from: https://readmill.com/tswicegood/reads/the-developers-code-for-travis-swicegood/highlights/fe4e

Deciding to make your product better in two ways every day is a good mental exercise to keep those large projects moving forward. In a working week, you’ll have ten better things to say about your product than you do now. In a working month, you’ll have forty better things to say about your product than you do now.

The travelling has moments of fun, but mostly it's hard work, dangerous food (it's tough to stay gluten free, especially abroad), and poor sleep.

Note to self: buy a few more nice dress shirts and slacks. My closet is pathetic.

We finally had the extra money to try again this year so got an estimate from a company my father-in-law recommended, Williams Insulation. Estimate: $425. Yeah, 25% the amount of Home Depot's contractor. The estimator also did a walk-through energy audit and suggested some really useful things.

The estimator actually found a whole section of attic we had never known about. He realized there was a gap along two whole sides of the house and suggested we cut a hatch to check it out. He turned out to be right — we found a space 40'x5' with even less insulation than the other main attic area. This was along the whole front and kitchen sides of the house.

I reported my findings and he came back for a free re-estimate. Amazingly, this added only $100 to the estimate, bringing it to $525. Frankly, we would have paid twice that and been happy about it. Five hundred bucks is a no-brainer!

The main prep work was to implement his main suggestion. He told us to tape up all gaps in the metal casings of can lights and ventilation fans, and encase them in styrofoam to fully air-seal them. He suggested the $2 styrofoam coolers from Wal-mart, which turned out to be the perfect shape and size for most of them. We had one larger fixture — the heat lamp in our shower — on which I used a larger, better cooler meant for shipping frozen goods.

I spent many hours up there the past few weeks, but particularly the past weekend. I spent half of Saturday and almost all of Sunday skittering around in the tiniest corners sealing everything. It had to be done carefully and correctly to make it permanent, at least until the fixture itself fails. I wanted to never have to crawl through all the new insulation to reach and work on this stuff.

Overall I sealed up 4 can lights above the kitchen, the rest being below the floor of the little playroom. In the main attic I replaced the non-working bathroom fan with a new one and sealed it up, and sealed up the other one that I replaced last year. I also ran ducting from the fans to exhaust outlets in the roof. There was one regular can light to enclose, then one huge heat lamp to enclose. All of those took a lot of work because of the cramped space. Much of it I had to work one-handed, holding myself on a joist with the other hand. It was brutal.

Monday night I worked from 9pm to 3am finishing up the various bits, including sealing up the huge hallway fan. It was quite a trial after a full day of work, boy scouts, and hanging out with Asa (my Little from BBBS). I was a mess of insulation, sweat, Great Stuff expanding foam, and grime.

The big payoff was Tuesday morning when the insulators came. In just an hour they crawled to all the dark corners of the attic and blew in insulation to the 20" mark. This gives an insulation of R-60, which is higher than even the latest standards for this part of the country. The work was fast, efficient, and looks great — a uniform sea of pink energy and money-saving fluff.

We've noticed our furnace running much less and the house feels warmer, particularly the upstairs office. We are super happy about the project. In fact, it's kind of embarrassing how exciting the insulation is to us. The insulation plus the work involved in prepping for it was really rewarding and feels like the best improvement we've done to the house since we replaced the doors. And the energy-saving aspect makes us feel generally good about ourselves and our house.

Really good long underwear for cold-weather camping and outdoor chores.

"Rayman Origins" game for Wii

Life is just great.

cgrep shell script: http://examples.oreilly.com/upt2/split/cgrep.sed

#!/bin/sh
#  cgrep - context grep via sed
#  Written by Greg Ubben, DoD, 10 Dec 1993
#
#  Cgrep finds all occurrences of <pattern> in <file...>, showing <context>
#  additional lines of context above and below each occurrence.  <context>
#  must be at least 1, and defaults to 2.  Each new block of context is
#  preceded by the line number of the first occurrence within that block.
#  <pattern> must be a grep-style regular expression, except that you can
#  match across lines, so use "\nWORD" vs "^WORD" and "WORD\n" vs "WORD$".
#
#  The following example will find all occurrences of the word "five" where
#  it is followed by the word "seven" somewhere within the next 3 lines:
#	cgrep -3 "five.*seven"

