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  • Random <hr/> that I don't know how to get rid of!

    - by Anonymous the Great
    There is no extra <hr/> on the page, and I cannot figure out why it is there. Do you see anything that is causing it? I am sorry for posting the whole thing, I do not know exactly where it starts. The <hr/> is at the top somewhere, but I'm not sure where. <?php print "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>"; ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <font face="Segoe UI"> <body> <script type="text/javascript"> /*function detectBrowser() { var browser = navigator.appCodeName; if (browser!="Mozilla") {document.location.href="noaccess.php"; alert(browser);} } detectBrowser(); */ </script> <title>Second</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="allCSS.css"/> <center> <!--<img align="right" src="logo.png" id="headerimg"/>--> <input type="image" id="headerimg" src="logo.png" align="right" onclick="toggleh();"/> <ul align="center" class=""> <div class="menu"> <ul class="nav"> <li><strong><a href="index.php">Home</a></strong> <ul> <li><a href="games.php">Games</a></li> <li><a href="browse.php">Browse</a></li> <li><a href="catalogue.php">Catalogue</a></li> <li><a href="forum.php">Forums</a></li> </ul> </li> <li><strong><a href="games">Games</a></strong> <ul> <li><a href="profile.php">Profile</a></li> <li><a href="settings.php">Settings</a></li> </ul> </li> <li><strong><a href="contact">Contact</a></strong> <ul> <li><a href="contact/index.php">Phone</a></li> <li><a href="contact/index.php">Email</a></li> <li><a href="contact/index.php">Mail</a></li> </ul> </li> </div> </center> </body> <center> <?php echo '<div id="msg">'; include 'message.txt'; echo '</div>'; //include 'hits.txt'; ?> <p> <?php function ChangeText($txt) { $txt='<script type="text/javascript">get();</script>'; echo '<script type="text/javascript">change();</script>'; $filename="message.txt"; $fp=fopen($filename,'w'); fwrite($fp,'<h4 class="hmsg">' . $txt . '</h4>'); fclose($fp); } ?> <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- window.onload=enter; function enter() { //alert("Welcome!"); //hideCMD(); } function get(text) { text=document.getElementById("ta").value; return text; } function toggleh() { var element=document.getElementById("headerimg"); if (element.style.display!="none"){element.style.display="none";} else {element.style.display="";} } function change(text) { text=document.getElementById("ta").value; if (text=="toggle") {toggleh(); return;} if (text=="home") {document.location.href="index.html"; return;} if (text.match("goto:*")) {var loc=text.substring(5,text.length); document.location.href=loc; return;} if (text.match("ban:*")) {var loc=text.substring(4,text.length); document.location.href=loc; return;} document.getElementById("msg").innerHTML='<h2 class="hmsg">'+text+'</h2>'; } function hideCMD() { document.getElementById("cmd").style.display="none"; } //--> </script> </head> <body> <div id="msg"> </div> <p id="cmd"> <hr class="cmdbar"></hr> <input class="panela" type="text" value="" id="ta" maxLength="20"/> <input class="panelb" type="image" src="submit.png" alt="Submit" onclick='change();'/> </p> </center> <p class="hide">HELLO!</p> </font> </html>

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  • Google Rules for Retail

    - by David Dorf
    In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts.  These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future.  While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth.  So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success.  The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I created. 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid black 1.0pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-border-alt:solid black .5pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insideh-themecolor:text1; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insidev-themecolor:text1; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Google Rule Industry Examples New Retailer Rule New Relationship Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond to customer comments that are critical of the product, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers. Listen to what your customers are saying about you.  Convert the critics to fans and the fans to influencers. New Architecture Join a network; be a platform Tesco and BestBuy released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new applications. Become a destination for information. New Publicness Life is public, so is business Zappos and WholeFoods founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and connecting to customers.  It's not always pretty, but it's genuine. Be transparent.  Share both your successes and failures with your customers. New Society Elegant organization Wet Seal helps their customers assemble outfits and show them off to each other.  Barnes & Noble has a community site that includes a bookclub. Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better. New Economy Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches lululemon found a niche for yoga inspired athletic wear.  Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs of T-shirts. Serve small markets with niche products. New Business Reality Decide what business you're in When Lowes realized catering to women brought the men along, their sales increased. Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy. New Attitude Trust the people and listen In 2008 Starbucks launched MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers. Use social networks as additional data points for making better merchandising decisions. New Ethic Be honest and transparent; don't be evil Target is giving away reusable shopping bags for Earth Day.  Kohl's has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays. Being green earns customers' respect and lowers costs too. New Speed Life is live H&M and Zara keep up with fashion trends. Be prepared to pounce on you customers' fickle interests. New Imperatives Encourage, enable and protect innovation 1-800-Flowers was the first do sales in Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce.  The Sears Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo. Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won't be stifled. Jeff will be a keynote speaker at Crosstalk, our upcoming annual user conference, so I'm looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on retail and the new economy.

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  • Feedback on "market manipulation", a peripheral game mechanic for a satirical MMO

    - by BerndBrot
    This question asks for feedback on a specific game-mechanic. Since there is not one right feedback on a game mechanic, I tried to provide enough context and guidelines to still make it possible for users to rate answers and to accept an answer as the best answer (following these criteria from Writer.SE's meta website). Please comment if you have any suggestions on how I could improve the question in that regard. So, let's begin with the game itself and some of its elements which are relevant for this question. Context I'm working on a satirical, text-based multiplayer adventure and role-playing game set in modern-day London. The game resolves around the concept of sin and features a myriad of (venomous) allusions to all the things that go wrong in this world. Players can choose between character classes like bullshit artist (consultant), bankster, lawyer, mobster, celebrity, politician, etc. In order to complete the game, the player has to live so sinfully with regard to any of the seven deadly sins that a demon is willing to offer them a contract of sponsorship. On their quest to live a sinful live, characters explore more and more locations of modern-day London (on a GoogleMap), fight "monsters" like insurance sales agents or Jehovah's Witnesses, and complete quests, like building a PowerPoint presentation out of marketing buzz words or keeping up a number of substance abuse effects in order to progress on the gluttony path. Battles are turn based with both combatants having a deck of cards, with which they try to make their enemy give in to temptations of all sorts. Tempted enemies sometimes become contacts (an item drop mechanic), which can be exploited for various benefits, depending on their area of influence (finance, underworld, bureaucracy, etc.), level of influence, and kind of sway that the player has over them (bribed, seduced, threatened, etc.) Once a contract has been exploited, the player loses that contact. Most actions require turns. Turns are limited, but refill each day. Criteria A number of peripheral game mechanics are supposed to represent real world abuses and mischief in a humorous way integrate real world data and events to strengthen the feeling of relevance of the game's humor with regard to real world problems add fun ways of interacting with other players add ways for players to express themselves through game-play Market manipulation is one such peripheral game mechanic and should fulfill all of these goals. Market manipulation This is my initial design of the mechanic: Players can enter the London Stock Exchange (LSE) (without paying a turn) LSE displays the stock prices of a number of companies in industries like weapons or tobacco as well as some derivatives based on wheat and corn. The stock prices are calculated based on the actual stock prices of these companies and derivatives (in real time) any market manipulations that were conducted by the players any market corrections of the system Players can buy and sell shares with cash, a resource in the game, at current in-game market value (without paying a turn). Players can manipulate the market, i.e. let the price of a share either rise or fall, by some amount, over a certain period of time. Manipulating the market requires 1 turn A contact in the financial sector (see above). The higher the level of influence of the contact, the stronger the effect of the manipulation on the stock price, and/or the shorter it takes for the manipulation to manifest itself. Market manipulation also adds a crime to the player's record. (There are a multitude of ways to take care of that, but it is still another "cost" of market manipulations.) The system continuously corrects market manipulations by letting the in-game prices converge towards their real world counterparts at a rate of 2% of the difference between the two per hour. Because of this market correction mechanism, pushing up prices (and screwing down prices) becomes increasingly difficult the higher (lower) the price already is. Whenever food prices reach a certain level, in-game stories are posted about hunger catastrophes happening somewhere far, far away (maybe with links to real world news stories). Whenever a player sells a certain number of shares with a sufficiently high margin, they are mentioned in that day's in-game financial news. Since the number of stock options is very limited, players will inevitably collide in their efforts to manipulate the market in their favor. Hopefully, it will also be a fun side-arena for guilds and covenants to fight each other. Question(s) What do you think of this mechanism given the criteria for peripheral game mechanics that I specified for my game? Do you have any ideas how the mechanic could be improved with regard to these criteria (or otherwise)? Could it be improved to allow for more expressive game-play, or involve an allusion to some other real world madness (like short selling, leveraging, or some other banking magic)? Are there any game-theoretic problems with this mechanic, like maybe certain dominant individual strategies that, collectively, lead to every player profiting and thus eliminating the idea of market manipulation PVP? Also, if you like (or dislike) this question, feel free to participate in the discussion on GDSE meta: "Should we be more lax with regard to SE's question/answer format to make game design questions possible?"

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  • Guest Post: Christian Finn: Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success?

