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• Actionscript flex sockets and telnet

  - by MAC

  I am trying to make a flex application where it gets data from a telnet connection and I am running into a weird problem. To give a brief introduction, i want to read data from a process that exposes it through a socket. So if in the shell i type telnet localhost 8651i receive the xml and then the connection is closed (I get the following Connection closed by foreign host.) Anyway i found a simple tutorial online for flex that essentially is a telnet client and one would expect it to work but everything follows Murphy's laws and nothing ever works! Now i have messages being printed in every event handler and all places that i can think off. When i connect to the socket nothing happens, no event handler is triggered even the connect or close handler and if i do the following the socket.connected returns false! I get no errors, try catch raises no exception. I am at a loss as to whats going wrong? socket.connect(serverURL, portNumber); msg(socket.connected.toString()); Is there something about telnet that i do not know and its causing this to not work. Whats more interesting is why none of the events get fired. Another interesting thing is that i have some python code that does the same thing and its able to get the xml back! The following is the python code that works! def getStats(host, port): sock = socket.socket() sock.connect((host, port)) res = sock.recv(1024*1024*1024, socket.MSG_WAITALL) sock.close() return statFunc(res) So i ask you whats going wrong!!!!!! Is there some inherent problem with how flex handles sockets?

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• Struct containing a Map in a Map? (C++/STL)

  - by karok

  I was wondering if it was possible to create a struct containing a number of variables and a map in a map. What I have at the moment: typedef std::map<std::string,double> lawVariables; struct ObjectCustomData { std::string objectType; bool global_lock; std::map<std::string, lawVariables> lawData; }; This struct is then passed on to another function as a single data block for that object. The structure setup is as follows: Each object has a data block that contains: its ObjectType, a bool for a lock, and a varying number of "laws" that could look like this: law1 -> var_a = 39.3; -> var_g = 8.1; law8 -> var_r = 83.1; -> var_y = 913.3; -> var_a = 9.81; Firstly, I'm unsure whether I should be using a Map within a Map and secondly even if this would be valid, I'm unsure how to fill it with data and how to recall it afterwards. I looked at maps because then I can search (on a name) if a certain object has a certain law, and if that law has certain variables. (sorry for the first messy post appearance, hope this is better :) )

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• Can't get jQuery to get focus on cloned input fields

  - by Rebel1Moon

  I have a page that needs to create dynamic form fields as often as the user needs, and I am trying to use Ajax to tie it in to my database for faster form entry and to prevent user typos. So, I have put my Ajax returned data into popup div, the user selects, then the form field is filled in. The problem comes on the cloned fields. They don't seem to want to bring up the popup div when focused. I am thinking it is something to do with when they get created/added to the DOM. Here is my JS that creates the clones: $(document).ready(function() { var regex = /^(.*)(\d)+$/i; var cloneIndex = $(".clonedInput").length; $("button.clone").live("click", function(){ $(this).parents(".clonedInput").clone() .appendTo("#course_container") .attr("id", "clonedInput" + cloneIndex) .find("*").each(function() { var id = this.id || ""; var match = id.match(regex) || []; if (match.length == 3) { this.id = match[1] + (cloneIndex); } }); cloneIndex++; numClones=cloneIndex-1; //alert("numClones "+numClones); }); Here is where I expect to be able to get focus on the correct cloned field and call the popup. The baker_equiv0 id is original code, whereas baker_equiv1 is the first clone. $('#baker_equiv0').focus(function() { \\ THIS CODE WORKS $('.popup').fadeIn(500); $('#results').empty(); // document.enter_data.baker_equiv1.value="test"; THIS LINE WORKS //alert("numClones "+numClones); }); $('#baker_equiv1').focus(function() { // THIS DOESN'T EVER FIRE alert("numClones "+numClones); $('.popup').fadeIn(500); $('#results').empty(); }); Here is the HTML with the form: <label for="baker_equiv" class="">Baker Equivalent: <span class="requiredField">*</span></label> <input type="text" class="cinputsa" name="baker_equiv[]" id="baker_equiv0" size="8" ONKEYUP="get_equiv(this.value);"> If I put this in the HTML code above, it works fine: onfocus="alert(this.id)" I'd also be interested in how to adjust the JS code to work based on the id array created rather than having to copy code for each potential set of fields clones, i.e., baker_equiv[] rather than baker_equiv0, baker_equiv1, etc. Thanks all!

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• Reference Data Management and Master Data: Are Relation ?

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  Submitted By:  Rahul Kamath  Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM) has always been extremely powerful as an Enterprise Master Data Management (MDM) solution that can help manage changes to master data in a way that influences enterprise structure, whether it be mastering chart of accounts to enable financial transformation, or revamping organization structures to drive business transformation and operational efficiencies, or restructuring sales territories to enable equitable distribution of leads to sales teams following the acquisition of new products, or adding additional cost centers to enable fine grain control over expenses. Increasingly, DRM is also being utilized by Oracle customers for reference data management, an emerging solution space that deserves some explanation. What is reference data? How does it relate to Master Data? Reference data is a close cousin of master data. While master data is challenged with problems of unique identification, may be more rapidly changing, requires consensus building across stakeholders and lends structure to business transactions, reference data is simpler, more slowly changing, but has semantic content that is used to categorize or group other information assets – including master data – and gives them contextual value. In fact, the creation of a new master data element may require new reference data to be created. For example, when a European company acquires a US business, chances are that they will now need to adapt their product line taxonomy to include a new category to describe the newly acquired US product line. Further, the cross-border transaction will also result in a revised geo hierarchy. The addition of new products represents changes to master data while changes to product categories and geo hierarchy are examples of reference data changes.1 The following table contains an illustrative list of examples of reference data by type. Reference data types may include types and codes, business taxonomies, complex relationships & cross-domain mappings or standards. Types & Codes Taxonomies Relationships / Mappings Standards Transaction Codes Industry Classification Categories and Codes, e.g., North America Industry Classification System (NAICS) Product / Segment; Product / Geo Calendars (e.g., Gregorian, Fiscal, Manufacturing, Retail, ISO8601) Lookup Tables (e.g., Gender, Marital Status, etc.) Product Categories City à State à Postal Codes Currency Codes (e.g., ISO) Status Codes Sales Territories (e.g., Geo, Industry Verticals, Named Accounts, Federal/State/Local/Defense) Customer / Market Segment; Business Unit / Channel Country Codes (e.g., ISO 3166, UN) Role Codes Market Segments Country Codes / Currency Codes / Financial Accounts Date/Time, Time Zones (e.g., ISO 8601) Domain Values Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC), eCl@ss International Classification of Diseases (ICD) e.g., ICD9 à IC10 mappings Tax Rates Why manage reference data? Reference data carries contextual value and meaning and therefore its use can drive business logic that helps execute a business process, create a desired application behavior or provide meaningful segmentation to analyze transaction data. Further, mapping reference data often requires human judgment. Sample Use Cases of Reference Data Management Healthcare: Diagnostic Codes The reference data challenges in the healthcare industry offer a case in point. Part of being HIPAA compliant requires medical practitioners to transition diagnosis codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10, a medical coding scheme used to classify diseases, signs and symptoms, causes, etc. The transition to ICD-10 has a significant impact on business processes, procedures, contracts, and IT systems. Since both code sets ICD-9 and ICD-10 offer diagnosis codes of very different levels of granularity, human judgment is required to map ICD-9 codes to ICD-10. The process requires collaboration and consensus building among stakeholders much in the same way as does master data management. Moreover, to build reports to understand utilization, frequency and quality of diagnoses, medical practitioners may need to “cross-walk” mappings -- either forward to ICD-10 or backwards to ICD-9 depending upon the reporting time horizon. Spend Management: Product, Service & Supplier Codes Similarly, as an enterprise looks to rationalize suppliers and leverage their spend, conforming supplier codes, as well as product and service codes requires supporting multiple classification schemes that may include industry standards (e.g., UNSPSC, eCl@ss) or enterprise taxonomies. Aberdeen Group estimates that 90% of companies rely on spreadsheets and manual reviews to aggregate, classify and analyze spend data, and that data management activities account for 12-15% of the sourcing cycle and consume 30-50% of a commodity manager’s time. Creating a common map across the extended enterprise to rationalize codes across procurement, accounts payable, general ledger, credit card, procurement card (P-card) as well as ACH and bank systems can cut sourcing costs, improve compliance, lower inventory stock, and free up talent to focus on value added tasks. Change Management: Point of Sales Transaction Codes and Product Codes In the specialty finance industry, enterprises are confronted with usury laws – governed at the state and local level – that regulate financial product innovation as it relates to consumer loans, check cashing and pawn lending. To comply, it is important to demonstrate that transactions booked at the point of sale are posted against valid product codes that were on offer at the time of booking the sale. Since new products are being released at a steady stream, it is important to ensure timely and accurate mapping of point-of-sale transaction codes with the appropriate product and GL codes to comply with the changing regulations. Multi-National Companies: Industry Classification Schemes As companies grow and expand across geographies, a typical challenge they encounter with reference data represents reconciling various versions of industry classification schemes in use across nations. While the United States, Mexico and Canada conform to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) standard, European Union countries choose different variants of the NACE industry classification scheme. Multi-national companies must manage the individual national NACE schemes and reconcile the differences across countries. Enterprises must invest in a reference data change management application to address the challenge of distributing reference data changes to downstream applications and assess which applications were impacted by a given change. References 1 Master Data versus Reference Data, Malcolm Chisholm, April 1, 2006.

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• To Bit or Not To Bit

  - by Johnm

  'Twas a long day of troubleshooting and firefighting and now, with most of the office vacant, you face a blank scripting window to create a new table in his database. Many questions circle your mind like dirty water gurgling down the bathtub drain: "How normalized should this table be?", "Should I use an identity column?", "NVarchar or Varchar?", "Should this column be NULLABLE?", "I wonder what apple blue cheese bacon cheesecake tastes like?" Well, there are times when the mind goes it's own direction. A Bit About Bit At some point during your table creation efforts you will encounter the decision of whether to use the bit data type for a column. The bit data type is an integer data type that recognizes only the values of 1, 0 and NULL as valid. This data type is often utilized to store yes/no or true/false values. An example of its use would be a column called [IsGasoline] which would be intended to contain the value of 1 if the row's subject (a car) had a gasoline engine and a 0 if the subject did not have a gasoline engine. The bit data type can even be found in some of the system tables of SQL Server. For example, the sysssispackages table in the msdb database which contains SQL Server Integration Services Package information for the packages stored in SQL Server. This table contains a column called [IsEncrypted]. A value of 1 indicates that the package has been encrypted while the value of 0 indicates that it is not. I have learned that the most effective way to disperse the crowd that surrounds the office coffee machine is to engage into SQL Server debates. The bit data type has been one of the most reoccurring, as well as the most enjoyable, of these topics. It contains a practical side and a philosophical side. Practical Consideration This data type certainly has its place and is a valuable option for database design; but it is often used in situations where the answer is really not a pure true/false response. In addition, true/false values are not very informative or scalable. Let's use the previously noted [IsGasoline] column for illustration. While on the surface it appears to be a rather simple question when evaluating a car: "Does the car have a gasoline engine?" If the person entering data is entering a row for a Jeep Liberty, the response would be a 1 since it has a gasoline engine. If the person is entering data is entering a row for a Chevrolet Volt, the response would be a 0 since it is an electric engine. What happens when a person is entering a row for the gasoline/electric hybrid Toyota Prius? Would one person's conclusion be consistent with another person's conclusion? The argument could be made that the current intent for the database is to be used only for pure gasoline and pure electric engines; but this is where the scalability issue comes into play. With the use of a bit data type a database modification and data conversion would be required if the business decided to take on hybrid engines. Whereas, alternatively, if the int data type were used as a foreign key to a reference table containing the engine type options, the change to include the hybrid option would only require an entry into the reference table. Philosophical Consideration Since the bit data type is often used for true/false or yes/no data (also called Boolean) it presents a philosophical conundrum of what to do about the allowance of the NULL value. The inclusion of NULL in a true/false or yes/no response simply violates the logical principle of bivalence which states that "every proposition is either true or false". If NULL is not true, then it must be false. The mathematical laws of Boolean logic support this concept by stating that the only valid values of this scenario are 1 and 0. There is another way to look at this conundrum: NULL is also considered to be the absence of a response. In other words, it is the equivalent to "undecided". Anyone who watches the news can tell you that polls always include an "undecided" option. This could be considered a valid option in the world of yes/no/dunno. Through out all of these considerations I have discovered one absolute certainty: When you have found a person, or group of persons, who are willing to entertain a philosophical debate of the bit data type, you have found some true friends.

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• Physics System ignores collision in some rare cases

  - by Gajoo

  I've been developing a simple physics engine for my game. since the game physics is very simple I've decided to increase accuracy a little bit. Instead of formal integration methods like fourier or RK4, I'm directly computing the results after delta time "dt". based on the very first laws of physics : dx = 0.5 * a * dt^2 + v0 * dt dv = a * dt where a is acceleration and v0 is object's previous velocity. Also to handle collisions I've used a method which is somehow different from those I've seen so far. I'm detecting all the collision in the given time frame, stepping the world forward to the nearest collision, resolving it and again check for possible collisions. As I said the world consist of very simple objects, so I'm not loosing any performance due to multiple collision checking. First I'm checking if the ball collides with any walls around it (which is working perfectly) and then I'm checking if it collides with the edges of the walls (yellow points in the picture). the algorithm seems to work without any problem except some rare cases, in which the collision with points are ignored. I've tested everything and all the variables seem to be what they should but after leaving the system work for a minute or two the system the ball passes through one of those points. Here is collision portion of my code, hopefully one of you guys can give me a hint where to look for a potential bug! void PhysicalWorld::checkForPointCollision(Vec2 acceleration, PhysicsComponent& ball, Vec2& collisionNormal, float& collisionTime, Vec2 target) { // this function checks if there will be any collision between a circle and a point // ball contains informations about the circle (it's current velocity, position and radius) // collisionNormal is an output variable // collisionTime is also an output varialbe // target is the point I want to check for collisions Vec2 V = ball.mVelocity; Vec2 A = acceleration; Vec2 P = ball.mPosition - target; float wallWidth = mMap->getWallWidth() / (mMap->getWallWidth() + mMap->getHallWidth()) / 2; float r = ball.mRadius / (mMap->getWallWidth() + mMap->getHallWidth()); // r is ball radius scaled to match actual rendered object. if (A.any()) // todo : I need to first correctly solve the collisions in case there is no acceleration return; if (V.any()) // if object is not moving there will be no collisions! { float D = P.x * V.y - P.y * V.x; float Delta = r*r*V.length2() - D*D; if(Delta < eps) return; Delta = sqrt(Delta); float sgnvy = V.y > 0 ? 1: (V.y < 0?-1:0); Vec2 c1(( D*V.y+sgnvy*V.x*Delta) / V.length2(), (-D*V.x+fabs(V.y)*Delta) / V.length2()); Vec2 c2(( D*V.y-sgnvy*V.x*Delta) / V.length2(), (-D*V.x-fabs(V.y)*Delta) / V.length2()); float t1 = (c1.x - P.x) / V.x; float t2 = (c2.x - P.x) / V.x; if(t1 > eps && t1 <= collisionTime) { collisionTime = t1; collisionNormal = c1; } if(t2 > eps && t2 <= collisionTime) { collisionTime = t2; collisionNormal = c2; } } } // this function should step the world forward by dt. it doesn't check for collision of any two balls (components) // it just checks if there is a collision between the current component and 4 points forming a rectangle around it. void PhysicalWorld::step(float dt) { for (unsigned i=0;i<mObjects.size();i++) { PhysicsComponent &current = *mObjects[i]; Vec2 acceleration = current.mForces * current.mInvMass; float rt=dt; // stores how much more the world should advance while(rt > eps) { float collisionTime = rt; Vec2 collisionNormal = Vec2(0,0); float halfWallWidth = mMap->getWallWidth() / (mMap->getWallWidth() + mMap->getHallWidth()) / 2; // we check if there is any collision with any of those 4 points around the ball // if there is a collision both collisionNormal and collisionTime variables will change // after these functions collisionTime will be exactly the value of nearest collision (if any) // and if there was, collisionNormal will report in which direction the ball should return. checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2(floor(current.mPosition.x) + halfWallWidth,floor(current.mPosition.y) + halfWallWidth)); checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2(floor(current.mPosition.x) + halfWallWidth, ceil(current.mPosition.y) - halfWallWidth)); checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2( ceil(current.mPosition.x) - halfWallWidth,floor(current.mPosition.y) + halfWallWidth)); checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2( ceil(current.mPosition.x) - halfWallWidth, ceil(current.mPosition.y) - halfWallWidth)); // either if there is a collision or if there is not we step the forward since we are sure there will be no collision before collisionTime current.mPosition += collisionTime * (collisionTime * acceleration * 0.5 + current.mVelocity); current.mVelocity += collisionTime * acceleration; // if the ball collided with anything collisionNormal should be at least none zero in one of it's axis if (collisionNormal.any()) { collisionNormal *= Dot(collisionNormal, current.mVelocity) / collisionNormal.length2(); current.mVelocity -= 2 * collisionNormal; // simply reverse velocity along collision normal direction } rt -= collisionTime; } // reset all forces for current object so it'll be ready for later game event current.mForces.zero(); } }

