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• Clone a Hard Drive Using an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Whether you’re setting up multiple computers or doing a full backup, cloning hard drives is a common maintenance task. Don’t bother burning a new boot CD or paying for new software – you can do it easily with your Ubuntu Live CD. Not only can you do this with your Ubuntu Live CD, you can do it right out of the box – no additional software needed! The program we’ll use is called dd, and it’s included with pretty much all Linux distributions. dd is a utility used to do low-level copying – rather than working with files, it works directly on the raw data on a storage device. Note: dd gets a bad rap, because like many other Linux utilities, if misused it can be very destructive. If you’re not sure what you’re doing, you can easily wipe out an entire hard drive, in an unrecoverable way. Of course, the flip side of that is that dd is extremely powerful, and can do very complex tasks with little user effort. If you’re careful, and follow these instructions closely, you can clone your hard drive with one command. We’re going to take a small hard drive that we’ve been using and copy it to a new hard drive, which hasn’t been formatted yet. To make sure that we’re working with the right drives, we’ll open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and enter in the following command sudo fdisk –l We have two small drives, /dev/sda, which has two partitions, and /dev/sdc, which is completely unformatted. We want to copy the data from /dev/sda to /dev/sdc. Note: while you can copy a smaller drive to a larger one, you can’t copy a larger drive to a smaller one with the method described below. Now the fun part: using dd. The invocation we’ll use is: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc In this case, we’re telling dd that the input file (“if”) is /dev/sda, and the output file (“of”) is /dev/sdc. If your drives are quite large, this can take some time, but in our case it took just less than a minute. If we do sudo fdisk –l again, we can see that, despite not formatting /dev/sdc at all, it now has the same partitions as /dev/sda.  Additionally, if we mount all of the partitions, we can see that all of the data on /dev/sdc is now the same as on /dev/sda. Note: you may have to restart your computer to be able to mount the newly cloned drive. And that’s it…If you exercise caution and make sure that you’re using the right drives as the input file and output file, dd isn’t anything to be scared of. Unlike other utilities, dd copies absolutely everything from one drive to another – that means that you can even recover files deleted from the original drive in the clone! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDHow to Browse Without a Trace with an Ubuntu Live CDRecover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CDCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveWipe, Delete, and Securely Destroy Your Hard Drive’s Data the Easy Way 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 Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7

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• SQL SERVER – CXPACKET – Parallelism – Advanced Solution – Wait Type – Day 7 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier we discussed about the what is the common solution to solve the issue with CXPACKET wait time. Today I am going to talk about few of the other suggestions which can help to reduce the CXPACKET wait. If you are going to suggest that I should focus on MAXDOP and COST THRESHOLD – I totally agree. I have covered them in details in yesterday’s blog post. Today we are going to discuss few other way CXPACKET can be reduced. Potential Reasons: If data is heavily skewed, there are chances that query optimizer may estimate the correct amount of the data leading to assign fewer thread to query. This can easily lead to uneven workload on threads and may create CXPAKCET wait. While retrieving the data one of the thread face IO, Memory or CPU bottleneck and have to wait to get those resources to execute its tasks, may create CXPACKET wait as well. Data which is retrieved is on different speed IO Subsystem. (This is not common and hardly possible but there are chances). Higher fragmentations in some area of the table can lead less data per page. This may lead to CXPACKET wait. As I said the reasons here mentioned are not the major cause of the CXPACKET wait but any kind of scenario can create the probable wait time. Best Practices to Reduce CXPACKET wait: Refer earlier article regarding MAXDOP and Cost Threshold. De-fragmentation of Index can help as more data can be obtained per page. (Assuming close to 100 fill-factor) If data is on multiple files which are on multiple similar speed physical drive, the CXPACKET wait may reduce. Keep the statistics updated, as this will give better estimate to query optimizer when assigning threads and dividing the data among available threads. Updating statistics can significantly improve the strength of the query optimizer to render proper execution plan. This may overall affect the parallelism process in positive way. Bad Practice: In one of the recent consultancy project, when I was called in I noticed that one of the ‘experienced’ DBA noticed higher CXPACKET wait and to reduce them, he has increased the worker threads. The reality was increasing worker thread has lead to many other issues. With more number of the threads, more amount of memory was used leading memory pressure. As there were more threads CPU scheduler faced higher ‘Context Switching’ leading further degrading performance. When I explained all these to ‘experienced’ DBA he suggested that now we should reduce the number of threads. Not really! Lower number of the threads may create heavy stalling for parallel queries. I suggest NOT to touch the setting of number of the threads when dealing with CXPACKET wait. Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and I no way claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading book on-line for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats over here is generic and it varies by system to system. You are recommended to test this on development server before implementing to production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: DMV, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• Review: ComponentOne Studio for Entity Framework

  - by Tim Murphy

  While I have always been a fan of libraries that improve coding efficiency and reduce code redundancy I have mostly been using ones that were in the public domain.  As part of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program a got my hands on ComponentOne’s Studio for Entity Framework.  Below are my thought after working with the product for several weeks. My coding preference has always been maintainable code that is reusable across an enterprises protfolio.  Because of this my focus in reviewing this product is less on the RAD components and more on its benefits for layered applications using code first Entity Framework. Before we get into the pros and cons here is a summary of the main feature listed for SEF. Unified Data Context Virtual Data Access More Powerful Data Binding Pros The first thing that I found to my liking is the C1DataSource. It basically manages a cache for your Entity Model context.  Under RAD conditions this is setup automatically when you drop the object on a your design surface.  If you are like me and want to abstract you data management into a library it takes a little more work, but it is still acceptable and gains the same benefits. The second feature that I found beneficial is the definition of views with improved sorting and filtering.  Again the ease of use of these features is greater on the RAD side but no capabilities are missing when manipulating object in code. Linq has become my friend over the last couple of years and it was great to see that ComponentOne had ensured that it remained a first class citizen in their design.  When you look into this product yourself I would suggest taking a dive into LiveLinq which allow the joining of different data source types. As I went through discovering the features of this framework I appreciated the number of examples that they supplied for different uses.  Besides showing how to use SEF with WinForms, WPF and Silverlight they also showed how to accomplish tasks both RAD, code only and MVVM approaches. Cons The only area that I would really like to see improvement is in there level of detail in their documentation.  Specifically I would like to have seen some of the supporting code explained, such as what some supporting object did, in the examples instead of having to go to the programmer’s reference. I did find some times where currently existing projects had some trouble determining scope that the RAD controls were allowed, but I expect this is something that is in part end user related. Summary Overall I found the Studio for Entity Framework capable and well thought out.  If you are already using the Entity Framework this product will fit into your environment with little effort in return for greater flexibility and greater robustness in your solutions. Whether the $895 list price for a standard version works for you will depend on your return on investment. Smaller companies with only a small number of projects may not be able to stomach it, you get a full featured product that is supported by a well established company.  The more projects and the more code you have the greater your return on investment will be. Personally I intend to apply this product to some production systems and will probably have some tips and tricks in the future. del.icio.us Tags: ComponentOne,Studio for Entity Framework,Geeks With Blogs,Influencers,Product Reviews

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• Asynchrony in C# 5: Dataflow Async Logger Sample

  - by javarg

  Check out this (very simple) code examples for TPL Dataflow. Suppose you are developing an Async Logger to register application events to different sinks or log writers. The logger architecture would be as follow: Note how blocks can be composed to achieved desired behavior. The BufferBlock<T> is the pool of log entries to be process whereas linked ActionBlock<TInput> represent the log writers or sinks. The previous composition would allows only one ActionBlock to consume entries at a time. Implementation code would be something similar to (add reference to System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow.dll in %User Documents%\Microsoft Visual Studio Async CTP\Documentation): TPL Dataflow Logger var bufferBlock = new BufferBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> infoLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Info: {0}", e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> errorLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Error: {0}", e.Item2)); bufferBlock.LinkTo(infoLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Info) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.LinkTo(errorLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Error) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Info, "info message")); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Error, "error message")); Note the filter applied to each link (in this case, the Logging Level selects the writer used). We can specify message filters using Predicate functions on each link. Now, the previous sample is useless for a Logger since Logging Level is not exclusive (thus, several writers could be used to process a single message). Let´s use a Broadcast<T> buffer instead of a BufferBlock<T>. Broadcast Logger var bufferBlock = new BroadcastBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(     e => new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(e.Item1, e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> infoLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Info: {0}", e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> errorLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(         e => Console.WriteLine("Error: {0}", e.Item2)); ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>> allLogger =     new ActionBlock<Tuple<LogLevel, string>>(     e => Console.WriteLine("All: {0}", e.Item2)); bufferBlock.LinkTo(infoLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Info) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.LinkTo(errorLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.Error) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.LinkTo(allLogger, e => (e.Item1 & LogLevel.All) != LogLevel.None); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Info, "info message")); bufferBlock.Post(new Tuple<LogLevel, string>(LogLevel.Error, "error message")); As this block copies the message to all its outputs, we need to define the copy function in the block constructor. In this case we create a new Tuple, but you can always use the Identity function if passing the same reference to every output. Try both scenarios and compare the results.

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• SQLAuthority News – Follow up on – Replace a Column Name in Multiple Stored Procedure all together

  - by pinaldave

  Last month I had a fantastic time with lots of puzzles and brain teasers, the amount of participation which I have received on the blog is indeed inspiring to write more. One of the blog post was about how to replace a column name in all the stored procedures. The article had very interesting conversation as a follow up. Please read the original article Replace a Column Name in Multiple Stored Procedure all together before reading this blog further as they are connected. Let us start few of the interesting comments. SQL Server Expert Imran Mohammed had a wonderful first and excellent note. I suggest all of you to read it. Imran stresses on the Data Modelling and Logical as well as Physical Design. Developers must create a logical design and get approval on naming convention, data types, references, constraints, indexes etc. He further suggested that one should not cut steps but must follow all the industry standards and guidelines. Here extended my blog post with following note – “Extending Pinal’s answer, what you can do is go to database properties, all tasks, scripts objects, in scripting wizard select all the stored procedure for which you want to change column name, export the query to a new window and then do find and replace, all in once window and execute the script. But make sure you check what you are replacing, sometimes column names are also used in table names, for ex:Table Name: Product and Column Name: ProductId, ProductName”. Thanks Imran Great Points!  Gatej Alexandru suggested that it is not good idea to DROP or CREATE but rather use ALTER as quite possible there may be permissions issue as well. Very good point let me see if I can write blog post over it. Vinay Kumar and SQLStudent144 have proposed another method to achieve the same. I am combining their solution and writing them here. Step 1. Press Ctrl+T or change “Result to Text” mode. Step 2. Execute below commands.SELECT 'EXEC sp_helptext [' + referencing_schema_name + '.' + referencing_entity_name + ']' FROM sys.dm_sql_referencing_entities('schema.objectname','OBJECT') Where schema.objectname is the object or table you are searching for. Step 3. Now copy the result and paste in new window. Again Press Ctrl+T or change “Result to Text” mode. Step 4. Copy the result and paste in new window. Execute the query. Step 5. Copy the result and paste in new window. Step 6. Now find your searching text in the script, make necessary changes and execute this script. Do not forget to remove the code which is generated in resultset which are not relevant to the T-SQL Script. Digitqr suggest we can do this for other objects besides Stored Procedure as well. Iosif suggests to use tool SQL Search from RedGate. I guess this sums it well. We have an alternative perspective to our original issue of replacing the column name in multiple stored procedure. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Oracle Big Data Software Downloads

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Companies have been making business decisions for decades based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. Oracle offers a broad integrated portfolio of products to help you acquire and organize these diverse data sources and analyze them alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data Connectors Downloads here, includes: Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Release 2.1.0 Oracle Loader for Hadoop Release 2.1.0 Oracle Data Integrator Companion 11g Oracle R Connector for Hadoop v 2.1 Oracle Big Data Documentation The Oracle Big Data solution offers an integrated portfolio of products to help you organize and analyze your diverse data sources alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data, Release 2.2.0 - E41604_01 zip (27.4 MB) Integrated Software and Big Data Connectors User's Guide HTML PDF Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Application Adapter for Hadoop Apache Hadoop is designed to handle and process data that is typically from data sources that are non-relational and data volumes that are beyond what is handled by relational databases. Typical processing in Hadoop includes data validation and transformations that are programmed as MapReduce jobs. Designing and implementing a MapReduce job usually requires expert programming knowledge. However, when you use Oracle Data Integrator with the Application Adapter for Hadoop, you do not need to write MapReduce jobs. Oracle Data Integrator uses Hive and the Hive Query Language (HiveQL), a SQL-like language for implementing MapReduce jobs. Employing familiar and easy-to-use tools and pre-configured knowledge modules (KMs), the application adapter provides the following capabilities: Loading data into Hadoop from the local file system and HDFS Performing validation and transformation of data within Hadoop Loading processed data from Hadoop to an Oracle database for further processing and generating reports Oracle Database Loader for Hadoop Oracle Loader for Hadoop is an efficient and high-performance loader for fast movement of data from a Hadoop cluster into a table in an Oracle database. It pre-partitions the data if necessary and transforms it into a database-ready format. Oracle Loader for Hadoop is a Java MapReduce application that balances the data across reducers to help maximize performance. Oracle R Connector for Hadoop Oracle R Connector for Hadoop is a collection of R packages that provide: Interfaces to work with Hive tables, the Apache Hadoop compute infrastructure, the local R environment, and Oracle database tables Predictive analytic techniques, written in R or Java as Hadoop MapReduce jobs, that can be applied to data in HDFS files You install and load this package as you would any other R package. Using simple R functions, you can perform tasks such as: Access and transform HDFS data using a Hive-enabled transparency layer Use the R language for writing mappers and reducers Copy data between R memory, the local file system, HDFS, Hive, and Oracle databases Schedule R programs to execute as Hadoop MapReduce jobs and return the results to any of those locations Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS, you can use an Oracle Database to access and analyze data residing in Hadoop in these formats: Data Pump files in HDFS Delimited text files in HDFS Hive tables For other file formats, such as JSON files, you can stage the input in Hive tables before using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS. Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS uses external tables to provide Oracle Database with read access to Hive tables, and to delimited text files and Data Pump files in HDFS. Related Documentation Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop Library HTML Oracle R Enterprise HTML Oracle NoSQL Database HTML Recent Blog Posts Big Data Appliance vs. DIY Price Comparison Big Data: Architecture Overview Big Data: Achieve the Impossible in Real-Time Big Data: Vertical Behavioral Analytics Big Data: In-Memory MapReduce Flume and Hive for Log Analytics Building Workflows in Oozie

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• Exploring packages in code

  In my previous post Searching for tasks with code you can see how to explore the control flow side of packages, drilling down through containers, task, and event handlers, but it didn’t cover the data flow. I recently saw a post on the MSDN forum asking how to edit an existing package programmatically, and the sticking point was how to find the the data flow and the components inside. This post builds on some of the previous code and shows how you can explore all objects inside a package. I took the sample Task Search application I’d written previously, and came up with a totally pointless little console application that just walks through the package and writes out the basic type and name of every object it finds, starting with the package itself e.g. Package – MyPackage . The sample package we used last time showed nested objects as well an event handler; a OnPreExecute event tucked away on the task SQL In FEL. The output of this sample tool would look like this: PackageObjects v1.0.0.0 (1.0.0.26627) Copyright (C) 2009 Konesans Ltd Processing File - Z:\Users\Darren Green\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\SSISTestProject\EventsAndContainersWithExe cSQLForSearch.dtsx Package - EventsAndContainersWithExecSQLForSearch For Loop - FOR Counter Loop Task - SQL In Counter Loop Sequence Container - SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper For Each Loop - FEL Simple Loop Task - SQL In FEL Task - SQL On Pre Execute for FEL SQL Task Sequence Container - SEQ Top Level Sequence Container - SEQ Nested Lvl 1 Sequence Container - SEQ Nested Lvl 2 Task - SQL In Nested Lvl 2 Task - SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #1 Task - SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #2 Connection Manager – LocalHost The code is very similar to what we had previously, but there are a couple of extra bits to deal with connections and to look more closely at a task and see if it is a Data Flow task. For connections your just examine the package's Connections collection as shown in the abridged snippets below. First you can see the call to the ProcessConnections method, followed by the method itself. // Load the package file Application application = new Application(); using (Package package = application.LoadPackage(filename, null)) { // Write out the package name Console.WriteLine("Package - {0}", package.Name); ... More ... // Look and the connections ProcessConnections(package.Connections); } private static void ProcessConnections(Connections connections) { foreach (ConnectionManager connectionManager in connections) { Console.WriteLine("Connection Manager - {0}", connectionManager.Name); } } What we didn’t see in the sample output above was anything to do with the Data Flow, but rest assured the code now handles it too. The following snippet shows how each task is examined to see if it is a Data Flow task, and if so we can then loop through all of the components inside the data flow. private static void ProcessTaskHost(TaskHost taskHost) { if (taskHost == null) { return; } Console.WriteLine("Task - {0}", taskHost.Name); // Check if the task is a Data Flow task MainPipe pipeline = taskHost.InnerObject as MainPipe; if (pipeline != null) { ProcessPipeline(pipeline); } } private static void ProcessPipeline(MainPipe pipeline) { foreach (IDTSComponentMetaData90 componentMetadata in pipeline.ComponentMetaDataCollection) { Console.WriteLine("Pipeline Component - {0}", componentMetadata.Name); // If you wish to make changes to the component then you should really use the managed wrapper. // CManagedComponentWrapper wrapper = componentMetadata.Instantiate(); // wrapper.SetComponentProperty("PropertyName", "Value"); } } Hopefully you can see how we get a reference to the Data Flow task, and then use the ComponentMetaDataCollection to find out what components we have inside the pipeline. If you wanted to know more about the component you could look at the ObjectType or ComponentClassID properties. After that it gets a bit harder and you should get a reference to the wrapper object as the comment suggest and start using the properties, just like you would in the create packages samples, see our Code Development category for some for these examples. Download Sample code project PackageObjects.zip (5KB)

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• Code is not the best way to draw

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  It should be quite obvious: drawing requires constant visual feedback. Why is it then that we still draw with code in so many situations? Of course it’s because the low-level APIs always come first, and design tools are built after and on top of those. Existing design tools also don’t typically include complex UI elements such as buttons. When we launched our Touch Display module for Netduino Go!, we naturally built APIs that made it easy to draw on the screen from code, but very soon, we felt the limitations and tedium of drawing in code. In particular, any modification requires a modification of the code, followed by compilation and deployment. When trying to set-up buttons at pixel precision, the process is not optimal. On the other hand, code is irreplaceable as a way to automate repetitive tasks. While tools like Illustrator have ways to repeat graphical elements, they do so in a way that is a little alien and counter-intuitive to my developer mind. From these reflections, I knew that I wanted a design tool that would be structurally code-centric but that would still enable immediate feedback and mouse adjustments. While thinking about the best way to achieve this goal, I saw this fantastic video by Bret Victor: The key to the magic in all these demos is permanent execution of the code being edited. Whenever a parameter is being modified, everything is re-executed immediately so that the impact of the modification is instantaneously visible. If you do this all the time, the code and the result of its execution fuse in the mind of the user into dual representations of a single object. All mental barriers disappear. It’s like magic. The tool I built, Nutshell, is just another implementation of this principle. It manipulates a list of graphical operations on the screen. Each operation has a nice editor, and translates into a bit of code. Any modification to the parameters of the operation will modify the bit of generated code and trigger a re-execution of the whole program. This happens so fast that it feels like the drawing reacts instantaneously to all changes. The order of the operations is also the order in which the code gets executed. So if you want to bring objects to the front, move them down in the list, and up if you want to move them to the back: But where it gets really fun is when you start applying code constructs such as loops to the design tool. The elements that you put inside of a loop can use the loop counter in expressions, enabling crazy scenarios while retaining the real-time edition features. When you’re done building, you can just deploy the code to the device and see it run in its native environment: This works thanks to two code generators. The first code generator is building JavaScript that is executed in the browser to build the canvas view in the web page hosting the tool. The second code generator is building the C# code that will run on the Netduino Go! microcontroller and that will drive the display module. The possibilities are fascinating, even if you don’t care about driving small touch screens from microcontrollers: it is now possible, within a reasonable budget, to build specialized design tools for very vertical applications. Direct feedback is a powerful ally in many domains. Code generation driven by visual designers has become more approachable than ever thanks to extraordinary JavaScript libraries and to the powerful development platform that modern browsers provide. I encourage you to tinker with Nutshell and let it open your eyes to new possibilities that you may not have considered before. It’s open source. And of course, my company, Nwazet, can help you develop your own custom browser-based direct feedback design tools. This is real visual programming…

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• How Exactly Is One Linux OS “Based On” Another Linux OS?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  When reviewing different flavors of Linux, you’ll frequently come across phrases like “Ubuntu is based on Debian” but what exactly does that mean? 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 PLPiper is trying to get a handle on how Linux variants work: I’ve been looking through quite a number of Linux distros recently to get an idea of what’s around, and one phrase that keeps coming up is that “[this OS] is based on [another OS]“. For example: Fedora is based on Red Hat Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu For someone coming from a Mac environment I understand how “OS X is based on Darwin”, however when I look at Linux Distros, I find myself asking “Aren’t they all based on Linux..?” In this context, what exactly does it mean for one Linux OS to be based on another Linux OS? So, what exactly does it mean when we talk about one version of Linux being based off another version? The Answer SuperUser contributor kostix offers a solid overview of the whole system: Linux is a kernel — a (complex) piece of software which works with the hardware and exports a certain Application Programming Interface (API), and binary conventions on how to precisely use it (Application Binary Interface, ABI) available to the “user-space” applications. Debian, RedHat and others are operating systems — complete software environments which consist of the kernel and a set of user-space programs which make the computer useful as they perform sensible tasks (sending/receiving mail, allowing you to browse the Internet, driving a robot etc). Now each such OS, while providing mostly the same software (there are not so many free mail server programs or Internet browsers or desktop environments, for example) differ in approaches to do this and also in their stated goals and release cycles. Quite typically these OSes are called “distributions”. This is, IMO, a somewhat wrong term stemming from the fact you’re technically able to build all the required software by hand and install it on a target machine, so these OSes distribute the packaged software so you either don’t need to build it (Debian, RedHat) or they facilitate such building (Gentoo). They also usually provide an installer which helps to install the OS onto a target machine. Making and supporting an OS is a very complicated task requiring a complex and intricate infrastructure (upload queues, build servers, a bug tracker, and archive servers, mailing list software etc etc etc) and staff. This obviously raises a high barrier for creating a new, from-scratch OS. For instance, Debian provides ca. 37k packages for some five hardware architectures — go figure how much work is put into supporting this stuff. Still, if someone thinks they need to create a new OS for whatever reason, it may be a good idea to use an existing foundation to build on. And this is exactly where OSes based on other OSes come into existence. For instance, Ubuntu builds upon Debian by just importing most packages from it and repackaging only a small subset of them, plus packaging their own, providing their own artwork, default settings, documentation etc. Note that there are variations to this “based on” thing. For instance, Debian fosters the creation of “pure blends” of itself: distributions which use Debian rather directly, and just add a bunch of packages and other stuff only useful for rather small groups of users such as those working in education or medicine or music industry etc. Another twist is that not all these OSes are based on Linux. For instance, Debian also provide FreeBSD and Hurd kernels. They have quite tiny user groups but anyway. 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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• MySQL for Excel 1.3.0 Beta has been released

  - by Javier Treviño

  The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.3.0.  This is a beta release for 1.3.x. MySQL for Excel is an application plug-in enabling data analysts to very easily access and manipulate MySQL data within Microsoft Excel. It enables you to directly work with a MySQL database from within Microsoft Excel so you can easily do tasks such as: Importing MySQL data into Excel Exporting Excel data directly into MySQL to a new or existing table Editing MySQL data directly within Excel As this is a beta version the MySQL for Excel product can be downloaded only by using the product standalone installer at this link http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/windows/excel/ Your feedback on this beta version is very well appreciated, you can raise bugs on the MySQL bugs page or give us your comments on the MySQL for Excel forum. Changes in MySQL for Excel 1.3.0 (2014-06-06, Beta) This section documents all changes and bug fixes applied to MySQL for Excel since the release of 1.2.1. Several new features were added, for more information see What Is New In MySQL for Excel (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-for-excel-what-is-new.html). Known limitations: Upgrading from versions MySQL for Excel 1.2.0 and lower is not possible due to a bug fixed in MySQL for Excel 1.2.1. In that scenario, the old version (MySQL for Excel 1.2.0 or lower) must be uninstalled first. Upgrading from version 1.2.1 works correctly. <CTRL> + <A> cannot be used to select all database objects. Either <SHIFT> + <Arrow Key> or <CTRL> + click must be used instead. PivotTables are normally placed to the right (skipping one column) of the imported data, they will not be created if there is another existing Excel object at that position. Functionality Added or Changed Imported data can now be refreshed by using the native Refresh feature. Fields in the imported data sheet are then updated against the live MySQL database using the saved connection ID. Functionality was added to import data directly into PivotTables, which can be created from any Import operation. Multiple objects (tables and views) can now be imported into Excel, when before only one object could be selected. Relational information is also utilized when importing multiple objects. All options now have descriptive tooltips. Hovering over an option/preference displays helpful information about its use. A new Export Data, Advanced Options option was added that shows all available data types in the Data Type combo box, instead of only showing a subset of the most popular data types. The option dialogs now include a Refresh to Defaults button that resets the dialog's options to their defaults values. Each option dialog is set individually. A new Add Summary Fields for Numeric Columns option was added to the Import Data dialog that automatically adds summary fields for numeric data after the last row of the imported data. The specific summary function is selectable from many options, such as "Total" and "Average." A new collation option was added for the schema and table creation wizards. The default schema collation is "Server Default", and the default table collation is "Schema Default". Collation options may be selected from a drop-down list of all available collations. Quick links: MySQL for Excel documentation: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/en/mysql-for-excel.html. MySQL on Windows blog: http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. MySQL for Excel forum: http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?172. MySQL YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/MySQLChannel. Enjoy and thanks for the support! 

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• Oracle’s New Approach to Cloud-based Applications User Experiences

  - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team

  By Misha Vaughan It was an exciting Oracle OpenWorld this year for customers and partners, as they got to see what their input into the Oracle user experience research and development process has produced for cloud-delivered applications. The result of all this engagement and listening is a focus on simplicity, mobility, and extensibility. These were the core themes across Oracle OpenWorld sessions, executive roundtables, and analyst briefings given by Jeremy Ashley, Oracle's vice president of user experience. The highlight of every meeting with a customer featured the new simplified UI for Oracle’s cloud applications.    Attendees at some sessions and events also saw a vision of what is coming next in the Oracle user experience, and they gave direct feedback on whether this would help solve their business problems.  What did attendees think of what they saw this year? Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus Research was part of  an analyst briefing on next-generation user experiences from Oracle. Here’s what she told CRM Buyer in an interview just after the event:  “Many of the improvements are incremental, which is not surprising, as Oracle regularly updates its application,” Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, told CRM Buyer. "Still, there are distinct themes to this latest set of changes. One is usability. Oracle Sales Cloud, for example, is designed to have zero training for onboarding sales reps, which it does," she explained. "It is quite impressive, actually—the intuitive nature of the application and the design work they have done with this goal in mind. The software uses as few buttons and fields as possible," she pointed out. "The sales rep doesn't have to ask, 'what is the next step?' because she can see what it is."  What else did we hear? Oracle OpenWorld is a time when we can take a broader pulse of our customers’ and partners’ concerns. This year we heard some common user experience themes on the following: · A desire to continue to simplify widely used self-service tasks · A need to understand how customers or partners could take some of the UX lessons learned on simplicity and mobility into their own custom areas and projects  · The continuing challenge of needing to support bring-your-own-device and corporate-provided mobile devices to end users · A desire to harmonize user experiences across platforms for specific business-use cases  What does this mean for next year? Well, there were a lot of things we could only show to smaller groups of customers in our Oracle OpenWorld usability labs and HQ lab tours, to partners at our Expo, and to analysts under non-disclosure agreements. But we used these events as a way to get some early feedback about where we are focusing for the year ahead. Attendees gave us a positive response: @bkhan Saw some excellent UX innovations at the expo “@usableapps: Great job @mishavaughan and @vinoskey on #oow13 UX partner expo!” @WarnerTim @usableapps @mishavaughan @vinoskey @ultan Thanks for an interesting afternoon definitely liked the UX tool kits for partners. You can expect Oracle to continue pushing themes of simplicity, mobility, and extensibility even more aggressively in the next year.  If you are interested to find out what really goes on in the UX labs, such as what we are doing with smartphones, tablets, heads-up displays, and the AppsLab robots, feel free to reach out to me for more information: Misha Vaughan or on Twitter: @mishavaughan.

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• List of available whitepapers as at 04 May 2010

  - by Anthony Shorten

  The following table lists the whitepapers available, from My Oracle Support, for any Oracle Utilities Application Framework based product: KB Id Document Title Contents 559880.1 ConfigLab Design Guidelines Whitepaper outlining how to design and implement a ConfigLab solution. 560367.1 Technical Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products Whitepaper summarizing common technical best practices used by partners, implementation teams and customers.  560382.1 Performance Troubleshooting Guideline Series A set of whitepapers on tracking performance at each tier in the framework. The individual whitepapers are as follows: Concepts - General Concepts and Performance Troublehooting processes Client Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the browser client with common issues and resolutions. Network Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the network with common issues and resolutions. Web Application Server Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the Web Application Server with common issues and resolutions. Server Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the Operating system with common issues and resolutions. Database Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the database with common issues and resolutions. Batch Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the background processing component of the product with common issues and resolutions. 560401.1 Software Configuration Management Series  A set of whitepapers on how to manage customization (code and data) using the tools provided with the framework. The individual whitepapers are as follows: Concepts - General concepts and introduction. Environment Management - Principles and techniques for creating and managing environments. Version Management - Integration of Version control and version management of configuration items.  Release Management - Packaging configuration items into a release.  Distribution - Distribution and installation of  releases across environments  Change Management - Generic change management processes for product implementations. Status Accounting -Status reporting techniques using product facilities.  Defect Management -Generic defect management processes for product implementations. Implementing Single Fixes - Discussion on the single fix architecture and how to use it in an implementation. Implementing Service Packs - Discussion on the service packs and how to use them in an implementation. Implementing Upgrades - Discussion on the the upgrade process and common techniques for minimizing the impact of upgrades. 773473.1 Oracle Utilities Application Framework Security Overview Whitepaper summarizing the security facilities in the framework. Updated for OUAF 4.0.1 774783.1 LDAP Integration for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products Whitepaper summarizing how to integrate an external LDAP based security repository with the framework.  789060.1 Oracle Utilities Application Framework Integration Overview Whitepaper summarizing all the various common integration techniques used with the product (with case studies). 799912.1 Single Sign On Integration for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products Whitepaper outlining a generic process for integrating an SSO product with the framework. 807068.1 Oracle Utilities Application Framework Architecture Guidelines This whitepaper outlines the different variations of architecture that can be considered. Each variation will include advice on configuration and other considerations. 836362.1 Batch Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products This whitepaper oulines the common and best practices implemented by sites all over the world. Updated for OUAF 4.0.1 856854.1 Technical Best Practices V1 Addendum  Addendum to Technical Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products containing only V1.x specific advice. 942074.1 XAI Best Practices This whitepaper outlines the common integration tasks and best practices for the Web Services Integration provided by the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. Updated for OUAF 4.0.1 970785.1 Oracle Identity Manager Integration Overview This whitepaper outlines the principals of the prebuilt intergration between Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products and Orade Identity Manager used to provision user and user group secuity information 1068958.1 Production Environment Configuration Guidelines (New!) Whitepaper outlining common production level settings for the products

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• SQL SERVER – ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION – Wait Type – Day 11 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  For any good system three things are vital: CPU, Memory and IO (disk). Among these three, IO is the most crucial factor of SQL Server. Looking at real-world cases, I do not see IT people upgrading CPU and Memory frequently. However, the disk is often upgraded for either improving the space, speed or throughput. Today we will look at another IO-related wait type. From Book On-Line: Occurs when a task is waiting for I/Os to finish. ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION Explanation: Any tasks are waiting for I/O to finish. If by any means your application that’s connected to SQL Server is processing the data very slowly, this type of wait can occur. Several long-running database operations like BACKUP, CREATE DATABASE, ALTER DATABASE or other operations can also create this wait type. Reducing ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION wait: When it is an issue related to IO, one should check for the following things associated to IO subsystem: Look at the programming and see if there is any application code which processes the data slowly (like inefficient loop, etc.). Note that it should be re-written to avoid this  wait type. Proper placing of the files is very important. We should check the file system for proper placement of the files – LDF and MDF on separate drive, TempDB on another separate drive, hot spot tables on separate filegroup (and on separate disk), etc. Check the File Statistics and see if there is a higher IO Read and IO Write Stall SQL SERVER – Get File Statistics Using fn_virtualfilestats. Check event log and error log for any errors or warnings related to IO. If you are using SAN (Storage Area Network), check the throughput of the SAN system as well as configuration of the HBA Queue Depth. In one of my recent projects, the SAN was performing really badly and so the SAN administrator did not accept it. After some investigations, he agreed to change the HBA Queue Depth on the development setup (test environment). As soon as we changed the HBA Queue Depth to quite a higher value, there was a sudden big improvement in the performance. It is very likely to happen that there are no proper indexes on the system and yet there are lots of table scans and heap scans. Creating proper index can reduce the IO bandwidth considerably. If SQL Server can use appropriate cover index instead of clustered index, it can effectively reduce lots of CPU, Memory and IO (considering cover index has lesser columns than cluster table and all other; it depends upon the situation). You can refer to the following two articles I wrote that talk about how to optimize indexes: Create Missing Indexes Drop Unused Indexes Checking Memory Related Perfmon Counters SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Pending (Consistent higher value than 0-2) SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Outstanding (Consistent higher value, Benchmark) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Buffer Hit Cache Ratio (Higher is better, greater than 90% for usually smooth running system) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Page Life Expectancy (Consistent lower value than 300 seconds) Memory: Available Mbytes (Information only) Memory: Page Faults/sec (Benchmark only) Memory: Pages/sec (Benchmark only) Checking Disk Related Perfmon Counters Average Disk sec/Read (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk sec/Write (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk Read/Write Queue Length (Consistent higher value than benchmark is not good) Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussions of Wait Stats in this blog are generic and vary from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – IO_COMPLETION – Wait Type – Day 10 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  For any good system three things are vital: CPU, Memory and IO (disk). Among these three, IO is the most crucial factor of SQL Server. Looking at real-world cases, I do not see IT people upgrading CPU and Memory frequently. However, the disk is often upgraded for either improving the space, speed or throughput. Today we will look at an IO-related wait types. From Book On-Line: Occurs while waiting for I/O operations to complete. This wait type generally represents non-data page I/Os. Data page I/O completion waits appear as PAGEIOLATCH_* waits. IO_COMPLETION Explanation: Any tasks are waiting for I/O to finish. This is a good indication that IO needs to be looked over here. Reducing IO_COMPLETION wait: When it is an issue concerning the IO, one should look at the following things related to IO subsystem: Proper placing of the files is very important. We should check the file system for proper placement of files – LDF and MDF on a separate drive, TempDB on another separate drive, hot spot tables on separate filegroup (and on separate disk),etc. Check the File Statistics and see if there is higher IO Read and IO Write Stall SQL SERVER – Get File Statistics Using fn_virtualfilestats. Check event log and error log for any errors or warnings related to IO. If you are using SAN (Storage Area Network), check the throughput of the SAN system as well as the configuration of the HBA Queue Depth. In one of my recent projects, the SAN was performing really badly so the SAN administrator did not accept it. After some investigations, he agreed to change the HBA Queue Depth on development (test environment) set up and as soon as we changed the HBA Queue Depth to quite a higher value, there was a sudden big improvement in the performance. It is very possible that there are no proper indexes in the system and there are lots of table scans and heap scans. Creating proper index can reduce the IO bandwidth considerably. If SQL Server can use appropriate cover index instead of clustered index, it can effectively reduce lots of CPU, Memory and IO (considering cover index has lesser columns than cluster table and all other; it depends upon the situation). You can refer to the two articles that I wrote; they are about how to optimize indexes: Create Missing Indexes Drop Unused Indexes Checking Memory Related Perfmon Counters SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Pending (Consistent higher value than 0-2) SQLServer: Memory Manager\Memory Grants Outstanding (Consistent higher value, Benchmark) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Buffer Hit Cache Ratio (Higher is better, greater than 90% for usually smooth running system) SQLServer: Buffer Manager\Page Life Expectancy (Consistent lower value than 300 seconds) Memory: Available Mbytes (Information only) Memory: Page Faults/sec (Benchmark only) Memory: Pages/sec (Benchmark only) Checking Disk Related Perfmon Counters Average Disk sec/Read (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk sec/Write (Consistent higher value than 4-8 millisecond is not good) Average Disk Read/Write Queue Length (Consistent higher value than benchmark is not good) Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussions of Wait Stats in this blog are generic and vary from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Types, SQL White Papers, T SQL, Technology

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• Prepping the Raspberry Pi for Java Excellence (part 1)

  - by HecklerMark

  I've only recently been able to begin working seriously with my first Raspberry Pi, received months ago but hastily shelved in preparation for JavaOne. The Raspberry Pi and other diminutive computing platforms offer a glimpse of the potential of what is often referred to as the embedded space, the "Internet of Things" (IoT), or Machine to Machine (M2M) computing. I have a few different configurations I want to use for multiple Raspberry Pis, but for each of them, I'll need to perform the following common steps to prepare them for their various tasks: Load an OS onto an SD card Get the Pi connected to the network Load a JDK I've been very happy to see good friend and JFXtras teammate Gerrit Grunwald document how to do these things on his blog (link to article here - check it out!), but I ran into some issues configuring wi-fi that caused me some needless grief. Not knowing if any of the pitfalls were caused by my slightly-older version of the Pi and not being able to find anything specific online to help me get past it, I kept chipping away at it until I broke through. The purpose of this post is to (hopefully) help someone else recognize the same issues if/when they encounter them and work past them quickly. There is a great resource page here that covers several ways to get the OS on an SD card, but here is what I did (on a Mac): Plug SD card into reader on/in Mac Format it (FAT32) Unmount it (diskutil unmountDisk diskn, where n is the disk number representing the SD card) Transfer the disk image for Debian to the SD card (dd if=2012-08-08-wheezy-armel.img of=/dev/diskn bs=1m) Eject the card from the Mac (diskutil eject diskn) There are other ways, but this is fairly quick and painless, especially after you do it several times. Yes, I had to do that dance repeatedly (minus formatting) due to the wi-fi issues, as it kept killing the ability of the Pi to boot. You should be able to dramatically reduce the number of OS loads you do, though, if you do a few things with regard to your wi-fi. Firstly, I strongly recommend you purchase the Edimax EW-7811Un wi-fi adapter. This adapter/chipset has been proven with the Raspberry Pi, it's tiny, and it's cheap. Avoid unnecessary aggravation and buy this one! Secondly, visit this page for a script and instructions regarding how to configure your new wi-fi adapter with your Pi. Here is the rub, though: there is a missing step. At least for my combination of Pi version, OS version, and uncanny gift of timing and luck there was. :-) Here is the sequence of steps I used to make the magic happen: Plug your newly-minted SD card (with OS) into your Pi and connect a network cable (for internet connectivity) Boot your Pi. On the first boot, do the following things: Opt to have it use all space on the SD card (will require a reboot eventually) Disable overscan Set your timezone Enable the ssh server Update raspi-config Reboot your Pi. This will reconfigure the SD to use all space (see above). After you log in (UID: pi, password: raspberry), upgrade your OS. This was the missing step for me that put a merciful end to the repeated SD card re-imaging and made the wi-fi configuration trivial. To do so, just type sudo apt-get upgrade and give it several minutes to complete. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and congratulate yourself on the time you've just saved.  ;-) With the OS upgrade finished, now you can follow Mr. Engman's directions (to the letter, please see link above), download his script, and let it work its magic. One aside: I plugged the little power-sipping Edimax directly into the Pi and it worked perfectly. No powered hub needed, at least in my configuration. To recap, that OS upgrade (at least at this point, with this combination of OS/drivers/Pi version) is absolutely essential for a smooth experience. Miss that step, and you're in for hours of "fun". Save yourself! I'll pick up next time with more of the Java side of the RasPi configuration, but as they say, you have to cross the moat to get into the castle. Hopefully, this will help you do just that. Until next time! All the best, Mark 

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• Silverlight Cream for June 16, 2011 -- #1108

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: René Schulte, Rajat Jaiswal(-2-), Peter Kuhn, Colin Eberhardt, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Beth Massi, Michael Crump, Daniel Vaughan, Chris Rouw, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jesse Liberty. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Cubelicious - Silverlight 5 + Balder + Physics + SLARToolkit Augmented Reality = Triple Win!" René Schulte WP7: "Binding the WP7 ProgressIndicator in XAML" Daniel Vaughan LightSwitch: "Adding Static Images and Text on a LightSwitch Screen" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Laurent Bugnion is Proposing a new RelayCommand snippet for MVVM Light V4... read about it and give him some feedback From SilverlightCream.com: Cubelicious - Silverlight 5 + Balder + Physics + SLARToolkit Augmented Reality = Triple Win! René Schulte has a post up about using the SLARToolkit for Silverlight 5 Beta in conjuncion with Balder and Physics ... dang this is cool, check out the video! PSD TO XAML in few easy steps using Expression Blend I'm not a Photoshop person, but apparently Rajat Jaiswal is, and he's demonstrating using Expression Blend to get your PSD file into XAML Its really great feature Silverlight realtime augment toolkit This is a fun post from Rajat Jaiswal... fun to see someone other than René Schulteposting about René's SLARToolkit :) Getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam 70-599 (Part 2) Peter Kuhn has part 2 of his series up on getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam at SilverlightShow Metro In Motion Part #7 – Panorama Prettiness and Opacity Colin Eberhardt has another Metro in Motion up... this one concentrates on the opacity effect when the user slides from item-to-item in Panorama contents Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorial - 13 - What is Tombstoning? Kunal Chowdhury has a couple of posts up... first up is this one on Tombstoning... and if you're just starting with WP7.1, it got easier Windows Phone 7 Tip: Showing and Hiding onscreen keyboard in Emulator Kunal Chowdhury's latest is a great hint if you haven't found it already... how to show/hide the onscreen keyboard in the emulator Adding Static Images and Text on a LightSwitch Screen Beth Massi's latest post is on showing how to display an image or static text such as a logo in a LightSwitch app Displaying PDF Files in Windows Phone 7 Mango Michael Crump responds to reader's questions about displaying a PDF file in WP7.1 with this post using ComponentOne's Studio for Windows Phone CTP Binding the WP7 ProgressIndicator in XAML Daniel Vaughan has a solution to the problem of having to bind the ProgressIndicator in WP7.1 in code-behind... he wrote a ProgressIndicatorProxy and shares it with us!<>/dd> Storing Files in SQL Server using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight – Part 2 Chris Rouw has Part 2 of his Storing Files in SQL Servier using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight up... this one is on uploading and saving files to the database from Silvelright by the user dropping them onto your app. Using SqlMetal to generate Windows Phone Mango Local Database classes OK I'm not too proud to admit I'd never heard of SQLMetal... if you haven't, or even if you have, this post by WindowsPhoneGeek is a good discussion of using it to generate your WP7.1 database classes. Obtaining Email, Address or Phone Number Jesse Liberty's latest is another in his 'Mango From Scratch' series discussing the new tasks to obtain more info from the contact list. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• about the JOGL 2 problem

  - by Chuchinyi

  Please some help me about the JOGL 2 problem(Sorry for previous error format). I complied JOGL2Template.java ok. but execut it with following error. D:\java\java\jogl>javac JOGL2Template.java <== compile ok D:\java\java\jogl>java JOGL2Template <== execute error Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError at javax.media.opengl.GLProfile.<clinit>(GLProfile.java:1176) at JOGL2Template.<init>(JOGL2Template.java:24) at JOGL2Template.main(JOGL2Template.java:57) Caused by: java.lang.SecurityException: no certificate for gluegen-rt.dll in D:\ java\lib\gluegen-rt-natives-windows-i586.jar at com.jogamp.common.util.JarUtil.validateCertificate(JarUtil.java:350) at com.jogamp.common.util.JarUtil.validateCertificates(JarUtil.java:324) at com.jogamp.common.util.cache.TempJarCache.validateCertificates(TempJa rCache.java:328) at com.jogamp.common.util.cache.TempJarCache.bootstrapNativeLib(TempJarC ache.java:283) at com.jogamp.common.os.Platform$3.run(Platform.java:308) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at com.jogamp.common.os.Platform.loadGlueGenRTImpl(Platform.java:298) at com.jogamp.common.os.Platform.<clinit>(Platform.java:207) ... 3 more there is JOGL2Template.java source code: import java.awt.Dimension; import java.awt.Frame; import java.awt.event.WindowAdapter; import java.awt.event.WindowEvent; import javax.media.opengl.GLAutoDrawable; import javax.media.opengl.GLCapabilities; import javax.media.opengl.GLEventListener; import javax.media.opengl.GLProfile; import javax.media.opengl.awt.GLCanvas; import com.jogamp.opengl.util.FPSAnimator; import javax.swing.JFrame; /* * JOGL 2.0 Program Template For AWT applications */ public class JOGL2Template extends JFrame implements GLEventListener { private static final int CANVAS_WIDTH = 640; // Width of the drawable private static final int CANVAS_HEIGHT = 480; // Height of the drawable private static final int FPS = 60; // Animator's target frames per second // Constructor to create profile, caps, drawable, animator, and initialize Frame public JOGL2Template() { // Get the default OpenGL profile that best reflect your running platform. GLProfile glp = GLProfile.getDefault(); // Specifies a set of OpenGL capabilities, based on your profile. GLCapabilities caps = new GLCapabilities(glp); // Allocate a GLDrawable, based on your OpenGL capabilities. GLCanvas canvas = new GLCanvas(caps); canvas.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(CANVAS_WIDTH, CANVAS_HEIGHT)); canvas.addGLEventListener(this); // Create a animator that drives canvas' display() at 60 fps. final FPSAnimator animator = new FPSAnimator(canvas, FPS); addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() { // For the close button @Override public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) { // Use a dedicate thread to run the stop() to ensure that the // animator stops before program exits. new Thread() { @Override public void run() { animator.stop(); System.exit(0); } }.start(); } }); add(canvas); pack(); setTitle("OpenGL 2 Test"); setVisible(true); animator.start(); // Start the animator } public static void main(String[] args) { new JOGL2Template(); } @Override public void init(GLAutoDrawable drawable) { // Your OpenGL codes to perform one-time initialization tasks // such as setting up of lights and display lists. } @Override public void display(GLAutoDrawable drawable) { // Your OpenGL graphic rendering codes for each refresh. } @Override public void reshape(GLAutoDrawable drawable, int x, int y, int w, int h) { // Your OpenGL codes to set up the view port, projection mode and view volume. } @Override public void dispose(GLAutoDrawable drawable) { // Hardly used. } }

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• JustMock is here !!

  - by mehfuzh

  As announced earlier by Hristo Kosev at Telerik blogs , we have started giving out JustMock builds from today. This is the first of early builds before the official Q2 release and we are pretty excited to get your feedbacks. Its pretty early to say anything on it. It actually depends on your feedback. To add few, with JustMock we tried to build a mocking tool with simple and intuitive syntax as possible excluding more and more noises and avoiding any smell that can be made to your code [We are still trying everyday] and we want to make the tool even better with your help. JustMock can be used to mock virtually anything. Moreover, we left an option open that it can be used to reduce / elevate the features  just though a single click. We tried to make a strong API and make stuffs fluent and guided as possible so that you never have the chance to get de-railed. Our syntax is AAA (Arrange – Act – Assert) , we don’t believe in Record – Reply model which some of the smarter mocking tools are planning to remove from their coming release or even don’t have [its always fun to lean from each other]. Overall more signals equals more complexity , reminds me of 37 signals :-). Currently, here are the things you can do with JustMock ( will cover more in-depth in coming days) Proxied mode Mock interfaces and class with virtuals Mock properties that includes indexers Set raise event for specific calls Use matchers to control mock arguments Assert specific occurrence of a mocked calls. Assert using matchers Do recursive mocks Do Sequential mocking ( same method with argument returns different values or perform different tasks) Do strict mocking (by default and i prefer loose , so that i can use it as stubs) Elevated mode Mock static calls Mock final class Mock sealed classes Mock Extension methods Partially mock a  class member directly using Mock.Arrange Mock MsCorlib (we will support more and more members in coming days) , currently we support FileInfo, File and DateTime. These are few, you need to take a look at the test project that is provided with the build to find more [Along with the document]. Also, one of feature that will i will be using it for my next OS projects is the ability to run it separately in  proxied mode which makes it easy to redistribute and do some personal development in a more DI model and my option to elevate as it go.   I’ve surely forgotten tons of other features to mention that i will cover time but  don’t for get the URL : www.telerik.com/justmock   Finally a little mock code:   var lvMock = Mock.Create<ILoveJustMock>();    // set your goal  Mock.Arrange(() => lvMock.Response(Arg.Any<string>())).Returns((int result) => result);    //perform  string ret =  lvMock.Echo("Yes");    Assert.Equal(ret, "Yes");  // make sure everything is fine  Mock.Assert(() => lvMock.Echo("Yes"), Occurs.Once());   Hope that helps to get started,  will cover if not :-).

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• Chrome Web Browser Messages: Some Observations

  - by ultan o'broin

  I'm always on the lookout for how different apps handle errors and what kind of messages are shown (I probably need to get out more), I use this 'research' to reflect on our own application error messages patterns and guidelines and how we might make things better for our users in future. Users are influenced by all sorts of things, but their everyday experiences of technology, and especially what they encounter on the internet, increasingly sets their expectations for the enterprise user experience too. I recently came across a couple of examples from Google's Chrome web browser that got me thinking. In the first case, we have a Chrome error about not being able to find a web page. I like how simple, straightforward messaging language is used along with an optional ability to explore things a bit further--for those users who want to. The 'more information' option shows the error encountered by the browser (or 'original' error) in technical terms, along with an error number. Contrasting the two messages about essentially the same problem reveals what's useful to users and what's not. Everyone can use the first message, but the technical version of the message has to be explicitly disclosed for any more advanced user to pursue further. More technical users might search for a resolution, using that Error 324 number, but I imagine most users who see the message will try again later or check their URL again. Seems reasonable that such an approach be adopted in the enterprise space too, right? Maybe. Generally, end users don't go searching for solutions based on those error numbers, and help desk folks generally prefer they don't do so. That's because of the more critical nature of enterprise data or the fact that end users may not have the necessary privileges to make any fixes anyway. What might be more useful here is a link to a trusted source of additional help provided by the help desk or reputable community instead. This takes me on to the second case, this time more closely related to the language used in messaging situations. Here, I first noticed by the using of the (s) approach to convey possibilities of there being one or more pages at the heart of the problem. This approach is a no-no in Oracle style terms (the plural would be used) and it can create translation issues (though it is not a show-stopper). I think Google could have gone with the plural too. However, of more interest is the use of the verb "kill", shown in the message text and as an action button label. For many writers, words like "kill" and "abort" are to be avoided as they can give offense. I am not so sure about that judgment, as really their use cannot be separated from the context. Certainly, for more technical users, they're fine and have been in use for years, so I see no reason to avoid these terms if the audience has accepted them. Most end users too, I think would find the idea of "kill" usable and may even use the term in every day speech. Others might disagree--Apple uses a concept of Force Quit, for example. Ultimately, the only way to really know how to proceed is to research these matter by asking users of differing roles and expertise to perform some tasks, encounter these messages and then make recommendations based on those findings for our designs. Something to do in 2011!

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• Oracle Products Reflect Key Trends Shaping Enterprise 2.0

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Following up on his predictions for 2011, we asked Enterprise 2.0 veteran Andy MacMillan to map out the ways Oracle solutions are at the forefront of industry trends--and how Oracle customers can benefit in the coming year. 1. Increase organizational awareness | Oracle WebCenter Suite Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a unique set of capabilities to drive organizational awareness. In particular, the expansive activity graph connects users directly to key enterprise applications, activities, and interests. In this way, applicable and critical business information is automatically and immediately visible--in the context of key tasks--via real-time dashboards and comprehensive reporting. Oracle WebCenter Suite also integrates key E2.0 services, such as blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, into critical business processes, including back-office systems of records such as ERP and CRM systems. 2. Drive online customer engagement | Oracle Real-Time Decisions With more and more business being conducted on the Web, driving increased online customer engagement becomes a critical key to success. This effort is usually spearheaded by an increasingly important executive role, the Head of Online, who usually reports directly to the CMO. To help manage the Web experience online, Oracle solutions are driving a new kind of intelligent social commerce by combining Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle WebCenter Services, and Oracle Real-Time Decisions with leading e-commerce and product recommendations. Oracle Real-Time Decisions provides multichannel recommendations for content, products, and services--including seamless integration across Web, mobile, and social channels. The result: happier customers, increased customer acquisition and retention, and improved critical success metrics such as shopping cart abandonment. 3. Easily build composite applications | Oracle Application Development Framework Thanks to the shared user experience strategy across Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Fusion Applications and many other Oracle Applications, customers can easily create real, customer-specific composite applications using Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle Application Development Framework. Oracle Application Development Framework components provide modular user interface components that can build rich, social composite applications. In addition, a broad set of components spanning BPM, SOA, ECM, and beyond can be quickly and easily incorporated into composite applications. 4. Integrate records management into a global content platform | Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g provides leading records management capabilities as part of a unified ECM platform for managing records, documents, Web content, digital assets, enterprise imaging, and application imaging. This unique strategy provides comprehensive records management in a consistent, cost-effective way, and enables organizations to consolidate ECM repositories and connect ECM to critical business applications. 5. Achieve ECM at extreme scale | Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Exadata To support the high-performance demands of a unified and rationalized content platform, Oracle has pioneered highly scalable and high-performing ECM infrastructures. Two innovations in particular helped make this happen. The core ECM platform itself moved to an Enterprise Java architecture, so organizations can now use Oracle WebLogic Server for enhanced scalability and manageability. Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g can leverage Oracle Exadata for extreme performance and scale. Likewise, Oracle Exalogic--Oracle's foundation for cloud computing--enables extreme performance for processor-intensive capabilities such as content conversion or dynamic Web page delivery. Learn more about Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

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• MacGyver Moments

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Denny Cherry tagged me to write about my best MacGyver Moment.  Usually I ignore blogosphere fluff and just use this space to write what I think is important.  However, #MVP10 just ended and I have a stronger sense of community.  Besides, where else would I mention my second best Macgyver moment was making a BIOS jumper out of a soda can.  Aluminum is conductive and I didn't have any real jumpers lying around. My best moment is probably my entire home computer network.  Every system but one is hand-built, usually cobbled together out of spare parts and 'adapted' from its original purpose. My Primary Domain Controller is a Dell 2300.   The Service Tag indicates it was shipped to the original owner in 1999.  Box has a PERC/1 RAID controller.  I acquired this from a previous employer for $50.  It runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.  Does DNS, DHCP, and RADIUS services as a bonus.  RADIUS authentication is used for VPN and Wireless access.  It is nice to sign in once and be done with it. The Secondary Domain Controller is an old desktop.  Dual P-III 933 with some extra drives. My VPN box is a P-II 250 with 384MB of RAM and a 21 GB hard drive.  I did a P-to-V to my Hyper-V box a year or so ago and retired the hardware again.  Dynamic DNS lets me connect no matter how often Comcast shuffles my IP. The Hyper-V box is a desktop system with 8GB RAM and an AMD Athlon 5000+ processor.  Cost me less than $500 to put together nearly two years ago.  I reasoned that if Vista and Windows 2008 were the same code then Vista 64-bit certified meant the drivers for Vista would load into Windows 2008.  Turns out I was right. Later I added three 1TB drives but wasn't too happy with how that turned out.  I recovered two of the drives yesterday and am building an iSCSI storage unit. (Much thanks to Starwind.  Great product).  I am using an old AMD 1.1GhZ box with 1.5 GB RAM (cobbled together from three old PCs) as my storave server.  The Hyper-V box is slated for an OS rebuild to 2008 R2 once I get the storage system worked out.  maybe in a week or two. A couple of DLink Gigabit switches ties everything together. Add in the Vonage box, the three PCs, the Wireless-N Access Point, the two notebooks and the XBox and you have gone from MacGyver to darn near Rube Goldberg. The only thing I really spend money on is power supplies and fans.  I buy top-of-the-line for both. I even pull and crimp my own cables. Oh, and if my kids hose up a PC, I have all of their data on a server elsewhere.  Every PC and laptop is pretty much interchangable for email and basic workstation tasks.  That helps a lot too. Of course I will tag SQLVariant.

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• Why some links appear in a new tab, others in a new window?

  - by SAMIR BHOGAYTA

  Originally, it was made to resolve problems on IE8 32 bits when you use a 32 bits OS. I changed "%ProgramFiles(x86)%" var, and now my issue is resolved for IE8 32 bits on my Windows 7 64 bits. Please try it, and tell me if everything work for you. For Win 7 64 bits : 1 - Create a new notepad document and paste this text : @echo off echo. echo IEREREG Version 1.07 for IE8 27.03.2009 echo by Kai Schaetzl http://iefaq.info echo installs and registers (if suitable) all DLLs known to be used by IE8. echo should only take a few seconds, but please be patient echo. REM ****************************** echo registering IE files REM IE files (= part of setup) regsvr32 /s /i browseui.dll REM regsvr32 /s /i browseui.dll,NI (unnecessary) regsvr32 /s corpol.dll regsvr32 /s dxtmsft.dll regsvr32 /s dxtrans.dll REM simple HTML Mail API regsvr32 /s "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\internet explorer\hmmapi.dll" REM group policy snap-in regsvr32 /s ieaksie.dll REM smart screen regsvr32 /s ieapfltr.dll REM ieak branding regsvr32 /s iedkcs32.dll REM dev tools regsvr32 /s "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\internet explorer\iedvtool.dll" regsvr32 /s iepeers.dll REM Symptom: IE8 closes immediately on launch, missing from IE7 regsvr32 /s "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\internet explorer\ieproxy.dll" REM no install point anymore REM regsvr32 /s /i iesetup.dll REM no reg point anymore REM regsvr32 /s imgutil.dll regsvr32 /s /i /n inetcpl.cpl REM no install point anymore REM regsvr32 /s /i inseng.dll regsvr32 /s jscript.dll REM license manager regsvr32 /s licmgr10.dll REM regsvr32 /s msapsspc.dll REM regsvr32 /s mshta.exe REM VS debugger regsvr32 /s msdbg2.dll REM no install point anymore REM regsvr32 /s /i mshtml.dll regsvr32 /s mshtmled.dll regsvr32 /s msident.dll REM no reg point anymore REM regsvr32 /s msrating.dll REM multimedia timer regsvr32 /s mstime.dll REM no install point anymore REM regsvr32 /s /i occache.dll REM process debug manager regsvr32 /s "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\internet explorer\pdm.dll" REM no reg point anymore REM regsvr32 /s pngfilt.dll REM regsvr32 /s /i setupwbv.dll (not there anymore!) regsvr32 /s tdc.ocx regsvr32 /s /i urlmon.dll REM regsvr32 /s /i urlmon.dll,NI,HKLM regsvr32 /s vbscript.dll REM VML renderer regsvr32 /s "%CommonProgramFiles%\microsoft shared\vgx\vgx.dll" REM no install point anymore REM regsvr32 /s /i webcheck.dll regsvr32 /s /i /n wininet.dll REM ****************************** echo registering system files REM additional system dlls known to be used by IE REM added 11.05.2006 Symptom: Add-Ons-Manager menu entry is present but nothing happens regsvr32 /s extmgr.dll REM added 12.05.2006 Symptom: Javascript links don't work (Robin Walker) .NET hub file regsvr32 /s mscoree.dll REM added 23.03.2009 Symptom: Find on this page is blank regsvr32 /s oleacc.dll REM added 24.03.2009 Symptom: Printing problems, open in new window regsvr32 /s ole32.dll REM mscorier.dll REM mscories.dll REM Symptom: open in new tab/window not working regsvr32 /s actxprxy.dll regsvr32 /s asctrls.ocx regsvr32 /s cdfview.dll regsvr32 /s comcat.dll regsvr32 /s /i /n comctl32.dll regsvr32 /s cryptdlg.dll regsvr32 /s /i /n digest.dll regsvr32 /s dispex.dll regsvr32 /s hlink.dll regsvr32 /s mlang.dll regsvr32 /s mobsync.dll regsvr32 /s /i msieftp.dll REM regsvr32 /s msnsspc.dll #no entry point regsvr32 /s msr2c.dll regsvr32 /s msxml.dll regsvr32 /s oleaut32.dll REM regsvr32 /s plugin.ocx #no entry point regsvr32 /s proctexe.ocx REM plus DllRegisterServerEx ExA ExW ... ? regsvr32 /s /i scrobj.dll REM shdocvw.dll hasn't been updated for IE7 and IE8, it still registers itself for the Windows Internet Controls regsvr32 /s /i shdocvw.dll regsvr32 /s sendmail.dll REM ****************************** REM PKI/crypto functionality REM initpki can take very long to run and is rarely a problem REM if there are problems with crypto, SSL, certificates REM remove the three following REMs from the lines REM echo We are almost done except one crypto file REM echo but this will take very long, be patient! REM regsvr32 /s /i:A initpki.dll REM ****************************** REM tabbed browser, do at the end, why originally with /n ? regsvr32 /s /i ieframe.dll REM ****************************** echo correcting bugs in the registry REM do some corrective work REM Symptom: new tabs page cannot display content because it cannot access the controls (added 27. 3.2009) REM This is a result of a bug in shdocvw.dll (see above), probably only on Windows XP reg add "HKCR\TypeLib\{EAB22AC0-30C1-11CF-A7EB-0000C05BAE0B}\1.1\0\win32" /ve /t REG_SZ /d %systemroot%\system32\ieframe.dll /f REM ****************************** echo all tasks have been finished echo. pause 2 - Close all your IE windows and processes. 3 - Save your document on your Desktop by example, with the .bat extension. Right-click on it, and select "Run as administrator". 4 - Test if this tip resolved your issue by openning IE. If you use a Windows 32 bits version, please replace %ProgramFiles(x86)% by %ProgramFiles% in your .bat file.

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• Unleash the Power of Cryptography on SPARC T4

  - by B.Koch

  by Rob Ludeman Oracle’s SPARC T4 systems are architected to deliver enhanced value for customer via the inclusion of many integrated features.  One of the best examples of this approach is demonstrated in the on-chip cryptographic support that delivers wire speed encryption capabilities without any impact to application performance.  The Evolution of SPARC Encryption SPARC T-Series systems have a long history of providing this capability, dating back to the release of the first T2000 systems that featured support for on-chip RSA encryption directly in the UltraSPARC T1 processor.  Successive generations have built on this approach by support for additional encryption ciphers that are tightly coupled with the Oracle Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 encryption framework.  While earlier versions of this technology were implemented using co-processors, the SPARC T4 was redesigned with new crypto instructions to eliminate some of the performance overhead associated with the former approach, resulting in much higher performance for encrypted workloads. The Superiority of the SPARC T4 Approach to Crypto As companies continue to engage in more and more e-commerce, the need to provide greater degrees of security for these transactions is more critical than ever before.  Traditional methods of securing data in transit by applications have a number of drawbacks that are addressed by the SPARC T4 cryptographic approach. 1. Performance degradation – cryptography is highly compute intensive and therefore, there is a significant cost when using other architectures without embedded crypto functionality.  This performance penalty impacts the entire system, slowing down performance of web servers (SSL), for example, and potentially bogging down the speed of other business applications.  The SPARC T4 processor enables customers to deliver high levels of security to internal and external customers while not incurring an impact to overall SLAs in their IT environment. 2. Added cost – one of the methods to avoid performance degradation is the addition of add-in cryptographic accelerator cards or external offload engines in other systems.  While these solutions provide a brute force mechanism to avoid the problem of slower system performance, it usually comes at an added cost.  Customers looking to encrypt datacenter traffic without the overhead and expenditure of extra hardware can rely on SPARC T4 systems to deliver the performance necessary without the need to purchase other hardware or add-on cards. 3. Higher complexity – the addition of cryptographic cards or leveraging load balancers to perform encryption tasks results in added complexity from a management standpoint.  With SPARC T4, encryption keys and the framework built into Solaris 10 and 11 means that administrators generally don’t need to spend extra cycles determining how to perform cryptographic functions.  In fact, many of the instructions are built-in and require no user intervention to be utilized.  For example, For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, SPARC T4 crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "t4 engine."  For a deeper technical dive into the new instructions included in SPARC T4, consult Dan Anderson’s blog. Conclusion In summary, SPARC T4 systems offer customers much more value for applications than just increased performance. The integration of key virtualization technologies, embedded encryption, and a true Enterprise Operating System, Oracle Solaris, provides direct business benefits that supersedes the commodity approach to data center computing.   SPARC T4 removes the roadblocks to secure computing by offering integrated crypto accelerators that can save IT organizations in operating cost while delivering higher levels of performance and meeting objectives around compliance. For more on the SPARC T4 family of products, go to here.

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• Organizational characteristics that impact the selection of Development Methodology concepts applied to a project

  Based on my experience, no one really follows a specific methodology exactly as it is formally designed. In fact, the key concepts of a few methodologies are usually combined to form a hybrid methodology for each project based on the current organizational makeup and the project need/requirements to be accomplished. Organizational characteristics that impact the selection of methodology concepts applied to a project. Prior subject knowledge pertaining to a project can be critical when deciding on what methodology or combination of methodologies to apply to a project. For example, if a project is very straight forward, and the development staff has experience in developing  that are similar, then the waterfall method could possibly be the best choice because little to no research is needed  in order to complete the project tasks and there is very little need for changes to occur.  On the other hand, if the development staff has limited subject knowledge or the requirements/specification of the project could possibly change as the project progresses then the use of spiral, iterative, incremental, agile, or any combination would be preferred. The previous methodologies used by an organization typically do not change much from project to project unless the needs of a project dictate differently. For example, if the waterfall method is the preferred development methodology then most projects will be developed by the waterfall method. Depending on the time allotted to a project each day can impact the selection of a development methodology. In one example, if the staff can only devote a few hours a day to a project then the incremental methodology might be ideal because modules can be added to the final project as they are developed. On the other hand, if daily time allocation is not an issue, then a multitude of methodologies could work well for a project. Project characteristics that impact the selection of methodology concepts applied to a project. The type of project being developed can often dictate the type of methodology used for the project. Based on my experience, projects that tend to have a lot of user interaction, follow a more iterative, incremental, or agile approach typically using a prototype that develops into a final project. These methodologies desire back and forth communication between users, clients, and developers to allow for requirements to change and functionality to be enhanced. Conversely, limited interaction applications or automated services can still sometimes get away with using the waterfall or transactional approach. The timeline of a project can also force an organization to prefer a particular methodology over the rest. For instance, if the project must be completed within 24 hours, then there is very little time for discussions back and forth between clients, users and the development team. In this scenario, the waterfall method would be perfect because the only interaction with the client occurs prior to a development project to outline the system requirements, and the development team can quickly move through the software development stages in order to complete the project within the deadline. If the team had more time, then the other methodologies could also be considered because there is more time for client and users to review the project and make changes as they see fit, and/or allow for more time to review the project in order to enhance the business performance and functionality. Sometimes the client and or user involvement can dictate the selection of methodologies applied to a project. One example of this is if a client is highly motivated to get a project completed and desires to play an active part in the development process then the agile development approach would work perfectly with this client because it allows for frequent interaction between clients, users and the development team. The inverse of this situation is a client that just wants to provide the project requirements and only wants to get involved when the project is to be delivered. In this case the waterfall method would work well because there is no room for changes and no back and forth between the users, clients or the development team.

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• Part 9: EBS Customizations, how to track

  - by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

  In the previous blogs we were concentrating on the preparation tasks. We have defined standards, we know about the tools and techniques we will start with. Additionally, we have defined the modification strategy, and how to handle such topics best. Now we are ready to take the requirements! Such requirements coming over in spreadsheets, word files (like GAP documents), or in any other format. As we have to assign some attributes, we start numbering all that and assign a short name to each of these requirements (=CEMLI reference). We may also have already a Functional person assigned, and we might involve someone from the tech team to estimate, and we like to assign a status such as 'planned', 'estimated' etc. All these data are usually kept in spreadsheets, but I would put them into a database (yes, I am from Oracle :). If you don't have any good looking and centralized application already, please give a try with Oracle APEX. It should be up and running in a day and the imported sheets are than manageable concurrently!  For one of my clients I have created this CEMLI-DB; in between enriched with a lot of additional functionality, but initially it was just a simple centralized CEMLI tracking application. Why I am pointing out again the centralized method to manage such data? Well, your data quality will dramatically increase, if you let your project members see (also review and update) "your" data.  APEX allows you to filter, sort, print, and also export. And if you can spend some time to define proper value lists, everyone will gain from. APEX allows you to work in 'agile' mode, means you can improve your application step by step. Let's say you like to reference a document, or even upload the same, you can do that. Or, you need to classify the CEMLIs by release, just add this release field, same for business area or CEMLI type. One CEMLI record may then look like this: Prepare one or two (online) reports, to be ready to present your "workload" to the project management. Use such extracts also when you work offline (to prioritize etc.). But as soon as you are again connected, feed the data back into the central application. Note: I have combined this application with an additional issue tracker.  Here the most important element is the CEMLI reference, which acts as link to any other application (if you are not using APEX also as issue tracker :).  Please spend a minute to define such a reference (see blog Part 8: How to name Customizations).   Summary: Building the bridge from Gap analyse to the development has to be done in a controlled way. Usually the information is provided differently, but it is suggested to collect all requirements centrally. Oracle APEX is a great solution to enter and maintain such information in a structured, but flexible way. APEX helped me a lot to work with distributed development teams during the complete development cycle.

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