USAGE="$0 [-context] pattern [file...]"

n=3
case $1 in -[1-9]*)
	n=`expr 1 - "$1"`
	shift
esac
re=${1?}; shift

sed -n "
	1b start
	: top
	\~$re~{
		h; n; p; H; g
		b endif
	}
		N
		: start
		//{ =; p; }
	: endif
	$n,\$D
	b top
" "$@"

This is extra useful for production systems where you can't install packages or make changes to /bin. Just copy the script into your home directory, then either edit your PATH to include your home directory, or reference this directly.

wget ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/intel/10/sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local.gz

copy sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local.gz to server

scp sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local.gz user@server:/tmp/

ssh to server

su — to root

cd /tmp
gunzip sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local.gz
pkgadd -d sudo-1.8.1p2-sol10-x86-local
	answer 'all' and 'y' to the install questions
ln -s /usr/local/etc/sudoers /etc/sudoers
ln -s /usr/local/bin/sudo /bin/sudo
ln -s /usr/local/bin/sudoedit /bin/sudoedit

Finally, edit /etc/sudoers to add any users or groups to sudo privileges. The root user is already in there. Just add your own username below. There are more maintainable ways to control sudo rights, like a wheel group, but that is well documented elsewhere.

##
## User privilege specification
##
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
jsmith  ALL=(ALL) ALL

Folks, Oracle removed the Ubuntu/Debian package after a few days. It simply isn't there anymore. I have uploaded the file to a few file file hosting services but they may be taken down without warning. Sorry about that. I hope Oracle reconsiders this and re-releases the .deb package — it was very useful and works well.

Below is the original post but with some added download links.

Download Oracle 11 XE beta for Ubuntu

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/express-edition/11gxe-beta-download-302519.html
http://db.tt/FZCeVMj may not last long
http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=716618
More links to come…

Auto-install script

Download this in same folder as .deb package, then run as root.

This script performs all the following steps. It has little error checking and hasn't been tested on systems that already have some pre-config done. That could change paths and break the script's assumptions of a pretty clean install.

Local download: oracle11xe_deploy.sh
GitHub gist: https://gist.github.com/1095816

Manual Install Steps

Install needed libraries

sudo apt-get install libaio1 bc

Install /sbin/chkconfig script to emulate Red Hat environment

As root, create the file /sbin/chkconfig:

#!/bin/bash
# Oracle 11gR2 XE installer chkconfig hack for Debian by Dude
file=/etc/init.d/oracle-xe
if [[ ! `tail -n1 $file | grep INIT` ]]; then
  echo >> $file
  echo '### BEGIN INIT INFO' >> $file
  echo '# Provides: OracleXE' >> $file
  echo '# Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog' >> $file
  echo '# Required-Stop: $remote_fs $syslog' >> $file
  echo '# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5' >> $file
  echo '# Default-Stop: 0 1 6' >> $file
  echo '# Short-Description: Oracle 11g Express Edition' >> $file
  echo '### END INIT INFO' >> $file
fi
update-rc.d oracle-xe defaults 80 01

then change file attributes to 755:
chmod 755 /sbin/chkconfig

Install Oracle .deb

sudo dpkg -i oracle-xe_11.2.0-1.5_amd64.deb

Run Oracle configuration

sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure

It will ask some questions about port numbers for the web UI, DB listening port, and whether to run on startup
Then it will spend a long time on "Configuring database…" Eventually it will finish, hopefully successfully.

Setup environment for oracle user

The installer creates an oracle user but doesn't populate the environment variables needed to run sqlplus and other tasks.

open "/home/oracle/.bashrc" and add these properties:

export ORACLE_SID=XE
alias vi='vim'
export ORACLE_BASE=$HOME
export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/11.2.0/xe
export ORACLE_TERM=xterm
export _EDITOR=vim
export NLS_LANG=american_america.utf8
export TNS_ADMIN=$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin
export ORA_NLS33=$ORACLE_HOME/ocommon/nls/admin/data
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH

Useful commands

Re-configure Oracle:

sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure

Stop Oracle:

sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe stop

Start Oracle:

sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe start