Long-term readers of this blog will know that I'm picky about where the buttons on my Windows go. (Also known as Window Controls) I prefer them to be on the left-hand side. For some reason while upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal, they switched from the left to the right. I was not happy. So, how can they be switched back...?

More than two years I published my guide to installing Oracle 10 onto Ubuntu. That was back when iPads where new things and Obama was still popular. Now times have changed and Oracle 11g is a popular database. This guide is aimed at other Developers who need a database to develop against and are using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The LTS versions of Ubuntu are handy since they are supported for a long time, until April 2017.

So given that you want to install it, how do you do go about this....?

I have a Magic Trackpad, and I also use a Mac at home. I've got used to using Natural Scrolling on the Mac, so I wanted to have this on my Ubuntu 12.04 Developer box at work. I managed to get this working by modifying some of the more hidden settings of Ubuntu.

So far I have not been able to install Oracle as a database on Apple hardware. However it is possible to install Oracle's SqlPlus utility instead. This will allow you to modify and update your Oracle database via Oracle's tool. However, the Oracle database server will have to be somewhere else on your network. By having a local version of SqlPlus life is made slightly easier while developing. No more having to ssh into to a remote server...!

Way back in March 2010 everyone was very, very excited about the Courier. I called this out as a vapour-ware product. And strangely enough, the Courier turned out to be another in a long line of vapour-ware products from Microsoft. Now Microsoft has unveiled its entry into the Tablet world. The Microsoft Surface Tablet.  It's an iPad with a stylus and a keyboard and a kick-stand. And anything else they can think of.

It's even rumoured to have "Pixel Sense". Aka the old Microsoft Surface table that went down like a over-sized interactive coffee table that only features in CSI: Miami. (Although I'm impressed by Digital Trends running with this rumour, even though no-one else picked up on it).

Unfortunately, I'm not inclined to believe this will be shipping any time soon either.

If you have a XGI Graphics card, you may find this tip useful. When I was upgrading a Dell PowerEdge server recently, it rebooted and instead of showing a nice looking UI, I was dumped back into 800x600 land. Why did this happen...? How did I fix it...?

This is a quick tip for people who haven't yet figured out how to change the size of the Unity Launcher bar. Yes, you know, the big vertical bar that is on the left-hand side of the screen in Ubuntu 12.04. When you first log in it's quite big and over-bearing.

Now that Ubuntu Precise Pangolin 12.04 has been released, it looks like Unity is finally good enough for Development use. So, how can you get Global Menus to work with that fairly standard IDE, Eclipse...? Guess where the solution is...?

As you can't fail to notice, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin is now released. Well, you could fail to notice if you aren't using Ubuntu, but then I would be wondering why you are reading this...

Anyhow, when upgrading a computer at work, I ran into the following problem on reboot. Rebooting brought up the familiar Grub screen. However, selecting the newly installed Ubuntu came back with:

error: no such partition.

This indicates that grub thinks that the partition does not exist. It is not a very useful or welcome error message. The first step is:

DON'T PANIC....!!!!

Yes, you can recover your data from this. Just follow these steps...

At the Mega-corp I work at, there is still some legacy code that uses JSPs. Of course, we all wish we could be using new technology like Wicket and other more interesting frameworks. However, sometimes we must work with that we have...