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• Taking a Flying Leap

  - by Lance Shaw

  Yesterday, I went skydiving with three of my children.  It was thrilling, scary, invigorating and exciting. While there is obvious risk involved, the reward and feeling of success was well worth it. You might already be wondering what skydiving would have to with WebCenter, so let me explain. Implementing a skydiving program and becoming an instructor does not happen overnight.  It does not happen with the purchase of the needed technology. Not one of us would go out, buy a parachute, the harnesses, helmet and all the gear and be able to convince anyone that we are now ready to be a skydiving instructor. The fact is that obtaining the technology is merely a small piece of the overall process and so is the case with managing content in your company. You don't just buy the right software (Oracle WebCenter Content) and go to your boss and declare information management success. There is planning, research and effort that goes into deploying software of any kind and especially when it is as mission-critical to the success of your business as Enterprise Content Management. To become a certified skydiving instructor takes at least 3 years of commitment and often longer. In the United States, candidates must complete over 500 solo jumps of their own over a minimum of 36 months and then must complete additional rigorous training under observation.  When you consider the amount of time and effort involved, it's not unlike getting a college degree and anyone that has trusted their lives to one of these instructors will no doubt appreciate their dedication to the curriculum.  Implementing an ECM system won't take that long, but it certainly requires commitment, analysis and consideration. But guess what?  Humans are involved and that means that mistakes can happen and that rules change.  This struck me while reading an excellent post on darkreading.com by Glenn S. Phillips entitled "Mission Impossible: 4 Reasons Compliance is Impossible".  His over-arching point was that with information management and security, environments change and people are involved meaning the work is never done.  He stated that you can never claim your compliance efforts are complete because of the following reasons. People are involved.  And lets face it, some are more trustworthy than others. Change is Constant. There is always some new technology coming along that is disruptive. Consumer grade cloud file sharing and sync tools come to mind here. Compliance is interpreted, not defined.  Laws and the judges that read them are always on the move. Technology is a tool, not a complete solution. There is no magic pill. The skydiving analogy holds true here as well.  Ultimately, a single person packs your parachute.  For obvious reasons, you prefer that this person be trustworthy but there are no absolute guarantees of a 100% error-free scenario.  Weather and wind conditions are never a constant and the best-laid plans for a great day of skydiving are easily disrupted by forces outside of your control.  Rules and regulations vary by location and may be updated at any time and as I mentioned early on, even the best technology on its own will only get you started. The good news is that, like skydiving, with the right technology, the right planning, the right team and a proper understanding of the rules and regulations that govern your industry, your ECM deployment can be a great success.  Failure to plan for any of the 4 factors that Glenn outlined in his article will certainly put your deployment and maybe even your company at risk, so consider them carefully. As a final aside, for those of you who consider skydiving an incredibly dangerous and risky pastime, consider this comparative statistic.  In 2012, the U.S. Parachute Association recorded 19 fatal skydiving accidents in the U.S. out of roughly 3.1 million jumps.  That’s 0.006 fatalities per 1,000 jumps. By comparison, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that there were 34,080 deaths due to car accidents in 2012.  Based on the percentages, one could argue that it is safer to jump out of a plane than to drive to the airport where the skydiving will take place. While the way you manage, secure, classify, control, retain and dispose of company files may not carry as much risk as driving or skydiving, it certainly carries risk for the organization when not planned and deployed appropriately.  Consider all the factors involved in your organization as you make your content management plans.  For additional areas of consideration, be sure to download our free whitepaper on the topic entitled "The Top 10 Criteria for Choosing an ECM System" which is available for download here.

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• Scared of Calculus - Required to pass Differential Calculus as part of my Computer science major

  - by ke3pup

  Hi guys I'm finishing my Computer science degree in university but my fear of maths (lack of background knowledge) made me to leave all my maths units til' the very end which is now. i either take them on and pass or have to give up. I've passed all my programming units easily but knowing my poor maths skills won't do i've been staying clear of the maths units. I have to pass Differential Calculus and Linear Algebra first. With a help of book named "Linear Algebra: A Modern Introduction" i'm finding myself on track and i think i can pass the Linear Algebra unit. But with differential calculus i can't find a book to help me. They're either too advanced or just too simple for what i have to learn. The things i'm required to know for this units are: Set notation, the real number line, Complex numbers in cartesian form. Complex plane, modulus. Complex numbers in polar form. De Moivre’s Theorem. Complex powers and nth roots. Definition of ei? and ez for z complex. Applications to trigonometry. Revision of domain and range of a function Working in R3. Curves and surfaces. Functions of 2 variables. Level curves.Partial derivatives and tangent planes. The derivative as a difference quotient. Geometric significance of the derivative. Discussion of limit. Higher order partial derivatives. Limits of f(x,y). Continuity. Maxima and minima of f(x,y). The chain rule. Implicit differentiation. Directional derivatives and the gradient. Limit laws, l’Hoˆpital’s rule, composition law. Definition of sinh and cosh and their inverses. Taylor polynomials. The remainder term. Taylor series. Is there a book to help me get on track with the above? Being a student i can't buy too many books hence why i'm looking for a book that covers topics I need to know. The University library has a fairly limited collection which i took as loan but didn't find useful as it was too complex.

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• CEN/CENELEC Lacks Perspective

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  Over the last few months, two of the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs), CEN and CENELEC have circulated an unfortunate position statement distorting the facts around fora and consortia. For the benefit of outsiders to this debate, let's just say that this debate regards whether and how the EU should recognize standards and specifications from certain fora and consortia based on a process evaluating the openness and transparency of such deliverables. The topic is complex, and somewhat confusing even to insiders, but nevertheless crucial to the European economy. As far as I can judge, their positions are not based on facts. This is unfortunate. For the benefit of clarity, here are some of the observations they make: a)"Most consortia are in essence driven by technology companies making hardware and software solutions, by definition very few of the largest ones are European-based". b) "Most consortia lack a European presence, relevant Committees, even those that are often cited as having stronger links with Europe, seem to lack an overall, inclusive set of participants". c) "Recognising specific consortia specifications will not resolve any concrete problems of interoperability for public authorities; interoperability depends on stringing together a range of specifications (from formal global bodies or consortia alike)". d) "Consortia already have the option to have their specifications adopted by the international formal standards bodies and many more exercise this than the two that seem to be campaigning for European recognition. Such specifications can then also be adopted as European standards." e) "Consortium specifications completely lack any process to take due and balanced account of requirements at national level - this is not important for technologies but can be a critical issue when discussing cross-border issues within the EU such as eGovernment, eHealth and so on". f) "The proposed recognition will not lead to standstill on national or European activities, nor to the adoption of the specifications as national standards in the CEN and CENELEC members (usually in their official national languages), nor to withdrawal of conflicting national standards. A big asset of the European standardization system is its coherence and lack of fragmentation." g) "We always miss concrete and specific examples of where consortia referencing are supposed to be helpful." First of all, note that ETSI, the third ESO, did not join the position. The reason is, of course, that ETSI beyond being an ESO, also has a global perspective and, moreover, does consider reality. Secondly, having produced arguments a) to g), CEN/CENELEC has the audacity to call a meeting on Friday 25 February entitled "ICT standardization - improving collaboration in Europe". This sounds very nice, but they have not set the stage for constructive debate. Rather, they demonstrate a striking lack of vision and lack of perspective. I will back this up by three facts, and leave it there. 1. Since the 1980s, global industry fora and consortia, such as IETF, W3C and OASIS have emerged as world-leading ICT standards development organizations with excellent procedures for openness and transparency in all phases of standards development, ex post and ex ante. - Practically no ICT system can be built without using fora and consortia standards (FCS). - Without using FCS, neither the Internet, upon which the EU economy depends, nor EU institutions would operate. - FCS are of high relevance for achieving and promoting interoperability and driving innovation. 2. FCS are complementary to the formally recognized standards organizations including the ESOs. - No work will be taken away from the ESOs should the EU recognize certain FCS. - Each FCS would be evaluated on its merit and on the openness of the process that produced it. ESOs would, with other stakeholders, have a say. - ESOs could potentially educate and assist European stakeholders to engage more actively and constructively with FCS. - ETSI, also an ESO, seems to clearly recognize these facts. 3. Europe and its Member States have a strong voice in several of the most relevant global industry fora and consortia. - W3C: W3C was founded in 1994 by an Englishman, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in collaboration with CERN, the European research lab. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) in France became the first European W3C host and in 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics), also based in France, took over the role of European W3C host from INRIA. Today, W3C has 326 Members, 40% of which are European. Government participation is also strong, and it could be increased - a development that is very much desired by W3C. Current members of the W3C Advisory Board includes Ora Lassila (Nokia) and Charles McCathie Nevile (Opera). Nokia is Finnish company, Opera is a Norwegian company. SAP's Claus von Riegen is an alumni of the same Advisory Board. - OASIS: its membership - 30% of which is European - represents the marketplace, reflecting a balance of providers, user companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. In particular, about 15% of OASIS members are governments or universities. Frederick Hirsch from Nokia, Claus von Riegen from SAP AG and Charles-H. Schulz from Ars Aperta are on the Board of Directors. Nokia is a Finnish company, SAP is a German company and Ars Aperta is a French company. The Chairman of the Board is Peter Brown, who is an Independent Consultant, an Austrian citizen AND an official of the European Parliament currently on long-term leave. - IETF: The oversight of its activities is by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), since 2007 chaired by Olaf Kolkman, a Dutch national who lives in Uithoorn, NL. Kolkman is director of NLnet Labs, a foundation chartered to develop open source software and open source standards for the Internet. Other IAB members include Marcelo Bagnulo whose affiliation is the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain as well as Hannes Tschofenig from Nokia Siemens Networks. Nokia is a Finnish company. Siemens is a German company. Nokia Siemens is a European joint venture. - Member States: At least 17 European Member States have developed Interoperability Frameworks that include FCS, according to the EU-funded National Interoperability Framework Observatory (see list and NIFO web site on IDABC). This also means they actively procure solutions using FCS, reference FCS in their policies and even in laws. Member State reps are free to engage in FCS, and many do. It would be nice if the EU adjusted to this reality. - A huge number of European nationals work in the global IT industry, on European soil or elsewhere, whether in EU registered companies or not. CEN/CENELEC lacks perspective and has engaged in an effort to twist facts that is quite striking from a publicly funded organization. I wish them all possible success with Friday's meeting but I fear all of the most important stakeholders will not be at the table. Not because they do not wish to collaborate, but because they just have been insulted. If they do show up, it would be a gracious move, almost beyond comprehension. While I do not expect CEN/CENELEC to line up perfectly in favor of fora and consortia, I think it would be to their benefit to stick to more palatable observations. Actually, I would suggest an apology, straightening out the facts. This works among friends and it works in an organizational context. Then, we can all move on. Standardization is important. Too important to ignore. Too important to distort. The European economy depends on it. We need CEN/CENELEC. It is an important organization. But CEN/CENELEC needs fora and consortia, too.

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• Premature-Optimization and Performance Anxiety

  - by James Michael Hare

  While writing my post analyzing the new .NET 4 ConcurrentDictionary class (here), I fell into one of the classic blunders that I myself always love to warn about.  After analyzing the differences of time between a Dictionary with locking versus the new ConcurrentDictionary class, I noted that the ConcurrentDictionary was faster with read-heavy multi-threaded operations.  Then, I made the classic blunder of thinking that because the original Dictionary with locking was faster for those write-heavy uses, it was the best choice for those types of tasks.  In short, I fell into the premature-optimization anti-pattern. Basically, the premature-optimization anti-pattern is when a developer is coding very early for a perceived (whether rightly-or-wrongly) performance gain and sacrificing good design and maintainability in the process.  At best, the performance gains are usually negligible and at worst, can either negatively impact performance, or can degrade maintainability so much that time to market suffers or the code becomes very fragile due to the complexity. Keep in mind the distinction above.  I'm not talking about valid performance decisions.  There are decisions one should make when designing and writing an application that are valid performance decisions.  Examples of this are knowing the best data structures for a given situation (Dictionary versus List, for example) and choosing performance algorithms (linear search vs. binary search).  But these in my mind are macro optimizations.  The error is not in deciding to use a better data structure or algorithm, the anti-pattern as stated above is when you attempt to over-optimize early on in such a way that it sacrifices maintainability. In my case, I was actually considering trading the safety and maintainability gains of the ConcurrentDictionary (no locking required) for a slight performance gain by using the Dictionary with locking.  This would have been a mistake as I would be trading maintainability (ConcurrentDictionary requires no locking which helps readability) and safety (ConcurrentDictionary is safe for iteration even while being modified and you don't risk the developer locking incorrectly) -- and I fell for it even when I knew to watch out for it.  I think in my case, and it may be true for others as well, a large part of it was due to the time I was trained as a developer.  I began college in in the 90s when C and C++ was king and hardware speed and memory were still relatively priceless commodities and not to be squandered.  In those days, using a long instead of a short could waste precious resources, and as such, we were taught to try to minimize space and favor performance.  This is why in many cases such early code-bases were very hard to maintain.  I don't know how many times I heard back then to avoid too many function calls because of the overhead -- and in fact just last year I heard a new hire in the company where I work declare that she didn't want to refactor a long method because of function call overhead.  Now back then, that may have been a valid concern, but with today's modern hardware even if you're calling a trivial method in an extremely tight loop (which chances are the JIT compiler would optimize anyway) the results of removing method calls to speed up performance are negligible for the great majority of applications.  Now, obviously, there are those coding applications where speed is absolutely king (for example drivers, computer games, operating systems) where such sacrifices may be made.  But I would strongly advice against such optimization because of it's cost.  Many folks that are performing an optimization think it's always a win-win.  That they're simply adding speed to the application, what could possibly be wrong with that?  What they don't realize is the cost of their choice.  For every piece of straight-forward code that you obfuscate with performance enhancements, you risk the introduction of bugs in the long term technical debt of the application.  It will become so fragile over time that maintenance will become a nightmare.  I've seen such applications in places I have worked.  There are times I've seen applications where the designer was so obsessed with performance that they even designed their own memory management system for their application to try to squeeze out every ounce of performance.  Unfortunately, the application stability often suffers as a result and it is very difficult for anyone other than the original designer to maintain. I've even seen this recently where I heard a C++ developer bemoaning that in VS2010 the iterators are about twice as slow as they used to be because Microsoft added range checking (probably as part of the 0x standard implementation).  To me this was almost a joke.  Twice as slow sounds bad, but it almost never as bad as you think -- especially if you're gaining safety.  The only time twice is really that much slower is when once was too slow to begin with.  Think about it.  2 minutes is slow as a response time because 1 minute is slow.  But if an iterator takes 1 microsecond to move one position and a new, safer iterator takes 2 microseconds, this is trivial!  The only way you'd ever really notice this would be in iterating a collection just for the sake of iterating (i.e. no other operations).  To my mind, the added safety makes the extra time worth it. Always favor safety and maintainability when you can.  I know it can be a hard habit to break, especially if you started out your career early or in a language such as C where they are very performance conscious.  But in reality, these type of micro-optimizations only end up hurting you in the long run. Remember the two laws of optimization.  I'm not sure where I first heard these, but they are so true: For beginners: Do not optimize. For experts: Do not optimize yet. This is so true.  If you're a beginner, resist the urge to optimize at all costs.  And if you are an expert, delay that decision.  As long as you have chosen the right data structures and algorithms for your task, your performance will probably be more than sufficient.  Chances are it will be network, database, or disk hits that will be your slow-down, not your code.  As they say, 98% of your code's bottleneck is in 2% of your code so premature-optimization may add maintenance and safety debt that won't have any measurable impact.  Instead, code for maintainability and safety, and then, and only then, when you find a true bottleneck, then you should go back and optimize further.