    - by Michael Snow
    12.00 Print 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}  Since we have a number of new members of the WebCenter Evangelist team - I thought it would be appropriate to close the week with the newest hire and leader of the global WebCenter Evangelists, Christian Finn, who has just joined the Red team after many years with the small technology company up in Redmond, WA. He gave an intro to himself in an earlier post this morning but his post below is a great example of how customer engagement takes on a life of its own in our global online connected and social digital ecosystem. Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success? What if I told you that your brand could advertise so successfully, you wouldn’t have to pay for the ads? A recent campaign by Ford Motor Company for the Ford Focus featuring Doug the spokespuppet (I am not making this up) did just that—and it raises some interesting issues for marketers and social media alike in the brave new world of customer engagement that is the Social Web. Allow me to elaborate. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week—“Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay” tells the story of Ford’s recently concluded online campaign for the 2012 Ford Focus. (Ford, by the way, under the leadership of people such as Scott Monty, has been a pioneer of effective social campaigns.) The centerpiece of the campaign was the aforementioned Doug, who appeared as a character on Facebook in videos and via chat. (If you are not familiar with Doug, you can see him in action here, and read the WSJ story here.) You may be thinking puppet ads are a sign of Internet Bubble 2.0 and want to stop now, but bear with me. The Journal reported that Ford spent about $95M on its overall Ford Focus campaign, with TV accounting for over $60M of that spend. The Internet buy for the campaign was just over $10M, which included ad buys to drive traffic to Facebook for people to meet and ‘Like’ Doug and some amount on Facebook ads, too, to promote Doug and by extension, the Ford Focus. So far, a fairly straightforward consumer marketing story in the Internet Era. Yet here’s the curious thing: once Doug reached 10,000 fans on Facebook, Ford stopped paying for Facebook ads. Doug had gone viral with people sharing his videos with one another; once critical mass was reached there was no need to buy more ads on Facebook. Doug went on to be Liked by over 43,000 people, and 61% of his fans said they would be more likely to consider buying a Focus. According to the article, Ford says Focus sales are up this year—and increasing sales is every marketer’s goal. And so in effect, Ford found its Facebook campaign so successful that it could stop paying for it, instead letting its target consumers communicate its messages for fun—and for free. Not only did they get a 3X increase in fans beyond their paid campaign, they had thousands of customers sharing their messages in video form for months. Since free advertising is the Holy Grail of marketing both old and new-- and it appears social networks have an advantage in generating that buzz—it seems reasonable to ask: what would happen to brands’ advertising strategies—and the media they use to engage customers, if this success were repeated at scale? It seems logical to conclude that, at least initially, more ad dollars would be spent with social networks like Facebook as brands attempt to replicate Ford’s success. Certainly Facebook ad revenues are on the rise—eMarketer expects Facebook’s ad revenues to quintuple by 2012 compared with 2009 levels, to nearly 2.9B. That’s bad news for TV and the already battered print media and good news for Facebook. But perhaps not so over the longer run. With TV buys, you have to keep paying to generate impressions. If Doug the spokespuppet is any guide, however, that may not be true for social media campaigns. After an initial outlay, if a social campaign takes off, the audience will generate more impressions on its own. Thus a social medium like Facebook could be the victim of its own success when it comes to ad revenue. It may be there is an inherent limiting factor in the ad spend they can capture, as exemplified by Ford’s experience with Dough and the Focus. And brands may spend much less overall on advertising, with as good or better results, than they ever have in the past. How will these trends evolve? Can brands create social campaigns that repeat Ford’s formula for the Focus with effective results? Can social networks find ways to capture more spend and overcome their potential tendency to make further spend unnecessary? And will consumers become tired and insulated from social campaigns, much as they have to traditional advertising channels? These are the questions CMOs and Facebook execs alike will be asking themselves in the brave new world of customer engagement. As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome.

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  • Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy Adds Social Cloud and Showcases early customers Redwood Shores, Calif. – June 6, 2012 “Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don’t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform.” News Facts In a major strategy update today, Larry Ellison announced the industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a broad Enterprise Social Platform offering. Oracle Cloud delivers a broad set of industry-standards based, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle. Offering a wide range of business applications and platform services, the Oracle Cloud is the only cloud to enable customers to avoid the data and business process fragmentation that occurs when using multiple, siloed public clouds. Oracle Cloud is powered by leading enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, providing customers and partners with a high-performance, reliable, and secure infrastructure for running critical business applications. Oracle Cloud enables easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can easily develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications. As part of the event, Oracle also showcased several early Oracle Cloud customers and partners including system integrators and independent software vendors. Oracle Cloud Platform Services Built on a common, complete, standards-based and enterprise-grade set of infrastructure components, Oracle Cloud Platform Services enable customers to speed time to market and lower costs by quickly building, deploying and managing bespoke applications. Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include: Database Services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database. Java Services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic. Developer Services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications. Web Services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python. Mobile Services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for leading smartphones and tablets. Documents Services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals. Sites Services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites Analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud. Oracle Cloud Application Services Oracle Cloud Application Services provides customers access to the industry’s broadest range of enterprise applications available in the cloud today, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Easy to setup, configure, extend, use and administer, Oracle Cloud Application Services will include: ERP Services: A complete set of Financial Accounting, Project Management, Procurement, Sourcing, and Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions. HCM Services: A complete Human Capital Management solution including Global HR, Workforce Lifecycle Management, Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and other solutions. Talent Management Services: A complete Talent Management solution including Recruiting, Sourcing, Performance Management, and Learning. Sales and Marketing Services: A complete Sales and Marketing solution including Sales Planning, Territory Management, Leads & Opportunity Management, and Forecasting. Customer Experience Services: A complete Customer Service solution including Web Self-Service, Contact Centers, Knowledge Management, Chat, and e-mail Management. Oracle Cloud Social Services Oracle Cloud Social Services provides the most broad and complete enterprise social platform available in the cloud today.  With Oracle Cloud Social Services, enterprises can engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a rich social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle’s integrated social platform will include: Oracle Social Network to enable secure enterprise collaboration and purposeful social networking for business. Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications. Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Oracle Social Intelligence Services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions and to enable customer service and sales teams to engage with customers and prospects effectively. Supporting Resources Oracle Cloud – learn more cloud.oracle.com – sign up now Webcast – watch the replay About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. TrademarksOracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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  • The Winds of Change are a Blowin&rsquo;

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now.  Not the fan part, but the paying customer part.  I’m still a huge fan.  I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often).  I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books.  I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do.  But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team.  I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools.  Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more.  (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it.  Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools.  They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum).  I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video).  I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime.  Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited.  I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up.  So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool.  This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with.  When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to.  The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route.  Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford:  Team Foundation Server.  And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now.  So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools.  I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny).  Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction.  As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching.  So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant.  It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry).  As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company.  This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with.  We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now.  This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time.  We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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  • Off The Beaten Path—Three Things Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful For

    - by Christine Randle
    By: Jim Lein, Senior Director, Oracle Accelerate Last Sunday I went on a walkabout.  That’s when I just step out the door of my Colorado home and hike through the mountains for hours with no predetermined destination. I favor “social trails”, the unmapped routes pioneered by both animal and human explorers.  These tracks  are usually more challenging than established, marked routes and you can’t be 100% sure of where you’re going to end up. But I’ve found the rewards to be much greater. For awhile, I pondered on how—depending upon your perspective—the current economic situation worldwide could be viewed as either a classic “the glass is half empty” or a “the glass is half full” scenario. Midsize companies buy Oracle to grow and so I’m continually amazed and fascinated by the success stories our customers relate to me.  Oracle’s successful midsize companies are growing via innovation, agility, and opportunity. For them, the glass isn’t half full—it’s overflowing. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Innovation The sun angling through the pine trees reminded me of a conversation with a European customer a year ago May.  You might not recognize the name but, chances are, your local evening weather report relies on this company’s weather observation, monitoring and measurement products.  For decades, the company was recognized in its industry for product innovation, but its recent rapid growth comes from tailoring end to end product and service solutions based on the needs of distinctly different customer groups across industrial, public sector, and defense sectors.  Hours after that phone call I was walking my dog in a local park and came upon a small white plastic box sprouting short antennas and dangling by a nylon cord from a tree branch.  I cut it down. The name of that customer’s company was stamped on the housing. “It’s a radiosonde from a high altitude weather balloon,” he told me the next day. “Keep it as a souvenir.”  It sits on my fireplace mantle and elicits many questions from guests. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Agility In July, I had another interesting discussion with the CFO of an Asia-Pacific company which owns and operates a large portfolio of leisure assets. They are best known for their epic outdoor theme parks. However, their primary growth today is coming from a chain of indoor amusement centers in the USA where billiards, bowling, and laser tag take the place of roller coasters, kiddy rides, and wave pools. With mountains and rivers right out my front door, I’m not much for theme parks, but I’ll take a spirited game of laser tag any day.  This company has grown dramatically since first implementing Oracle ERP more than a decade ago. Their profitable expansion into a completely foreign market is derived from the ability to replicate proven and efficient best business practices across diverse operating environments.  They recently went live on Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Taleo. Their CFO explained to me how, with thousands of employees in three countries, Fusion HCM and Taleo would enable them to remain incredibly agile by acting on trends linking individual employee performance to their management, establishing and maintaining those best practices. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Opportunity I have three GPS apps on my iPhone. I use them mainly to keep track of my stats—distance, time, and vertical gain. However, every once in awhile I need to find the most efficient route back home before dark from my current location (notice I didn’t use the word “lost”). In August I listened in on an interview with the CFO of another European company that designs and delivers telematics solutions—the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics—for managing the mobile workforce. These solutions enable customers to achieve evolutionary step-changes in their performance and service delivery. Forgive the overused metaphor, but this is route optimization on steroids.  The company’s executive team saw an opportunity in this emerging market and went “all in”. Consequently, they are being rewarded with tremendous growth results and market domination by providing the ability for their clients to collect and analyze performance information related to fuel consumption, service workforce safety, and asset productivity. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for health, family, friends, and a career with an innovative company that helps companies leverage top tier software to drive and manage growth. And I’m thankful to have learned the lesson that good things happen when you get off the beaten path—both when hiking and when forging new routes through a complex world economy. Halfway through my walkabout on Sunday, after scrambling up a long stretch of scree-covered hill, I crested a ridge with an obstructed view of 14,265 ft Mt Evans just a few miles to the west.  There, nowhere near a house or a trail, someone had placed a wooden lounge chair. Its wood was worn and faded but it was sturdy. I had lunch and a cold drink in my pack. Opportunity knocked and I seized it. Happy Thanksgiving.  

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  • The Complementary Roles of PLM and PIM

