Category: Misc

Blog update!

Hi everyone!

This blog hasn’t seen any updates since over a year now and I do apologize for that. However, the reason for that is simple. Last year I’ve decided to take on a new project. But before I was going to tell everybody about it I wanted to make sure that I also really got the time to do so. In the meantime I got the confidence that the project will succeed and that I have enough time to take it forward. So, how to say it… it’s almost like breaking up with a girlfriend. Well, here it is: I got a new one! Blog I mean of course. Last year in August I started a new blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/developer/
The intention of that blog is to show how write the right code for using Oracle technologies. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of badly written code that would never ever perform on top of technologies such as the Oracle Database. Unfortunately, I’ve also not seen too many folks that did understand Database performance and were good programmers. There seems to be a gap between the database world and the programming world, well I’m sure that that doesn’t come as a surprise to you. So, with this new blog I want to bridge the gap as good as I can.

Let’s stay friends!

However, this blog is not dead yet! The other blog is for a very specific goal. But there is more in my IT life than just that. And everything that doesn’t fit into the above one will sooner or later end up here. That being said, the above one will definitely get more attention from me going forward so you may want to add that one to your RSS Reader as well!

Last but not least: I’ve also finally managed to go live on Twitter. If you prefer that way of communication you can follow me @GeraldVenzl

Java class finding tool: ClassFinder

I got into more coding again lately and that is a good thing I think. I’m a believer of the German saying “Wer rastet, der rostet” or in English: A rolling stone gathers no moss! Java seems to be my main programming language since quite a while now. But believe it or not I’m still coding some PL/SQL as well now and then. Anyway, sometimes when you get some ClassNotFound exceptions in Java it can be quite handy to have a little tool that can scan .jar and .zip files for the class that you’re missing. Yes, there are tons of those little programs out there on the web but as you might have guessed by the title I’ve decided to write yet another class finding tool. Damn, I really should have called it YACFT! But instead I did go for ClassFinder. Why did I write yet another class finding tool then? Well, although there are some good ones out there, non of them fulfilled all of my requirements – at least none of those that I have found. First I was a big fan of Xigole’s classfinder tool. A really slick, fast and easy to use command-line class finding tool which is really great for Unix systems where you ssh in. However, I soon got fed up with it when I did have a proper graphical interface available, whether it was Windows or X11 or simply my MacBook Pro. So I started searching for other tools and soon found that they were either just GUI based or just GUI based and on Windows only (Why? I don’t get it!) or GUI based on ugly AWT. But all that I wanted was a slick tool like Xigole’s that was clever enough to spawn a GUI when there was X11 available but still provide a nice CLI when there wasn’t. Well, as I said I couldn’t find one, so I wrote my own and here it is, ClassFinder:

ClassFinder Window-mode

It’s really easy to use:

  1. Give it either a file or a folder to search – files currently supported are .jar, .war, .ear, .zip, .rar, .class, .java
  2. Give it the class name that you’re looking for
  3. Shall the class name be case sensitive?
  4. Shall the folder be searched recursively?
  5. Hit Search!

Continue reading “Java class finding tool: ClassFinder”

DTrace is now also available for Oracle Linux

Oracle has ported DTrace for Oracle Linux. DTrace is a very powerful performance analysis and troubleshooting tool that allows you to instrument all software. It’s name is short for Dynamic Tracing. I’m not a DTrace expert but some say it is that powerful that it allows you to reverse engineer any software…