Released myself from Vista hell – completed my upgrade to Win XP!

Yes, yes, and yes! Last week, I finally decided to admit defeat and upgrade to XP from Vista. The final straw in the coffin was Vista’s repeated propensity for killing IBM Rational Application Developer v7. Yes, RAD is bloatware in several respects, but Vista would also kill Windows Explorer repeatedly. You would think the O/S would be able to control a key component like Windows Explorer better. Anyways, I had it with Vista and reinstalled XP on my laptop. Whew! It is good to be back to a real Operating System that actually delivers acceptable performance.

Getting past issues with reverse engineering an Oracle schema with Visio on Vista

Yesterday, I had the need to reverse engineer an Oracle schema in Microsoft Visio on my now not-so-new Vista laptop. While I had the Oracle JDBC drivers copied onto my Vista laptop, I did not have the Oracle client installed. I first tried to install the Oracle 9i client, because the Oracle schema was in a Oracle 9i database instance. The Oracle 9i client installer warns about incompatibility with Vista and it certainly lived up to the billing. I saw several other users with postings about issues. I saw one obvious issue with folder permissions and changed ownership/permissions on the Oracle client install folder, but that did not resolve the issue all the way. While trying to configure an ODBC data source (only for reverse engineering the Oracle schema) , I ran into errors that had again been encountered by many. The first error was “The setup routines for the oracle in orahome92 odbc driver could not be loaded due to system error code 126”. Clicking ok on this error resulted in a secondary error alert – “Could not load the setup or translator library”. At this point, rather than spend more cycles on the issue, I switched to reverse engineering the schema using the eclipse plugin – Clay. Clay worked just fine for reverse engineering the schema (took all of 5 minutes), but the issue with it was that it did not allow me to move the foreign key connectors to make them route better. At this point, I was back looking at the Visio route and the solution was extremely simple!

Seem to have fixed my Windows Vista Network Performance Woes!

I just had a quick update on my Windows Vista issues in general, and my network performance in particular. As I had written earlier, since getting my new Vista laptop, I had experienced slow network performance compared to Windows XP computers with the same ISP connection. I had turned off auto-tuning by executing netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable on a command prompt run with administrator access. This had helped, but not all the way. I was still experiencing occasional issues with using network shares at work.