    - by Ulf Köster
    Oracle Product Value Chain Solutions (aka Enterprise PLM Solutions) are a comprehensive set of product management solutions that work together to provide Oracle customers with a broad array of capabilities to manage all aspects of product life: innovation, design, launch, and supply chain / commercialization processes beyond the capabilities and boundaries of traditional engineering-focused Product Lifecycle Management applications. They support companies with an integrated managed view across the product value chain: From Lab to Launch, From Farm to Fork, From Concept to Product to Customer, From Product Innovation to Product Design and Product Commercialization. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) represents a broad suite of software solutions to improve product-oriented business processes and data. PLM success stories prove that PLM helps companies improve time to market, increase product-related revenue, reduce product costs, reduce internal costs and improve product quality. As a maturing suite of enterprise solutions, PLM is still evolving to realize the promise it can provide across all facets of a business and all phases of the product lifecycle. The vision for PLM includes everything from gathering early requirements for a product through multiple stages of the product lifecycle from product design, through commercialization and eventual product retirement or replacement. In discrete or process industries, PLM is typically more focused on Product Definition as items with respect to the technical view of a material or part, including specifications, bills of material and manufacturing data. With Agile PLM, this is specifically related to capabilities addressing Product Collaboration, Governance and Compliance, Product Quality Management, Product Cost Management and Engineering Collaboration. PLM today is mainly addressing key requirements in the early product lifecycle, in engineering changes or in the “innovation cycle”, and primarily adds value related to product design, development, launch and engineering change process. In short, PLM is the master for Product Definition, wherever manufacturing takes place. Product Information Management (PIM) is a product suite that has evolved in parallel to PLM. Product Information Management (PIM) can extend the value of PLM implementations by providing complementary tools and capabilities. More relevant in the area of Product Commercialization, the vision for PIM is to manage product information throughout an enterprise and supply chain to improve product-related knowledge management, information sharing and synchronization from multiple data sources. PIM success stories have shown the ability to provide multiple benefits, with particular emphasis on reducing information complexity and information management costs. Product Information in PIM is typically treated as the commercial view of a material or part, including sales and marketing information and categorization. PIM collects information from multiple manufacturing sites and multiple suppliers into its repository, but also provides integration tools to push the information back out to the other systems, serving as an active central repository with the aim to provide a holistic view on any product sold by a company (hence the name “Product Hub”). In short, PIM is the master of commercial Product Information. So PIM is quickly becoming mandatory because of its value in optimizing multichannel selling processes and relationships with customers, as you can see from the following table: Viewpoint PLM Current State PIM Key Benefits PIM adds to PLM Product Lifecycle Primarily R&D Front end Innovation Cycle Change process Primarily commercial / transactional state of lifecycle Provides a seamless information flow from design and manufacturing through the ultimate selling and servicing of products Data Primarily focused on “item” vs. “product” data Product structures Specifications Technical information Repository for all product information. Reaches out to entire enterprise and its various silos of product information and descriptions Provides a “trusted source” of accurate product information to the internal organization and trading partners Data Lifecycle Repository for all design iterations Historical information Released, current information, with version management and time stamping Provides a single location to track and audit historical product information Communication PLM release finished product to ERP PLM is the master for Product Definition Captures information from disparate sources, including in-house data stores Recognizes the reality of today’s data “mess” across information silos Provides the ability to package product information to its audience in the desired, relevant format to meet their exacting business requirements Departmental R&D Manufacturing Quality Compliance Procurement Strategic Marketing Focus on Marketing and Sales Gathering information from other Departments, multiple sites, multiple suppliers A singular enterprise solution that leverages existing information silos and data stores Supply Chain Multi-site internal collaboration Supplier collaboration Customer collaboration Works with customers, exchanges / data pools, and trading partners to provide relevant product information packaged the way the customer desires Provides ability to provide trading partners and internal customers with information in a manner they desire, continuously Tools Data Management Collaboration Innovation Management Cleansing Synchronization Hub functions Consistent, clean and complete commercial product information The goals of both PLM and PIM, put simply, are to help companies make more profit from their products. PLM and PIM solutions can be easily added as they share some of the same goals, while coming from two different perspectives: the definition of the product and the commercialization of the product. Both can serve as a form of product “system of record”, but take different approaches to delivering value. Oracle Product Value Chain solutions offer rich new strategies for executives to collectively leverage Agile PLM, Product Data Hub, together with Enterprise Data Quality for Products, and other industry leading Oracle applications to achieve further incremental value, like Oracle Innovation Management. This is unique on the market today.

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  • World Record Oracle Business Intelligence Benchmark on SPARC T4-4

    - by Brian
    Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server configured with four SPARC T4 3.0 GHz processors delivered the first and best performance of 25,000 concurrent users on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) 11g benchmark using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris 10. A SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g achieved 25,000 concurrent users with an average response time of 0.36 seconds with Oracle BI server cache set to ON. The benchmark data clearly shows that the underlying hardware, SPARC T4 server, and the Oracle BI EE 11g (11.1.1.6.0 64-bit) platform scales within a single system supporting 25,000 concurrent users while executing 415 transactions/sec. The benchmark demonstrated the scalability of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g 11.1.1.6.0, which was deployed in a vertical scale-out fashion on a single SPARC T4-4 server. Oracle Internet Directory configured on SPARC T4 server provided authentication for the 25,000 Oracle BI EE users with sub-second response time. A SPARC T4-4 with internal Solid State Drive (SSD) using the ZFS file system showed significant I/O performance improvement over traditional disk for the Web Catalog activity. In addition, ZFS helped get past the UFS limitation of 32767 sub-directories in a Web Catalog directory. The multi-threaded 64-bit Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g and SPARC T4-4 server proved to be a successful combination by providing sub-second response times for the end user transactions, consuming only half of the available CPU resources at 25,000 concurrent users, leaving plenty of head room for increased load. The Oracle Business Intelligence on SPARC T4-4 server benchmark results demonstrate that comprehensive BI functionality built on a unified infrastructure with a unified business model yields best-in-class scalability, reliability and performance. Oracle BI EE 11g is a newer version of Business Intelligence Suite with richer and superior functionality. Results produced with Oracle BI EE 11g benchmark are not comparable to results with Oracle BI EE 10g benchmark. Oracle BI EE 11g is a more difficult benchmark to run, exercising more features of Oracle BI. Performance Landscape Results for the Oracle BI EE 11g version of the benchmark. Results are not comparable to the Oracle BI EE 10g version of the benchmark. Oracle BI EE 11g Benchmark System Number of Users Response Time (sec) 1 x SPARC T4-4 (4 x SPARC T4 3.0 GHz) 25,000 0.36 Results for the Oracle BI EE 10g version of the benchmark. Results are not comparable to the Oracle BI EE 11g version of the benchmark. Oracle BI EE 10g Benchmark System Number of Users 2 x SPARC T5440 (4 x SPARC T2+ 1.6 GHz) 50,000 1 x SPARC T5440 (4 x SPARC T2+ 1.6 GHz) 28,000 Configuration Summary Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server 4 x SPARC T4-4 processors, 3.0 GHz 128 GB memory 4 x 300 GB internal SSD Storage Configuration: "> Sun ZFS Storage 7120 16 x 146 GB disks Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 Oracle Solaris Studio 12.1 Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (11.1.1.6.0) Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.5 Oracle Internet Directory 11.1.1.6.0 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Benchmark Description Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Oracle BI EE) delivers a robust set of reporting, ad-hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboard, and scorecard functionality with a rich end-user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, and more. The Oracle BI EE benchmark test used five different business user roles - Marketing Executive, Sales Representative, Sales Manager, Sales Vice-President, and Service Manager. These roles included a maximum of 5 different pre-built dashboards. Each dashboard page had an average of 5 reports in the form of a mix of charts, tables and pivot tables, returning anywhere from 50 rows to approximately 500 rows of aggregated data. The test scenario also included drill-down into multiple levels from a table or chart within a dashboard. The benchmark test scenario uses a typical business user sequence of dashboard navigation, report viewing, and drill down. For example, a Service Manager logs into the system and navigates to his own set of dashboards using Service Manager. The BI user selects the Service Effectiveness dashboard, which shows him four distinct reports, Service Request Trend, First Time Fix Rate, Activity Problem Areas, and Cost Per Completed Service Call spanning 2002 to 2005. The user then proceeds to view the Customer Satisfaction dashboard, which also contains a set of 4 related reports, drills down on some of the reports to see the detail data. The BI user continues to view more dashboards – Customer Satisfaction and Service Request Overview, for example. After navigating through those dashboards, the user logs out of the application. The benchmark test is executed against a full production version of the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Applications with a fully populated underlying database schema. The business processes in the test scenario closely represent a real world customer scenario. See Also SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Business Intelligence oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN WebLogic Suite oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 30 September 2012.

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  • Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

    - by Michael Hylton
    Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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  • Not so long ago in a city not so far away by Carlos Martin

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is the story of how the EMEA Presales Center turned an Oracle intern into a trusted technology advisor for both Oracle’s Sales and customers. It was the summer of 2011 when I was finishing my Computer Engineering studies as well as my internship at Oracle when I was offered what could possibly be THE dream job for any young European Computer Engineer. Apart from that, it also seemed like the role was particularly tailored to me as I could leverage almost everything I learned at University and during the internship. And all of it in one of the best cities to live in, not only from my home country but arguably from Europe: Malaga! A day at EPC As part of the EPC Technology pillar, and later on completely focused on WebCenter, there was no way to describe a normal day on the job as each day had something unique. Some days I was researching documentation in order to elaborate accurate answers for a customer’s question within a Request for Information or Proposal (RFI/RFP), other days I was doing heavy programming in order to bring a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a customer to life and last not but least, some days I presented to the customer via webconference the demo I built for them the past weeks. So as you can see, the role has research, development and presentation, could you ask for more? Well, don’t worry because there IS more! Internationality As the organization’s name suggests, EMEA Presales Center, it is the Center of Presales within Europe, Middle East and Africa so I got the chance to work with great professionals from all this regions, expanding my network and learning things from one country to apply them to others. In addition to that, the teams based in the Malaga office are comprised of many young professionals hailing mainly from Western and Central European countries (although there are a couple of exceptions!) with very different backgrounds and personalities which guaranteed many laughs and stories during lunch or coffee breaks (or even while working on projects!). Furthermore, having EPC offices in Bucharest and Bangalore and thanks to today’s tele-presence technologies, I was working every day with people from India or Romania as if they were sitting right next to me and the bonding with them got stronger day by day. Career development Apart from the research and self-study I’ve earlier mentioned, one of the EPC’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is that 15% of your time is spent on training so you get lots and lots of trainings in order to develop both your technical product knowledge and your presentation, negotiation and other soft skills. Sometimes the training is via webcast, sometimes the trainer comes to the office and sometimes, the best times, you get to travel abroad in order to attend a training, which also helps you to further develop your network by meeting face to face with many people you only know from some email or instant messaging interaction. And as the months go by, your skills improving at a very fast pace, your relevance increasing with each new project you successfully deliver, it’s only a matter of time (and a bit of self-promoting!) that you get the attention of the manager of a more senior team and are offered the opportunity to take a new step in your professional career. For me it took 2 years to move to my current position, Technology Sales Consultant at the Oracle Direct organization. During those 2 years I had built a good relationship with the Oracle Direct Spanish sales and sales managers, who are also based in the Malaga office. I supported their former Sales Consultant in a couple of presentations and demos and were very happy with my overall performance and attitude so even before the position got eventually vacant, I got a heads-up from then in advance that their current Sales Consultant was going to move to a different position. To me it felt like a natural step, same as when I joined EPC, I had at least a 50% of the “homework” already done but wanted to experience that extra 50% to add new product and soft skills to my arsenal. The rest is history, I’ve been in the role for more than half a year as I’m writing this, achieved already some important wins, gained a lot of trust and confidence in front of customers and broadened my view of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware portfolio. I look back at the 2 years I spent in EPC and think: “boy, I’d recommend that experience to absolutely anyone with the slightest interest in IT, there are so many different things you can do as there are different kind of roles you can end up taking thanks to the experience gained at EPC” /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;}

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  • PRUEBAS DE ESPECIALIZACION 2013/2014

