Oracle Metalink: User experience (Error #1095 ;-)

Today i logged into metalink - ups - into support.oracle.com. The new interface with Adobe flash is really nice. Three months ago i had problems in viewing service requests, so i decided to stay with the old metalink interface (take a look at my posting).
Now i have to work with the new interface. This worked but more then 20 times i got the following error message:

I queried metalink itself for this error - nothing.
I queried google: and there i found a very nice page:
(Before following the link, read to the end!!!)

http://blogs.oracle.com/Support/2009/11/top_issues_for_my_oracle_suppo.html

The posting at this link is nice but you should read the COMMENTS!!
Here a best of:

Here's my saga:
- Did everything as requested and on time (well before time) by tying my MetaLink account with Oracle SSO
- It stopped working promptly with the cutover with 'Account setup in progres ...' error.
- Had a colleage open an SR (strike 1) which was promptly closed by support without resolving the issue.
- Had my colleage open yet another SR (strike 2) which was promptly closed by support without resolving the issue
- My colleage called in the problem (strike 3) and of course support didn't resolve the problem.
- Many days pass by and yesterday I called it in (strike 4) and I was told to re-register. Didn't work as expected.
- Sent email to our customer rep in disgust
- Finally able to login this morning and what do you know they lost all my CSIs associated with the account.
- Call support again to have the CSI issue resolved again.
- I've many CSIs associated with my account (some of which I'm the admin) and was flooded with email (add/approve/... requests).
- A total of 9 days without access to the Support site; not that I needed to create any SRs.
- I was surprised to discover how much I depend on the Support site on a routine basis.

or

So, Oracle Support has
1.) intentionally decided to choose a competitors product to build their new front end (thereby declaring their own software products are inferior for the task),
2.) made themselves completely dependant upon a competitors ability (and/or desire) to quickly fix security and/or compatibility problems,
3.) wound up ignoring the largest installed base of browser on the web
4.) created a HTML version of the support site (to replace a version that was working fine, built with an Oracle product) that isn't supported!!!!!

or

My Oracle Support Services Error:
A server connection error occurred.
You cannot continue.
Please try again later.

or

Collection of exotic fly-by error messages we are receiving

"Unable to perform "" operation due to the following error: "BusinessException thrown from ReOpen First Step : updateSR() at 2009-12-02 14:59:12.488 CST"."

"Service Error: sr/home: javax.xml.rpc.soap.SOAPFaultException: Cannot perform client request"

"Error #1095"

"Error #1088"

And last but not the least - the neat and deadly
"Exception raised"

or

It would be nice to have an official admission by Support that says:

"Yes. We screwed up in a big way. We realize that out support system is in complete disarray. Here are the things that we know are completely and unacceptably messed up and here are the current statuses and what is being done."

or ....
Enjoy ;-) and remember Things can only get better!

Twitter: First Contact...

After all this articles about twitter, i decided to create a account on twitter and to take a look at this new, so called real-time internet.
OK, creating an account is very easy and after that, you can login and see something like this:

Hmmm...
So what about following someone? In the magazine of the GI i read, that the Tower Bridge in London is twittering its status. So i searched for this bridge and here we go:

This was easy, but not really helpful ;-). So what about some further searches e.g. Oracle:

???
This is not really what i expected.
So let's do my first tweet(?):

Without any follower this does not really look good ;-(
After that i did a search for "dietrich schroff". This gave the following result:

Yippie! My blog postings are already in the real-time internet via blog aggregators....
[Does anybody know some good tweets to follow?]

Chrome beta for Linux

Today i downloaded google's browser chrome for Linux. It is available via this link.
I chose

The size of the debian package is 12MB:

-rw-r--r-- 1 schroff schroff 12M 8. Dez 20:17 /tmp/google-chrome-beta_current_i386.deb

I tried dpgk -i google-chrome-beta_current_i386.deb but this did not work:

dpkg: Abhängigkeitsprobleme verhindern Konfiguration von google-chrome-beta:
google-chrome-beta hängt ab von xdg-utils (>= 1.0.1); aber:
Paket xdg-utils ist nicht installiert.

Ok. Not really a big problem. Just add this packages: apt-get install xdg-utils. After that the installation succeded.
But how to start chrome?
There is no binary named chrome, but a the package name gives a hint:

/usr/bin/X11/google-chrome

While installation, there following is happening:

1. an entry in /etc/cron.daily is added.
   # This script is part of the google-chrome package.
   #
   # It creates the repository configuration file for package updates, and it
   # monitors that config to see if it has been disabled by the overly aggressive
   # distro upgrade process (e.g. intrepid -> jaunty). When this situation is
   # detected, the respository will be re-enabled. If the respository is disabled
   # for any other reason, the config file won't be changed.
   #
   # This functionality can be controlled by creating the $DEFAULTS_FILE and
   # setting "repo_add_once" and/or "repo_reenable_on_distupgrade" to "true" or
   # "false" as desired. An empty $DEFAULTS_FILE is the same as setting both values
   # to "false".
   
2. in /opt/google/chrome some files are added (product_logo*png, locales
3. in /usr/share something in gnome-control-center, menu and man
4. a link in /usr/bin and /usr/bin/X11 to /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome
   

After that i started chrome. The first dailog was:

The import from firefox failed, because i did not stop firefox and then:

Faster rendering of webpages is promotoed as one of the advantages of chrome. So i tried www.faz.de:

• Firefox: 14s
• Chrome: 14s
  

But this is not really a benchmark ;-)