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• Top 10 Browser Productivity Tips

  - by Renso

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/renso/archive/2013/10/14/top-10-browser-productivity-tips.aspxYou don’t have to be a geek to be a productive browser user. The tips below have been selected by actions users take most of the time to navigate a web-site but use long-standing keyboard or mouse actions to get them done, when there are keyboard short-cuts you can use instead. Since you hands are already on the keyboard it is almost always faster to sue a keyboard shortcut to get something done that you usually used the mouse for. For example right-clicking on something to copy it and then doing to same for pasting something is very time consuming, keyboard shortcuts have been created that simplify the task. All it takes are a few memory brain cells to remember them. Here are the tips, in no particular order:   Tip 1 Hold down the spacebar on your keyboard to page to the end of your web page rather than using your mouse. This is really a slow way of doing it. If you want to page one page at a time, hit the spacebar once, and again to page again. But if you want to page all the way to the end of the web page simply hit Ctrl+End (that is hold down the Ctrl key and hit the End button on your keyboard). To get to the top of your web page, simply hit Ctrl + Home to go all the way to the top of your web page. Tip 2 Where are my downloads? Some folks run downloads again-and-again because they do not know where the last one went and they do not see the popup, or browser note on their web page in the footer, etc. Simply hit Ctrl+J. Works in most browsers. Tip 3 Selecting a US state from a drop down box. Don’t use the mouse, takes just way too long to scroll. When you tab to the drop down box or click on it with your mouse, simply hit the first character of the state and it will be selected. For Texas for example hit the letter “T” twice on your keyboard to get to it. The same concept can be applied to any drop down box that is alphabetical or numerically sorted. Tip 4 Fixing spelling errors. All modern-day browsers support this now. You see the red wavy lines underscoring a word, yes it is a spelling error. How do you fix it? Don’t overtype it or try and fix it manually, fist right-click on it and a list of suggestions comes up. If it does not show up, like my name “Renso” and you know how to spell your name as in this example, look further down the list of options (the little window popup that appears when you right click) and you should see an option to “Add to Dictionary”. Be warned, when you add it, it only adds it to the browser you’re using’s dictionary. If you use Google Chrome, Firefox and IE, each one will have their own list. Tip 5 So you have trouble seeing the text on the screen. Or you are looking at a photo, for example in Facebook. You want to zoom in to read better or zoom into a photo a bit more. Hit Ctrl++ (hold down Ctrl key and hit the plus key – actually it’s the equal key but it is easier to remember that it is plus for bigger). Hit the minus to zoom out. Now you can’t remember what the original size was since you were so excited to hit it 20 times, or was that 21… Simply hit Ctrl+0 (that is zero) and it will reset it to the default. Tip 6 So you closed a couple of tabs in your browser. Suddenly you remember something you wanted to double-check something on one of the tabs, you cannot remember the URL ad the tab is gone forever, or is it? Simply hit Ctrl+Shift+t and it will bring back your tabs one by one each time you click the T. This has also been a great way for me to quickly close some tabs because I don’t want my boss to see I’m shopping and then hitting Ctrl+Shift+t to quickly get it back and complete my check-put and purchase. Or, for parents, when you walk into your daughter’s room and you see she quickly clicks and closes a window/tab in here browser. Not to worry my little darling, daddy will Ctrl+Shift+t and see what boys on Facebook you were talking too… Tip 7 The web browser is frozen on your PC/Laptop/Whatever, in this example it may be your Internet Explorer browser. I don’t mention Firefox or Chrome here because it probably never happens in their world. You cannot close it, it won’t respond to anything you have done s far except for the next step you are about to take, which is throw your two-day old coffee on your keyboard. This happens especially on sites that want to force you to complete a purchase order. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard on any version of windows, select TASK MANAGER. In the  First Tab, which is the Process Tab, look for the item in question. In this example you should see Internet Explorer. Right-click it and select “End Task”. It will force the thread out of memory and terminate that process. You can of course do this with any program running under your account. Tip 8 This is a personal favorite of mine. To select words in the paragraph without using the mouse. You don’t want to select one character at a time like when you use the Ctrl+arrows as it can be very slow if you want to select a lot of text. You also want to select whole words. Simply use the Ctrl+Shift_arrow (right or left depending which direction you want to go. Tip 9 I was a bit reluctant to add this one, but being in the professional services industry still come across many-a-folk that simply can’t copy-and-paste them-all text or images that reside on them screens, y’all. Ctrl+c to copy and Ctrl+v to paste it. Works a lot faster than using the mouse. You may be asking: “Well why in the devil did they not use Ctrl+p for paste…. because that is for printing. This is of course not limited to the browser world, it applies to almost any piece of software running on PC or Mac. Go try it on an image on your browser, right-click it and select copy. Open a word document and Ctrl+v to paste the image in there. Please consider copyright laws. Tip 10 Getting rid of annoying ads. Now this only works when you load a web page, meaning when you get back to the same page later you will have to do this again and you will need to learn a tool to do it, WELL WORTH IT. For example, I use GrooveShark to listen to music but I don’t like the ads they show. Install a tool like Firebug for Firefox or use the Ctrl+Shift+I on Chrome to bring up the developer toolbar. Shows at the bottom of the page. With Firefox, once you have installed Firebug as an add-on, a yellow bug should appear on the top right-hand-side of your browser, click on it to display the developer toolbar. You will need to learn how to use it, but once you know how to select an item/section on the window (usually just right-click the add you don’t want to see and select “Inspect Element”, the developer toolbar will appear (if not already there)) and then simply hit delete and it will remove the add from the screen. If you don’t know HTML you may need to play with it a bit, but once you understand how it works can open up a whole new world for you on how web pages actually work. If you can think of any others that have saved you a ton of time please let me know so I can add them to a top 99 list.

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• 5 Ways Android Still Disappoints (Me)

  - by TStewartDev

  Let me make this clear: I'm annoyed with Apple. I don't like their current policies and I don't like where Steve Jobs is taking the company. In general, I don't like it when any one company gets too much control in a market. When that happens, the leading company dictates the game and as consumers, our options all but disappear. That said, I'm still going to buy a new iPhone next week. My Apple-hating friends seem to desperately want me to go Android instead, but frankly, it's not good enough for me, and here are the reasons why. The Modern WinMo One of the reasons that Microsoft has identified for Windows Mobile's rapid decline is the breadth of hardware. They exercised little control over manufacturer's implementations. In theory, that sounds great. We as consumers have lots of choice. In practice, though, it meant among other things that updates to the devices were left up to the manufacturers. As a result, that rarely happened. (I'm still bitter at Toshiba for leaving me hanging back in 2002.) And now, Google is doing the same thing with Android. Case in point: my wife has a Motorola Backflip that we bought in April. It was released in March. Motorola says it will get Android 2.1 "sometime in Q3". Great. Meanwhile, I pull down the latest version of iPhone OS (now iOS) and install it the same day it's released. You may say that I can't judge Android by one lazy manufacturer. Yup, I sure can. With Apple, my original iPhone has been supported perfectly for 3 years. With Android, I will have to wait for upgrades after Google releases them, possibly indefinitely. Not cool. AT&T We signed a new contract with AT&T in April to get my wife's phone. I've had a reasonable experience with them. I don't imagine my experience with Verizon would be any better, and I'm relatively confident that Sprint doesn't have the coverage it takes to work well for us. The fact is, AT&T, for whatever reason, doesn't have jack for Android phones. May not be Android's fault, but it's still a shortcoming that prevents me from having it just like the iPhone's exclusivity keeps some folks on other networks from having it. Innovation? What Innovation? Android has a nice dashboard and a great notification system and… nothing else original. I keep reading about how disappointing the iPhone is nowadays. "It has no innovation," people say. Who does? Android has modeled its behavior after the iPhone. That's fine, but if all you've got is a similar product and I'm invested both skill-wise and app-wise in my current platform, why should I change? Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 looks somewhat innovative, and I'm pretty excited to see what they'll bring to the table, but that's another six months away, at least. I've got a 3 year old phone that has some annoying issues now (thanks to recent encounters with water). I need a new phone now. Is This Going to Work? There's no shortage of criticism of Apple over its App Store policies, and I've vented my own anger about it. However, I will give them credit: their screening of apps has done a great job of weeding out the crap and gives an excellent indication that the app will work on my device. How about Android? Nope. It might work on your phone. Maybe. You'll have to try it to see. Get burned by it? Well, write a nasty review to try to keep others from making the mistake you did. If you don't mind doing that stuff, then Android is the platform for you. Personally, I'd rather have a receptionist screening out the telemarketing and survey calls than hang up on them myself, but that's your call. Slow, Slowing, Slower All this yapping about multitasking. This is an area I've been on Apple's side from the beginning. Sorry folks, but this is the number one reason I hated Windows Mobile: the longer you use it, the slower it gets because it doesn't kill apps. I'm with Steve Jobs on this one: if you see a task manager, we're doing it wrong. I don't want to have to manually kill apps. I hate doing that on Windows let alone on a mobile device. To me, priority one should be keeping the device speedy. Waiting for your device to respond is unacceptable. Bonus! Taken from iPhone Letdown? 8 Things Apple Didn't Announce, here are my responses: 4G Yeah, let me know if your area actually has it. I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. No carrier is going to have 4G here for at least 3 years. Meanwhile, you still get to pay for it. Yay! Cloud iTunes/OTA Sync You got me here. Of course, whether or not your Android device will be able to do it is always a good question. 3G Video Chat You got me here, too. I'm sure you spent countless hours in front of your phone with video chat. Also, I can't wait for the "No Video Chat While Driving" laws. Mobile Hotspot This is a neat feature, but as the author points out, it's left up to the carrier whether to implement it or not. Pretty sure any Android phones that come to AT&T won't have this enabled in the foreseeable future. Is Verizon even allowing this? I just figured Sprint was because they're failing so hard at keeping customers. Free MobileMe I use Google's services with my iPhone. The only people I know who use MobileMe are Apple fanboys and fangirls. If you choose to pay for a service that you can get for free, that's your decision, not Apple's. Voice Input Voice input has been available on phones (even "dumb" phones) for years now. iPhone does have the ability, though limited. Why don't I hear people telling their phones what to do? Maybe because it's still easier to use your fingers than talk to it. Get back to me when this becomes an important feature. Free Navigation Maybe this will be a bigger deal to me now that I'm getting a phone with GPS, but when using my buddy's 3gs, Google maps has worked just fine. Maybe I just don't trust turn-by-turn navigation enough to want it. Dashboard The only legitimate complaint on this list, to me. iPhone's home screen is pathetic, doubly so for the iPad. What a waste of perfectly usable space. I also want to add notifications to this list. Android's notification panel is far superior to the iPhone's. I don't want to hunt all over my screen to find little red dots. Put 'em in one place, Apple.

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• First PC Build (Part 1)

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tonyt/archive/2014/08/05/157959.aspxA couple of months ago I made the decision to build myself a new computer. The intended use is gaming and for using the last real version of Photoshop. I was motivated by the poor state of console gaming and a simple desire to do something I haven’t done before – build a PC from the ground up. I’ve been using PCs for more than two decades. I’ve replaced a component hear and there, but for the last 10 years or so I’ve only used laptops. Therefore, this article will be written from the perspective of someone familiar with PCs, but completely new at building. I’m not an expert and this is not a definitive guide for building a PC, but I do hope that it encourages you to try it yourself. Component List Research There was a lot of research necessary, because building a PC is completely new to me, and I haven’t kept up with what’s out there. The first thing you want to do is nail down what your goals are. Your goals are going to be driven by what you want to do with your computer and personal choice. Don’t neglect the second one, because if you’re doing this for fun you want to get what you want. In my case, I focused on three things: performance, longevity, and aesthetics. The performance aspect is important for gaming and Photoshop. This will drive what components you get. For example, heavy gaming use is going to drive your choice of graphics card. Longevity is relevant to me, because I don’t want to be changing things out anytime soon for the next hot game. The consequence of performance and longevity is cost. Finally, aesthetics was my next consideration. I could have just built a box, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as fun for me. Aesthetics might not be important to you. They are for me. I also like gadgets and that played into at least one purchase for this build. I used PC Part Picker to put together my component list. I found it invaluable during the process and I’d recommend it to everyone. One caveat is that I wouldn’t trust the compatibility aspects. It does a pretty good job of not steering you wrong, but do your own research. The rest of it isn’t really sexy. I started out with what appealed to me and then I made changes and additions as I dived deep into researching each component and interaction I could find. The resources I used are innumerable. I used reviews, product descriptions, forum posts (praises and problems), et al. to assist me. I also asked friends into gaming what they thought about my component list. And when I got near the end I posted my list to the Reddit /r/buildapc forum. I cannot stress the value of extra sets of eyeballs and first hand experiences. Some of the resources I used: PC Part Picker Tom’s Hardware bit-tech Reddit Purchase PC Part Picker favors certain vendors. You should look at others too. In my case I found their favorites to be the best. My priorities were out-the-door price and shipping time. I knew that once I started getting parts I’d want to start building. Luckily, I timed it well and everything arrived within the span of a few days. Here are my opinions on the vendors I ended up using in alphabetical order. Amazon.com is a good, reliable choice. They have excellent customer service in my experience, and I knew I wouldn’t have trouble with them. However, shipping time is often a problem when you use their free shipping unless you order expensive items (I’ve found items over $100 ship quickly). Ultimately though, price wasn’t always the best and their collection of sales tax in my state turned me off them. I did purchase my case from them. I ordered the mouse as well, but I cancelled after it was stuck four days in a “shipping soon” state. I purchased the mouse locally. Best Buy is not my favorite place to do business. There’s a lot of history with poor, uninterested sales representatives and they used to have a lot of bad anti-consumer policies. That’s a lot better now, but the bad taste is still in my mouth. I ended up purchasing the accessories from them including mouse (locally) and headphones. NCIX is a company that I’ve never heard of before. It popped up as a recommendation for my CPU cooler on PC Part Picker. I didn’t do a lot of research on the company, because their policy on you buying insurance for your orders turned me off. That policy makes it clear to me that the company finds me responsible for the shipment once it leaves their dock. That’s not right, and may run afoul of state laws. Regardless they shipped my CPU cooler quickly and I didn’t have a problem. NewEgg.com is a well known company. I had never done business with them, but I’m glad I did. They shipped quickly and provided good visibility over everything. The prices were also the best in most cases. My main complaint is that they have a lot of exchange only return policies on components. To their credit those policies are listed in the cart underneath each item. The visibility tells me that they’re not playing any shenanigans and made me comfortable dealing with that risk. The vast majority of what I ordered came from them. Coming Next In the next part I’ll tackle my build experience.

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• General Policies and Procedures for Maintaining the Value of Data Assets

  Here is a general list for policies and procedures regarding maintaining the value of data assets. Data Backup Policies and Procedures Backups are very important when dealing with data because there is always the chance of losing data due to faulty hardware or a user activity. So the need for a strategic backup system should be mandatory for all companies. This being said, in the real world some companies that I have worked for do not really have a good data backup plan. Typically when companies tend to take this kind of approach in data backups usually the data is not really recoverable.  Unfortunately when companies do not regularly test their backup plans they get a false sense of security because they think that they are covered. However, I can tell you from personal and professional experience that a backup plan/system is never fully implemented until it is regularly tested prior to the time when it actually needs to be used. Disaster Recovery Plan Expanding on Backup Policies and Procedures, a company needs to also have a disaster recovery plan in order to protect its data in case of a catastrophic disaster.  Disaster recovery plans typically encompass how to restore all of a company’s data and infrastructure back to a restored operational status.  Most Disaster recovery plans also include time estimates on how long each step of the disaster recovery plan should take to be executed.  It is important to note that disaster recovery plans are never fully implemented until they have been tested just like backup plans. Disaster recovery plans should be tested regularly so that the business can be confident in not losing any or minimal data due to a catastrophic disaster. Firewall Policies and Content Filters One way companies can protect their data is by using a firewall to separate their internal network from the outside. Firewalls allow for enabling or disabling network access as data passes through it by applying various defined restrictions. Furthermore firewalls can also be used to prevent access from the internal network to the outside by these same factors. Common Firewall Restrictions Destination/Sender IP Address Destination/Sender Host Names Domain Names Network Ports Companies can also desire to restrict what their network user’s view on the internet through things like content filters. Content filters allow a company to track what webpages a person has accessed and can also restrict user’s access based on established rules set up in the content filter. This device and/or software can block access to domains or specific URLs based on a few factors. Common Content Filter Criteria Known malicious sites Specific Page Content Page Content Theme  Anti-Virus/Mal-ware Polices Fortunately, most companies utilize antivirus programs on all computers and servers for good reason, virus have been known to do the following: Corrupt/Invalidate Data, Destroy Data, and Steal Data. Anti-Virus applications are a great way to prevent any malicious application from being able to gain access to a company’s data.  However, anti-virus programs must be constantly updated because new viruses are always being created, and the anti-virus vendors need to distribute updates to their applications so that they can catch and remove them. Data Validation Policies and Procedures Data validation is very important to ensure that only accurate information is stored. The existence of invalid data can cause major problems when businesses attempt to use data for knowledge based decisions and for performance reporting. Data Scrubbing Policies and Procedures Data scrubbing is valuable to companies in one of two ways. The first can be used to clean data prior to being analyzed for report generation. The second is that it allows companies to remove things like personally Identifiable information from its data prior to transmit it between multiple environments or if the information is sent to an external location. An example of this can be seen with medical records in regards to HIPPA laws that prohibit the storage of specific personal and medical information. Additionally, I have professionally run in to a scenario where the Canadian government does not allow any Canadian’s personal information to be stored on a server not located in Canada. Encryption Practices The use of encryption is very valuable when a company needs to any personal information. This allows users with the appropriated access levels to view or confirm the existence or accuracy of data within a system by either decrypting the information or encrypting a piece of data and comparing it to the stored version.  Additionally, if for some unforeseen reason the data got in to the wrong hands then they would have to first decrypt the data before they could even be able to read it. Encryption just adds and additional layer of protection around data itself. Standard Normalization Practices The use of standard data normalization practices is very important when dealing with data because it can prevent allot of potential issues by eliminating the potential for unnecessary data duplication. Issues caused by data duplication include excess use of data storage, increased chance for invalidated data, and over use of data processing. Network and Database Security/Access Policies Every company has some form of network/data access policy even if they have none. These policies help secure data from being seen by inappropriate users along with preventing the data from being updated or deleted by users. In addition, without a good security policy there is a large potential for data to be corrupted by unassuming users or even stolen. Data Storage Policies Data storage polices are very important depending on how they are implemented especially when a company is trying to utilize them in conjunction with other policies like Data Backups. I have worked at companies where all network user folders are constantly backed up, and if a user wanted to ensure the existence of a piece of data in the form of a file then they had to store that file in their network folder. Conversely, I have also worked in places where when a user logs on or off of the network there entire user profile is backed up. Training Policies One of the biggest ways to prevent data loss and ensure that data will remain a company asset is through training. The practice of properly train employees on how to work with in systems that access data is crucial when trying to ensure a company’s data will remain an asset. Users need to be trained on how to manipulate a company’s data in order to perform their tasks to reduce the chances of invalidating data.