    - by agallego
    Consigue  tu Certificado de Especialista Oracle  de forma GRATUITA , 27 y 28 de Noviembre de 2013  Ahora puedes realizar los exámenes de implementación de las especializaciones de Oracle y convertirte en especialista. Podrás realizar cualquiera de los exámenes de implementación de la siguiente lista: Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management 11g Sales Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-456) Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management 11g Incentive Compensation Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-472) Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-510) Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service 2012 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-465) Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service 2012 Developer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-480) Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management 11g Human Resources Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-584) Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management 11g Talent Management Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-585) Oracle Taleo Recruiting Cloud Service 2013 Certified Implementation Specialist  (1Z0-474) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g Accounts Payable Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-507) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g Accounts Receivable Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-506) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-508) Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration 11g Essentials (1Z0-469) Oracle Documaker Standard Edition 12 Implementation Essentials (1Z0-570) Oracle Hyperion Planning 11 Essentials (1Z0-533) Oracle Hyperion Financial Management 11 Essentials (1Z0-532) Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g Essentials (1Z0-591) Oracle Essbase 11 Essentials (1Z0-531) Oracle GoldenGate 10 Essentials (1Z0-539) Oracle GoldenGate 11g Certified Implementation Exam Essentials Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for CRM Essentials (1Z0-524) Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for ERP Essentials (1Z0-525) Oracle Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 2.3 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-461) Oracle SOA Suite 11g Essentials (1Z0-478) Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-451) Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite 11g Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-560) Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-599) Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-523) Oracle WebCenter Content 11g Essentials (1Z0-542) Oracle WebCenter Portal 11g Essentials (1Z0-541) Oracle Application Development Framework Essentials (1Z1-554) Oracle Identity Governance Suite 11g Essentials(1z0-459) Oracle Access Management Suite Plus 11g Essentials Exam(1z0-479) M2M Platform Certified Architecture Essentials (1Z0-467) Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-462)  Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Essentials(1Z0-468) Oracle Exadata 11g Essentials (1Z0-536) Exadata Database Machine Models X3-2 and X3-8 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-485) Oracle Certified Expert, Oracle Exadata X3 Administration(1Z0-027) Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-569) Oracle Linux System Administration (1Z0-403) Oracle Linux Fundamentals (1Z0-402) Oracle Linux 6 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-460) Oracle VM 3 for x86 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-590) Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Essentials  (1Z0-530 ) Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Essentials (1Z0-457) SPARC T4-Based Server Installation Essentials (1Z0-597) 1Z0-821 Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration 1Z0-822 Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced System Administration Oracle Solaris 11 Installation and Configuration Essentials (1Z0-580) StorageTek Tape Libraries Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-546) Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Certified Implementation Specialist The Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management 8 Essentials (1Z0-567) The Primavera Portfolio Management Essentials (1Z0-544) Primavera Contract Management 14 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-582) Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-562) Oracle Policy Automation 10 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-534) Oracle User Productivity Kit 11 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-566) Oracle User Productivity Kit 11 Technical Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-583) Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting 13.3 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-463) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Merchandising System 13.2 Foundation Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-453) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Point-of-Service Technical Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-572) Oracle Retail Price Management 13.2 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-454) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management 13.2 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-455) Oracle Flexcube Universal Banking 11 Technical Implementation Essentials (1Z0-579) Oracle FlexCube Universal Banking 11 Basic Implementation Essentials (1Z0-561) Oracle Flexcube Universal Banking 11 Technical Implementation Essentials (1Z0-579) Oracle FLEXCUBE Direct Banking 6 Implementation Essentials (1Z0-594)   Puedes consultar la información acerca de los examenes en cada uno de los enlaces. Para prepararte los examenes sigue la Guia de estudio que encontrarás en la página de cada examen. Requisitos: ser  Partner Gold, Platinum o Diamond de Oracle y tener un usuario de Oracle Pearson Vue.  ¿Cuándo?: 27 y 28 de noviembre  a las (9:00, 12:00, 16:00)  ¿Dónde?: Core Networks, C.E.Parque Norte, Edificio Olmo, Planta 1 Serrano Galvache 56 | 28033, Madrid Para inscribirte: Create una cuenta en Pearson Vue (www.pearsonvue.com/oracle). Para Registrarte aquí. Para más información sobre el programa de especializaciones, haz clic aquí. No pierdas esta oportunidad e inscríbete hoy.  Para cualquier duda contactar con [email protected]. Ana María Gallego Partner Enablement Manager Spain and Portugal        

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  • Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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  • SEO with an iframe and a secondary domain

    - by MisterM
    Just a question, a client of the company I work for was They run the SEO page on a new domain (they own it for the client) http://kunstplanten-decoratie.nl/kunst_vetplanten/ while the original page is located at: http://www.deco-trade.nl/index.php/kunstplanten/alle-planten.html Below is the code they are using, they use an iframe to include the real domain. Is this even allowed by SEO tactics and does the content of the iframe even get indexed? <!doctype html> <html lang="nl" dir="ltr"> <head> <title>Kunst vetplanten | Deco Trade</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <meta name="description" content="De kunst vetplanten van Deco Trade zijn een mooi decoratiemiddel voor zowel thuis als op kantoor"> <meta name="keywords" content="Kunst vetplanten, KUNSTPLANTEN"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css.php"> </head> <body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Florist"><div id="wrap"><div id="body"> <h1>Kunst vetplanten</h1> <p><img src="kunst_vetplanten.gif" alt="Kunst vetplanten | Deco Trade"><strong>Kunst vetplanten, KUNSTPLANTEN</strong></p> <h3>De kunst vetplanten van Deco Trade zijn een mooi decoratiemiddel voor zowel thuis als op kantoor</h3> <p>Deco Trade heeft een ruime sortering kunst vetplanten in verschillende maten. Een tweetal keuzes zijn de Crassula kunt vetplant en de Senecio kunst vetplant. De Crassula kunst vetplant is met zijn dikke diep groene bladeren en echte houten stammen een mooie vetplant voor op tafel of dressoir. Het model leent zich perfect voor presentatie in een luxe schaal, maar de Crassula laat zich ook goed combineren met een smalle hoge plantenbak.</p> <p>De diameter van de kunst Crassula is ±45-50cm en de hoogte inclusief de binnenpot is ±70cm. Standaard wordt de kunstplant geleverd in een plastic binnenpot zodat deze eenvoudig in een sierpot te plaatsen is. De afgebeelde sierpotten kunnen los besteld worden. Tevens leverbaar in een kleine maat van 40cm.</p> <p>De Senecio kunst vetplant, is met zijn vele blaadjes een leuke vetplant voor op tafel of in de vensterbank. Als enkel kunstplantje in een hoge sierpot, met meerdere op een rij, of in een luxe platte schaal, met deze kunst vetplant kun je perfect decoreren! De diameter van de Senecio kunstplant is ±30cm en de hoogte inclusief het binnenpotje is ±20cm. Standaard wordt het plantje geleverd in een 12cm plastic binnenpot zodat deze eenvoudig in een sierpot te plaatsen is. De afgebeelde sierpotten kunnen los besteld worden.</p> <p class="centre"><a href="../kunst_buxusbal/" title="Kunst buxusbal">Kunst buxusbal</a> <a href="../kunstbuxusballen/" title="Kunstbuxusballen">Kunstbuxusballen</a> <a href="../kunstcactus/" title="Kunstcactus">Kunstcactus</a> <a href="../kunst_cactus/" title="Kunst cactus">Kunst cactus</a> <a href="../kunst_bloeiende_planten/" title="Kunst bloeiende planten">Kunst bloeiende planten</a> <a href="../buiten_kunst_planten/" title="Buiten kunst planten">Buiten kunst planten</a> <a href="../kunst_ficus/" title="Kunst Ficus">Kunst Ficus</a> <a href="../kunst_guirlande/" title="Kunst Guirlande">Kunst Guirlande</a> <a href="../kunsthaag_elementen/" title="Kunsthaag elementen">Kunsthaag elementen</a> <a href="../uv_planten/" title="UV planten">UV planten</a> <a href="../grote_kunstplanten/" title="Grote kunstplanten">Grote kunstplanten</a></p> <p class="centre">Copyright 2011 <a href="../index.php">kunstplanten-decoratie.nl</a> | <a href="../contact.php" title="Contact">Contact</a> | <a href="../sitemap.php" title="Sitemap">Sitemap</a></p> </div></div> <iframe src="http://www.deco-trade.nl/index.php/kunstplanten/alle-planten.html" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe> </body> </html>

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  • A tale of two dev accounts

    - by TechTwaddle
    Note: I am currently in the process of relocating my blog from http://www.geekswithblogs.net/techtwaddle to my new address at http://www.techtwaddle.net I suggest you point your feed readers to the new address as I slowly transition to my new shared-hosted, ad-free wordpress blog :)   You probably remember my rant from a while back about my windows mobile developer account having problems with the new AppHub, well, there have been few developments and I thought I should share it with you. First up, the issue isn’t fixed yet. I still cannot login to AppHub using my windows mobile 6.x developer account and can’t view details of my Minesweeper app. Who knows how many copies its sold. I had numerous exchanges with Microsoft’s support team on the AppHub forums and via email as well (support ticket), but somehow we never managed to get to the root of it. In fact, the support team itself grew so tired of the problem that they suggested I create a new dev account. I grew impatient, and it was really frustrating to have an app ready for submission but not being able to do anything with it. Eventually, the frustration had to show somewhere, and it was on this forum thread Prabhu Kumar in reply to Nick Nick, I feel for you and totally understand the frustration. Since day one I have been getting the XBOX profile linking error, We encountered an issue connecting your App Hub account with your Xbox Live Profile. Please visit Xbox.com and update your contact information. After you have updated your contact information, please return to the App Hub (https://users.create.msdn.com/Register) to continue. I have an app published on the Windows Mobile 6.x marketplace since Aug, now I can't view the details of this app. I completed work on my WP7 application 1.5 months ago and the first version is ready for submission to marketplace, only if I can login. You can imagine how frustrating all this can be, the issue has taken far too long to be fixed, this has drained all my motivation. I have exchanged numerous mails with Microsoft support team on this issue, and from the looks of it they really are trying their best, unfortunately, their best is not good enough for some of us. During the first week of December I was told that there would be an update happening to AppHub around mid of December. I was hoping that the issue would be fixed but it wasn't. After the update the only change I notice is that the xbox.com link on the error page now takes me to the correct link. Previously, this link used to take me to the 404 page you mentioned above. Out of desperation, I am now considering creating another developer account on AppHub with a new live id, even this I am not 100% sure will work. I asked the support team when the next update to AppHub was planned and got this reply, "We do not have  release date to announce for the next App Hub update at this time. In regards to the login issue you are experiencing at this point the only solution would be to create a new account with a different live ID but make sure to go to xbox.com before hand to get all the information in order on that side." I know it's an extra $99, and not that I can't afford it but it doesn't feel right and I shouldn't have to be doing it in the first place. I have lost all hope of this issue being resolved. I went ahead and created a new dev account, the id verification was in progress when Shaun Taulbee of Microsoft, who has been really helpful in the forums, replied saying, If you find it necessary to pay again to create a new account due to a Microsoft problem, send in a support request asking for a refund and we'll review it (and likely approve it given the circumstances). The thought of refund made me happy, but I had my doubts. So once my second account was verified by Geotrust I applied for a refund through the developer dashboard, by creating a support ticket. Couple of days later I got an email from Microsoft saying that the refund had been approved! yay! Few days and the refund showed up on my bill, Well, thank you Microsoft, it means a lot. I am glad it’s over now. The new account works flawlessly. I would still like to get my first account working again and look at my app numbers for Win Mo 6.x, and probably transfer the credits to the new account somehow, but I’ll save it for another day. If you’ve had similar problems with the AppHub, and had to create a new account to submit your app, I suggest you contact the support team and get your dollars refunded!

