WebLogic 8.1 vs Admin Password

In WebLogic 8.1, if you change the administrator's password from the console, the server will fail to start when you next restart it.  The error message is:

<BEA-090402> <Authentication denied: Boot identity not valid; The user name and/or password from the boot identity file (boot.properties) is not valid. The boot identity may have been changed since the boot identity file was created. Please edit and update the boot identity file with the proper values of username and password. The first time the updated boot identity file is used to start the server, these new values are encrypted.>

The solution proposed in the error message works.

Visio: Office vs Visual Studio

Files written using Visio 2003 (from Office 2003) cannot be read from the Enterprise Architect version of Visio that comes with Visual Studio 2003.  The latter appears to be compatible with Visio 2002, so if you save files in that format, all is well.

Crude Code Line Counting

I used the following UNIX pipe to perform crude code line counting:

find . -name '*.java' -not -wholename '*/generated/*' -exec cat {} \; |
sed -e '/^[ \t]*$/d' |
wc -l

Every non-blank line is counted.

BCEL and ASM

The BCEL project (for Java bytecode manipulation) seems to be inactive.  The site suggests looking at ObjectWeb's ASM project.  ASM has nice Eclipse plug-in.

Facelets and JBoss Seam

Facelets is an interesting technology that makes JSF a little easier to use.  It seems to be a plug-in replacement for JSP that adds some Tapestry-like features.  I ran across Facelets while reading about JBoss Seam, yet another application framework in the Web space.

TOra

There appears to be an open source sibling to TOAD called TOra.  [Postscript, 2006-07-14:  There are bugs in TOra that are so obvious that I can't help thinking that the TOAD guys have purposely introduced them to drive business their way.  TOra is still useful, though.]

XML Namespace Oddities in ALDSP

I was confused about the behaviour of namespaces in BEA ALDSP.  It appeared to be ignoring namespaces for all but the root elements of data service types.  Well, it was ignoring them.  This is because when you create an XML Schema in Workshop, it does not specify the elementFormDefault.  I keep forgetting that elementFormDefault only applies to local elements, not global ones, and that the default behaviour is unqualified, in defiance of common usage.  The moral of the story is to manually add elementFormDefault="qualified" to the XSD.

Oracle Agent Won't Start

Our Oracle installation mysteriously stopped working.  In particular, the Oracle Agent service would not start (OracleOraHome92Agent).  The Windows Event Viewer was no help, it simply said "Agent service failed to launch the agent process." and "Faulting application agntsrvc.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x00000000.".  When I manually started the service from the services control panel, I got the additional helpful message "The handle is invalid".

I searched the Web for advice, but none of the suggestions were helpful.  For example, one site suggested turning on tracing by adding the directive "dbsnmp.trace_level=admin" or "agentctl.trace_level=admin" to the file "${ORA_HOME}/network/admin/snmp_rw.ora", but those settings were not being respected.  In fact, there was no evidence whatsoever in the Oracle directory that any processes were being started -- nothing in the log directory and nothing in the trace directory.

I used the SysInternals FILEMON utility to see what files were being accessed.  It turns out that the service was attempting to launch a program from the C: drive even though Oracle was installed on the C: drive.  This, in turn, was due to the fact that the Oracle registry entries had been overwritten with invalid values (due to an inappropriate .REG file being loaded).

All was well after I corrected the erroneous registry entries, pointing Oracle back to its true home directory.