Thursday, October 20, 2011

Installing SQL Developer

This is slightly offtopic for this blog, but nevertheless a very important one. I have decided to blog this one becuase this particular problem dragged for atleast few days for me and after surfing countless number of sites and installing various softwares including harmful ones, I learnt the hard way how to tackle it.
If you have a 64 bit windows7  machine and you are trying your luck installing SQL Developer and failing consistently, this post is for you.
SQL developer is available at the oracle site here http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/sql-developer/downloads/index.html. However, this version does not come with a compatible java version. You may already have java installed in your machine, if not, you may need to follow the instructions from the above mentioned site on how to install java.
After you downloaded and unpacked SQL Developer, when you click on the sqldeveloper.exe file, it may say "permission denied". This may be because the executable file may not have execution permission. You may like to change that with a chmod 755 <filename> . Then click on the executable file sqldeveloper.exe . It may possibly ask you the java path if it does not find one, just provide the path through the browse button option. I was stuck when the program complained about absence of msvcr100.dll and jvm.dll files . I browsed countless number of sites and in that process installed a melaware and ended up cleaning it later. Be aware, don't download .dll files from anywhere other than safe places. I looked for resources that asked me to download .NET and visual C++ that could solve the lingering msvcr100.dll problem but in vein. I have installed uninstalled .NET and visual C++ few times at least to make sure that the softwares are installed correctly, but that did not work. Since it was looking for this file from Java, I checked the java distribution and finally located it under  ProgramsFiles/Java/jdk.7.0_01/bin/ . Copy pasted it under Windows/system32/ . For jvm.dll, many sites including the java site advised that probably the java installation was incorrect. I re-installed java several times after each un-install and it still did not work. Finally I found a safe site at https://rt4.cceb.med.upenn.edu/crcu_html/jinit/jinit_download.htm , from where I downloaded jvm.dll. Copy pasted this file under Windows/system32 and it solved the problem!!

Monday, October 17, 2011

RGS14 - The protein that makes us forget

In this months protein spotlight issue, there is a protein, RGS14 highlighted that makes us filter our memory. Do we not need something that will make us remember things rather forget them? Well, too much un-necessary information stored in brain will certainly make it more chaotic. However, silencing RGS14 in mice makes them smarter, I wonder if same can be said about humans.

The full article is available here http://web.expasy.org/spotlight/pdf/132/