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  • Professional Development – Difference Between Bio, CV and Resume

    - by Pinal Dave
    Applying for work can be very stressful – you want to put your best foot forward, and it can be very hard to sell yourself to a potential employer while highlighting your best characteristics and answering questions.  On top of that, some jobs require different application materials – a biography (or bio), a curriculum vitae (or CV), or a resume.  These things seem so interchangeable, so what is the difference? Let’s start with the one most of us have heard of – the resume.  A resume is a summary of your job and education history.  If you have ever applied for a job, you will have used a resume.  The ability to write a good resume that highlights your best characteristics and emphasizes your qualifications for a specific job is a skill that will take you a long way in the world.  For such an essential skill, unfortunately it is one that many people struggle with. RESUME So let’s discuss what makes a great resume.  First, make sure that your name and contact information are at the top, in large print (slightly larger font than the rest of the text, size 14 or 16 if the rest is size 12, for example).  You need to make sure that if you catch the recruiter’s attention and they know how to get a hold of you. As for qualifications, be quick and to the point.  Make your job title and the company the headline, and include your skills, accomplishments, and qualifications as bullet points.  Use good action verbs, like “finished,” “arranged,” “solved,” and “completed.”  Include hard numbers – don’t just say you “changed the filing system,” say that you “revolutionized the storage of over 250 files in less than five days.”  Doesn’t that sentence sound much more powerful? Curriculum Vitae (CV) Now let’s talk about curriculum vitae, or “CVs”.  A CV is more like an expanded resume.  The same rules are still true: put your name front and center, keep your contact info up to date, and summarize your skills with bullet points.  However, CVs are often required in more technical fields – like science, engineering, and computer science.  This means that you need to really highlight your education and technical skills. Difference between Resume and CV Resumes are expected to be one or two pages long – CVs can be as many pages as necessary.  If you are one of those people lucky enough to feel limited by the size constraint of resumes, a CV is for you!  On a CV you can expand on your projects, highlight really exciting accomplishments, and include more educational experience – including GPA and test scores from the GRE or MCAT (as applicable).  You can also include awards, associations, teaching and research experience, and certifications.  A CV is a place to really expand on all your experience and how great you will be in this particular position. Biography (Bio) Chances are, you already know what a bio is, and you have even read a few of them.  Think about the one or two paragraphs that every author includes in the back flap of a book.  Think about the sentences under a blogger’s photo on every “About Me” page.  That is a bio.  It is a way to quickly highlight your life experiences.  It is essentially the way you would introduce yourself at a party. Where a bio is required for a job, chances are they won’t want to know about where you were born and how many pets you have, though.  This is a way to summarize your entire job history in quick-to-read format – and sometimes during a job hunt, being able to get to the point and grab the recruiter’s interest is the best way to get your foot in the door.  Think of a bio as your entire resume put into words. Most bios have a standard format.  In paragraph one, talk about your most recent position and accomplishments there, specifically how they relate to the job you are applying for.  If you have teaching or research experience, training experience, certifications, or management experience, talk about them in paragraph two.  Paragraph three and four are for highlighting publications, education, certifications, associations, etc.  To wrap up your bio, provide your contact info and availability (dates and times). Where to use What? For most positions, you will know exactly what kind of application to use, because the job announcement will state what materials are needed – resume, CV, bio, cover letter, skill set, etc.  If there is any confusion, choose whatever the industry standard is (CV for technical fields, resume for everything else) or choose which of your documents is the strongest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, Professional Development, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

    - by aspiringgeek
    Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario Conventional Structures Columnstore ? SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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  • What Keeps You from Changing Your Public IP Address and Wreaking Havoc on the Internet?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    What exactly is preventing you (or anyone else) from changing their IP address and causing all sorts of headaches for ISPs and other Internet users? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Whitemage is curious about what’s preventing him from wantonly changing his IP address and causing trouble: An interesting question was asked of me and I did not know what to answer. So I’ll ask here. Let’s say I subscribed to an ISP and I’m using cable internet access. The ISP gives me a public IP address of 60.61.62.63. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75, and messing with another consumer’s internet access? For the sake of this argument, let’s say that this other IP address is also owned by the same ISP. Also, let’s assume that it’s possible for me to go into the cable modem settings and manually change the IP address. Under a business contract where you are allocated static addresses, you are also assigned a default gateway, a network address and a broadcast address. So that’s 3 addresses the ISP “loses” to you. That seems very wasteful for dynamically assigned IP addresses, which the majority of customers are. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Two things to investigate here, why can’t we just go around changing our addresses, and is the assignment process as wasteful as it seems? The Answer SuperUser contributor Moses offers some insight: Cable modems aren’t like your home router (ie. they don’t have a web interface with simple point-and-click buttons that any kid can “hack” into). Cable modems are “looked up” and located by their MAC address by the ISP, and are typically accessed by technicians using proprietary software that only they have access to, that only runs on their servers, and therefore can’t really be stolen. Cable modems also authenticate and cross-check settings with the ISPs servers. The server has to tell the modem whether it’s settings (and location on the cable network) are valid, and simply sets it to what the ISP has it set it for (bandwidth, DHCP allocations, etc). For instance, when you tell your ISP “I would like a static IP, please.”, they allocate one to the modem through their servers, and the modem allows you to use that IP. Same with bandwidth changes, for instance. To do what you are suggesting, you would likely have to break into the servers at the ISP and change what it has set up for your modem. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Every ISP is different, both in practice and how close they are with the larger network that is providing service to them. Depending on those factors, they could be using a combination of ACL and static ARP. It also depends on the technology in the cable network itself. The ISP I worked for used some form of ACL, but that knowledge was a little beyond my paygrade. I only got to work with the technician’s interface and do routine maintenance and service changes. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75 and mess with another consumer’s internet access? Given the above, what keeps you from changing your IP to one that your ISP hasn’t specifically given to you is a server that is instructing your modem what it can and can’t do. Even if you somehow broke into the modem, if 60.61.62.75 is already allocated to another customer, then the server will simply tell your modem that it can’t have it. David Schwartz offers some additional insight with a link to a white paper for the really curious: Most modern ISPs (last 13 years or so) will not accept traffic from a customer connection with a source IP address they would not route to that customer were it the destination IP address. This is called “reverse path forwarding”. See BCP 38. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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  • Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Let's Get Social and Interactive

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} On this blog, we often write about getting social and interactive.  Usually, we’re talking about how to create a social business or how to make the customer experience more social and interactive.  Today’s topic is about getting social and interactive as well. But this time we’re talking about getting social and interactive the old fashioned way, face-to-face at Oracle OpenWorld with fellow Oracle WebCenter customers, partners and experts and the broader Oracle community.  Here are some great ways to get social at OpenWorld outside of the exhibition halls and meeting rooms: Oracle OpenWorld Welcome Reception - Sponsored by FujitsuSunday, September 30, 7:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m.Yerba Buena Gardens & Howard Street Tent You’ll definitely want to attend the Opening Ceremonies for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 on Sunday, September 30. Centered in Yerba Buena Gardens (YBG) and shimmying out to other venues, the Opening Ceremonies are not to be missed. Join other attendees for great food and drink, energizing music, networking opportunities, and more. While you’re at YBG (home of ORACLE TEAM USA’s America’s Cup Pavilion), be sure to meet the sailors who will be defending the 34th America’s Cup in 2013. Get a good look at the 161-year old Trophy itself—the oldest trophy still being contested in international sport. And at the AC72 boat display, view a model of the largest wingsail ever built. Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation ReceptionTuesday, October 2, 6:30 p.m.—9:30 p.m.The Palace Hotel, Rallston BallroomThose Oracle WebCenter customers who’ve RSVP’d to attend the Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation Reception shouldn’t miss this private cocktail reception at one of San Francisco’s finest hotels. Sponsored by Oracle WebCenter partners Fishbowl Solutions, Fujitsu, Keste, Mythics, Redstone Content Solutions, TEAM Informatics, and TekStream, this evening will provide plenty of time to interact with other WebCenter customers, partners and employees over hors d'oeuvres and cocktails. Oracle Appreciation Event – Sponsored by CSC, Fujitsu and IntelWednesday, October 3, 7:30 p.m.—1:00 a.m.Treasure Island, San Francisco On Wednesday night October 3, Treasure Island will be engineered to rock as the Oracle Appreciation Event gets revved up and attendees get rolling. As always at the Oracle Appreciation Event, there will be unlimited refreshments, fun and games, the most awesome views of San Francisco from just about anywhere, and top notch entertainment.  Past performers read like a veritable who’s who of the rock and roll elite. Join us—it's our way of saying thanks to you for supporting Oracle and our flagship conference. Complimentary shuttle service to and from Treasure Island will be provided, so all you have to worry about is having a rocking night of your own. Oracle OpenWorld Music FestivalSeptember 30-October 4, Check schedule for venues and times.Oracle presents the first annual Oracle OpenWorld Musical Festival, featuring some of today’s breakthrough musicians from around the country and the world including Macy Gray, Joss Stone, Jimmy Cliff and The Hives. It’s five nights of back-to-back performances in the heart of San Francisco. Registered Oracle conference attendees get free admission, so remember your badge when you head to a show. With limited space at some venues, these concerts are first-come, first-served. So mark your calendars and get ready for the music to begin. See you there!I hope this give you an idea of the many opportunities to socialize and interact with the Oracle community at OpenWorld, and if you’re a music lover like me, you’re in for a special treat as we debut our first annual Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival.  Check out the links below for more information on these events and the many featured performers: Reflections from the Young Prisms A Brief Soul Session with Joss Stone Mixing It Up with Blues Mix Red Meat’s Music is Rare and Well Done The English Beat’s Dave Wakeling Gets Philosophical Top Ten Reasons to Attend the Oracle Appreciation Event There’s Magic in the Air, There’ll Be Music Everywhere Looking forward to seeing you at OpenWorld!