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• Problem implementing Blinn–Phong shading model

  - by Joe Hopfgartner

  I did this very simple, perfectly working, implementation of Phong Relflection Model (There is no ambience implemented yet, but that doesn't bother me for now). The functions should be self explaining. /** * Implements the classic Phong illumination Model using a reflected light * vector. */ public class PhongIllumination implements IlluminationModel { @RGBParam(r = 0, g = 0, b = 0) public Vec3 ambient; @RGBParam(r = 1, g = 1, b = 1) public Vec3 diffuse; @RGBParam(r = 1, g = 1, b = 1) public Vec3 specular; @FloatParam(value = 20, min = 1, max = 200.0f) public float shininess; /* * Calculate the intensity of light reflected to the viewer . * * @param P = The surface position expressed in world coordinates. * * @param V = Normalized viewing vector from surface to eye in world * coordinates. * * @param N = Normalized normal vector at surface point in world * coordinates. * * @param surfaceColor = surfaceColor Color of the surface at the current * position. * * @param lights = The active light sources in the scene. * * @return Reflected light intensity I. */ public Vec3 shade(Vec3 P, Vec3 V, Vec3 N, Vec3 surfaceColor, Light lights[]) { Vec3 surfaceColordiffused = Vec3.mul(surfaceColor, diffuse); Vec3 totalintensity = new Vec3(0, 0, 0); for (int i = 0; i < lights.length; i++) { Vec3 L = lights[i].calcDirection(P); N = N.normalize(); V = V.normalize(); Vec3 R = Vec3.reflect(L, N); // reflection vector float diffuseLight = Vec3.dot(N, L); float specularLight = Vec3.dot(V, R); if (diffuseLight > 0) { totalintensity = Vec3.add(Vec3.mul(Vec3.mul( surfaceColordiffused, lights[i].calcIntensity(P)), diffuseLight), totalintensity); if (specularLight > 0) { Vec3 Il = lights[i].calcIntensity(P); Vec3 Ilincident = Vec3.mul(Il, Math.max(0.0f, Vec3 .dot(N, L))); Vec3 intensity = Vec3.mul(Vec3.mul(specular, Ilincident), (float) Math.pow(specularLight, shininess)); totalintensity = Vec3.add(totalintensity, intensity); } } } return totalintensity; } } Now i need to adapt it to become a Blinn-Phong illumination model I used the formulas from hearn and baker, followed pseudocodes and tried to implement it multiple times according to wikipedia articles in several languages but it never worked. I just get no specular reflections or they are so weak and/or are at the wrong place and/or have the wrong color. From the numerous wrong implementations I post some little code that already seems to be wrong. So I calculate my Half Way vector and my new specular light like so: Vec3 H = Vec3.mul(Vec3.add(L.normalize(), V), Vec3.add(L.normalize(), V).length()); float specularLight = Vec3.dot(H, N); With theese little changes it should already work (maby not with correct intensity but basically it should be correct). But the result is wrong. Here are two images. Left how it should render correctly and right how it renders. If i lower the shininess factor you can see a little specular light at the top right: Altough I understand the concept of Phong illumination and also the simplified more performant adaptaion of blinn phong I am trying around for days and just cant get it to work. Any help is appriciated. Edit: I was made aware of an error by this answer, that i am mutiplying by |L+V| instead of dividing by it when calculating H. I changed to deviding doing so: Vec3 H = Vec3.mul(Vec3.add(L.normalize(), V), 1/Vec3.add(L.normalize(), V).length()); Unfortunately this doesnt change much. The results look like this: and if I rise the specular constant and lower the shininess You can see the effects more clearly in a smilar wrong way: However this division just the normalisation. I think I am missing one step. Because the formulas like this just dont make sense to me. If you look at this picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blinn-Phong_vectors.svg The projection of H to N is far less than V to R. And if you imagine changing the vector V in the picture the angle is the same when the viewing vector is "on the left side". and becomes more and more different when going to the right. I pesonally would multiply the whole projection by two to become something similiar (and the hole point is to avoid the calculation of R). Altough I didnt read anythinga bout that anywehre i am gonna try this out... Result: The intension of the specular light is far too much (white areas) and the position is still wrong. I think I am messing something else up because teh reflection are just at the wrong place. But what? Edit: Now I read on wikipedia in the notes that the angle of N/H is in fact approximalty half or V/R. To compensate that i should multiply my shineness exponent by 4 rather than my projection. If i do that I end up with this: Far to intense but still one thing. The projection is at the wrong place. Where could i mess up my vectors?

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• Solaris: What comes next?

  - by alanc

  As you probably know by now, a few months ago, we released Solaris 11 after years of development. That of course means we now need to figure out what comes next - if Solaris 11 is “The First Cloud OS”, then what do we need to make future releases of Solaris be, to be modern and competitive when they're released? So we've been having planning and brainstorming meetings, and I've captured some notes here from just one of those we held a couple weeks ago with a number of the Silicon Valley based engineers. Now before someone sees an idea here and calls their product rep wanting to know what's up, please be warned what follows are rough ideas, and as I'll discuss later, none of them have any committment, schedule, working code, or even plan for integration in any possible future product at this time. (Please don't make me force you to read the full Oracle future product disclaimer here, you should know it by heart already from the front of every Oracle product slide deck.) To start with, we did some background research, looking at ideas from other Oracle groups, and competitive OS'es. We examined what was hot in the technology arena and where the interesting startups were heading. We then looked at Solaris to see where we could apply those ideas. Making Network Admins into Socially Networking Admins We all know an admin who has grumbled about being the only one stuck late at work to fix a problem on the server, or having to work the weekend alone to do scheduled maintenance. But admins are humans (at least most are), and crave companionship and community with their fellow humans. And even when they're alone in the server room, they're never far from a network connection, allowing access to the wide world of wonders on the Internet. Our solution here is not building a new social network - there's enough of those already, and Oracle even has its own Oracle Mix social network already. What we proposed is integrating Solaris features to help engage our system admins with these social networks, building community and bringing them recognition in the workplace, using achievement recognition systems as found in many popular gaming platforms. For instance, if you had a Facebook account, and a group of admin friends there, you could register it with our Social Network Utility For Facebook, and then your friends might see: Alan earned the achievement Critically Patched (April 2012) for patching all his servers. Matt is only at 50% - encourage him to complete this achievement today! To avoid any undue risk of advertising who has unpatched servers that are easier targets for hackers to break into, this information would be tightly protected via Facebook's world-renowned privacy settings to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. A related form of gamification we considered was replacing simple certfications with role-playing-game-style Experience Levels. Instead of just knowing an admin passed a test establishing a given level of competency, these would provide recruiters with a more detailed level of how much real-world experience an admin has. Achievements such as the one above would feed into it, but larger numbers of experience points would be gained by tougher or more critical tasks - such as recovering a down system, or migrating a service to a new platform. (As long as it was an Oracle platform of course - migrating to an HP or IBM platform would cause the admin to lose points with us.) Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a good way to prevent (if you will) “gaming” the system. For instance, a disgruntled admin might decide to start ignoring warnings from FMA that a part is beginning to fail or skip preventative maintenance, in the hopes that they'd cause a catastrophic failure to earn more points for bolstering their resume as they look for a job elsewhere, and not worrying about the effect on your business of a mission critical server going down. More Z's for ZFS Our suggested new feature for ZFS was inspired by the worlds most successful Z-startup of all time: Zynga. Using the Social Network Utility For Facebook described above, we'd tie it in with ZFS monitoring to help you out when you find yourself in a jam needing more disk space than you have, and can't wait a month to get a purchase order through channels to buy more. Instead with the click of a button you could post to your group: Alan can't find any space in his server farm! Can you help? Friends could loan you some space on their connected servers for a few weeks, knowing that you'd return the favor when needed. ZFS would create a new filesystem for your use on their system, and securely share it with your system using Kerberized NFS. If none of your friends have space, then you could buy temporary use space in small increments at affordable rates right there in Facebook, using your Facebook credits, and then file an expense report later, after the urgent need has passed. Universal Single Sign On One thing all the engineers agreed on was that we still had far too many "Single" sign ons to deal with in our daily work. On the web, every web site used to have its own password database, forcing us to hope we could remember what login name was still available on each site when we signed up, and which unique password we came up with to avoid having to disclose our other passwords to a new site. In recent years, the web services world has finally been reducing the number of logins we have to manage, with many services allowing you to login using your identity from Google, Twitter or Facebook. So we proposed following their lead, introducing PAM modules for web services - no more would you have to type in whatever login name IT assigned and try to remember the password you chose the last time password aging forced you to change it - you'd simply choose which web service you wanted to authenticate against, and would login to your Solaris account upon reciept of a cookie from their identity service. Pinning notes to the cloud We also all noted that we all have our own pile of notes we keep in our daily work - in text files in our home directory, in notebooks we carry around, on white boards in offices and common areas, on sticky notes on our monitors, or on scraps of paper pinned to our bulletin boards. The contents of the notes vary, some are things just for us, some are useful for our groups, some we would share with the world. For instance, when our group moved to a new building a couple years ago, we had a white board in the hallway listing all the NIS & DNS servers, subnets, and other network configuration information we needed to set up our Solaris machines after the move. Similarly, as Solaris 11 was finishing and we were all learning the new network configuration commands, we shared notes in wikis and e-mails with our fellow engineers. Users may also remember one of the popular features of Sun's old BigAdmin site was a section for sharing scripts and tips such as these. Meanwhile, the online "pin board" at Pinterest is taking the web by storm. So we thought, why not mash those up to solve this problem? We proposed a new BigAddPin site where users could “pin” notes, command snippets, configuration information, and so on. For instance, once they had worked out the ideal Automated Installation manifest for their app server, they could pin it up to share with the rest of their group, or choose to make it public as an example for the world. Localized data, such as our group's notes on the servers for our subnet, could be shared only to users connecting from that subnet. And notes that they didn't want others to see at all could be marked private, such as the list of phone numbers to call for late night pizza delivery to the machine room, the birthdays and anniversaries they can never remember but would be sleeping on the couch if they forgot, or the list of automatically generated completely random, impossible to remember root passwords to all their servers. For greater integration with Solaris, we'd put support right into the command shells — redirect output to a pinned note, set your path to include pinned notes as scripts you can run, or bring up your recent shell history and pin a set of commands to save for the next time you need to remember how to do that operation. Location service for Solaris servers A longer term plan would involve convincing the hardware design groups to put GPS locators with wireless transmitters in future server designs. This would help both admins and service personnel trying to find servers in todays massive data centers, and could feed into location presence apps to help show potential customers that while they may not see many Solaris machines on the desktop any more, they are all around. For instance, while walking down Wall Street it might show “There are over 2000 Solaris computers in this block.” [Note: this proposal was made before the recent media coverage of a location service aggregrator app with less noble intentions, and in hindsight, we failed to consider what happens when such data similarly falls into the wrong hands. We certainly wouldn't want our app to be misinterpreted as “There are over $20 million dollars of SPARC servers in this building, waiting for you to steal them.” so it's probably best it was rejected.] Harnessing the power of the GPU for Security Most modern OS'es make use of the widespread availability of high powered GPU hardware in today's computers, with desktop environments requiring 3-D graphics acceleration, whether in Ubuntu Unity, GNOME Shell on Fedora, or Aero Glass on Windows, but we haven't yet made Solaris fully take advantage of this, beyond our basic offering of Compiz on the desktop. Meanwhile, more businesses are interested in increasing security by using biometric authentication, but must also comply with laws in many countries preventing discrimination against employees with physical limations such as missing eyes or fingers, not to mention the lost productivity when employees can't login due to tinted contacts throwing off a retina scan or a paper cut changing their fingerprint appearance until it heals. Fortunately, the two groups considering these problems put their heads together and found a common solution, using 3D technology to enable authentication using the one body part all users are guaranteed to have - pam_phrenology.so, a new PAM module that uses an array USB attached web cams (or just one if the user is willing to spin their chair during login) to take pictures of the users head from all angles, create a 3D model and compare it to the one in the authentication database. While Mythbusters has shown how easy it can be to fool common fingerprint scanners, we have not yet seen any evidence that people can impersonate the shape of another user's cranium, no matter how long they spend beating their head against the wall to reshape it. This could possibly be extended to group users, using modern versions of some of the older phrenological studies, such as giving all users with long grey beards access to the System Architect role, or automatically placing users with pointy spikes in their hair into an easy use mode. Unfortunately, there are still some unsolved technical challenges we haven't figured out how to overcome. Currently, a visit to the hair salon causes your existing authentication to expire, and some users have found that shaving their heads is the only way to avoid bad hair days becoming bad login days. Reaction to these ideas After gathering all our notes on these ideas from the engineering brainstorming meeting, we took them in to present to our management. Unfortunately, most of their reaction cannot be printed here, and they chose not to accept any of these ideas as they were, but they did have some feedback for us to consider as they sent us back to the drawing board. They strongly suggested our ideas would be better presented if we weren't trying to decipher ink blotches that had been smeared by the condensation when we put our pint glasses on the napkins we were taking notes on, and to that end let us know they would not be approving any more engineering offsites in Irish themed pubs on the Friday of a Saint Patrick's Day weekend. (Hopefully they mean that situation specifically and aren't going to deny the funding for travel to this year's X.Org Developer's Conference just because it happens to be in Bavaria and ending on the Friday of the weekend Oktoberfest starts.) They recommended our research techniques could be improved over just sitting around reading blogs and checking our Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts, such as considering input from alternate viewpoints on topics such as gamification. They also mentioned that Oracle hadn't fully adopted some of Sun's common practices and we might have to try harder to get those to be accepted now that we are one unified company. So as I said at the beginning, don't pester your sales rep just yet for any of these, since they didn't get approved, but if you have better ideas, pass them on and maybe they'll get into our next batch of planning.

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• Finding the Right Solution to Source and Manage Your Contractors

