atomicvindaloo.com – the occasionally drunken ramblings of an urban philosopher

Installing SAS 9.3 on Ubuntu 11.10

Ξ January 9th, 2012 | → 0 Comments | ∇ SAS, Ubuntu |

(Or why is life never easy)

Scenario. We’ve got a 9.3 mid-tier to test out and our current environment is 9.13 32-bit. Curses! We need to get a 64-bit environment up and running quickly and the simple answer is a 64-bit Ubuntu in a Virtualbox machine running on 32-bit XP. Nice.

I have to say that this took a few days to debug and get running. I would therefore recommend taking a snapshot of your Virtualbox image at each milestone – to avoid the agony of reinstall, reinstall, reinstall that I had to go through.

What you will need to do:

• Download and install Virtualbox ……. it’s free.
• Download the 64-bit Ubuntu ISO ……. it’s also free.
• You will now need to build a new Virtualbox machine and point the active drive to the bootable image that you have just loaded.
• Note: You will need a good fifty gig for the hard-drive.
• Fire up the VM and the Ubuntu installation will start. Click through and install.

Now the prep for Ubuntu to be able to install everything:

• If, like me, you’re at work behind a proxy, you will need to do the following;
• sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf
• Add the following lines:
• Acquire::http::Proxy “http://user:pass@@proxy-host:port/“;
• Acquire::ftp::Proxy http://user:pass@proxy-host:port/;
• Install a decent version of Java;
• I’m not impressed with the default version on 11.10 so used the “real” one here ( http://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/java ) instead.
• Now you’ll need to make sure that everything is up to date;
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
• You’ll need a few odds and sods installed too;
• sudo apt-get install smbfs
• Now you’ll need to either copy your SAS Software depot locally or mount the remote version;
• sudo mkdir /media/sasdepot
• For some reason, Ubuntu isn’t happy with spaces in the path for the SAS depot.
• sudo nano ~/.smbcredentials (These steps are to provide your domain credentials for a Windows share if your Depot is held there)
• Add the following lines to .smbcredentials
• username=<your domain username>
• password=<your domain password>
• save
• sudo chmod 600 ~/.smbcredentials
• sudo nano /etc/fstab
• add the following line;
• //servername/sharename /media/sasdepot cifs credentials=~/.smbcredentials, iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,0 0
• save
• sudo mount -a
• (You can either try to run the install from the mounted drive or just cp -R /media/sasdepot ~/sasdepot)
• Either way you will need to sudo chmod -R 0755 the sasdepot directory
• SAS requires BASH so ;
• sudo rm /bin/sh
• sudo ln /bin/bash /bin/sh
• You now need to install a couple more odds and sods to get the intall wizard to work;
• sudo apt-get install xauth x11-apps libstdc++5 ia32-libs libxp6
• Download and extract WAS (or whatever Application server you are using) and install
• Note: Do not create any applications. The SAS install wizard will create a default application with default ports. If you use these on a separate container, then you will have to configure the SAS/Application server connection manually and this is a very time consuming process!
• cd <your sasdepot>
• sudo sh ./setup.sh
• Follow the install Wizard and you are away!

Don’t take a knife to a gun fight

Ξ August 22nd, 2011 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Family, Life, Me |

Don't bring a knife to a gunfight

Four years ago now – August 2007 – we decided to have a family holiday and rented a villa in Spain. We found a nice quite town a couple of hours North of Alicante and a beautiful place with its own pool and within walking distance of the beach and town centre.

We picked up the hire car at the airport and set off for the place arriving in the town in the early evening. Well, it _should_ have been the early evening if not for the fact that, as we turned up the road the villa was in, a woman stepped out from her car straight into the path of ours.

Wallop. Great start to the holiday.

The Police and Ambulance turned up and, after a visit to the local station the next day, all was done and dusted. The Police were happy that she was at fault (she was English by the way) and we got on with having a brilliant holiday.

Fast forward just over three years and I was rather surprised to receive a court summons in the post last August from the woman’s solicitors. “That can’t be right” was what crossed my mind.

The summons had been timed such that it was within the three-year limitation period for the UK, but that I received it outside that time. The charges and costs in it were numerous and, because of the three-year period, I was on my own.

The papers kindly listed a European statute that allows members of the same country to use the local court of their country to litigate an accident that happened in another member state. Long and short of which being that, because she and I are English, she could take me to court in the UK for an accident that happened in Spain.

Still, though, something wasn’t ringing true here. So I turned to my good friend Google and started doing some research. In fact, I did a lot of research. I researched that law inside out and came to a conclusion.

Even though you can use your local country’s legal system, the claims limitation period of the country where the accident occurred applies. In this case, Spain has a one year limitation period meaning that the summons wasn’t valid.

I dropped her solicitors a line to tell them so and they said that I was wrong. Problem then, I wasn’t confident enough in my role of part time lawyer to stand up in court against a real one and argue the case, so I would have to employ the services of a solicitor. I’m all for the adage of “You get what you pay for” and so ended up contacting Blake Lapthorn – who specialise in not only accidents abroad, but foreign law.

After a lot of time on the phone to the Spanish insurance company of the hire care they agreed to contribute to my legal costs (not all, but a little) and battle commenced.

Blake Lapthorn were superb. Full stop. Not only did they agree with the claims limitation period item that I had researched, but came up with a long list of every Spanish law that the woman had broken by parking her car where she did and by crossing the road as she did.

At the initial hearing with the judge, he didn’t just throw the case out but also refused any permission to appeal. A complete and utter trouncing. Not only but also, she had to pay all costs. So, that little bit of what appeared to be stitching me up by getting a summons to me when statue meant that I would have to deal with it personally probably end up costing her the best part of twenty-five grand.

Have it!

Back up and running

Ξ August 21st, 2011 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life, Me |

Up and running

Wow! It’s been a whacky twelve months that’s for sure.

Now I’ve got breathing space, I’ve got so much to write. Shower is calling for the moment though – stay tuned.

Whilst I’m at it …….

Ξ March 1st, 2011 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Me |

I treated myself to an Olympus PEN E-PL2 as well. Blimey! Photos and review to follow.

ZaggMate case and keyboard

Ξ March 1st, 2011 | → 0 Comments | ∇ iPad |

Zaggmate

Wow! And I mean wow. I’ve had my eyes on one of these babies since they were vapourware and, with some time on my hands, and a need to be able to type easily anywhere, decided to splash out.

I really can’t explain how impressed I am. The iPad is now the next best thing (and in some cases a whole better than) the tablet that I left behind.

The iPad in the ZaggMate still fit perfectly into the StM case that I already owned, and the case itself look like it could have been made by Apple. I have large hands and, despite only having had the keyboard for a couple of days, am having no trouble typing on it. Yes. I’m using it now.

Where once I would hesitate from any prolonged typing on the iPad – as I just can’t get on with virtual keyboards. I’m now updating CV’s, replying to emails, writing PowerPoints and Word documents with no worries at all.

This thing is purely and simply superb.

Sorry folks

Ξ February 6th, 2011 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life, Me |

Censored

Legally. I can’t comment. X

Let’s talk about the iPad

Ξ November 17th, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ iPad, Life, Me, Review |

… Or the newest member of the family, as I call it.

I will freely admit that I dissed the iPad on launch. And again a bit later. Yes, I’m more than man enough to admit that the whole thing looked like a very expensive, over large iPod Touch.

But then I got to play with one in Cary. I got to appreciate the difference in screen real-estate. I got to feel just how good the thing fitted and felt in my hands. Got to experience the weight of it, the blisteringly fast response and the gorgeous graphics. Man. This was one serious bit of kit. So serious, in fact, that – had I had the spare cash (and the shops had any in stock) I would have run out and bought one straight away.

But, neither of those qualifying items were to be true so it was some months later and approaching my birthday that I finally gave in and sold back a week of my annual leave to the company to be able to buy an iPad.

I went for the 32 Gig WiFi version – figuring that nearly everywhere on earth has WiFi now and, in case of emergency, I could tether it to my phone. 32 Gig – in the words of Bill Gates – seemed more that enough for anything I was going to throw at it. To protect my investment, I also ordered an STM bag and also got the camera connection kit from Apple.

It’s only when you unbox your own iPad that you begin to truly understand the thing. (Sorry, sorry. I’m sounding like a total fanboi here – I know). Inside the box is the iPad, a USB cable, a diagram of what the buttons are and a power adaptor. That’s it. No instructions for use. Why? Because it doesn’t need any, that’s why.

You turn the thing on, go through a walk-through, activate it on iTunes (that bit may upset some people) and that’s it. A working piece of beauty in your hands. Everything about the UI is totally intuitive.