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  • Xobni Plus for Outlook [Review]

    - by The Geek
    Overview Xobni Plus is an addin that will bring a sidebar to Outlook which allows you to search through your inbox and contacts a lot easier. It provides the ability to search and keep track of your favorite social networks. Searching with Xobni is a lot more powerful than the default search feature in Outlook. It let’s you drill down your searches to conversations, email, links, and attachments. It now supports Outlook 2010 both 32 & 64-bit versions. Installation & Setup Installation is easy following the wizard. After completing the wizard you can tell you’re friends on Facebook and Twitter that you are now using it. You can also decide to join their Product Improvement Program if you want. After installation when you open Outlook, Xobni appears as a sidebar on the right side. Don’t worry about it always being in the way, as you can hide it if you need more room for other Outlook functions. After Xobni free is installed, you can upgrade to the Plus version at any time. A new window will open up and you can use your Credit Card, PayPal, or redeem a code if you have one. Features & Use Where to begin with the amount of features available in Xobni Plus? It really has an amazing amount of cool features. Of course you’ll have all of the features of the Free Version which we previously covered…and a lot more. After Xobni is installed you’ll notice a section for it on the Ribbon. From here you can search Xobni, show or hide the Sidebar, and change other options. It allows you to easily keep up with various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn… Check out email analytics and contact ranks. Click on the Files Exchanged tab to search for specific attachments. Quickly search links exchanged with your contacts. Hover over a link to get a preview of what it entails. It gives you the ability to index all of your Yahoo mail as well, without the need for purchasing Yahoo Plus! Then your Yahoo messages appear in the Xobni sidebar. When you select a contact you can see related messages from you Yahoo account. Easily index all of your mail…including Yahoo mail for better organization and faster search results. There are several options you can select to change the way Xobni works. From setting up your Yahoo email, Indexing options, and much more. Additional Features of Xobni Plus Advanced Search Capabilities – Filter results, Boolean & Phrase Search, Ability to search Appointments & Tasks, Advanced Search Builder Search unlimited PST data files Xobni contacts in the compose screen Find links exchanged with your contacts View calendar appointments One year premium tech support No Ads! Performance We ran Xobni Plus on Outlook 2010 32-bit on a Dual-Core AMD Athlon system with 4GB of RAM and found it to run quite smoothly. However, we did notice it would sometimes slow down launching Outlook, especially if other apps are running at the same time. Product Support When you buy a license for Xobni Plus you get a full year of premium tech support. They provide a Questions and Answers page on their site where you can run a search query and answers appear instantly. You can contact support directly as a Plus member through their web form and they advise the turn around time is 2 business days. However, when we tested it, we received a response within 24 hours. They also provide FAQ, Community forum, and you can download the Owners Manual in PDF format from the support page. Conclusion Xobni Plus is a very powerful addin for Outlook and includes a lot more features that we didn’t cover in this review. You can download Xobni free edition which includes an 8 day free trial of the Plus version. This provides a good way to start getting familiar with it. Then upgrade to Xobni Plus at any time for $29.95. Once you get started, you’ll find the sidebar is nicely laid out and intuitive to use. If you live out of Outlook during the day, Xobni Plus is a great addition for fast and powerful searches. It provides an easy way to keep all of your contacts and messages well organized and easy to find. Xobni Plus works with XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (32 & 64-bit editions) Outlook 2003, 2007 and both 32 & 64-bit editions of Outlook 2010. Download Xobni Plus Download Xobni Free Edition Rating Installation: 8 Ease of Use: 8 Features: 9 Performance: 8 Product Support: 8 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Xobni Free Powers Up Outlook’s Search and ContactsCreate an Email Template in Outlook 2003Add Social Elements to Your Gmail Contacts with RapportiveChange Outlook Startup FolderClear Outlook Searches and MRU (Most Recently Used) Lists TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 10 Superb Firefox Wallpapers OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides

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  • Using Stored Procedures in SSIS

    - by dataintegration
    The SSIS Data Flow components: the source task and the destination task are the easiest way to transfer data in SSIS. Some data transactions do not fit this model, they are procedural tasks modeled as stored procedures. In this article we show how you can call stored procedures available in RSSBus ADO.NET Providers from SSIS. In this article we will use the CreateJob and the CreateBatch stored procedures available in RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for Salesforce, but the same steps can be used to call a stored procedure in any of our data providers. Step 1: Open Visual Studio and create a new Integration Services Project. Step 2: Add a new Data Flow Task to the Control Flow window. Step 3: Open the Data Flow Task and add a Script Component to the data flow pane. A dialog box will pop-up allowing you to select the Script Component Type: pick the source type as we will be outputting columns from our stored procedure. Step 4: Double click the Script Component to open the editor. Step 5: In the "Inputs and Outputs" settings, enter all the columns you want to output to the data flow. Ensure the correct data type has been set for each output. You can check the data type by selecting the output and then changing the "DataType" property from the property editor. In our example, we'll add the column JobID of type String. Step 6: Select the "Script" option in the left-hand pane and click the "Edit Script" button. This will open a new Visual Studio window with some boiler plate code in it. Step 7: In the CreateOutputRows() function you can add code that executes the stored procedures included with the Salesforce Component. In this example we will be using the CreateJob and CreateBatch stored procedures. You can find a list of the available stored procedures along with their inputs and outputs in the product help. //Configure the connection string to your credentials String connectionString = "Offline=False;user=myusername;password=mypassword;access token=mytoken;"; using (SalesforceConnection conn = new SalesforceConnection(connectionString)) { //Create the command to call the stored procedure CreateJob SalesforceCommand cmd = new SalesforceCommand("CreateJob", conn); cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; cmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("ObjectName", "Contact")); cmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("Action", "insert")); //Execute CreateJob //CreateBatch requires JobID as input so we store this value for later SalesforceDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader(); String JobID = ""; while (rdr.Read()) { JobID = (String)rdr["JobID"]; } //Create the command for CreateBatch, for this example we are adding two new rows SalesforceCommand batCmd = new SalesforceCommand("CreateBatch", conn); batCmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; batCmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("JobID", JobID)); batCmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("Aggregate", "<Contact><Row><FirstName>Bill</FirstName>" + "<LastName>White</LastName></Row><Row><FirstName>Bob</FirstName><LastName>Black</LastName></Row></Contact>")); //Execute CreateBatch SalesforceDataReader batRdr = batCmd.ExecuteReader(); } Step 7b: If you had specified output columns earlier, you can now add data into them using the UserComponent Output0Buffer. For example, we had set an output column called JobID of type String so now we can set a value for it. We will modify the DataReader that contains the output of CreateJob like so:. while (rdr.Read()) { Output0Buffer.AddRow(); JobID = (String)rdr["JobID"]; Output0Buffer.JobID = JobID; } Step 8: Note: You will need to modify the connection string to include your credentials. Also ensure that the System.Data.RSSBus.Salesforce assembly is referenced and include the following using statements to the top of the class: using System.Data; using System.Data.RSSBus.Salesforce; Step 9: Once you are done editing your script, save it, and close the window. Click OK in the Script Transformation window to go back to the main pane. Step 10: If had any outputs from the Script Component you can use them in your data flow. For example we will use a Flat File Destination. Configure the Flat File Destination to output the results to a file, and you should see the JobId in the file. Step 11: Your project should be ready to run.

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  • Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

    - by Tarun Arora
    Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples.         After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped.         Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run.   Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test.   Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through.  As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete.      Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’.    Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap   Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You!   Share this post : CodeProject

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  • How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