  - by mark.rosenberg(at)oracle.com

  Many of our PeopleSoft Enterprise applications customers operate in service-based industries, and all of our customers have at least some internal service units, such as IT, marketing, and facilities. Employing the services of contractors, often referred to as "contingent labor," to deliver either or both internal and external services is common practice. As we've transitioned from an industrial age to a knowledge age, talent has become a primary competitive advantage for most organizations. Contingent labor offers talent on flexible terms; it offers the ability to scale up operations, close skill gaps, and manage risk in the process of delivering services. Talent comes from many sources and the rise in the contingent worker (contractor, consultant, temporary, part time) has increased significantly in the past decade and is expected to reach 40 percent in the next decade. Managing the total pool of talent in a seamless integrated fashion not only saves organizations money and increases efficiency, but creates a better place for workers of all kinds to work. Although the term "contingent labor" is frequently used to describe both contractors and employees who have flexible schedules and relationships with an organization, the remainder of this discussion focuses on contractors. The term "contingent labor" is used interchangeably with "contractor." Recognizing the importance of contingent labor, our PeopleSoft customers often ask our team, "What Oracle vendor management system (VMS) applications should I evaluate for managing contractors?" In response, I thought it would be useful to describe and compare the three most common Oracle-based options available to our customers. They are:   The enterprise licensed software model in which you implement and utilize the PeopleSoft Services Procurement (sPro) application and potentially other PeopleSoft applications;  The software-as-a-service model in which you gain access to a derivative of PeopleSoft sPro from an Oracle Business Process Outsourcing Partner; and  The managed service provider (MSP) model in which staffing industry professionals utilize either your enterprise licensed software or the software-as-a-service application to administer your contingent labor program. At this point, you may be asking yourself, "Why three options?" The answer is that since there is no "one size fits all" in terms of talent, there is also no "one size fits all" for effectively sourcing and managing contingent workers. Various factors influence how an organization thinks about and relates to its contractors, and each of the three Oracle-based options addresses an organization's needs and preferences differently. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe the options with respect to (A) pricing and software provisioning models; (B) control and flexibility; (C) level of engagement with contractors; and (D) approach to sourcing, employment law, and financial settlement. Option 1:  Enterprise Licensed Software In this model, you purchase from Oracle the license and support for the applications you need. Typically, you license PeopleSoft sPro as your VMS tool for sourcing, monitoring, and paying your contract labor. In conjunction with sPro, you can also utilize PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) applications (if you do not already) to configure more advanced business processes for recruiting, training, and tracking your contractors. Many customers choose this enterprise license software model because of the functionality and natural integration of the PeopleSoft applications and because the cost for the PeopleSoft software is explicit. There is no fee per transaction to source each contractor under this model. Our customers that employ contractors to augment their permanent staff on billable client engagements often find this model appealing because there are no fees to affect their profit margins. With this model, you decide whether to have your own IT organization run the software or have the software hosted and managed by either Oracle or another application services provider. Your organization, perhaps with the assistance of consultants, configures, deploys, and operates the software for managing your contingent workforce. This model offers you the highest level of control and flexibility since your organization can configure the contractor process flow exactly to your business and security requirements and can extend the functionality with PeopleTools. This option has proven very valuable and applicable to our customers engaged in government contracting because their contingent labor management practices are subject to complex standards and regulations. Customers find a great deal of value in the application functionality and configurability the enterprise licensed software offers for managing contingent labor. Some examples of that functionality are... The ability to create a tiered network of preferred suppliers including competencies, pricing agreements, and elaborate candidate management capabilities. Configurable alerts and online collaboration for bid, resource requisition, timesheet, and deliverable entry, routing, and approval for both resource and deliverable-based services. The ability to manage contractors with the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects applications that are used to manage the permanent workforce. Because it allows you to utilize much of the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects application functionality for contractors that you use for permanent employees, the enterprise licensed software model supports the deepest level of engagement with the contingent workforce. For example, you can: fill job openings with contingent labor; guide contingent workers through essential safety and compliance training with PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management; and source contingent workers directly to project-based assignments in PeopleSoft Resource Management and PeopleSoft Program Management. This option enables contingent workers to collaborate closely with your permanent staff on complex, knowledge-based efforts - R&D projects, billable client contracts, architecture and engineering projects spanning multiple years, and so on. With the enterprise licensed software model, your organization maintains responsibility for the sourcing, onboarding (including adherence to employment laws), and financial settlement processes. This means your organization maintains on staff or hires the expertise in these domains to utilize the software and interact with suppliers and contractors. Option 2:  Software as a Service (SaaS) The effort involved in setting up and operating VMS software to handle a contingent workforce leads many organizations to seek a system that can be activated and configured within a few days and for which they can pay based on usage. Oracle's Business Process Outsourcing partner, Provade, Inc., provides exactly this option to our customers. Provade offers its vendor management software as a service over the Internet and usually charges your organization a fee that is a percentage of your total contingent labor spending processed through the Provade software. (Percentage of spend is the predominant fee model, although not the only one.) In addition to lower implementation costs, the effort of configuring and maintaining the software is largely upon Provade, not your organization. This can be very appealing to IT organizations that are thinly stretched supporting other important information technology initiatives. Built upon PeopleSoft sPro, the Provade solution is tailored for simple and quick deployment and administration. Provade has added capabilities to clone users rapidly and has simplified business documents, like work orders and change orders, to facilitate enterprise-wide, self-service adoption with little to no training. Provade also leverages Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to provide integrated spend analytics and dashboards. Although pure customization is more limited than with the enterprise licensed software model, Provade offers a very effective option for organizations that are regularly on-boarding and off-boarding high volumes of contingent staff hired to perform discrete support tasks (for example, order fulfillment during the holiday season, hourly clerical work, desktop technology repairs, and so on) or project tasks. The software is very configurable and at the same time very intuitive to even the most computer-phobic users. The level of contingent worker engagement your organization can achieve with the Provade option is generally the same as with the enterprise licensed software model since Provade can automatically establish contingent labor resources in your PeopleSoft applications. Provade has pre-built integrations to Oracle's PeopleSoft and the Oracle E-Business Suite procurement, projects, payables, and HCM applications, so that you can evaluate, train, assign, and track contingent workers like your permanent employees. Similar to the enterprise licensed software model, your organization is responsible for the contingent worker sourcing, administration, and financial settlement processes. This means your organization needs to maintain the staff expertise in these domains. Option 3:  Managed Services Provider (MSP) Whether you are using the enterprise licensed model or the SaaS model, you may want to engage the services of sourcing, employment, payroll, and financial settlement professionals to administer your contingent workforce program. Firms that offer this expertise are often referred to as "MSPs," and they are typically staffing companies that also offer permanent and temporary hiring services. (In fact, many of the major MSPs are Oracle applications customers themselves, and they utilize the PeopleSoft Solution for the Staffing Industry to run their own business operations.) Usually, MSPs place their staff on-site at your facilities, and they can utilize either your enterprise licensed PeopleSoft sPro application or the Provade VMS SaaS software to administer the network of suppliers providing contingent workers. When you utilize an MSP, there is a separate fee for the MSP's service that is typically funded by the participating suppliers of the contingent labor. Also in this model, the suppliers of the contingent labor (not the MSP) usually pay the contingent labor force. With an MSP, you are intentionally turning over business process control for the advantages associated with having someone else manage the processes. The software option you choose will to a certain extent affect your process flexibility; however, the MSPs are often able to adapt their processes to the unique demands of your business. When you engage an MSP, you will want to give some thought to the level of engagement and "partnering" you need with your contingent workforce. Because the MSP acts as an intermediary, it can be very valuable in handling high volume, routine contracting for which there is a relatively low need for "partnering" with the contingent workforce. However, if your organization (or part of your organization) engages contingent workers for high-profile client projects that require diplomacy, intensive amounts of interaction, and personal trust, introducing an MSP into the process may prove less effective than handling the process with your own staff. In fact, in many organizations, it is common to enlist an MSP to handle contractors working on internal projects and to have permanent employees handle the contractor relationships that affect the portion of the services portfolio focused on customer-facing, billable projects. One of the key advantages of enlisting an MSP is that you do not have to maintain the expertise required for orchestrating the sourcing, hiring, and paying of contingent workers.  These are the domain of the MSPs. If your own staff members are not prepared to manage the essential "overhead" processes associated with contingent labor, working with an MSP can make solid business sense. Proper administration of a contingent workforce can make the difference between project success and failure, operating profit and loss, and legal compliance and fines. Concluding Thoughts There is little doubt that thoughtfully and purposefully constructing a service delivery strategy that leverages the strengths of contingent workers can lead to better projects, deliverables, and business results. What requires a bit more thinking is determining the platform (or platforms) that will enable each part of your organization to best deliver on its mission.

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• Big GRC: Turning Data into Actionable GRC Intelligence

  - by Jenna Danko

  While it’s no longer headline news that Governments have carried out large scale data-mining programmes aimed at terrorism detection and identifying other patterns of interest across a wide range of digital data sources, the debate over the ethics and justification over this action, will clearly continue for some time to come. What is becoming clear is that these programmes are a framework for the collation and aggregation of massive amounts of unstructured data and from this, the creation of actionable intelligence from analyses that allowed the analysts to explore and extract a variety of patterns and then direct resources. This data included audio and video chats, phone calls, photographs, e-mails, documents, internet searches, social media posts and mobile phone logs and connections. Although Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) professionals are not looking at the implementation of such programmes, there are many similar GRC “Big data” challenges to be faced and potential lessons to be learned from these high profile government programmes that can be applied a lot closer to home. For example, how can GRC professionals collect, manage and analyze an enormous and disparate volume of data to create and manage their own actionable intelligence covering hidden signs and patterns of criminal activity, the early or retrospective, violation of regulations/laws/corporate policies and procedures, emerging risks and weakening controls etc. Not exactly the stuff of James Bond to be sure, but it is certainly more applicable to most GRC professional’s day to day challenges. So what is Big Data and how can it benefit the GRC process? Although it often varies, the definition of Big Data largely refers to the following types of data: Traditional Enterprise Data – includes customer information from CRM systems, transactional ERP data, web store transactions, and general ledger data. Machine-Generated /Sensor Data – includes Call Detail Records (“CDR”), weblogs and trading systems data. Social Data – includes customer feedback streams, micro-blogging sites like Twitter, and social media platforms like Facebook. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40% per year, and will grow 44x between 2009 and 2020. But while it’s often the most visible parameter, volume of data is not the only characteristic that matters. In fact, according to sources such as Forrester there are four key characteristics that define big data: Volume. Machine-generated data is produced in much larger quantities than non-traditional data. This is all the data generated by IT systems that power the enterprise. This includes live data from packaged and custom applications – for example, app servers, Web servers, databases, networks, virtual machines, telecom equipment, and much more. Velocity. Social media data streams – while not as massive as machine-generated data – produce a large influx of opinions and relationships valuable to customer relationship management as well as offering early insight into potential reputational risk issues. Even at 140 characters per tweet, the high velocity (or frequency) of Twitter data ensures large volumes (over 8 TB per day) need to be managed. Variety. Traditional data formats tend to be relatively well defined by a data schema and change slowly. In contrast, non-traditional data formats exhibit a dizzying rate of change. Without question, all GRC professionals work in a dynamic environment and as new services, new products, new business lines are added or new marketing campaigns executed for example, new data types are needed to capture the resultant information.  Value. The economic value of data varies significantly. Typically, there is good information hidden amongst a larger body of non-traditional data that GRC professionals can use to add real value to the organisation; the greater challenge is identifying what is valuable and then transforming and extracting that data for analysis and action. For example, customer service calls and emails have millions of useful data points and have long been a source of information to GRC professionals. Those calls and emails are critical in helping GRC professionals better identify hidden patterns and implement new policies that can reduce the amount of customer complaints.   Now on a scale and depth far beyond those in place today, all that unstructured call and email data can be captured, stored and analyzed to reveal the reasons for the contact, perhaps with the aggregated customer results cross referenced against what is being said about the organization or a similar peer organization on social media. The organization can then take positive actions, communicating to the market in advance of issues reaching the press, strengthening controls, adjusting risk profiles, changing policy and procedures and completely minimizing, if not eliminating, complaints and compensation for that specific reason in the future. In this one example of many similar ones, the GRC team(s) has demonstrated real and tangible business value. Big Challenges - Big Opportunities As pointed out by recent Forrester research, high performing companies (those that are growing 15% or more year-on-year compared to their peers) are taking a selective approach to investing in Big Data.  "Tomorrow's winners understand this, and they are making selective investments aimed at specific opportunities with tangible benefits where big data offers a more economical solution to meet a need." (Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence and Big Data, Q4 2012) As pointed out earlier, with the ever increasing volume of regulatory demands and fines for getting it wrong, limited resource availability and out of date or inadequate GRC systems all contributing to a higher cost of compliance and/or higher risk profile than desired – a big data investment in GRC clearly falls into this category. However, to make the most of big data organizations must evolve both their business and IT procedures, processes, people and infrastructures to handle these new high-volume, high-velocity, high-variety sources of data and be able integrate them with the pre-existing company data to be analyzed. GRC big data clearly allows the organization access to and management over a huge amount of often very sensitive information that although can help create a more risk intelligent organization, also presents numerous data governance challenges, including regulatory compliance and information security. In addition to client and regulatory demands over better information security and data protection the sheer amount of information organizations deal with the need to quickly access, classify, protect and manage that information can quickly become a key issue  from a legal, as well as technical or operational standpoint. However, by making information governance processes a bigger part of everyday operations, organizations can make sure data remains readily available and protected. The Right GRC & Big Data Partnership Becomes Key  The "getting it right first time" mantra used in so many companies remains essential for any GRC team that is sponsoring, helping kick start, or even overseeing a big data project. To make a big data GRC initiative work and get the desired value, partnerships with companies, who have a long history of success in delivering successful GRC solutions as well as being at the very forefront of technology innovation, becomes key. Clearly solutions can be built in-house more cheaply than through vendor, but as has been proven time and time again, when it comes to self built solutions covering AML and Fraud for example, few have able to scale or adapt appropriately to meet the changing regulations or challenges that the GRC teams face on a daily basis. This has led to the creation of GRC silo’s that are causing so many headaches today. The solutions that stand out and should be explored are the ones that can seamlessly merge the traditional world of well-known data, analytics and visualization with the new world of seemingly innumerable data sources, utilizing Big Data technologies to generate new GRC insights right across the enterprise.Ultimately, Big Data is here to stay, and organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be the ones that are well positioned to make the most of it. A Blueprint and Roadmap Service for Big Data Big data adoption is first and foremost a business decision. As such it is essential that your partner can align your strategies, goals, and objectives with an architecture vision and roadmap to accelerate adoption of big data for your environment, as well as establish practical, effective governance that will maintain a well managed environment going forward. Key Activities: While your initiatives will clearly vary, there are some generic starting points the team and organization will need to complete: Clearly define your drivers, strategies, goals, objectives and requirements as it relates to big data Conduct a big data readiness and Information Architecture maturity assessment Develop future state big data architecture, including views across all relevant architecture domains; business, applications, information, and technology Provide initial guidance on big data candidate selection for migrations or implementation Develop a strategic roadmap and implementation plan that reflects a prioritization of initiatives based on business impact and technology dependency, and an incremental integration approach for evolving your current state to the target future state in a manner that represents the least amount of risk and impact of change on the business Provide recommendations for practical, effective Data Governance, Data Quality Management, and Information Lifecycle Management to maintain a well-managed environment Conduct an executive workshop with recommendations and next steps There is little debate that managing risk and data are the two biggest obstacles encountered by financial institutions.  Big data is here to stay and risk management certainly is not going anywhere, and ultimately financial services industry organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be best positioned to make the most of it. Matthew Long is a Financial Crime Specialist for Oracle Financial Services. He can be reached at matthew.long AT oracle.com.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 10, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 10, 2014Popular ReleasesBell Open Imaging package: 1.0: First release at Codeplex.Australia Income and Tax Calculator: Australia Income and Tax Calculator 1.4: 1. added 2014 financial year 2. refactored the codeCS-Script Source: Release v3.8.1: Improved ConfigConsole AdvancedShell extensions support cs-script.7z - CS-Script Suite (binaries, documentation, samples) cs-script.ExtensionPack.7z - CS-Script Extension Pack (additional binaries and samples) cs-scriptDocs.7z - CS-Script DocumentationPapercut: Papercut v3.0.0.0: Papercut has switched to semantic versioning! That means you will have to uninstall old "clickonce" versions to get the latest as it will see it as an older version. Latest Has Tons of New Features: Modern UI MVVM Architecture Watch Directories for New Messages Optional Backend Papercut Service Load on Windows Startup Attachments/Mime SectionsExperfwiz (Exchange Performance Data Collection tool): Experfwiz 1.3.8: List of updates in 1.3.8 Added support for Windows 2012 & 2012 R2 (for future use) Added support for Exchange 2013 Full is now enabled by default. To disable full mode, use 'nofull'. Exchange 2013 requires full. Added "\Processor Information()\" counters to Exchange 2010 full Blocked Exmon execution on Exchange 2013BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 1.6: Version 1.6 is a major upgrade to the latest frameworks and components by Microsoft. It includes a major UI overhaul using the bootstrap framework to have a modern, mobile friendly and easily customized layout. Upgrade to .NET 4.5 ASP.NET social auth Add script bundling and optimization Improvements for mobile devices Bootstrap (UI overhaul) Rewritten / friendly URL's Please read our release notes for BugNET 1.6: http://blog.bugnetproject.com/2014/06/08/bugnet-1-6-and-bugnet-pro-1...NDataTable: NDataTable Source Code: Source codeWindows System API in Visual Basic: DataTools Merged Beta 2.4: Added FileSystemWatcher and demonstration to this release..NET Memory Tools: DataTools Merged Beta 2.4: Added FileSystemWatcher and demonstration to this release.freeasyExplorer: 3. Alpha: This is the 3th alpha release. Please inform me if you find some issues or problems. Fixes: - add assembly informations - set list view to list mode and add custom icon - add settings window - update Mahapp.Metro Framework - add drag&drop functionality - change target .net versionkbvault-mysql: V0.16a: Additions for SEO friendly pages,printer friendly view option and tag cloud on landing pageSFDL.NET: SFDL.NET (2.2.9.3): Changelog: Retry Bugfix (Error Counter wurde nicht korrekt zurückgesetzt) Neue Einstellung: Retry Wartezeit ist nun Einstellbarbabelua: 1.5.7.0: V1.5.7.0 - 2014.6.6Stability improvement: use "lua scripts folder" as lua search path when debugging;SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.033.007 Release 1: Fixed breaking changes in Space Engineers in latest update. Installation of this version will replace older version.Virto Commerce Enterprise Open Source eCommerce Platform (asp.net mvc): Virto Commerce 1.10: Virto Commerce Community Edition version 1.10. To install the SDK package, please refer to SDK getting started documentation To configure source code package, please refer to Source code getting started documentation This release includes bug fixes and improvements (including Commerce Manager localization and https support). More details about this release can be found on our blog at http://blog.virtocommerce.com.NPOI: NPOI 2.1: Assembly Version: 2.1.0 New Features a. XSSFSheet.CopySheet b. Excel2Html for XSSF c. insert picture in word 2007 d. Implement IfError function in formula engine Bug Fixes a. fix conditional formatting issue b. fix ctFont order issue c. fix vertical alignment issue in XSSF d. add IndexedColors to NPOI.SS.UserModel e. fix decimal point issue in non-English culture f. fix SetMargin issue in XSSF g.fix multiple images insert issue in XSSF h.fix rich text style missing issue in XSSF i. fix cell...51Degrees - Device Detection and Redirection: 3.1.2.3: Version 3.1 HighlightsDevice detection algorithm is over 100 times faster. Regular expressions and levenshtein distance calculations are no longer used. The device detection algorithm performance is no longer limited by the number of device combinations contained in the dataset. Two modes of operation are available: Memory – the detection data set is loaded into memory and there is no continuous connection to the source data file. Slower initialisation time but faster detection performanc...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.27.0: CodeMap now indicates the type name for all members Implemented running scripts 'as administrator'. Just add '//css_npp asadmin' to the script and run it as usual. 'Prepare script for distribution' now aggregates script dependency assemblies. Various improvements in CodeSnipptet, Autcompletion and MethodInfo interactions with each other. Added printing line number for the entries in CodeMap (subject of configuration value) Improved debugging step indication for classless scripts ...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.72.3: 70426e13c415 ClosedXML for .Net 4.0 now uses Open XML SDK 2.5 b9ef53a6654f Merge branch 'master' of https://git01.codeplex.com/forks/vbjay/closedxml 727714e86416 Fix range.Merge(Boolean) for .Net 3.5 eb1ed478e50e Make public range.Merge(Boolean checkIntersects) 6284cf3c3991 More performance improvements when saving.DNN Blog: 06.00.07: Highlights: Enhancement: Option to show management panel on child modules Fix: Changed SPROC and code to ensure the right people are notified of pending comments. (CP-24018) Fix: Fix to have notification actions authentication assume the right module id so these will work from the messaging center (CP-24019) Fix: Fix to issue in categories in a post that will not save when no categories and no tags selectedNew ProjectsATC FSX Console: Flight Simulator CodeCRM 2011 Duplicate Detection Sample: CRM 2011 Duplicate Detection Plug-in SampleCustomisation tool for Visual Studio projects: This tool is used to speedup the setting up of a Visual Studio projects and suppress any repetitive manual tasks.D3 Focus: A basic tool for people with trouble deciding what to do with their time in Diablo 3.EPS - PowerShell templating: EPS (Embedded PowerShell), inspired by erb, is a templating system that embeds PowerShell code into a text document such as HTML files. Export Bugs: Export Bugs is an application using the TFS API. Killer Bytes Pack: project of class visual studioMagickViewer: An application that uses the Magick.NET library to display images.Mario Card: https://drive.google.com/?authuser=0#folders/0B0VMM5klwOkwLXptMVV6b3NhRVEOZone: OZonePlexApp PowerShell Module: PoSH4PlexApp is an in-development PowerShell module for querying and managing PlexApp libraries via Plex Media Server's HTTP listener. Contributions welcomeProduct Usage Tracker: This project is about creating a tool/mechanism to capture and record the usage volume and usage patterns of any application.Project C²: A simple lightweight C-style programming language for near-hardware system development using GNU GAS as a back-end.Random Execute: Random Execute is a command wrapper that randomizes the start time of a processes execution.RuLaw.NET: .NET library for official Russian State Duma API web service for querying and searching information of laws, deputies, authorities, sessions, votings, etcTest_DB_Name_Check: Latestweb_gioman_proyecto: proyecto de lucas gioiaWPF Globalization and Multi-language Application: Multilingual User Interfaces providing support for switching UIs from one language to another. ??????-??????【??】: ????????,??????:?????,?????,??????,??????????,????????。????????!??????-??????【??】: ?????????????????????????????,??????????,????,????,?????????、??????,??????。?????-?????【??】: ???????????????????,??????????,????????、????,??????????,??????????。?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????、????,??100%????,??????,????????????,???????????!?????-?????【??】: ??????????????????????:????、????、??????????????,????????。????????!??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????????,????,????,??????????。???????????????,??,??,??????????,????????????-??????【??】: ???????????????????,?????????????,????,?????????,?????????????,?????,?????!??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????,???????????,??????????????,??????????，??????????????！?????-?????【??】: ????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???????????????,???,??????????、???????????????????。??????,????、????，??????！ ?????-?????【??】: ???????????????,?????????????? ??。????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。?????-?????【??】: ????????????????,???????????????。???????????,??????:????、????、????????????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????????????,????,????“???、???、???”?????,?????,?????????????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ?????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】,???????????,??????????,????:??,????,???????? ??????????,????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ?????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】????:?????,??????!???????????????,???????、?????、??????“??”????,????,????!?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???????,??????,??????,??????、??????,??????、??，????，????????????-??????【??】: ?????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】????????????????????,???????????,??????,??????????????...????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????、?????????,??????、??????????????????,???????.??????????,????????。??????-??????【??】: ?????????????????,??????????、??????,??????????、????、????、???????。??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????,???????????????,???????,?????,?????,????? !!!?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】????????,????,?????、???、?????,???????,?????,???????????100%。??????！????-????【??】: ???????????、??????????????????,????????,?????,??????,????,????,????!?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????????,???????????????,????????????????????!?????-?????【??】: ?????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???2005?,????????????????????,??????????,??????。?????,???????????????????，??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???????:??????!?????!???:????、????、????、????。??,??????????!??????.?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】??????????,????????????,????????,???,???????????,????,????。?????,??????. ?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????:??????!?????!???:????、????、????、????。??,??????????!??????.?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】 ?????????????????,????,????“???、???、???”?????,?????,?????????????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????????,??????,???????????,????????????????,????????.??????.?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???1992?,????????????????。??????????????????????。????????????,????，????????！?????-?????【??】: ?????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】??????:?????,??????!???????????????,???????、?????、??????“??”????,????,????! ?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】????????,????,?????、???、?????,???????,?????,???????????100%。??????！??????-??????【??】: ????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????、?????????,??????、??????????????????,???????.??????????,????????。?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???1992?,????????????????。??????????????????????。????????????,????，????????！ ?????-?????【??】: ?????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???2005?,????????????????????,??????????,??????。?????,???????????????????，??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】??????????????????,???????????,??????,??????????????...????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ?????????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????????,??????,???????????,????????????????,????????.??????.??????-??????【??】: ???????????,?????,???????????,???????,????,????,????,?????。??????-??????【??】: ????????????????8?，????????,????????,??????????,?????,????? ,????????!??????-??????【??】: ????????????????6?,???????????????????????????,??????????????,?????????！?????-?????【??】: ?????????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???????,??????,??????,??????、??????,??????、??，????，??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????????、???、??、??????????????????????????????,????????????????!?????-?????【??】: ????????????????????????????、????、????、???????????,????,????!?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????????????,????,????“???、???、???”?????,?????,?????????????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】??????????,????????????,????????,???,???????????,????,????。?????,??????.