Day to day use

Once you’ve added a few films and some music to it through iTunes, you’ll be wanting to install some apps. In my experience in life, you get what you pay for and it is thus that most of the free apps are a bag of nails. Notable exceptions to that rule are ;

• iBooks – The app is free, but most of the books aren’t. An absolute joy to use though.
• Kindle – As above, except the books are cheaper.
• BBC News – Amazing UI
• Google Earth
• The Weather Channel – excellent weather app
• TV Guide for iPad – great UI and interfaces with SKY+
• Flipboard – an amazing way to amalgamate news and the web in one place
• Wikipanion for iPad
• Twitterrific
• WebEx for iPad
• Dropbox
• VLC Media player
• CineXPlayer
• eBay
• WordPress

Apps I’ve paid for that I totally recommend are ;

• The Times – sign up online rather than through the app and you get all seven days versions for £1 (first month) and then £8 per month following. Note, the Sunday Times is only accessible via the web not the app.
• Social – A Facebook clone
• MobileNoter – seamless integration with Microsoft OneNote on my laptop
• RadioBOX – radio from around the world (recordable)
• SoundNote – for when the talking is happening fast
• Let’s Golf
• Angry Birds HD
• iTap RDP – Full remote desktop client
• Sketchbook PRO
• Conquist
• AirAttack HD
• Atomic Clock – Buy it, it’s gorgeous
• NFS Shift
• ServerControl
• Photo Delight

There are a host of other apps that I’ve got installed, but the above are the ones that fill the first couple of screens of my iPad.

The battery life is as advertised. I have never had any cause for concern and end up trickle charging it from my laptop. The screen says “Not Charging”, but it is really. If you do need to use the wall adapter to charge it, then it does so very quickly. I think I’ve only had to resort to using the wall charger twice since I’ve had it and get by with three or four days constant use without worrying too much.

The screen and the responsiveness to the UI are a case of seen to be believed. Smooth – almost crystal ball prediction of what you’re going to be doing next – and the Apple UI guidelines mean that you know what every app is doing.

Courtesy of the STM bag, the iPad goes with me everywhere. I may look a tad metrosexual, but the ability to read a book, catch up on news, surf the web, Facebook, play a game or even do some work anywhere and any time is totally addictive. (Did I mention the screen? It begs you to be used) As predicted, I can find WiFi access just about anywhere I need. Using WiFi radar I can find hidden networks and just ask the owners if they’ll let me in.

What more do I need?

Not a whole lot to be honest.

When iWorks support Dropbox or some other form of file system, then I will invest and be able to work on my work documents from anywhere.

Father Christmas will probably bring me a folio with bluetooth keyboard. There are a couple of versions out there at the moment, but I’m hanging on for a couple that are pending release.

Hard Candy iPad stylus for note taking (scribbling) and some of the art apps

With the above, I reckon that I can ditch the laptop on a general basis and use the iPad as a complete work tool as well as my constant companion.

And….

Back to the Bill Gates quote. I have a eighty-nine apps (most installed, and some are BIG), 232 songs and three full length films on the iPad. Along with the necessary application data, Dropbox content etc. I have 17.2 Gig free.

So. Do I recommend the iPad? Hell yes.

Bert and John’s Golden Wedding

Ξ October 31st, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |

The videos (Bert and John’s dance; Jules, Em and Milly busting a move; Gina and Jenny) are now on YouTube.

The pictures are all up on Flickr. Full size so you can do what you want with them.

Installing Teambox under Lucid

Ξ October 5th, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Me, Ubuntu, Work |

Teambox is a collaborative Project Management environment with a Twitter-esque feel to it. After playing with the demo version I decided that this could be exactly what we’re looking for in the team to give a greater ownership and transparency to our project portfolio. As luck would have it, the software is open source and therefore ripe for setting up. Only problem is, it’s a Ruby on Rails application and I’ve got no experience of this environment. So, here’s the step-by-step of me trying to get Teambox up and running.

• A blank install of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx – 10.04 LTS
  1. No problem th3ere, Ubuntu is always a breeze to install and, after some updates, we’re ready to rock.
• Next step, a visit to http://github.com/teambox/teambox/wiki for the local installation instructions. I know that I’m going to be needing at least Apache and MySQL so I could do with a list of pre-requisites. Luckily, http://github.com/teambox/teambox/wiki/Installing-on-Ubuntu has a step-by-step guide.
• First step looks easy; Install some default packages. The instructions say;

Sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby ruby-dev irb libmysqlclient15-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libopenssl-ruby libpcre3-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libreadline5-dev apache2 apache2-prefork-dev libapr1-dev imagemagick

• Great stuff. All those packages have installed fine and dandy. Next up is to install RubyGems and Bundler. I down load the tarball of RubyGems and tar-xvf the file. CD into that directory – default location is ~/home/Downloads/ – and I can see a setup.rb file ….. clearly one for Ruby.