    - by kanichiro.nishida
      Do you know how many reports on your BI Publisher server are accessed yesterday ? Or, how many users accessed to the reports yesterday, or what are the average number of the users accessed to the reports during the week vs. weekend or morning vs. afternoon ? With BI Publisher 11G, now you can audit your user’s reports access and understand the state of the reporting environment at your server, each user, or each report level. At the previous post I’ve talked about what the BI Publisher’s auditing functionality and how to enable it so that BI Publisher can start collecting such data. (How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?)Now, how can you visualize such auditing data to have a better understanding and gain more insights? With Fusion Middleware Audit Framework you have an option to store the auditing data into a database instead of a log file, which is the default option. Once you enable the database storage option, that means you have your auditing data (or, user report access data) in your database tables, now no brainer, you can start visualize the data, create reports, analyze, and share with BI Publisher. So, first, let’s take a look on how to enable the database storage option for the auditing data. How to Feed the Auditing Data into Database First you need to create a database schema for Fusion Middleware Audit Framework with RCU (Repository Creation Utility). If you have already installed BI Publisher 11G you should be familiar with this RCU. It creates any database schema necessary to run any Fusion Middleware products including BI stuff. And you can use the same RCU that you used for your BI or BI Publisher installation to create this Audit schema. Create Audit Schema with RCU Here are the steps: Go to $RCU_HOME/bin and execute the ‘rcu’ command Choose Create at the starting screen and click Next. Enter your database details and click Next. Choose the option to create a new prefix, for example ‘BIP’, ‘KAN’, etc. Select 'Audit Services' from the list of schemas. Click Next and accept the tablespace creation. Click Finish to start the process. After this, there should be following three Audit related schema created in your database. <prefix>_IAU (e.g. KAN_IAU) <prefix>_IAU_APPEND (e.g. KAN_IAU_APPEND) <prefix>_IAU_VIEWER (e.g. KAN_IAU_VIEWER) Setup Datasource at WebLogic After you create a database schema for your auditing data, now you need to create a JDBC connection on your WebLogic Server so the Audit Framework can access to the database schema that was created with the RCU with the previous step. Connect to the Oracle WebLogic Server administration console: http://hostname:port/console (e.g. http://report.oracle.com:7001/console) Under Services, click the Data Sources link. Click ‘Lock & Edit’ so that you can make changes Click New –> ‘Generic Datasource’ to create a new data source. Enter the following details for the new data source:  Name: Enter a name such as Audit Data Source-0.  JNDI Name: jdbc/AuditDB  Database Type: Oracle  Click Next and select ‘Oracle's Driver (Thin XA) Versions: 9.0.1 or later’ as Database Driver (if you’re using Oracle database), and click Next. The Connection Properties page appears. Enter the following information: Database Name: Enter the name of the database (SID) to which you will connect. Host Name: Enter the hostname of the database.  Port: Enter the database port.  Database User Name: This is the name of the audit schema that you created in RCU. The suffix is always IAU for the audit schema. For example, if you gave the prefix as ‘BIP’, then the schema name would be ‘KAN_IAU’.  Password: This is the password for the audit schema that you created in RCU.   Click Next. Accept the defaults, and click Test Configuration to verify the connection. Click Next Check listed servers where you want to make this JDBC connection available. Click ‘Finish’ ! After that, make sure you click ‘Activate Changes’ at the left hand side top to take the new JDBC connection in effect. Register your Audit Data Storing Database to your Domain Finally, you can register the JNDI/JDBC datasource as your Auditing data storage with Fusion Middleware Control (EM). Here are the steps: 1. Login to Fusion Middleware Control 2. Navigate to Weblogic Domain, right click on ‘bifoundation…..’, select Security, then Audit Store. 3. Click the searchlight icon next to the Datasource JNDI Name field. 4.Select the Audit JNDI/JDBC datasource you created in the previous step in the pop-up window and click OK. 5. Click Apply to continue. 6. Restart the whole WebLogic Servers in the domain. After this, now the BI Publisher should start feeding all the auditing data into the database table called ‘IAU_BASE’. Try login to BI Publisher and open a couple of reports, you should see the activity audited in the ‘IAU_BASE’ table. If not working, you might want to check the log file, which is located at $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/logs/AdminServer-diagnostic.log to see if there is any error. Once you have the data in the database table, now, it’s time to visualize with BI Publisher reports! Create a First BI Publisher Auditing Report Register Auditing Datasource as JNDI datasource First thing you need to do is to register the audit datasource (JNDI/JDBC connection) you created in the previous step as JNDI data source at BI Publisher. It is a JDBC connection registered as JNDI, that means you don’t need to create a new JDBC connection by typing the connection URL, username/password, etc. You can just register it using the JNDI name. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Login to BI Publisher as Administrator (e.g. weblogic) Go to Administration Page Click ‘JNDI Connection’ under Data Sources and Click ‘New’ Type Data Source Name and JNDI Name. The JNDI Name is the one you created in the WebLogic Console as the auditing datasource. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Click ‘Test Connection’ to make sure the datasource connection works. Provide appropriate roles so that the report developers or viewers can share this data source to view reports. Click ‘Apply’ to save. Create Data Model Select Data Model from the tool bar menu ‘New’ Set ‘Default Data Source’ to the audit JNDI data source you have created in the previous step. Select ‘SQL Query’ for your data set Use Query Builder to build a query or just type a sql query. Either way, the table you want to report against is ‘IAU_BASE’. This IAU_BASE table contains all the auditing data for other products running on the WebLogic Server such as JPS, OID, etc. So, if you care only specific to BI Publisher then you want to filter by using  ‘IAU_COMPONENTTYPE’ column which contains the product name (e.g. ’xmlpserver’ for BI Publisher). Here is my sample sql query. select     "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" as "IAU_COMPONENTTYPE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTTYPE" as "IAU_EVENTTYPE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTCATEGORY" as "IAU_EVENTCATEGORY",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TSTZORIGINATING" as "IAU_TSTZORIGINATING",    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'YYYY-MM-DD') IAU_DATE,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'DAY') as IAU_DAY,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'HH24') as IAU_HH24,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'WW') as IAU_WEEK_OF_YEAR,      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_INITIATOR" as "IAU_INITIATOR",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_RESOURCE" as "IAU_RESOURCE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TARGET" as "IAU_TARGET",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_MESSAGETEXT" as "IAU_MESSAGETEXT",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_FAILURECODE" as "IAU_FAILURECODE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_REMOTEIP" as "IAU_REMOTEIP" from    "KAN3_IAU"."IAU_BASE" "IAU_BASE" where "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" = 'xmlpserver' Once you saved a sample XML for this data model, now you can create a report with this data model. Create Report Now you can use one of the BI Publisher’s layout options to design the report layout and visualize the auditing data. I’m a big fan of Online Layout Editor, it’s just so easy and simple to create reports, and on top of that, all the reports created with Online Layout Editor has the Interactive View with automatic data linking and filtering feature without any setting or coding. If you haven’t checked the Interactive View or Online Layout Editor you might want to check these previous blog posts. (Interactive Reporting with BI Publisher 11G, Interactive Master Detail Report Just A Few Clicks Away!) But of course, you can use other layout design option such as RTF template. Here are some sample screenshots of my report design with Online Layout Editor.     Visualize and Gain More Insights about your Customers (Users) ! Now you can visualize your auditing data to have better understanding and gain more insights about your reporting environment you manage. It’s been actually helping me personally to answer the  questios like below.  How many reports are accessed or opened yesterday, today, last week ? Who is accessing which report at what time ? What are the time windows when the most of the reports access happening ? What are the most viewed reports ? Who are the active users ? What are the # of reports access or user access trend for the last month, last 6 months, last 12 months, etc ? I was talking with one of the best concierge in the world at this hotel the other day, and he was telling me that the best concierge knows about their customers inside-out therefore they can provide a very private service that is customized to each customer to meet each customer’s specific needs. Well, this is true when it comes to how to administrate and manage your reporting environment, right ? The best way to serve your customers (report users, including both viewers and developers) is to understand how they use, what they use, when they use. Auditing is not just about compliance, but it’s the way to improve the customer service. The BI Publisher 11G Auditing feature enables just that to help you understand your customers better. Happy customer service, be the best reporting concierge! p.s. please share with us on what other information would be helpful for you for the auditing! Always, any feedback is a great value and inspiration for us!  

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  • Remove box2d bodies after collision deduction android?

    - by jubin
    Can any one explain me how to destroy box2d body when collide i have tried but my application crashed.First i have checked al collisions then add all the bodies in array who i want to destroy.I am trying to learning this tutorial My all the bodies are falling i want these bodies should destroy when these bodies will collide my actor monkey but when it collide it destroy but my aplication crashed.I have googled and from google i got the application crash reasons we should not destroy body in step funtion but i am removing body in the last of tick method. could any one help me or provide me code aur check my code why i am getting this prblem or how can i destroy box2d bodies. This is my code what i am doing. Please could any one check my code and tell me what is i am doing wrong for removing bodies. The code is for multiple box2d objects falling on my actor monkey it should be destroy when it will fall on the monkey.It is destroing but my application crahes. static class Box2DLayer extends CCLayer { protected static final float PTM_RATIO = 32.0f; protected static final float WALK_FACTOR = 3.0f; protected static final float MAX_WALK_IMPULSE = 0.2f; protected static final float ANIM_SPEED = 0.3f; int isLeft=0; String dir=""; int x =0; float direction; CCColorLayer objectHint; // protected static final float PTM_RATIO = 32.0f; protected World _world; protected static Body spriteBody; CGSize winSize = CCDirector.sharedDirector().winSize(); private static int count = 200; protected static Body monkey_body; private static Body bodies; CCSprite monkey; float animDelay; int animPhase; CCSpriteSheet danceSheet = CCSpriteSheet.spriteSheet("phases.png"); CCSprite _block; List<Body> toDestroy = new ArrayList<Body>(); //CCSpriteSheet _spriteSheet; private static MyContactListener _contactListener = new MyContactListener(); public Box2DLayer() { this.setIsAccelerometerEnabled(true); CCSprite bg = CCSprite.sprite("jungle.png"); addChild(bg,0); bg.setAnchorPoint(0,0); bg.setPosition(0,0); CGSize s = CCDirector.sharedDirector().winSize(); // Use scaled width and height so that our boundaries always match the current screen float scaledWidth = s.width/PTM_RATIO; float scaledHeight = s.height/PTM_RATIO; Vector2 gravity = new Vector2(0.0f, -30.0f); boolean doSleep = false; _world = new World(gravity, doSleep); // Create edges around the entire screen // Define the ground body. BodyDef bxGroundBodyDef = new BodyDef(); bxGroundBodyDef.position.set(0.0f, 0.0f); // The body is also added to the world. Body groundBody = _world.createBody(bxGroundBodyDef); // Register our contact listener // Define the ground box shape. PolygonShape groundBox = new PolygonShape(); Vector2 bottomLeft = new Vector2(0f,0f); Vector2 topLeft = new Vector2(0f,scaledHeight); Vector2 topRight = new Vector2(scaledWidth,scaledHeight); Vector2 bottomRight = new Vector2(scaledWidth,0f); // bottom groundBox.setAsEdge(bottomLeft, bottomRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // top groundBox.setAsEdge(topLeft, topRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // left groundBox.setAsEdge(topLeft, bottomLeft); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // right groundBox.setAsEdge(topRight, bottomRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); CCSprite floorbg = CCSprite.sprite("grassbehind.png"); addChild(floorbg,1); floorbg.setAnchorPoint(0,0); floorbg.setPosition(0,0); CCSprite floorfront = CCSprite.sprite("grassfront.png"); floorfront.setTag(2); this.addBoxBodyForSprite(floorfront); addChild(floorfront,3); floorfront.setAnchorPoint(0,0); floorfront.setPosition(0,0); addChild(danceSheet); //CCSprite monkey = CCSprite.sprite(danceSheet, CGRect.make(0, 0, 48, 73)); //addChild(danceSprite); monkey = CCSprite.sprite("arms_up.png"); monkey.setTag(2); monkey.setPosition(200,100); BodyDef spriteBodyDef = new BodyDef(); spriteBodyDef.type = BodyType.DynamicBody; spriteBodyDef.bullet=true; spriteBodyDef.position.set(200 / PTM_RATIO, 300 / PTM_RATIO); monkey_body = _world.createBody(spriteBodyDef); monkey_body.setUserData(monkey); PolygonShape spriteShape = new PolygonShape(); spriteShape.setAsBox(monkey.getContentSize().width/PTM_RATIO/2, monkey.getContentSize().height/PTM_RATIO/2); FixtureDef spriteShapeDef = new FixtureDef(); spriteShapeDef.shape = spriteShape; spriteShapeDef.density = 2.0f; spriteShapeDef.friction = 0.70f; spriteShapeDef.restitution = 0.0f; monkey_body.createFixture(spriteShapeDef); //Vector2 force = new Vector2(10, 10); //monkey_body.applyLinearImpulse(force, spriteBodyDef.position); addChild(monkey,10000); this.schedule(tickCallback); this.schedule(createobjects, 2.0f); objectHint = CCColorLayer.node(ccColor4B.ccc4(255,0,0,128), 200f, 100f); addChild(objectHint, 15000); objectHint.setVisible(false); _world.setContactListener(_contactListener); } private UpdateCallback tickCallback = new UpdateCallback() { public void update(float d) { tick(d); } }; private UpdateCallback createobjects = new UpdateCallback() { public void update(float d) { secondUpdate(d); } }; private void secondUpdate(float dt) { this.addNewSprite(); } public void addBoxBodyForSprite(CCSprite sprite) { BodyDef spriteBodyDef = new BodyDef(); spriteBodyDef.type = BodyType.StaticBody; //spriteBodyDef.bullet=true; spriteBodyDef.position.set(sprite.getPosition().x / PTM_RATIO, sprite.getPosition().y / PTM_RATIO); spriteBody = _world.createBody(spriteBodyDef); spriteBody.setUserData(sprite); Vector2 verts[] = { new Vector2(-11.8f / PTM_RATIO, -24.5f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(11.7f / PTM_RATIO, -24.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(29.2f / PTM_RATIO, -14.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(28.7f / PTM_RATIO, -0.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(8.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.2f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-29.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-26.3f / PTM_RATIO, -12.2f / PTM_RATIO) }; PolygonShape spriteShape = new PolygonShape(); spriteShape.set(verts); //spriteShape.setAsBox(sprite.getContentSize().width/PTM_RATIO/2, //sprite.getContentSize().height/PTM_RATIO/2); FixtureDef spriteShapeDef = new FixtureDef(); spriteShapeDef.shape = spriteShape; spriteShapeDef.density = 2.0f; spriteShapeDef.friction = 0.70f; spriteShapeDef.restitution = 0.0f; spriteShapeDef.isSensor=true; spriteBody.createFixture(spriteShapeDef); } public void addNewSprite() { count=0; Random rand = new Random(); int Number = rand.nextInt(10); switch(Number) { case 0: _block = CCSprite.sprite("banana.png"); break; case 1: _block = CCSprite.sprite("backpack.png");break; case 2: _block = CCSprite.sprite("statue.png");break; case 3: _block = CCSprite.sprite("pineapple.png");break; case 4: _block = CCSprite.sprite("bananabunch.png");break; case 5: _block = CCSprite.sprite("hat.png");break; case 6: _block = CCSprite.sprite("canteen.png");break; case 7: _block = CCSprite.sprite("banana.png");break; case 8: _block = CCSprite.sprite("statue.png");break; case 9: _block = CCSprite.sprite("hat.png");break; } int padding=20; //_block.setPosition(CGPoint.make(100, 100)); // Determine where to spawn the target along the Y axis CGSize winSize = CCDirector.sharedDirector().displaySize(); int minY = (int)(_block.getContentSize().width / 2.0f); int maxY = (int)(winSize.width - _block.getContentSize().width / 2.0f); int rangeY = maxY - minY; int actualY = rand.nextInt(rangeY) + minY; // Create block and add it to the layer float xOffset = padding+_block.getContentSize().width/2+((_block.getContentSize().width+padding)*count); _block.setPosition(CGPoint.make(actualY, 750)); _block.setTag(1); float w = _block.getContentSize().width; objectHint.setVisible(true); objectHint.changeWidth(w); objectHint.setPosition(actualY-w/2, 460); this.addChild(_block,10000); // Create ball body and shape BodyDef ballBodyDef1 = new BodyDef(); ballBodyDef1.type = BodyType.DynamicBody; ballBodyDef1.position.set(actualY/PTM_RATIO, 480/PTM_RATIO); bodies = _world.createBody(ballBodyDef1); bodies.setUserData(_block); PolygonShape circle1 = new PolygonShape(); Vector2 verts[] = { new Vector2(-11.8f / PTM_RATIO, -24.5f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(11.7f / PTM_RATIO, -24.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(29.2f / PTM_RATIO, -14.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(28.7f / PTM_RATIO, -0.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(8.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.2f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-29.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-26.3f / PTM_RATIO, -12.2f / PTM_RATIO) }; circle1.set(verts); FixtureDef ballShapeDef1 = new FixtureDef(); ballShapeDef1.shape = circle1; ballShapeDef1.density = 10.0f; ballShapeDef1.friction = 0.0f; ballShapeDef1.restitution = 0.1f; bodies.createFixture(ballShapeDef1); count++; //Remove(); } @Override public void ccAccelerometerChanged(float accelX, float accelY, float accelZ) { //Apply the directional impulse /*float impulse = monkey_body.getMass()*accelY*WALK_FACTOR; Vector2 force = new Vector2(impulse, 0); monkey_body.applyLinearImpulse(force, monkey_body.getWorldCenter());*/ walk(accelY); //Remove(); } private void walk(float accelY) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub direction = accelY; } private void Remove() { for (Iterator<MyContact> it1 = _contactListener.mContacts.iterator(); it1.hasNext();) { MyContact contact = it1.next(); Body bodyA = contact.fixtureA.getBody(); Body bodyB = contact.fixtureB.getBody(); // See if there's any user data attached to the Box2D body // There should be, since we set it in addBoxBodyForSprite if (bodyA.getUserData() != null && bodyB.getUserData() != null) { CCSprite spriteA = (CCSprite) bodyA.getUserData(); CCSprite spriteB = (CCSprite) bodyB.getUserData(); // Is sprite A a cat and sprite B a car? If so, push the cat // on a list to be destroyed... if (spriteA.getTag() == 1 && spriteB.getTag() == 2) { //Log.v("dsfds", "dsfsd"+bodyA); //_world.destroyBody(bodyA); // removeChild(spriteA, true); toDestroy.add(bodyA); } // Is sprite A a car and sprite B a cat? If so, push the cat // on a list to be destroyed... else if (spriteA.getTag() == 2 && spriteB.getTag() == 1) { //Log.v("dsfds", "dsfsd"+bodyB); toDestroy.add(bodyB); } } } // Loop through all of the box2d bodies we want to destroy... for (Iterator<Body> it1 = toDestroy.iterator(); it1.hasNext();) { Body body = it1.next(); // See if there's any user data attached to the Box2D body // There should be, since we set it in addBoxBodyForSprite if (body.getUserData() != null) { // We know that the user data is a sprite since we set // it that way, so cast it... CCSprite sprite = (CCSprite) body.getUserData(); // Remove the sprite from the scene _world.destroyBody(body); removeChild(sprite, true); } // Destroy the Box2D body as well // _contactListener.mContacts.remove(0); } } public synchronized void tick(float delta) { synchronized (_world) { _world.step(delta, 8, 3); //_world.clearForces(); //addNewSprite(); } CCAnimation danceAnimation = CCAnimation.animation("dance", 1.0f); // Iterate over the bodies in the physics world Iterator<Body> it = _world.getBodies(); while(it.hasNext()) { Body b = it.next(); Object userData = b.getUserData(); if (userData != null && userData instanceof CCSprite) { //Synchronize the Sprites position and rotation with the corresponding body CCSprite sprite = (CCSprite)userData; if(sprite.getTag()==1) { //b.applyLinearImpulse(force, pos); sprite.setPosition(b.getPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b.getPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); sprite.setRotation(-1.0f * ccMacros.CC_RADIANS_TO_DEGREES(b.getAngle())); } else { //Apply the directional impulse float impulse = monkey_body.getMass()*direction*WALK_FACTOR; Vector2 force = new Vector2(impulse, 0); b.applyLinearImpulse(force, b.getWorldCenter()); sprite.setPosition(b.getPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b.getPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); animDelay -= 1.0f/60.0f; if(animDelay <= 0) { animDelay = ANIM_SPEED; animPhase++; if(animPhase > 2) { animPhase = 1; } } if(direction < 0 ) { isLeft=1; } else { isLeft=0; } if(isLeft==1) { dir = "left"; } else { dir = "right"; } float standingLimit = (float) 0.1f; float vX = monkey_body.getLinearVelocity().x; if((vX > -standingLimit)&& (vX < standingLimit)) { // Log.v("sasd", "standing"); } else { } } } } Remove(); } } Sorry for my english. Thanks in advance.

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  • Mysterious dbboon folder with proxy.php file on my godaddy account

    - by Paul
    When doing some web maintenance today, I noticed a strange new folder on my GoDaddy hosting account at the root level named "dbboon", with a single file inside, called proxy.php. It's code is listed below, and seems to be some sort of proxy function. I was kind of troubled because I didn't put it there. I googled all this to learn more, but didn't find anything, except for the proxy file happened to be also stored at pastebin.com: http://pastebin.com/PQsSPbCr I called GoDaddy and they confirmed that it belonged to them, said it was put there by their advanced hosting group for testing purposes but didn't have any more information. I thought this was all really weird: why would they put something in my folder without giving me a heads-up, and why would they need to do something like this? anybody know anything about this? <?php $version = '1.2'; if(isset($_GET['dbboon_version'])) { echo '{"version":"' . $version . '"}'; exit; } function dbboon_parseHeaders($subject) { global $version; $subject = trim($subject); $parsed = Array(); $len = strlen($subject); $position = $field = 0; $position = strpos($subject, "\r\n") + 2; while(isset($subject[$position])) { $nextC = strpos($subject, ':', $position); $fieldName = substr($subject, $position, ($nextC-$position)); $position += strlen($fieldName) + 1; $fieldValue = NULL; while(1) { $nextCrlf = strpos($subject, "\r\n", $position - 1); if(FALSE === $nextCrlf) { $t = substr($subject, $position); $position = $len; } else { $t = substr($subject, $position, $nextCrlf-$position); $position += strlen($t) + 2; } $fieldValue .= $t; if(!isset($subject[$position]) || (' ' != $subject[$position] && "\t" != $subject[$position])) { break; } } $parsed[strtolower($fieldName)] = trim($fieldValue); if($position > $len) { echo '{"result":false,"error":{"code":4,"message":"Communication error, unable to contact proxy service.","version":"' . $version . '"}}'; exit; } } return $parsed; } if(!function_exists('http_build_query')) { function http_build_query($data, $prefix = '', $sep = '', $key = '') { $ret = Array(); foreach((array) $data as $k => $v) { if(is_int($k) && NULL != $prefix) { $k = urlencode($prefix . $k); } if(!empty($key) || $key === 0) { $k = $key . '[' . urlencode($k) . ']'; } if(is_array($v) || is_object($v)) { array_push($ret, http_build_query($v, '', $sep, $k)); } else { array_push($ret, $k . '=' . urlencode($v)); } } if(empty($sep)) { $sep = '&'; } return implode($sep, $ret); } } $host = 'dbexternalsubscriber.secureserver.net'; $get = http_build_query($_GET); $post = http_build_query($_POST); $url = $get ? "?$get" : ''; $fp = fsockopen($host, 80, $errno, $errstr); if($fp) { $payload = "POST /embed/$url HTTP/1.1\r\n"; $payload .= "Host: $host\r\n"; $payload .= "Content-Length: " . strlen($post) . "\r\n"; $payload .= "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n"; $payload .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n"; $payload .= $post; fwrite($fp, $payload); $httpCode = NULL; $response = NULL; $timeout = time() + 15; do { while($line = fgets($fp)) { $response .= $line; if(!trim($line)) { break; } } } while($timeout > time() && NULL === $response); $headers = dbboon_parseHeaders($response); if(isset($headers['transfer-encoding']) && 'chunked' === $headers['transfer-encoding']) { do { $cSize = $read = hexdec(trim(fgets($fp))); while($read > 0) { $buff = fread($fp, $read); $read -= strlen($buff); $response .= $buff; } $response .= fgets($fp); } while($cSize > 0); } else { preg_match('/Content-Length:\s([0-9]+)\r\n/msi', $response, $match); if(!isset($match[1])) { echo '{"result":false,"error":{"code":3,"message":"Communication error, unable to contact proxy service.","version":"' . $version . '"}}'; exit; } else { while($match[1] > 0) { $buff = fread($fp, $match[1]); $match[1] -= strlen($buff); $response .= $buff; } } } fclose($fp); if(!$pos = strpos($response, "\r\n\r\n")) { echo '{"result":false,"error":{"code":2,"message":"Communication error, unable to contact proxy service.","version":"' . $version . '"}}'; exit; } echo substr($response, $pos + 4); } else { echo '{"result":false,"error":{"code":1,"message":"Communication error, unable to contact proxy service.","version":"' . $version . '"}}'; exit; }

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