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• Reference Data Management

  - by rahulkamath

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2 {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-tstyle-shading:#F8EDED; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:25; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; color:black; mso-themecolor:text1;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2FirstRow {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:first-row; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#9E3A38; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themeshade:204; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.5pt solid white; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:background1; color:white; mso-themecolor:background1; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2LastRow {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:white; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:background1; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.5pt solid black; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:text1; color:#9E3A38; mso-themecolor:accent2; mso-themeshade:204; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2LastCol {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#EFD3D2; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63; mso-tstyle-border-top:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-left:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-right:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-insideh:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-insidev:cell-none;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2OddRow {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F2DBDB; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:51;} Reference Data Management Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM) has always been extremely powerful as an Enterprise MDM solution that can help manage changes to master data in a way that influences enterprise structure, whether it be mastering chart of accounts to enable financial transformation, or revamping organization structures to drive business transformation and operational efficiencies, or mastering sales territories in light of rapid fire acquisitions that require frequent sales territory refinement, equitable distribution of leads and accounts to salespersons, and alignment of budget/forecast with results to optimize sales coverage. Increasingly, DRM is also being utilized by Oracle customers for reference data management, an emerging solution space that deserves some explanation. What is reference data? Reference data is a close cousin of master data. While master data may be more rapidly changing, requires consensus building across stakeholders and lends structure to business transactions, reference data is simpler, more slowly changing, but has semantic content that is used to categorize or group other information assets – including master data – and give them contextual value. The following table contains an illustrative list of examples of reference data by type. Reference data types may include types and codes, business taxonomies, complex relationships & cross-domain mappings or standards. Types & Codes Taxonomies Relationships / Mappings Standards Transaction Codes Industry Classification Categories and Codes, e.g., North America Industry Classification System (NAICS) Product / Segment; Product / Geo Calendars (e.g., Gregorian, Fiscal, Manufacturing, Retail, ISO8601) Lookup Tables (e.g., Gender, Marital Status, etc.) Product Categories City à State à Postal Codes Currency Codes (e.g., ISO) Status Codes Sales Territories (e.g., Geo, Industry Verticals, Named Accounts, Federal/State/Local/Defense) Customer / Market Segment; Business Unit / Channel Country Codes (e.g., ISO 3166, UN) Role Codes Market Segments Country Codes / Currency Codes / Financial Accounts Date/Time, Time Zones (e.g., ISO 8601) Domain Values Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC), eCl@ss International Classification of Diseases (ICD) e.g., ICD9 à IC10 mappings Tax Rates Why manage reference data? Reference data carries contextual value and meaning and therefore its use can drive business logic that helps execute a business process, create a desired application behavior or provide meaningful segmentation to analyze transaction data. Further, mapping reference data often requires human judgment. Sample Use Cases of Reference Data Management Healthcare: Diagnostic Codes The reference data challenges in the healthcare industry offer a case in point. Part of being HIPAA compliant requires medical practitioners to transition diagnosis codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10, a medical coding scheme used to classify diseases, signs and symptoms, causes, etc. The transition to ICD-10 has a significant impact on business processes, procedures, contracts, and IT systems. Since both code sets ICD-9 and ICD-10 offer diagnosis codes of very different levels of granularity, human judgment is required to map ICD-9 codes to ICD-10. The process requires collaboration and consensus building among stakeholders much in the same way as does master data management. Moreover, to build reports to understand utilization, frequency and quality of diagnoses, medical practitioners may need to “cross-walk” mappings -- either forward to ICD-10 or backwards to ICD-9 depending upon the reporting time horizon. Spend Management: Product, Service & Supplier Codes Similarly, as an enterprise looks to rationalize suppliers and leverage their spend, conforming supplier codes, as well as product and service codes requires supporting multiple classification schemes that may include industry standards (e.g., UNSPSC, eCl@ss) or enterprise taxonomies. Aberdeen Group estimates that 90% of companies rely on spreadsheets and manual reviews to aggregate, classify and analyze spend data, and that data management activities account for 12-15% of the sourcing cycle and consume 30-50% of a commodity manager’s time. Creating a common map across the extended enterprise to rationalize codes across procurement, accounts payable, general ledger, credit card, procurement card (P-card) as well as ACH and bank systems can cut sourcing costs, improve compliance, lower inventory stock, and free up talent to focus on value added tasks. Specialty Finance: Point of Sales Transaction Codes and Product Codes In the specialty finance industry, enterprises are confronted with usury laws – governed at the state and local level – that regulate financial product innovation as it relates to consumer loans, check cashing and pawn lending. To comply, it is important to demonstrate that transactions booked at the point of sale are posted against valid product codes that were on offer at the time of booking the sale. Since new products are being released at a steady stream, it is important to ensure timely and accurate mapping of point-of-sale transaction codes with the appropriate product and GL codes to comply with the changing regulations. Multi-National Companies: Industry Classification Schemes As companies grow and expand across geographies, a typical challenge they encounter with reference data represents reconciling various versions of industry classification schemes in use across nations. While the United States, Mexico and Canada conform to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) standard, European Union countries choose different variants of the NACE industry classification scheme. Multi-national companies must manage the individual national NACE schemes and reconcile the differences across countries. Enterprises must invest in a reference data change management application to address the challenge of distributing reference data changes to downstream applications and assess which applications were impacted by a given change.

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• I finished coding my program. What's next? what are the steps I should take that would enable me to

  - by Luay

  Hi, I finished developing a program and would like to sell it online. However, I am not really sure of what to do next. Here is my current plan (in-order): 1- Add a 'deployment' project (i'm using visual studio) to my project so I can create a setup file for my program. 2- Use visual studio 'testing' add ons to test the program. I have no idea how to do it, but will teach myself. 3- When all is done, install the program on my wife's, parents and in-laws computer to further test it under different environments. 3- Setup a small Ltd. company. ( I might start this earlier as it might take a few weeks to complete). 4- Build / finish building a website (actually I started on this step a few weeks ago but haven't devoted enough time for it to complete yet). 5- Find a software / service to protect my program from piracy. I know it is impossible to protect the program from piracy. I understand that fully. But I still want to implement some sort of solution that wouldn't harm or deter honest customers. 6- Set up a business paypal account. 7- Find a software / service to handle payments on my website 8- Find a software / service to handle issuing license codes 9- Set up all of the above and go 'live'. However, I have zero experience in this sort of thing and would like your guidance on some points. 1- Is it necessary to setup a company? Can I sell as an individual? Will selling as an individual deter persons or companies from buying my software? 2- What is a decent choice for as a software / service to protect my program from my piracy. I have done a quick search and found something called Quick License Manager by Interactive Studios. Is this the sort of thing I am looking for? Is it any good? At which stage do I use or implement their service (or any similar service you might point me too? I guess I am really asking: how does this work? Would they give me a file I just add to my project, rebuild it and that's it? 3- What should I implement to handle payments online and how complicated is it? could you point me to any such services, please? 4- What should I implement to handle issuing license codes and how will that software / service coordinate with the software / service that handles the anti-piracy stuff? could you point me to such services, please? 5- In a different Stack Overflow question (by another user) someone suggested a cms system called Software Droid (http://www.softwaredroid.com). Is this what I am after. Will it help? 6- If the steps i'm following are incorrect in order or logic could you please advise me on what I should actually do? I guess these are question for those of you who have 'been there and done that'. So any guidance will be vary much appreciated. Many thanks in advance for your help.

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• Using Oracle Proxy Authentication with JPA (eclipselink-Style)

