I have developed a search plugin for Firefox that uses the Google Desktop to search for files. Unfortunately, you have to go in and manually edit the source file for your particular unique string for right now until I figure out how to generate or capture it.

1. Do a search in the Google Desktop and copy the unique string. The part you need is bolded:
   http://127.0.0.1:4664/search&s=2247545786 ?q=test&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Search+Desktop
2. Go here to the install search plugin
3. Go to your searchplugins folder in Firefox and open the googdesktop.src with a text editor. Typically this is stored in Windows at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\.
4. Edit the googdesktop.src with the unique string you copied from step 1 above. The src file will indicate where to copy this value. Save and close the .src file.
5. Restart Firefox.

If you have any problems, let me know. This search plugin is still in beta, but it seems to work OK in my testing.

Google released a tool today that allows you to search for email, documents (like Word, PowerPoint, Excel), web pages, IM logs, and any other text on your hard drive (Windows only). It looks pretty fast, too.

desktop.google.com

Here is a long article about it at O’Reilly.

I had a need to move database tables from one Oracle SID to another and I didn’t want to have to export/import each table. Our DBA turned me on to SQL*Copy, something I had never used before, and it worked like a charm. Here is the syntax:

DBa = scott/tiger@SID1
DBb = scott/tiger@SID2

Log into SQL*Plus as scott/tiger@SID1

SQL> COPY FROM scott/tiger@SID2 CREATE <table_name> USING SELECT * FROM <table_name>

And that is it, it will pull the indexes and contraints as well. Easy, cheesy.

One note, line wrap doesn’t work here, so you have to us a minus (-) like this:

SQL> COPY FROM scott/tiger@SID2 CREATE <table_name> USING -
> SELECT * FROM <table_name>

A minor annoyance with XP is that it expands zip files into folders when you are browsing on Windows Explorer. To turn this off, do the following on the command prompt:

regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll

To re-enable it, type this on the command prompt:

regsvr32 zipfldr.dll

You should hear a bell and a confirmation after doing these commands. You probably need to be in the Administrator group to do this as well.

Looks like lots of people are reporting on the availability of Flex and Flex Builder for free for students, educators, anyone that is non-commercial.

In other news, Laszlo Systems launched Laszlo Presentation Server 2.2 as open source (CPL) that looks like a Flex clone and runs in Tomcat or on any Java application server. Downloads are here, more information is here.