sudo ruby setup.rb gives me the message ;

RubyGems installed the following executables:
/usr/bin/gem1.8

• Next up to install Bundler;

sudo gem install bundler

gives me;

sudo: gem: command not found

Ah! Ok then ….

sudo gem1.8 install bundler

gives me;

ERROR: http://rubygems.org/ does not appear to be a repository

Right. A few minutes of pondering here ….

sudo gem1.8 install bundler –http-proxy http://myproxyaddress:80

Successfully installed bundler-1.0.2
1 gem installed
ERROR: While executing gem … (Gem::DocumentError)
ERROR: RDoc documentation generator not installed: no such file to load – rdoc/rdoc

OK. Some more pondering. I’m happy that Bundler installed, but I don’t want any apparently inconsequential errors to come back and haunt me later. A bit of Googling and it turns out that the ruby-doc package needs to be installed – I do that through Synaptic Package Manager

Re-run the Bundler install and now all the documentation is there too.

I can see that this proxy thing is going to be a PITA so ;

sudo nano /etc/bash.bashrc

Scroll to the end and add ;

export http_proxy=http://yourproxy:port
export ftp_proxy=http://yourproxy:port

• Next up is to install Git and MySQL – I do this via Synaptic
• We now download the Teambox code;

sudo git clone git://github.com/teambox/teambox.git

• Now to bootstrap the Reuby libraries with Bundler. (At this point we were suffering a few network problems so I ended up doing this part as su)

bundle install

Gives a load of feedback ending with;

Your bundle is complete! Use ‘bundle show [gemname]’ to see where a bundled gem is installed.

• Now create a configuration database

cp config/database.example.yml config/database.yml

• Edit the config file that we have just created;

host: your SMTP host
username: your username
password: your password
auth: plain
port: 25
enable_starttls_auto: false

• Edit the database.yml file to set your username and password
• Bootstrap the database;

(You’ll discover that you need to install rake)

apt-get install rake

rake db:create db:schema:load RAILS_ENV=development

• Now fire up your application from the directory where Teambox is installed;

script/server –e development

• Browse to http://localhost:3000 and you should see your Teambox installation!
• Now we need to add the application to Apache2
• Copy your teambox directory to /var/www/
• Install Passenger to enable Apache to run the Rails application;

gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module

• This will fire up a text-based dialogue
  • You will be faced with a message giving you some information to add to your Apache configuration file – /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.conf
• Create the file /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.load and add something like ;

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.11/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so

• Enable mod_passenger;

cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled

sudo ln –s ../mods-available/passenger.* ./

• Restart apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

• At this point I got an error about syntax errors, so I’m guessing that the guess for passenger.load could be wrong.
  • A little bit of looking later ….
• OK. That was simple. I needed passenger-2.2.15 not 2.2.11 in passenger.load

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

• Works fine this time.
• Now we need to configure the virtual host for the domain. I reckon that the file to edit here is going to be /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default however, this is where things get a little flaky – to the extent of have I actually copied the application and, if so, to the right place. Testing will tell;

cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled

sudo cp 000-default hope-it-works

sudo nano 000-default

And change the file to the following ;

<VirtualHost *:80>
Options +Indexes
ServerAdmin youremailaddress
ServerName yourservername.com.or.whatever

DocumentRoot /whereyoucopiedtheappicationto/public

<Directory /thesameasabove>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Options –Multiviews
</Directory>

RailsEnv production
</VirtualHost>

• I then pointed a browser to http://localhost and got;

An unexpected error ocurred on Teambox

• Not a bad thing – apart from the spelling of occurred. This means that something is trying to happen. Having a look at /var/log/apache2/error.log shows something interesting;

Unknown database ‘teambox2_production’

• OK then. Just on the off, I’ll try changing “production” in 000-default to “development”, restart apache2 and see what happens;

Bingo! I get to the configure your site admin screen. The only thing of note is a warning that ;

You haven’t configured the correct domain name in config/teambox.yml. This will cause the stylesheets to not work properly in production mode.

Other than that, everything seems to be working fine and dandy. I’ve added a project, put some dates against it, added a conversation. Looking bloody good all round.

One last thing

You will find a script error when running Teambox in IE – which will prevent certain features from running. The error shows up in line 11614 of sprockets.js . This can be fixed by removing the trailing comma from line 11613 so that it reads ;

‘organization’: null

Enjoy!

I was wrong!

Ξ August 22nd, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |

Coming next. The review of the iPad