  - by olaf.heimburger

  Security is a very intriguing topic. You will find it everywhere and you need to implement it everywhere. Yes, you need. Unfortunately, one can easily forget it while implementing the last mile. The Last Mile In a multi-tier application it is a common practice to use connection pools between the business layer and the database layer. Connection pools are quite useful to speed database connection creation and to split the load. Another very common practice is to use a specific, often called technical, user to connect to the database. This user has authentication and authorization rules that apply to all application users. Imagine you've put every effort to define roles for different types of users that use your application. These roles are necessary to differentiate between normal users, premium users, and administrators (I bet you will find or already have more roles in your application). While these user roles are pretty well used within your application, once the flow of execution enters the database everything is gone. Each and every user just has one role and is the same database user. Issues? What Issues? As long as things go well, this is not a real issue. However, things do not go well all the time. Once your application becomes famous performance decreases in certain situations or, more importantly, current and upcoming regulations and laws require that your application must be able to apply different security measures on a per user role basis at every stage of your application. If you only have a bunch of users with the same name and role you are not able to find the application usage profile that causes the performance issue, or which user has accessed data that he/she is not allowed to. Another thread to your role concept is that databases tend to be used by different applications and tools. These tools can be developer tools like SQL*Plus, SQL Developer, etc. or end user applications like BI Publisher, Oracle Forms and so on. These tools have no idea of your applications role concept and access the database the way they think is appropriate. A big oversight for your perfect role model and a big nightmare for your Chief Security Officer. Speaking of the CSO, brings up another issue: Password management. Once your technical user account is compromised, every user is able to do things that he/she is not expected to do from the design of your application. Counter Measures In the Oracle world a common counter measure is to use Virtual Private Database (VPD). This restricts the values a database user can see to the allowed minimum. However, it doesn't help in regard of a connection pool user, because this one is still not the real user. Oracle Proxy Authentication Another feature of the Oracle database is Proxy Authentication. First introduced with version 9i it is a quite useful feature for nearly every situation. The main idea behind Proxy Authentication is, to create a crippled database user who has only connect rights. Even if this user is compromised the risks are well understood and fairly limited. This user can be used in every situation in which you need to connect to the database, no matter which tool or application (see above) you use.The proxy user is perfect for multi-tier connection pools. CREATE USER app_user IDENTIFIED BY abcd1234; GRANT CREATE SESSION TO app_user; But what if you need to access real data? Well, this is the primary use case, isn't it? Now is the time to bring the application's role concept into play. You define database roles that define the grants for your identified user groups. Once you have these groups you grant access through the proxy user with the application role to the specific user. CREATE ROLE app_role_a; GRANT app_role_a TO scott; ALTER USER scott GRANT CONNECT THROUGH app_user WITH ROLE app_role_a; Now, hr has permission to connect to the database through the proxy user. Through the role you can restrict the hr's rights the are needed for the application only. If hr connects to the database directly all assigned role and permissions apply. Testing the Setup To test the setup you can use SQL*Plus and connect to your database: $ sqlplus app_user[hr]/abcd1234 Java Persistence API The Java Persistence API (JPA) is a fairly easy means to build applications that retrieve data from the database and put it into Java objects. You use plain old Java objects (POJOs) and mixin some Java annotations that define how the attributes of the object are used for storing data from the database into the Java object. Here is a sample for objects from the HR sample schema EMPLOYEES table. When using Java annotations you only specify what can not be deduced from the code. If your Java class name is Employee but the table name is EMPLOYEES, you need to specify the table name, otherwise it will fail. package demo.proxy.ejb; import java.io.Serializable; import java.sql.Timestamp; import java.util.List; import javax.persistence.Column; import javax.persistence.Entity; import javax.persistence.Id; import javax.persistence.JoinColumn; import javax.persistence.ManyToOne; import javax.persistence.NamedQueries; import javax.persistence.NamedQuery; import javax.persistence.OneToMany; import javax.persistence.Table; @Entity @NamedQueries({ @NamedQuery(name = "Employee.findAll", query = "select o from Employee o") }) @Table(name = "EMPLOYEES") public class Employee implements Serializable { @Column(name="COMMISSION_PCT") private Double commissionPct; @Column(name="DEPARTMENT_ID") private Long departmentId; @Column(nullable = false, unique = true, length = 25) private String email; @Id @Column(name="EMPLOYEE_ID", nullable = false) private Long employeeId; @Column(name="FIRST_NAME", length = 20) private String firstName; @Column(name="HIRE_DATE", nullable = false) private Timestamp hireDate; @Column(name="JOB_ID", nullable = false, length = 10) private String jobId; @Column(name="LAST_NAME", nullable = false, length = 25) private String lastName; @Column(name="PHONE_NUMBER", length = 20) private String phoneNumber; private Double salary; @ManyToOne @JoinColumn(name = "MANAGER_ID") private Employee employee; @OneToMany(mappedBy = "employee") private List employeeList; public Employee() { } public Employee(Double commissionPct, Long departmentId, String email, Long employeeId, String firstName, Timestamp hireDate, String jobId, String lastName, Employee employee, String phoneNumber, Double salary) { this.commissionPct = commissionPct; this.departmentId = departmentId; this.email = email; this.employeeId = employeeId; this.firstName = firstName; this.hireDate = hireDate; this.jobId = jobId; this.lastName = lastName; this.employee = employee; this.phoneNumber = phoneNumber; this.salary = salary; } public Double getCommissionPct() { return commissionPct; } public void setCommissionPct(Double commissionPct) { this.commissionPct = commissionPct; } public Long getDepartmentId() { return departmentId; } public void setDepartmentId(Long departmentId) { this.departmentId = departmentId; } public String getEmail() { return email; } public void setEmail(String email) { this.email = email; } public Long getEmployeeId() { return employeeId; } public void setEmployeeId(Long employeeId) { this.employeeId = employeeId; } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public Timestamp getHireDate() { return hireDate; } public void setHireDate(Timestamp hireDate) { this.hireDate = hireDate; } public String getJobId() { return jobId; } public void setJobId(String jobId) { this.jobId = jobId; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public String getPhoneNumber() { return phoneNumber; } public void setPhoneNumber(String phoneNumber) { this.phoneNumber = phoneNumber; } public Double getSalary() { return salary; } public void setSalary(Double salary) { this.salary = salary; } public Employee getEmployee() { return employee; } public void setEmployee(Employee employee) { this.employee = employee; } public List getEmployeeList() { return employeeList; } public void setEmployeeList(List employeeList) { this.employeeList = employeeList; } public Employee addEmployee(Employee employee) { getEmployeeList().add(employee); employee.setEmployee(this); return employee; } public Employee removeEmployee(Employee employee) { getEmployeeList().remove(employee); employee.setEmployee(null); return employee; } } JPA could be used in standalone applications and Java EE containers. In both worlds you normally create a Facade to retrieve or store the values of the Entities to or from the database. The Facade does this via an EntityManager which will be injected by the Java EE container. Here is sample Facade Session Bean for a Java EE container. package demo.proxy.ejb; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.List; import javax.ejb.Local; import javax.ejb.Remote; import javax.ejb.Stateless; import javax.persistence.EntityManager; import javax.persistence.PersistenceContext; import javax.persistence.Query; import javax.interceptor.AroundInvoke; import javax.interceptor.InvocationContext; import oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleConnection; import org.eclipse.persistence.config.EntityManagerProperties; import org.eclipse.persistence.internal.jpa.EntityManagerImpl; @Stateless(name = "DataFacade", mappedName = "ProxyUser-TestEJB-DataFacade") @Remote @Local public class DataFacadeBean implements DataFacade, DataFacadeLocal { @PersistenceContext(unitName = "TestEJB") private EntityManager em; private String username; public Object queryByRange(String jpqlStmt, int firstResult, int maxResults) { // setSessionUser(); Query query = em.createQuery(jpqlStmt); if (firstResult 0) { query = query.setFirstResult(firstResult); } if (maxResults 0) { query = query.setMaxResults(maxResults); } return query.getResultList(); } public Employee persistEmployee(Employee employee) { // setSessionUser(); em.persist(employee); return employee; } public Employee mergeEmployee(Employee employee) { // setSessionUser(); return em.merge(employee); } public void removeEmployee(Employee employee) { // setSessionUser(); employee = em.find(Employee.class, employee.getEmployeeId()); em.remove(employee); } /** select o from Employee o */ public List getEmployeeFindAll() { Query q = em.createNamedQuery("Employee.findAll"); return q.getResultList(); } Putting Both Together To use Proxy Authentication with JPA and within a Java EE container you have to take care of the additional requirements: Use an OCI JDBC driver Provide the user name that connects through the proxy user Use an OCI JDBC driver To use the OCI JDBC driver you need to set up your JDBC data source file to use the correct JDBC URL. hr jdbc:oracle:oci8:@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=localhost)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=XE))) oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver user app_user 62C32F70E98297522AD97E15439FAC0E SQL SELECT 1 FROM DUAL jdbc/hrDS Application Additionally you need to make sure that the version of the shared libraries of the OCI driver match the version of the JDBC driver in your Java EE container or Java application and are within your PATH (on Windows) or LD_LIBRARY_PATH (on most Unix-based systems). Installing the Oracle Database Instance Client software works perfectly. Provide the user name that connects through the proxy user This part needs some modification of your application software and session facade. Session Facade Changes In the Session Facade we must ensure that every call that goes through the EntityManager must be prepared correctly and uniquely assigned to this session. The second is really important, as the EntityManager works with a connection pool and can not guarantee that we set the proxy user on the connection that will be used for the database activities. To avoid changing every method call of the Session Facade we provide a method to set the username of the user that connects through the proxy user. This method needs to be called by the Facade client bfore doing anything else. public void setUsername(String name) { username = name; } Next we provide a means to instruct the TopLink EntityManager Delegate to use Oracle Proxy Authentication. (I love small helper methods to hide the nitty-gritty details and avoid repeating myself.) private void setSessionUser() { setSessionUser(username); } private void setSessionUser(String user) { if (user != null && !user.isEmpty()) { EntityManagerImpl emDelegate = ((EntityManagerImpl)em.getDelegate()); emDelegate.setProperty(EntityManagerProperties.ORACLE_PROXY_TYPE, OracleConnection.PROXYTYPE_USER_NAME); emDelegate.setProperty(OracleConnection.PROXY_USER_NAME, user); emDelegate.setProperty(EntityManagerProperties.EXCLUSIVE_CONNECTION_MODE, "Always"); } } The final step is use the EJB 3.0 AroundInvoke interceptor. This interceptor will be called around every method invocation. We therefore check whether the Facade methods will be called or not. If so, we set the user for proxy authentication and the normal method flow continues. @AroundInvoke public Object proxyInterceptor(InvocationContext invocationCtx) throws Exception { if (invocationCtx.getTarget() instanceof DataFacadeBean) { setSessionUser(); } return invocationCtx.proceed(); } Benefits Using Oracle Proxy Authentification has a number of additional benefits appart from implementing the role model of your application: Fine grained access control for temporary users of the account, without compromising the original password. Enabling database auditing and logging. Better identification of performance bottlenecks. References Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design, David Knox TopLink Developer's Guide, Chapter 98

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• unexplainable packet drops with 5 ethernet NICs and low traffic on Ubuntu

  - by jon

  I'm stuck on problem where my machine started to drops packets with no sign of ANY system load or high interrupt usage after an upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04. My server is a network monitoring sensor, running Ubuntu LTS 12.04, it passively collects packets from 5 interfaces doing network intrusion type stuff. Before the upgrade I managed to collect 200+GB of packets a day while writing them to disk with around 0% packet loss depending on the day with the help of CPU affinity and NIC IRQ to CPU bindings. Now I lose a great deal of packets with none of my applications running and at very low PPS rate which a modern workstation NIC would have no trouble with. Specs: x64 Xeon 4 cores 3.2 Ghz 16 GB RAM NICs: 5 Intel Pro NICs using the e1000 driver (NAPI). [1] eth0 and eth1 are integrated NICs (in the motherboard) There are 2 other PCI-X network cards, each with 2 Ethernet ports. 3 of the interfaces are running at Gigabit Ethernet, the others are not because they're attached to hubs. Specs: [2] http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe2850/en/ug/t1390aa.htm uptime 17:36:00 up 1:43, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05 # uname -a Linux nms 3.2.0-29-generic #46-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 27 17:03:23 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux I also have the CPU governor set to performance mode and irqbalance off. The problem still occurs with them on. # lspci -t -vv -[0000:00]-+-00.0 Intel Corporation E7520 Memory Controller Hub +-02.0-[01-03]--+-00.0-[02]----0e.0 Dell PowerEdge Expandable RAID controller 4 | \-00.2-[03]-- +-04.0-[04]-- +-05.0-[05-07]--+-00.0-[06]----07.0 Intel Corporation 82541GI Gigabit Ethernet Controller | \-00.2-[07]----08.0 Intel Corporation 82541GI Gigabit Ethernet Controller +-06.0-[08-0a]--+-00.0-[09]--+-04.0 Intel Corporation 82546EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) | | \-04.1 Intel Corporation 82546EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) | \-00.2-[0a]--+-02.0 Digium, Inc. Wildcard TE210P/TE212P dual-span T1/E1/J1 card 3.3V | +-03.0 Intel Corporation 82546EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) | \-03.1 Intel Corporation 82546EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) +-1d.0 Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #1 +-1d.1 Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #2 +-1d.2 Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #3 +-1d.7 Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB2 EHCI Controller +-1e.0-[0b]----0d.0 Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV100 QY [Radeon 7000/VE] +-1f.0 Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC Interface Bridge \-1f.1 Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) IDE Controller I believe the NIC nor the NIC drivers are dropping the packets because ethtool reports 0 under rx_missed_errors and rx_no_buffer_count for each interface. On the old system, if it couldn't keep up this is where the drops would be. I drop packets on multiple interfaces just about every second, usually in small increments of 2-4. I tried all these sysctl values, I'm currently using the uncommented ones. # cat /etc/sysctl.conf # high net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 3000000 net.core.rmem_max = 16000000 net.core.rmem_default = 8000000 # defaults #net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 1000 #net.core.rmem_max = 131071 #net.core.rmem_default = 163480 # moderate #net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 10000 #net.core.rmem_max = 33554432 #net.core.rmem_default = 33554432 Here's an example of an interface stats report with ethtool. They are all the same, nothing is out of the ordinary ( I think ), so I'm only going to show one: ethtool -S eth2 NIC statistics: rx_packets: 7498 tx_packets: 0 rx_bytes: 2722585 tx_bytes: 0 rx_broadcast: 327 tx_broadcast: 0 rx_multicast: 1504 tx_multicast: 0 rx_errors: 0 tx_errors: 0 tx_dropped: 0 multicast: 1504 collisions: 0 rx_length_errors: 0 rx_over_errors: 0 rx_crc_errors: 0 rx_frame_errors: 0 rx_no_buffer_count: 0 rx_missed_errors: 0 tx_aborted_errors: 0 tx_carrier_errors: 0 tx_fifo_errors: 0 tx_heartbeat_errors: 0 tx_window_errors: 0 tx_abort_late_coll: 0 tx_deferred_ok: 0 tx_single_coll_ok: 0 tx_multi_coll_ok: 0 tx_timeout_count: 0 tx_restart_queue: 0 rx_long_length_errors: 0 rx_short_length_errors: 0 rx_align_errors: 0 tx_tcp_seg_good: 0 tx_tcp_seg_failed: 0 rx_flow_control_xon: 0 rx_flow_control_xoff: 0 tx_flow_control_xon: 0 tx_flow_control_xoff: 0 rx_long_byte_count: 2722585 rx_csum_offload_good: 0 rx_csum_offload_errors: 0 alloc_rx_buff_failed: 0 tx_smbus: 0 rx_smbus: 0 dropped_smbus: 01 # ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:11:43:e0:e2:8c UP BROADCAST RUNNING NOARP PROMISC ALLMULTI MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:373348 errors:16 dropped:95 overruns:0 frame:16 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:356830572 (356.8 MB) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:11:43:e0:e2:8d UP BROADCAST RUNNING NOARP PROMISC ALLMULTI MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:13616 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:8690528 (8.6 MB) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth2 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:23:e1:77:6a UP BROADCAST RUNNING NOARP PROMISC ALLMULTI MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:7750 errors:0 dropped:471 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:2780935 (2.7 MB) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth3 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:23:e1:77:6b UP BROADCAST RUNNING NOARP PROMISC ALLMULTI MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:5112 errors:0 dropped:206 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:639472 (639.4 KB) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth4 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:23:b6:35:6c UP BROADCAST RUNNING NOARP PROMISC ALLMULTI MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:961467 errors:0 dropped:935 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:958561305 (958.5 MB) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth5 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:23:b6:35:6d inet addr:192.168.1.6 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:4264 errors:0 dropped:16 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:699 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:572228 (572.2 KB) TX bytes:124456 (124.4 KB) I tried the defaults, then started to play around with settings. I wasn't using any flow control and I increased the RxDescriptor count to 4096 before the upgrade as well without any problems. # cat /etc/modprobe.d/e1000.conf options e1000 XsumRX=0,0,0,0,0 RxDescriptors=4096,4096,4096,4096,4096 FlowControl=0,0,0,0,0 debug=16 Here's my network configuration file, I turned off checksumming and various offloading mechanisms along with setting CPU affinity with heavy use interfaces getting an entire CPU and light use interfaces sharing a CPU. I used these settings prior to the upgrade without problems. # cat /etc/network/interfaces # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface auto eth0 iface eth0 inet manual pre-up /sbin/ethtool -G eth0 rx 4096 tx 0 pre-up /sbin/ethtool -K eth0 gro off gso off rx off pre-up /sbin/ethtool -A eth0 rx off autoneg off up ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 -arp promisc mtu 1500 allmulti txqueuelen 0 up post-up echo "4" > /proc/irq/48/smp_affinity down ifconfig eth0 down post-down /sbin/ethtool -G eth0 rx 256 tx 256 post-down /sbin/ethtool -K eth0 gro on gso on rx on post-down /sbin/ethtool -A eth0 rx on autoneg on auto eth1 iface eth1 inet manual pre-up /sbin/ethtool -G eth1 rx 4096 tx 0 pre-up /sbin/ethtool -K eth1 gro off gso off rx off pre-up /sbin/ethtool -A eth1 rx off autoneg off up ifconfig eth1 0.0.0.0 -arp promisc mtu 1500 allmulti txqueuelen 0 up post-up echo "4" > /proc/irq/49/smp_affinity down ifconfig eth1 down post-down /sbin/ethtool -G eth1 rx 256 tx 256 post-down /sbin/ethtool -K eth1 gro on gso on rx on post-down /sbin/ethtool -A eth1 rx on autoneg on auto eth2 iface eth2 inet manual pre-up /sbin/ethtool -G eth2 rx 4096 tx 0 pre-up /sbin/ethtool -K eth2 gro off gso off rx off pre-up /sbin/ethtool -A eth2 rx off autoneg off up ifconfig eth2 0.0.0.0 -arp promisc mtu 1500 allmulti txqueuelen 0 up post-up echo "1" > /proc/irq/82/smp_affinity down ifconfig eth2 down post-down /sbin/ethtool -G eth2 rx 256 tx 256 post-down /sbin/ethtool -K eth2 gro on gso on rx on post-down /sbin/ethtool -A eth2 rx on autoneg on auto eth3 iface eth3 inet manual pre-up /sbin/ethtool -G eth3 rx 4096 tx 0 pre-up /sbin/ethtool -K eth3 gro off gso off rx off pre-up /sbin/ethtool -A eth3 rx off autoneg off up ifconfig eth3 0.0.0.0 -arp promisc mtu 1500 allmulti txqueuelen 0 up post-up echo "2" > /proc/irq/83/smp_affinity down ifconfig eth3 down post-down /sbin/ethtool -G eth3 rx 256 tx 256 post-down /sbin/ethtool -K eth3 gro on gso on rx on post-down /sbin/ethtool -A eth3 rx on autoneg on auto eth4 iface eth4 inet manual pre-up /sbin/ethtool -G eth4 rx 4096 tx 0 pre-up /sbin/ethtool -K eth4 gro off gso off rx off pre-up /sbin/ethtool -A eth4 rx off autoneg off up ifconfig eth4 0.0.0.0 -arp promisc mtu 1500 allmulti txqueuelen 0 up post-up echo "4" > /proc/irq/77/smp_affinity down ifconfig eth4 down post-down /sbin/ethtool -G eth4 rx 256 tx 256 post-down /sbin/ethtool -K eth4 gro on gso on rx on post-down /sbin/ethtool -A eth4 rx on autoneg on auto eth5 iface eth5 inet static pre-up /etc/fw.conf address 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255 gateway 192.168.1.1 dns-nameservers 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3 up ifconfig eth5 up post-up echo "8" > /proc/irq/77/smp_affinity down ifconfig eth5 down Here's a few examples of packet drops, i ran one after another, probabling totaling 3 or 4 seconds. You can see increases in the drops from the 1st and 3rd. This was a non-busy time, very little traffic. # awk '{ print $1,$5 }' /proc/net/dev Inter-| face drop eth3: 225 lo: 0 eth2: 505 eth1: 0 eth5: 17 eth0: 105 eth4: 1034 # awk '{ print $1,$5 }' /proc/net/dev Inter-| face drop eth3: 225 lo: 0 eth2: 507 eth1: 0 eth5: 17 eth0: 105 eth4: 1034 # awk '{ print $1,$5 }' /proc/net/dev Inter-| face drop eth3: 227 lo: 0 eth2: 512 eth1: 0 eth5: 17 eth0: 105 eth4: 1039 I tried the pci=noacpi options. With and without, it's the same. This is what my interrupt stats looked like before the upgrade, after, with ACPI on PCI it showed multiple NICs bound to an interrupt and shared with other devices such as USB drives which I didn't like so I think i'm going to keep it with ACPI off as it's easier to designate sole purpose interrupts. Is there any advantage I would have using the default i.e. ACPI w/ PCI. ? # cat /etc/default/grub | grep CMD_LINE GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="ipv6.disable=1 noacpi pci=noacpi" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" # cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3 0: 45 0 0 16 IO-APIC-edge timer 1: 1 0 0 7936 IO-APIC-edge i8042 2: 0 0 0 0 XT-PIC-XT-PIC cascade 6: 0 0 0 3 IO-APIC-edge floppy 8: 0 0 0 1 IO-APIC-edge rtc0 9: 0 0 0 0 IO-APIC-edge acpi 12: 0 0 0 1809 IO-APIC-edge i8042 14: 1 0 0 4498 IO-APIC-edge ata_piix 15: 0 0 0 0 IO-APIC-edge ata_piix 16: 0 0 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb2 18: 0 0 0 1350 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb4, radeon 19: 0 0 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb3 23: 0 0 0 4099 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb1 38: 0 0 0 61963 IO-APIC-fasteoi megaraid 48: 0 0 1002319 4 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth0 49: 0 0 38772 3 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth1 77: 0 0 130076 432159 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth4 78: 0 0 0 23917 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth5 82: 1329033 0 0 4 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth2 83: 0 4886525 0 6 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth3 NMI: 5 6 4 5 Non-maskable interrupts LOC: 61409 57076 64257 114764 Local timer interrupts SPU: 0 0 0 0 Spurious interrupts IWI: 0 0 0 0 IRQ work interrupts RES: 17956 25333 13436 14789 Rescheduling interrupts CAL: 22436 607 539 478 Function call interrupts TLB: 1525 1458 4600 4151 TLB shootdowns TRM: 0 0 0 0 Thermal event interrupts THR: 0 0 0 0 Threshold APIC interrupts MCE: 0 0 0 0 Machine check exceptions MCP: 16 16 16 16 Machine check polls ERR: 0 MIS: 0 Here's sample output of vmstat, showing the system. Barebones system right now. root@nms:~# vmstat -S m 1 procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 0 0 0 14992 192 1029 0 0 56 2 419 29 1 0 99 0 0 0 0 14992 192 1029 0 0 0 0 922 27 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 14991 192 1029 0 0 0 36 763 50 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 14991 192 1029 0 0 0 0 646 35 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 14991 192 1029 0 0 0 0 722 54 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 14991 192 1029 0 0 0 0 793 27 0 0 100 0 ^C Here's dmesg output. I can't figure out why my PCI-X slots are negotiated as PCI. The network cards are all PCI-X with the exception of the integrated NICs that came with the server. In the output below it looks as if eth3 and eth2 negotiated at PCI-X speeds rather than PCI:66Mhz. Wouldn't they all drop to PCI:66Mhz? If your integrated NICs are PCI, as labeled below (eth0,eth1), then wouldn't all devices on your bus speed drop down to that slower bus speed? If not, I still don't know why only one of my NICs ( each has two ethernet ports) is labeled as PCI-X in the output below. Does that mean it is running at PCI-X speeds are is it showing that it's capable? # dmesg | grep e1000 [ 3678.349337] e1000: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - version 7.3.21-k8-NAPI [ 3678.349342] e1000: Copyright (c) 1999-2006 Intel Corporation. [ 3678.349394] e1000 0000:06:07.0: PCI->APIC IRQ transform: INT A -> IRQ 48 [ 3678.409725] e1000 0000:06:07.0: Receive Descriptors set to 4096 [ 3678.409730] e1000 0000:06:07.0: Checksum Offload Disabled [ 3678.409734] e1000 0000:06:07.0: Flow Control Disabled [ 3678.586409] e1000 0000:06:07.0: eth0: (PCI:66MHz:32-bit) 00:11:43:e0:e2:8c [ 3678.586419] e1000 0000:06:07.0: eth0: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection [ 3678.586642] e1000 0000:07:08.0: PCI->APIC IRQ transform: INT A -> IRQ 49 [ 3678.649854] e1000 0000:07:08.0: Receive Descriptors set to 4096 [ 3678.649859] e1000 0000:07:08.0: Checksum Offload Disabled [ 3678.649863] e1000 0000:07:08.0: Flow Control Disabled [ 3678.826436] e1000 0000:07:08.0: eth1: (PCI:66MHz:32-bit) 00:11:43:e0:e2:8d [ 3678.826444] e1000 0000:07:08.0: eth1: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection [ 3678.826627] e1000 0000:09:04.0: PCI->APIC IRQ transform: INT A -> IRQ 82 [ 3679.093266] e1000 0000:09:04.0: Receive Descriptors set to 4096 [ 3679.093271] e1000 0000:09:04.0: Checksum Offload Disabled [ 3679.093275] e1000 0000:09:04.0: Flow Control Disabled [ 3679.130239] e1000 0000:09:04.0: eth2: (PCI-X:133MHz:64-bit) 00:04:23:e1:77:6a [ 3679.130246] e1000 0000:09:04.0: eth2: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection [ 3679.130449] e1000 0000:09:04.1: PCI->APIC IRQ transform: INT B -> IRQ 83 [ 3679.397312] e1000 0000:09:04.1: Receive Descriptors set to 4096 [ 3679.397318] e1000 0000:09:04.1: Checksum Offload Disabled [ 3679.397321] e1000 0000:09:04.1: Flow Control Disabled [ 3679.434350] e1000 0000:09:04.1: eth3: (PCI-X:133MHz:64-bit) 00:04:23:e1:77:6b [ 3679.434360] e1000 0000:09:04.1: eth3: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection [ 3679.434553] e1000 0000:0a:03.0: PCI->APIC IRQ transform: INT A -> IRQ 77 [ 3679.704072] e1000 0000:0a:03.0: Receive Descriptors set to 4096 [ 3679.704077] e1000 0000:0a:03.0: Checksum Offload Disabled [ 3679.704081] e1000 0000:0a:03.0: Flow Control Disabled [ 3679.738364] e1000 0000:0a:03.0: eth4: (PCI:33MHz:64-bit) 00:04:23:b6:35:6c [ 3679.738371] e1000 0000:0a:03.0: eth4: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection [ 3679.738538] e1000 0000:0a:03.1: PCI->APIC IRQ transform: INT B -> IRQ 78 [ 3680.046060] e1000 0000:0a:03.1: eth5: (PCI:33MHz:64-bit) 00:04:23:b6:35:6d [ 3680.046067] e1000 0000:0a:03.1: eth5: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection [ 3682.132415] e1000: eth0 NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Half Duplex, Flow Control: None [ 3682.224423] e1000: eth1 NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Half Duplex, Flow Control: None [ 3682.316385] e1000: eth2 NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Half Duplex, Flow Control: None [ 3682.408391] e1000: eth3 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: None [ 3682.500396] e1000: eth4 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: None [ 3682.708401] e1000: eth5 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX At first I thought it was the NIC drivers but I'm not so sure. I really have no idea where else to look at the moment. Any help is greatly appreciated as I'm struggling with this. If you need more information just ask. Thanks! [1]http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/devices/lxr/http/source/linux/Documentation/networking/e1000.txt?v=2.6.11.8 [2] http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe2850/en/ug/t1390aa.htm

