Lacking Natural Simplicity

Recent Reading

• Blue Magic, by Jo Clayton; DAW, May 1988; DAW Collecttors No. 743. Good, but not quite as good as the first in the series.

• Two-Bit Heroes, by Doris Egan; DAW, January 1992; DAW Book Collectors No. 870. Also good, but not quite as good as the first in the series.

• The Suns of Scorpio, by Kenneth Bulmer, as by Alan Burt Akers; DAW Books 1973; Futura Publications Limited, 1974. This is the second of the Dray Prescot books and deals extensively with his adventures in the Eye of the World amongst the partisans of the Red and the Green. This was the first of the Dray Prescot books that I read. I got it from the Salem College library as a youngster one snowy winter day when I'd gone there with my Dad (who was a professor there at the time) because schools in our county had been canceled because of the snow. The copy that I borrowed that day was the DAW (USA) edition; the version I own now, oddly enough, is the British edition.

Recent Viewing

• Zatoichi sakate giri, also known as Zatoichi and the Doomed Man, 1965; directed by Kazuo Mori; writing by Shozaburo Asai and Kan Shimozawa; starring Shintarô Katsu.

• A Man Apart, 2003; directed by F. Gary Gray; writing by Christian Gudegast and Paul Scheuring; starring Vin Diesel. Worth seeing on cable, I suppose, for those who like that sort of thing.

Oracle

It turns out that to install Oracle 10g on a Windows XP machine that doesn't have a static address or which is not connected to a network you have to install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter, configure it with a non-routable IP address, make it the primary network address, and make sure oracle uses that address when it installs. This is documented in this version of the release notes but unfortunately, this is not the current version of the release notes, so if you follow the normal links on their website or you look at the relase notes that come with the download you won't see that section.

Just for posterity, here's what Oracle has to say:

10.22 Prerequisite for DHCP Installation

To install Oracle Database or Oracle Database 10g Companion Products on a server configured with DHCP, or if you want to perform an off- network installation and connect to the network afterwards, then you must appropriately configure the Microsoft Loopback adapter as the primary network interface before installation.

Follow this procedure:

1. Install Microsoft Loopback adapter on the DHCP computer. See Also: Microsoft Knowledge Base documentation for instructions on installing and configuring the Loopback adapter

2. After installing the adapter, you must assign it a non-routable IP. The following values are recommended: 192.168.x.x (where x is any value) and 10.10.10.10. Then assign a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

3. Modify System32\drivers\etc\hosts to include an entry of the form:

   ;non-routable IP Fully-Qualified-Windows-Machine-Name Windows-Machine-Name-Aliases

   For example:

   10.10.10.10 oracle-laptop.us.oracle.com oracle-laptop

4. Windows considers Loopback adapters as a type of network adapter. After installing the Loopback adapter, you have at least two network adapters on your computer: your network adapter and the Loopback adapter. You want Windows to use the loopback adapter as the primary adapter. Check your operating system documentation for instructions on how to do this.