I got Toad For Oracle installed on my new machine at work. My new machine is a Window 7 box. The version of Toad is 11.0.0.116. I had Toad For Oracle running fine on my old XP machine. The version of Toad over there was version 9.6.1.1. Apparently they changed a bunch of stuff about how it was configured.
The first issue I had was that I didn’t have an Oracle client. But this was pretty easy to fix. I went to Oracle’s website, and under downloads, they had something called Instant Client. I downloaded that. It was just a zip file. Inside the zip file was a directory full of stuff. All I had to do was copy the directory on to my harddrive, and add the directory to my “Path” variable. This was done by going to the control panel. Then going to System> Advanced System Settings> Environment Variables. Then I found the “Path” variable under system variables, and appended the new directory to it (with a semicolon separator).
The tricky part was that Toad could not find the TNSNames.ora file. The TNSNames Editor button was greyed out. And if I clicked TNSNames Editor under the Utilities drop down menu, I got an error “A TNSNames.ora file was not found.” I knew where the TNSNames.ora file was, I just couldn’t figure out how to tell Toad where it was. In the version 9 of Toad, there was an entry in the Toad.ini file. With the new version of Toad For Oracle, it took me a bit of hunting around to find the Toad.ini file as they had moved it to a whole new place. With the older version 9 Toad, I found it in the program directory in a subdirectory “User Files”. I found it at C:\Users\{user name}\AppData\Roaming\Quest Software\Toad for Oracle\11.0\User Files. And in the older Toad.ini file, there was an entry TNSLSMRUFilename=f:\etc\tnsnames.ora to tell Toad where the TNSNames.ora file was located. But there was no such entry in the new Toad.ini file. I tried copying and pasting this entry into the new Toad.in file, but it didn’t work. After a bunch of research in Google, I found what I needed to do. It was very simple. I needed to add a new enviroment variable “TNS_ADMIN”. So under the control panel, I went to System> Advanced System Settings> Environment Variables. I created a new user enviroment variable named “TNS_ADMIN” and set the value to “f:\etc” the directory where the TNSNames.ora file was located. When I started Toad For Oracle, the TNSNames Editor button was no longer greyed out!
I bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking to help me with making my blog posts. Blog posts such as this one. I record them on my digital voice recorder, an Olympus WS400S digital voice recorder. I had been using a Panasonic RR-US360, but Panasonic being the dorks they are, did not release a new driver to support Windows 7. So I was forced by Panasonic to buy a new digital voice recorder, which would not be from Panasonic. Because Panasonic sucks. Anyway enough ranting about Panasonic the dorks. With the new digital voice recorder I had to go back and retrain it. Training for the digital recorder involves reading a long selection of text into the digital voice recorder and then playing it into the software. I don’t think the Olympus digital voice recorder translated as well as the Panasonic digital voice recorder off the bat unfortunately. But I have been working making corrections. And I think it has gotten better. I started off by reading a 10 page chunk of Dogbert’s management book into recorder and played that back into the software. The translation was working okay but I thought it could been better. The selection I had read into the Panasonic recorder had been from a book by David Barry. So I went back and and read the 13 page chunk from Dave Barry’s book and trained the software using that. It seemed to get a little bit better. Now I continue the training process by making corrections. Every time I do a blog post using the digital voice recorder and I translate it, I go back and correct any of the mistranslations. I do this by reading through the translated text looking for any mistakes. I can highlight the mistake. And hit the little play button on the menu bar. It plays back and I can hear what was actually said. Then I can click the correction button and it will come up with some alternative options or allow me to type in the correct text. By repeatedly doing this software should get more and more accurate I have already noticed that if I go back and re-process previously transcribed and corrected text it will correctly translate some of the things they made mistakes on before. But I still notice that some of the things it translates incorrectly. It will be a process I believe, but in the long run I believe the software will get more and more accurate.
Most of my computer’s have come with speakers. But I haven’t liked the speakers that they came with. They’ve been cheap little speakers that sound very tinny. My newest computer came with speakers built into the monitor. This is very space efficient, but unfortunately they didn’t sound very good. The speakers I have been using are speakers that I bought about 15 years ago. There are Reveal Hi-Fi Stereo Digital Series speakers that I bought at CompUSA. They weren’t real expensive, but they sound great. But being 15 years old they have gotten a lot of wear and tear. The volume control became very scratchy. As I went to adjust the volume the speakers might cut out or change in volume erratically. I really dont change the treble or bass knobs much so I really haven’t had issues with those. Another issue with the volume control is it just seemed kind of sticky to where it would just not turn smoothly.
Here is how you fix a scratchy volume control. Go to RadioShack and buy a can of tuner cleaner. This is a small spray can that comes with a little tube similar to what a can of WP 40 comes with. Make sure that your speaker is powered off and unplugged. Open up your speaker; for my speaker I’d had to remove for Philips head screws on the back. Inside the speaker, locate the volume control. These are called potentiometers. Insert the little tube into the nozzle of the tuner cleaner. Find a small little opening in the side of the potentiometers for the volume control. Put the small to the tuner cleaner up to the small little hole in the side of the potentiometer. The hole is usually not big enough to insert a tube into. Spray tuner cleaner into the body of the potentiometer. Now move the volume knob back and forth. You might need to spray some more tuner cleaner into the body of the potentiometer and move the volume control back and forth until it moves nice and freely. If there are other controls such as tone or any other controls you might want to repeat this process on those as well. If you have problems with any switches on your speakers, you can also try this on those. Let the tuner controller tuner cleaner dry. It doesn’t take too long. Then go ahead and hook up your speaker again and see if the volume control has improved. If it hasn’t you might not have gotten enough tuner cleaner into the body of the potentiometer. You may need to repeat the whole process again.
