OracleBulkCopy Privileges

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I had to export an excel file into a DB. The excel file contains cross tab information. So I had to store it in the DB as normal table. When I insert row by row, it took 150 seconds for a 800 row excel file.

 

So decided to optimize using OracleBulkCopy. When I tested in staging server, it took only 48 seconds for the same file.

 

After deploying the solution in production, I was getting the following error as the production environment is using a restricted/scaled down user.

ORA-01031: insufficient privileges

Even after granting the user, Insert privilege, the same error.

 

Finally found out “Select” privilege is also required. Though, not sure why this is required.

 

 

Technical

wkhtmltopdf – inconsistent conversion

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For the past 2-3 days, i stuck with wkhtmltopdf tool. We have an ASP.NET application converting some html files to pdf files. It worked perfectly in dev/QA server. We are using .NET Process class to start the conversion.

The development server is “Windows Server 2008 R2″. The production server is “Windows Server 2003″ :)

hahaha Wait a minute! We will upgrade our production soon.

Ok, the problem here with the production server is, the html to pdf conversion is not consistent. One in 8 attempts it worked. After trying the followings

  1. give some pause for the process to complete
  2. thinking some image references is the problem, replaced absolute path with relative path

Nothing helped. It was really frustrating. My colleague Vijay asked to check if any command line option will help.

I tried the “-q” global option in the wkhtmltopdf tool and it worked perfectly everywhere. Don’t know the actual cause of this problem yet. Hope this helps someone.

 

Update: still not working consistently. planning to upgrade the server to Windows Server 2008 R2, before MS releases Windows Server 2012.