Great Hackers

Posted by Jesper on July 30, 2004

I just stumbled upon an essay today that completely blew me away: Great Hackers by Paul Graham. Here are two parts that I could totally relate to:

After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you’re a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.
...
This could explain the disconnect over cubicles. Maybe the people in charge of facilities, not having any concentration to shatter, have no idea that working in a cubicle feels to a hacker like having one’s brain in a blender. (Whereas Bill, if the rumors of autism are true, knows all too well.)

But hey, go read the essay yourself and then send the link to your boss. For the completely clueless manager you may need to buy the book: Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age.

Oracle9iAS Portal And Discoverer Integration

Posted by Jesper on July 15, 2004

  • Also, patch 9.0.2.53 corrects many of the minor problems in the initial release.

    Discoverer 9.0.2 Known Issue:
    Discoverer With mod_osso And Portal Fails With “HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden”

    Use this as a workaround:

  • Stop OPMN <$BI-FORMS_ORACLE_HOME>/opmn/bin/opmnctl stopall
  • Modify <$BI-FORMS_ORACLE_HOME>/Apache/Apache/conf/mod_osso.conf and set OssoIPCheck off.

    • NOTE: The $ORACLE_HOME here is the BI-Forms Oracle Home, not the Infrastructure Oracle Home
  • Restart OPMN <$BI-FORMS_ORACLE_HOME>/opmn/bin/opmnctl startall