I love my Plustek Opticbook 3600 scanner. I’ve had it for four or five years I think. I own thousands of books, and don’t often have enough time to sit down and just read. And I am also a relatively slow reader. I tried to learn speed-reading one time, but found that I just didn’t enjoy the books nearly as much. The Plustek Opticbook 3600 scanner is especially designed for scanning books. The scanning surface comes right up to the edge of the scanner. So you can open the book to about 90°, lay the book on the scanner, and scan one page at a time. I can scan pages at about 7 seconds each. Depending on how long the book, is I can maybe scan the entire book in a little over an hour. There is special software that comes with the scanner that aids in scanning books. The software will automatically rotate every other page for me. So all I have to do is lay the book on there, hit the button, flip the book, hit the button, turn the page, hit the button, flip the book, hit the button, over and over again. The scanner stores all the pages as images and has them as a collection within a project. When I’m done scanning the entire book, I can take all those scans and run him through another program that will make them into a very large PDF file, but I don’t do this very often for entire book. The PDF is just too big. It’ll also let me one them into an OCR program. That’s optical character recognition. This is what I do most of the time. I run the program the book through the OCR program, and it gives me the text output in a Microsoft Word file. Then I’ll spend another hour or so cleaning up the text. Removing the book title at the top of each page, and page numbers at the bottom of the page. Also spending some time fixing translation mistakes. I find that some things get translated poorly time and time again. Such as in running books you will often translate 10K into LOK. Or the word “I” will often get translated as the number one. So after spending an hour or more scanning a book and spending another hour or so doing a little bit of editing, I have the book in a text file. Then I take the text file and split it up into smaller files and run those through program called TextAloudMP3, which will create audio files of the book. These I will then burn these to CDs, and I can listen to the book in my car at my leisure, on drives to and from work, or other long drives. And if I ever want to read the book again, I just pull out the CDs and listen to them again. As far as photo scanning quality, the scanner is okay. I think the scanning quality for photographs on my HP scanner was a little bit better.
I bought my new machine, a Compaq Presario at Best Buy specifically because I wanted to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10. My old computer just had too old of processor. I’d bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred edition specifically because I wanted to be able to use my digital voice recorder. I wanted to be able to record blog posts while driving to and from work. Or any other times when I have spare time. I was able to hook up my USB microphone to the machine and record using NaturallySpeaking. But I had also recorded some blog posts on my digital voice recorder which is a Panasonic RR-US 360 digital voice recorder which I’ve had for years. I bought it because I can download recordings into my machine via a USB port. I download the recordings onto my machine at work, and transferred them to a USB drive. I was able to copy those to my new machine. And after training the NaturallySpeaking software, I was able to transcribe some of those posts from a digital voice recorder. But when I went to set up my USB Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder on my new machine I got an error saying that the driver was not installed. I had installed the Voice Studio software that came with the digital voice recorder. Apparently it didn’t install the driver or the driver was not compatible with Windows 7. Searching around on the Internet, I found many sites mentioning a Windows 7 driver for the Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder. But many of these seem to be spam sites with little or no content. The page title would mention Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder and Windows 7 driver, but when you went there the pages were full of ads or if you followed through the links they would ask you to click on advertiser links to be able to download the driver. I went to Panasonic’s website to search for new drivers but there were no download sections there, not even for the older drivers or software. I submitted a tech support request asking about Windows 7 drivers for the Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder and got a prompt reply back from Panasonic.
“We regret to inform you but your RR-US360 is not compatible with Windows 7. It can only be compatible with Windows 98, 2000, millenium ed. and XP. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
I e-mailed backasking clarifying that they would not be releasing Windows 7 drivers for the Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder “So you are telling me, you are not coming out with new drivers for Windows 7? And so I have an expensive paperweight?”
They responded back thanking me for my patronage of Panasonic. “Your patronage as a Panasonic customer is truly valued. Therefore, we appreciate this information regarding your experience with our product. We do regret to hear of your dissatisfaction. Be assured all consumer comments, whether favorable or not, are appreciated. All comments are investigated and given careful consideration in our continuing effort to produce high quality products, and customer service that consumers expect from our label.”
One of the reasons I bought this digital voice recorder was because it was USB and figured that being a plug-in to a machine would be fairly standard. But apparently my digital voice recorder will not work with Windows 7 ever. Because they will not be releasing new drivers for Windows 7. And mine is just one of a bunch of Panasonic digital voice recorders that came out about that time. So they are basically abandoning all of those older digital voice recorders, leaving all of the users in the lurch with useless pieces of hardware. I e-mailed back to Panasonic tech-support saying that I will no longer be buying any Panasonic products. If this is the way they support their products, I have no interest in buying any more. Why would I buy a new Panasonic digital voice recorder if when Windows 8 or Windows 9 or whatever comes out, I will longer be able to use it. It’s not like it’s some sort of specialized piece of hardware that should be limited to by the operating system. I can still plug in my digital camera, and printer and scanner, and they work fine. Though for my scanner I did have to download a new driver. Plustek, the company that made my scanner is much smaller than great big Panasonic. But they managed to come out with a new Windows 7 driver. So Panasonic sucks, and I will no longer buy any Panasonic products. I’m currently looking at a new digital voice recorder made by Olympus.