Tag Archives: Windows

Activate Oracle on XAMPP for Windows

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PHPWith the default installation of XAMPP for Windows, we don’t get PHP Oracle connectivity enabled. This can be enabled easily when you need to connect to a Oracle Database from your PHP application/script. PHP has got the OCI8 extension, which provides Oracle connectivity to PHP application, and OCI8 uses Oracle Instant Client Package to get Oracle specific functions.
Oracle Database
I had the need to connect to a Oracle Database from a PHP script in one of my recent projects, the following is what I did to enable Oracle connectivity in XAMPP for Windows.

  1. In your XAMPP Start Page, go to phpinfo, look for string oci8. If string found it indicate that connection to oracle is available, otherwise to activate connection do the following steps:
  2. Open the currently used php.ini file by looking at the phpinfo, from the XAMPP folder.
  3. Find string ;extension=php_oci8.dll. Remove the semicolon (;) ahead of the string to activate the oracle extension.
  4. Save the php.ini file.
  5. Download the “Instant Client Package – Basic” for Windows from the OTN Instant Client page. Unzip it to c:\instantclient_11_1
  6. Edit the PATH environment setting and add c:\instantclient_11_1 before any other Oracle directories. For example, on Windows XP, follow Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables and edit PATH in the System variables list.
  7. Set desired Oracle globalization language environment variables such as NLS_LANG. If nothing is set, a default local environment will be assumed. See An Overview on Globalizing Oracle PHP Applications for more details.
  8. Unset Oracle variables such as ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID, which are unnecessary with Instant Client (if they are set previously).
  9. Restart XAMPP (or Start if its not already started).
  10. To make sure that connection to oracle database has successfully activated, go to phpinfo. Find string: oci8. If found, then XAMPP can now communicate with Oracle Database.

The steps to do the same in a Linux box are almost similar, except there you will use the Linux versions of the packages and setting PATH variables would be different.

You can ping me back with a comment if you run into any issues, I might be able to help you or I can learn from you.

Reference:

VLC Media Player says Merry Christmas

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VLC Christmas Cap The popular multiplatform media player VLC Media Player says Merry Christmas to all users this festive season by putting a red Christmas hat icon. This is an Easter egg in the latest version of VLC media player, and those who have the updated version will notice this at use.

renjus blog reports that,

If you are a VLC addict then you will have noticed this change as of Midnight 18 December.It seems as the developers from VLC decided to included this Easter egg on their later version 0.9+.

VLC Player for Christmas Image source: jb [Kinnda lazy to take a screenshot :) ]

IE users, Be Careful

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Disclaimer:
This is not an advertisement to any other browsers.

Serious security flaw found in IE (Internet Explorer):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7784908.stm

"Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer," said the firm in a security advisory alert about the flaw.

So be in the safer side, don't use IE…
Use Open Source alternatives…!

(Thanks Ramanan)

Notepad++: Its and IDE

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Most of my friends know me as a person advocating for Linux and FOSS . But most of them get surpurised to see me using Vista half the time. There are few reason I have for that, but this post is not about that.

While I’m on Linux I really enjoy the text editors such as Kate and gedit , (I’m not a big fan of vi and vim ). But when it comes to Windows I missed them with the default Notepad. Then only I found Notepad++ . A cool feature to Notepad++ that was available not in the Windows Notepad is a spell checker feature. This feature is not automatically installed with the initial installation of Notepad++, but we just have to install GNU Aspell , a pre-compiled dictionary. Once you download and install the latest version of Aspell, and a dictionary from for your language of choice (English in my case), from the GNU ASpell site you are ready to use this is a cool feature, and this helps me a lot for sure.

Notepad++ also has many more plug-ins, which make it more like a full fledged IDE, specially FTP browser, Syntax highlighting, Auto-completion and others will help any developer have a great time coding. Here are some of the features it offers with the default install of Notepad++:

  • Syntax highlighting (and brace and indent highlighting)
  • Regular expression find and replace
  • Split screen editing
  • Zooming
  • Spell checker (built in but requires Aspell)
  • Tabbed document interface
  • FTP Browser (plug-in included in standard installation)
  • Support for various file formats including Unicode.
  • File Status Auto-detection
  • Zoom in and zoom out
  • Auto-completion (language and file)
Notepad++ is available only for the Microsoft Windows operating system. However, users can still get Notepad++ to work on other platforms, like Linux and Mac OS X, using software such as Wine .