Today I received a call from my father. He worried about a pandemic called Singapore Flu, a disease that I have no idea about. My first thought was SARS pandemic strike Singapore again, and I totally missed it. Shoot, I must watch Channel News Asia more and less lurking in Facebook :D. So I told him I am okay and getting better (I am still recovering from flu :)). And I also promise him to find out more about this ‘Singapore Flu’.

My first step was googling about it, hoping that Google’s Web Crawler has indexed any of the news regarding this disease. Google returned a number of results, most of it regarding past flu outbreaks in Singapore. Scrolling down further, I found news about the ban of poultry from Kentucky by Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority of Singapore– still not related to what my father worried about.

Near the bottom of the page, I found out these news about the so-called “Singapore Flu“:

1. Singapore Flu Spreads To Depok’s Children
2. City warns spread of flu from S’pore
3. Singaporean Flu Strikes Depok (now a disease can have a nationality? :D)

Flu Virus

Apparently all the buzz came from Indonesian media 🙂 No surprise there. A surprise would be the media here applies Singapore brand to a disease :). Anyway, the disease itself is actually known as Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD). At least this is good news to my parents as there is no pandemic outbreaks here in Singapore. But now I am curious to know why this disease is known as ‘Singapore Flu’.

So googling further, I found this article (in Bahasa Indonesia). The article stated that “in Indonesia, HFMD also called as Singapore Flu”. Okay, now it is clearer that Singapore Flu is popularized only in Indonesia. Maybe only in Indonesia HFMD is known as “Singapore Flu”. No wonder it’s quite difficult to find online resources about this flu :D.

Anyway, I found out about this Singaporean (I assume) which mentioned that Singapore Flu is killing him. But from the way he described the symptoms, I think he’s referring to the actual flu, not HFMD.

Okay, I still don’t know why HFMD is called Singapore Flu in Indonesia. My wildest theory would be long long time a go, there is no HFMD in Indonesia. Then an Indonesian contracted with the virus during his/her visit to Singapore. Upon his/her return to Indonesia, he/she spreads the disease. I totally have no proof for this 😀

Perhaps you know why?

Earlier today, I blogged about the connection problem between IIS and Oracle. I finally found the answer. The problem is actually very simple, it is related to NTFS File permission.

All this time I thought that when you give a user permission to a parent folder, the permission will automatically inherited by the child folders and files (if you click the Advanced button in Folder’s Properties – Security tab, the “Inherit from parent the permission entries that apply to child objects. ….” is checked by default).

So I did add full-control permission to the Oracle Home folder for the IIS Anonymous User account as recommended by Microsoft Knowledge Base. But it didn’t help.

After trying to use the Oracle OLE DB Provider (provided by Oracle, previously using the one provided by Microsoft), I encountered a new error message. I googled for it, and I found that I must REPLACE the child objects’ NTFS security permission in the Oracle Home Folder to make the parent’s folder NTFS security permission transcended to the child objects.

So remember, after added the IIS Anonymous User (IUSR_…) to Oracle Home’s folder, we need to force the permission to apply to its child folders and files. Hopefully the following screenshots will help.

I have deployed my CPAMS application to the production server. To my dismay, I encountered this error message:

“Oracle client and networking components were not found. These components are supplied by Oracle Corporation and are part of the Oracle Version 7.3.3 or later client software installation.

Provider is unable to function until these components are installed.

So far I have used these resources to resolve this problem:

1. How To Troubleshoot an ASP-to-Oracle Connectivity Problem
2. OTN Discussion Forums : Oracle client and networking components
3. System.Data.OracleClient requires Oracle client software version 8.1.7 or greater

None of them able to resolve the issue. I’ll update more on this issue later on.