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• Accelerated C++, problem 5-6 (copying values from inside a vector to the front)

  - by Darel

  Hello, I'm working through the exercises in Accelerated C++ and I'm stuck on question 5-6. Here's the problem description: (somewhat abbreviated, I've removed extraneous info.) 5-6. Write the extract_fails function so that it copies the records for the passing students to the beginning of students, and then uses the resize function to remove the extra elements from the end of students. (students is a vector of student structures. student structures contain an individual student's name and grades.) More specifically, I'm having trouble getting the vector.insert function to properly copy the passing student structures to the start of the vector students. Here's the extract_fails function as I have it so far (note it doesn't resize the vector yet, as directed by the problem description; that should be trivial once I get past my current issue.) // Extract the students who failed from the "students" vector. void extract_fails(vector<Student_info>& students) { typedef vector<Student_info>::size_type str_sz; typedef vector<Student_info>::iterator iter; iter it = students.begin(); str_sz i = 0, count = 0; while (it != students.end()) { // fgrade tests wether or not the student failed if (!fgrade(*it)) { // if student passed, copy to front of vector students.insert(students.begin(), it, it); // tracks of the number of passing students(so we can properly resize the array) count++; } cout << it->name << endl; // output to verify that each student is iterated to it++; } } The code compiles and runs, but the students vector isn't adding any student structures to its front. My program's output displays that the students vector is unchanged. Here's my complete source code, followed by a sample input file (I redirect input from the console by typing " < grades" after the compiled program name at the command prompt.) #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <algorithm> // to get the declaration of `sort' #include <stdexcept> // to get the declaration of `domain_error' #include <vector> // to get the declaration of `vector' //driver program for grade partitioning examples using std::cin; using std::cout; using std::endl; using std::string; using std::domain_error; using std::sort; using std::vector; using std::max; using std::istream; struct Student_info { std::string name; double midterm, final; std::vector<double> homework; }; bool compare(const Student_info&, const Student_info&); std::istream& read(std::istream&, Student_info&); std::istream& read_hw(std::istream&, std::vector<double>&); double median(std::vector<double>); double grade(double, double, double); double grade(double, double, const std::vector<double>&); double grade(const Student_info&); bool fgrade(const Student_info&); void extract_fails(vector<Student_info>& v); int main() { vector<Student_info> vs; Student_info s; string::size_type maxlen = 0; while (read(cin, s)) { maxlen = max(maxlen, s.name.size()); vs.push_back(s); } sort(vs.begin(), vs.end(), compare); extract_fails(vs); // display the new, modified vector - it should be larger than // the input vector, due to some student structures being // added to the front of the vector. cout << "count: " << vs.size() << endl << endl; vector<Student_info>::iterator it = vs.begin(); while (it != vs.end()) cout << it++->name << endl; return 0; } // Extract the students who failed from the "students" vector. void extract_fails(vector<Student_info>& students) { typedef vector<Student_info>::size_type str_sz; typedef vector<Student_info>::iterator iter; iter it = students.begin(); str_sz i = 0, count = 0; while (it != students.end()) { // fgrade tests wether or not the student failed if (!fgrade(*it)) { // if student passed, copy to front of vector students.insert(students.begin(), it, it); // tracks of the number of passing students(so we can properly resize the array) count++; } cout << it->name << endl; // output to verify that each student is iterated to it++; } } bool compare(const Student_info& x, const Student_info& y) { return x.name < y.name; } istream& read(istream& is, Student_info& s) { // read and store the student's name and midterm and final exam grades is >> s.name >> s.midterm >> s.final; read_hw(is, s.homework); // read and store all the student's homework grades return is; } // read homework grades from an input stream into a `vector<double>' istream& read_hw(istream& in, vector<double>& hw) { if (in) { // get rid of previous contents hw.clear(); // read homework grades double x; while (in >> x) hw.push_back(x); // clear the stream so that input will work for the next student in.clear(); } return in; } // compute the median of a `vector<double>' // note that calling this function copies the entire argument `vector' double median(vector<double> vec) { typedef vector<double>::size_type vec_sz; vec_sz size = vec.size(); if (size == 0) throw domain_error("median of an empty vector"); sort(vec.begin(), vec.end()); vec_sz mid = size/2; return size % 2 == 0 ? (vec[mid] + vec[mid-1]) / 2 : vec[mid]; } // compute a student's overall grade from midterm and final exam grades and homework grade double grade(double midterm, double final, double homework) { return 0.2 * midterm + 0.4 * final + 0.4 * homework; } // compute a student's overall grade from midterm and final exam grades // and vector of homework grades. // this function does not copy its argument, because `median' does so for us. double grade(double midterm, double final, const vector<double>& hw) { if (hw.size() == 0) throw domain_error("student has done no homework"); return grade(midterm, final, median(hw)); } double grade(const Student_info& s) { return grade(s.midterm, s.final, s.homework); } // predicate to determine whether a student failed bool fgrade(const Student_info& s) { return grade(s) < 60; } Sample input file: Moo 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 Fail1 45 55 65 80 90 70 65 60 Moore 75 85 77 59 0 85 75 89 Norman 57 78 73 66 78 70 88 89 Olson 89 86 70 90 55 73 80 84 Peerson 47 70 82 73 50 87 73 71 Baker 67 72 73 40 0 78 55 70 Davis 77 70 82 65 70 77 83 81 Edwards 77 72 73 80 90 93 75 90 Fail2 55 55 65 50 55 60 65 60 Thanks to anyone who takes the time to look at this!

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• background image not showing in html

  - by Registered User

  I am having following css <!DOCTYPE html > <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Black Goose Bistro Summer Menu</title> <link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Marko+One' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> <style> body { font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; line-height: 175%; margin: 0 15% 0; background-image:url(images/bullseye.png); } #header { margin-top: 0; padding: 3em 1em 2em 1em; text-align: center; } a { text-decoration: none; } h1 { font: bold 1.5em Georgia, serif; text-shadow: .1em .1em .2em gray; } h2 { font-size: 1em; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: .5em; text-align: center; } dt { font-weight: bold; } strong { font-style: italic; } ul { list-style-type: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; } #info p { font-style: italic; } .price { font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: italic; } p.warning, sup { font-size: small; } .label { font-weight: bold; font-variant: small-caps; font-style: normal; } h2 + p { text-align: center; font-style: italic; } ); </style> </head> <body> <div id="header"> <h1>Black Goose Bistro &bull; Summer Menu</h1> <div id="info"> <p>Baker's Corner, Seekonk, Massachusetts<br> <span class="label">Hours: Monday through Thursday:</span> 11 to 9, <span class="label">Friday and Saturday;</span> 11 to midnight</p> <ul> <li><a href="#appetizers">Appetizers</a></li> <li><a href="#entrees">Main Courses</a></li> <li><a href="#toast">Traditional Toasts</a></li> <li><a href="#dessert">Dessert Selection</a></li> </ul> </div> </div> <div id="appetizers"> <h2>Appetizers</h2> <p>This season, we explore the spicy flavors of the southwest in our appetizer collection.</p> <dl> <dt>Black bean purses</dt> <dd>Spicy black bean and a blend of mexican cheeses wrapped in sheets of phyllo and baked until golden. <span class="price">$3.95</span></dd> <dt class="newitem">Southwestern napoleons with lump crab &mdash; <strong>new item!</strong></dt> <dd>Layers of light lump crab meat, bean and corn salsa, and our handmade flour tortillas. <span class="price">$7.95</span></dd> </dl> </div> <div id="entrees"> <h2>Main courses</h2> <p>Big, bold flavors are the name of the game this summer. Allow us to assist you with finding the perfect wine.</p> <dl> <dt class="newitem">Jerk rotisserie chicken with fried plantains &mdash; <strong>new item!</strong></dt> <dd>Tender chicken slow-roasted on the rotisserie, flavored with spicy and fragrant jerk sauce and served with fried plantains and fresh mango. <strong>Very spicy.</strong> <span class="price">$12.95</span></dd> <dt>Shrimp sate kebabs with peanut sauce</dt> <dd>Skewers of shrimp marinated in lemongrass, garlic, and fish sauce then grilled to perfection. Served with spicy peanut sauce and jasmine rice. <span class="price">$12.95</span></dd> <dt>Grilled skirt steak with mushroom fricasee</dt> <dd>Flavorful skirt steak marinated in asian flavors grilled as you like it^*. Served over a blend of sauteed wild mushrooms with a side of blue cheese mashed potatoes. <span class="price">$16.95</span></dd> </dl> </div> <div id="toast"> <h2>Traditional Toasts</h2> <p>The ultimate comfort food, our traditional toast recipes are adapted from <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13923/13923-h/13923-h.htm"><cite>The Whitehouse Cookbook</cite></a> published in 1887.</p> <dl> <dt>Cream toast</dt> <dd>Simple cream sauce over highest quality toasted bread, baked daily. <span class="price">$3.95</span></dd> <dt>Mushroom toast</dt> <dd>Layers of light lump crab meat, bean and corn salsa, and our handmade flour tortillas. <span class="price">$6.95</span></dd> <dt>Nun's toast</dt> <dd>Onions and hard-boiled eggs in a cream sauce over buttered hot toast. <span class="price">$6.95</span></dd> <dt>Apple toast</dt> <dd>Sweet, cinnamon stewed apples over delicious buttery grilled bread. <span class="price">$6.95</span></dd> </dl> </div> <div id="dessert"> <h2>Dessert Selection</h2> <p>Be sure to save room for our desserts, made daily by our own <a href="http://www.jwu.edu/college.aspx?id=19510">Johnson & Wales</a> trained pastry chef.</p> <dl> <dt class="newitem">Lemon chiffon cake &mdash; <strong>new item!</strong></dt> <dd>Light and citrus flavored sponge cake with buttercream frosting as light as a cloud. <span class="price">$2.95</span></dd> <dt class="newitem">Molten chocolate cake</dt> <dd>Bubba's special dark chocolate cake with a warm, molten center. Served with or without a splash of almond liqueur. <span class="price">$3.95</span></dd> </dl> </div> <p class="warning">^* We are required to warn you that undercooked food is a health risk.</p> </body> </html> but the background image does not appear in body tag you can see background-image:url(images/bullseye.png); this html page is bistro.html and the directory in which it is contained there is a folder images and inside images folder I have a file bullseye.png .I expect the png to appear in background.But that does not happen. For sake of question I am posting the image here also Let me know if the syntax of css wrong? following is image http://i.stack.imgur.com/YUKgg.png

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