In my recent project, I was required to open up a portion of an Intranet web application to external customer. I was researching for options.

Yes, IIS7 has an Application Request Routing extension. But since my public facing server is Windows 2003 Server, IIS7 was out.

Then I read Karl Seguin’s post on using NGINX to improve ASP.NET Performance. So I said to myself, let’s get dirty on this 🙂

My first step was to download VMWare Player. Why VMWare Player? Mainly because it’s free. You just need to register, activate VMWare account, then grab the installer.

Next step is to download Ubuntu Server VMWare image. Visit http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/ and grab a copy.

By now I believe you already run the Ubuntu server in VMWare Player.

1. Login as ‘notroot’. Password: ‘thoughtpolice’
2. Download Nginx source code. Command: wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.0.4.tar.gz
3. Follow the following commands to extract the archive:
   1. gunzip nginx-1.0.4.tar.gz
   2. tar -xf nginx-1.0.4.tar
4. Follow the following commands to install the required runtime libraries:
   1. sudo -s
   2. apt-get update
   3. apt-get install gcc
   4. apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev
   5. apt-get install zlib1g-dev
   6. exit
5. Follow the following commands to build nginx:
   1. cd nginx-1.0.4
   2. ./configure
   3. sudo make install

By now you should have NGINX installed to /usr/local/nginx. You could now edit the configuration in /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf. If you’re not sure how, NGINX’s documentation have section with many examples on how to configure NGINX. Editing the .conf is done using vi, so iIf you’re unfamiliar with vi, you could read a simple intro here.

Have fun!

In the past I have talked about using Tora to connect to Oracle. I also listed down downloads of Oracle Client for Windows.

Today I am going to introduce you to SQLPal.

Installation

No installation needed! Just download the zip file and extract it at your convenience. You also need to have the latest JRE installed.

Important: If you get an error when connecting to Oracle you need to update the JDBC driver included with SQLpal. Find classes12.jar in your Oracle installation and copy the file over to your SQLpal directory, replacing the existing file.

Setting Up Oracle Connection

Click the ‘power-plug’ icon to initiate connection. It will ask you to provide:

1. User ID
2. Password
3. Oracle’s server host name
4. Oracle’s server port number
5. Oracle’s server System ID (SID)

If you don’t know what is your Oracle server’s SID, connect to Oracle using your existing tools, and run the following query:

select instance from v$thread

SQLPal is very simple yet sufficient. It has only four tabs:

1. SQL Prompt. This tab is pretty much like SQL*Plus with steroid. You can:
   1. run queries
   2. use Up / Down key to retrieve previous queries
   3. bookmark your queries (Bookmarks -> Bookmark last command …)
   4. export query result to Excel (by pressing the Excel icon)
2. Scratchpad. This tab is just like any other query editor. You can:
   1. load/save SQL file
   2. save query result as HTML
   3. export query result to Excel (by pressing the Excel icon)
3. Schema Browser. This tab will help you to see the details of every Oracle objects (Procedures, Packages, Functions, Tables, Views, Sequences, Synonims). Some objects are read-only (Tables, Views, Sequences, Synonims). But the rest are editable.
4. Research. This tab is basically a browser pointing to resources that might help you when you hit a stumbling block.

Try this tiny and efficient tools. I’m sure you going to like it very much!

Credit:

1. timewasteblog.com

Taken from Forex Market Hours

 
I must read more economic publications on Eurozone and USA 🙂

Below is the economic calendars that might affect the rates: