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• What algorithm would you use to code a parrot?

  - by Phil H

  A parrot learns the most commonly uttered words and phrases in its vicinity so it can repeat them at inappropriate moments. So how would you create a software version? Assuming it has access to a microphone and can record sound at will, how would you code it without requiring infinite resources? The best I can imagine is to divide the stream using silences in the sound, and then use some pattern recognition to encode each one as a list of tokens, storing new ones as you meet them. Hashing the token sequences and counting occurrences in a database, you could build up a picture of the most frequently uttered phrases. But given the huge variety in phrases, how do you prevent this just becoming a huge list? And the sheer number of pairs to match would surely generate lot of false positives from the combinatorial nature of matching. Would you use a neural net, since that's how a real parrot manages it? Or is there another, cleverer way of matching large-scale patterns in analogue data?

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• Suggest a best algorithm to encrypt XML file in C#.NET ?

  - by karthik

  I have to encrypt XML file and send in network to place in a private server. My other application will decrypt and import to SQL the file by giving the actual Public key. Could you please suggest me best way for this. File: XML Type Possible size: Up to 250 MB Technology: C#.NET 2008

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• What are all the concurrent things [data structure, algorithm, locking mechanism] missing in .Net 3.

  - by user49767

  First time I am bit disappointed in StackOverflow cause my http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2571727/c-concurrency-vs-java-concurrency-which-is-neatly-designed-which-is-better question was closed. My intension was just trying to gather knowledge from programming guru's who worked in both the programming technologies. Rather closing this question, please help me by discussing what is good, bad, and ugly in multi-threading part in both the platforms. It is also welcome, if someone would like to compare with .Net 4.0 with JDK 6 (or JDK 7)

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• What algorithm can I use to determine points within a semi-circle?

  - by dmessf

  How can I do this on a grid with several "centers", and therefore, having coincident points that I want to count only once? What is the most efficient way to do this?

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• A very interesting MYSQL problem (related to indexing, million records, algorithm.)

  - by terence410

  This problem is pretty hard to describe and therefore difficult to search the answer. I hope some expert could share you opinions on that. I have a table with around 1 million of records. The table structure is similar to something like this: items{ uid (primary key, bigint, 15) updated (indexed, int, 11) enabled (indexed, tinyint, 1) } The scenario is like this. I have to select all of the records everyday and do some processing. It takes around 3 second to handle each item. I have written a PHP script to fetch 200 items each time using the following. select * from items where updated unix_timestamp(now()) - 86400 and enabled = 1 limit 200; I will then update the "updated" field of the selected items to make sure that it wont' be selected again within one day. The selected query is something like that. update items set updated = unix_timestamp(now()) where uid in (1,2,3,4,...); Then, the PHP will continue to run and process the data which doesn't require any MYSQL connection anymore. Since I have million records and each record take 3 seconds to process, it's definitely impossible to do it sequentially. Therefore, I will execute the PHP in every 10 seconds. However, as time goes by and the table growth, the select getting much slower. Sometimes, it take more than 100 seconds to run! Do you guys have any suggestion how may I solve this problem?

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• What's the fastest lookup algorithm for a key, pair data structure (i.e, a map)?

  - by truncheon

  In the following example a std::map structure is filled with 26 values from A - Z (for key) and 0 – 26 for value. The time taken (on my system) to lookup the last entry (10000000 times) is roughly 250 ms for the vector, and 125 ms for the map. (I compiled using release mode, with O3 option turned on for g++ 4.4) But if for some odd reason I wanted better performance than the std::map, what data structures and functions would I need to consider using? I apologize if the answer seems obvious to you, but I haven't had much experience in the performance critical aspects of C++ programming. #include <ctime> #include <map> #include <vector> #include <iostream> struct mystruct { char key; int value; mystruct(char k = 0, int v = 0) : key(k), value(v) { } }; int find(const std::vector<mystruct>& ref, char key) { for (std::vector<mystruct>::const_iterator i = ref.begin(); i != ref.end(); ++i) if (i->key == key) return i->value; return -1; } int main() { std::map<char, int> mymap; std::vector<mystruct> myvec; for (int i = 'a'; i < 'a' + 26; ++i) { mymap[i] = i - 'a'; myvec.push_back(mystruct(i, i - 'a')); } int pre = clock(); for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; ++i) { find(myvec, 'z'); } std::cout << "linear scan: milli " << clock() - pre << "\n"; pre = clock(); for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; ++i) { mymap['z']; } std::cout << "map scan: milli " << clock() - pre << "\n"; return 0; }

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• Could a hashing algorithm be used to save space in a database?

  - by Zubair

  I have been using git a lot recently and I quite like the concept of how GIT avoid duplicating similar data by using a hashing function based on sha1. I was wondering if current databases do something similar, or is this inefficient for some reason?

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• Apriori Algorithm- what to do with small min.support?

  - by user3707650

  I have a question about the table beneath my question: If i was told that the given min.support=10%, how can i know what is the support count, by which i will use during the exercise? What i know is: that you take the number of transactions (8) and multiple it by the min.support: 8*(10/100)=0.8 the problem is that i get this number: 0.8, how can i use this support count during this example?? 0.8 is a number that will make me prune all combination set that i will build... please help me!!! TID A B C D E F G 10 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 20 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 30 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 40 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 50 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 60 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 70 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 80 0 0 1 0 1 1 1

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• What kind of memory reclamation algorithm does MRI Ruby 1.8 use?

  - by Foo

  In other languages you have a number of possibilities usually for memory reclamation: Mark objects and then remove them Explicit retain and release Count references to objects Internal heap disposition How does Ruby work?

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• is it possible to apply an RC5 algorithm on an audio file in c++ ?

  - by mekasperasky

  is it possible to encrypt an audio file in c++ using rc5?

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• Which of these algorithms is best for my goal?

  - by JonathonG

  I have created a program that restricts the mouse to a certain region based on a black/white bitmap. The program is 100% functional as-is, but uses an inaccurate, albeit fast, algorithm for repositioning the mouse when it strays outside the area. Currently, when the mouse moves outside the area, basically what happens is this: A line is drawn between a pre-defined static point inside the region and the mouse's new position. The point where that line intersects the edge of the allowed area is found. The mouse is moved to that point. This works, but only works perfectly for a perfect circle with the pre-defined point set in the exact center. Unfortunately, this will never be the case. The application will be used with a variety of rectangles and irregular, amorphous shapes. On such shapes, the point where the line drawn intersects the edge will usually not be the closest point on the shape to the mouse. I need to create a new algorithm that finds the closest point to the mouse's new position on the edge of the allowed area. I have several ideas about this, but I am not sure of their validity, in that they may have far too much overhead. While I am not asking for code, it might help to know that I am using Objective C / Cocoa, developing for OS X, as I feel the language being used might affect the efficiency of potential methods. My ideas are: Using a bit of trigonometry to project lines would work, but that would require some kind of intense algorithm to test every point on every line until it found the edge of the region... That seems too resource intensive since there could be something like 200 lines that would have each have to have as many as 200 pixels checked for black/white.... Using something like an A* pathing algorithm to find the shortest path to a black pixel; however, A* seems resource intensive, even though I could probably restrict it to only checking roughly in one direction. It also seems like it will take more time and effort than I have available to spend on this small portion of the much larger project I am working on, correct me if I am wrong and it would not be a significant amount of code (100 lines or around there). Mapping the border of the region before the application begins running the event tap loop. I think I could accomplish this by using my current line-based algorithm to find an edge point and then initiating an algorithm that checks all 8 pixels around that pixel, finds the next border pixel in one direction, and continues to do this until it comes back to the starting pixel. I could then store that data in an array to be used for the entire duration of the program, and have the mouse re-positioning method check the array for the closest pixel on the border to the mouse target position. That last method would presumably execute it's initial border mapping fairly quickly. (It would only have to map between 2,000 and 8,000 pixels, which means 8,000 to 64,000 checked, and I could even permanently store the data to make launching faster.) However, I am uncertain as to how much overhead it would take to scan through that array for the shortest distance for every single mouse move event... I suppose there could be a shortcut to restrict the number of elements in the array that will be checked to a variable number starting with the intersecting point on the line (from my original algorithm), and raise/lower that number to experiment with the overhead/accuracy tradeoff. Please let me know if I am over thinking this and there is an easier way that will work just fine, or which of these methods would be able to execute something like 30 times per second to keep mouse movement smooth, or if you have a better/faster method. I've posted relevant parts of my code below for reference, and included an example of what the area might look like. (I check for color value against a loaded bitmap that is black/white.) // // This part of my code runs every single time the mouse moves. // CGPoint point = CGEventGetLocation(event); float tX = point.x; float tY = point.y; if( is_in_area(tX,tY, mouse_mask)){ // target is inside O.K. area, do nothing }else{ CGPoint target; //point inside restricted region: float iX = 600; // inside x float iY = 500; // inside y // delta to midpoint between iX,iY and tX,tY float dX; float dY; float accuracy = .5; //accuracy to loop until reached do { dX = (tX-iX)/2; dY = (tY-iY)/2; if(is_in_area((tX-dX),(tY-dY),mouse_mask)){ iX += dX; iY += dY; } else { tX -= dX; tY -= dY; } } while (abs(dX)>accuracy || abs(dY)>accuracy); target = CGPointMake(roundf(tX), roundf(tY)); CGDisplayMoveCursorToPoint(CGMainDisplayID(),target); } Here is "is_in_area(int x, int y)" : bool is_in_area(NSInteger x, NSInteger y, NSBitmapImageRep *mouse_mask){ NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; NSUInteger pixel[4]; [mouse_mask getPixel:pixel atX:x y:y]; if(pixel[0]!= 0){ [pool release]; return false; } [pool release]; return true; }

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• SQL SERVER – Database Dynamic Caching by Automatic SQL Server Performance Acceleration

  - by pinaldave

  My second look at SafePeak’s new version (2.1) revealed to me few additional interesting features. For those of you who hadn’t read my previous reviews SafePeak and not familiar with it, here is a quick brief: SafePeak is in business of accelerating performance of SQL Server applications, as well as their scalability, without making code changes to the applications or to the databases. SafePeak performs database dynamic caching, by caching in memory result sets of queries and stored procedures while keeping all those cache correct and up to date. Cached queries are retrieved from the SafePeak RAM in microsecond speed and not send to the SQL Server. The application gets much faster results (100-500 micro seconds), the load on the SQL Server is reduced (less CPU and IO) and the application or the infrastructure gets better scalability. SafePeak solution is hosted either within your cloud servers, hosted servers or your enterprise servers, as part of the application architecture. Connection of the application is done via change of connection strings or adding reroute line in the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file on all application servers. For those who would like to learn more on SafePeak architecture and how it works, I suggest to read this vendor’s webpage: SafePeak Architecture. More interesting new features in SafePeak 2.1 In my previous review of SafePeak new I covered the first 4 things I noticed in the new SafePeak (check out my article “SQLAuthority News – SafePeak Releases a Major Update: SafePeak version 2.1 for SQL Server Performance Acceleration”): Cache setup and fine-tuning – a critical part for getting good caching results Database templates Choosing which database to cache Monitoring and analysis options by SafePeak Since then I had a chance to play with SafePeak some more and here is what I found. 5. Analysis of SQL Performance (present and history): In SafePeak v.2.1 the tools for understanding of performance became more comprehensive. Every 15 minutes SafePeak creates and updates various performance statistics. Each query (or a procedure execute) that arrives to SafePeak gets a SQL pattern, and after it is used again there are statistics for such pattern. An important part of this product is that it understands the dependencies of every pattern (list of tables, views, user defined functions and procs). From this understanding SafePeak creates important analysis information on performance of every object: response time from the database, response time from SafePeak cache, average response time, percent of traffic and break down of behavior. One of the interesting things this behavior column shows is how often the object is actually pdated. The break down analysis allows knowing the above information for: queries and procedures, tables, views, databases and even instances level. The data is show now on all arriving queries, both read queries (that can be cached), but also any types of updates like DMLs, DDLs, DCLs, and even session settings queries. The stats are being updated every 15 minutes and SafePeak dashboard allows going back in time and investigating what happened within any time frame. 6. Logon trigger, for making sure nothing corrupts SafePeak cache data If you have an application with many parts, many servers many possible locations that can actually update the database, or the SQL Server is accessible to many DBAs or software engineers, each can access some database directly and do some changes without going thru SafePeak – this can create a potential corruption of the data stored in SafePeak cache. To make sure SafePeak cache is correct it needs to get all updates to arrive to SafePeak, and if a DBA will access the database directly and do some changes, for example, then SafePeak will simply not know about it and will not clean SafePeak cache. In the new version, SafePeak brought a new feature called “Logon Trigger” to solve the above challenge. By special click of a button SafePeak can deploy a special server logon trigger (with a CLR object) on your SQL Server that actually monitors all connections and informs SafePeak on any connection that is coming not from SafePeak. In SafePeak dashboard there is an interface that allows to control which logins can be ignored based on login names and IPs, while the rest will invoke cache cleanup of SafePeak and actually locks SafePeak cache until this connection will not be closed. Important to note, that this does not interrupt any logins, only informs SafePeak on such connection. On the Dashboard screen in SafePeak you will be able to see those connections and then decide what to do with them. Configuration of this feature in SafePeak dashboard can be done here: Settings -> SQL instances management -> click on instance -> Logon Trigger tab. Other features: 7. User management ability to grant permissions to someone without changing its configuration and only use SafePeak as performance analysis tool. 8. Better reports for analysis of performance using 15 minute resolution charts. 9. Caching of client cursors 10. Support for IPv6 Summary SafePeak is a great SQL Server performance acceleration solution for users who want immediate results for sites with performance, scalability and peak spikes challenges. Especially if your apps are packaged or 3rd party, since no code changes are done. SafePeak can significantly increase response times, by reducing network roundtrip to the database, decreasing CPU resource usage, eliminating I/O and storage access. SafePeak team provides a free fully functional trial www.safepeak.com/download and actually provides a one-on-one assistance during such trial. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

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• Oracle Database 12c Spatial: Vector Performance Acceleration

  - by Okcan Yasin Saygili-Oracle

  Most business information has a location component, such as customer addresses, sales territories and physical assets. Businesses can take advantage of their geographic information by incorporating location analysis and intelligence into their information systems. This allows organizations to make better decisions, respond to customers more effectively, and reduce operational costs – increasing ROI and creating competitive advantage. Oracle Database, the industry’s most advanced database,  includes native location capabilities, fully integrated in the kernel, for fast, scalable, reliable and secure spatial and massive graph applications. It is a foundation for deploying enterprise-wide spatial information systems and locationenabled business applications. Developers can extend existing Oracle-based tools and applications, since they can easily incorporate location information directly in their applications, workflows, and services. Spatial Features The geospatial data features of Oracle Spatial and Graph option support complex geographic information systems (GIS) applications, enterprise applications and location services applications. Oracle Spatial and Graph option extends the spatial query and analysis features included in every edition of Oracle Database with the Oracle Locator feature, and provides a robust foundation for applications that require advanced spatial analysis and processing in the Oracle Database. It supports all major spatial data types and models, addressing challenging business-critical requirements from various industries, including transportation, utilities, energy, public sector, defense and commercial location intelligence. Network Data Model Graph Features The Network Data Model graph explicitly stores and maintains a persistent data model withnetwork connectivity and provides network analysis capability such as shortest path, nearest neighbors, within cost and reachability. It loads partitioned networks into memory on demand, overcomingthe limitations of in-memory analysis. Partitioning massive networks into manageable sub-networkssimplifies the network analysis. RDF Semantic Graph Features RDF Semantic Graph has native support for World Wide Web Consortium standards. It has open, scalable, and secure features for storing RDF/OWL ontologies anddata; native inference with OWL 2, SKOS and user-defined rules; and querying RDF/OWL data withSPARQL 1.1, Java APIs, and SPARQLgraph patterns in SQL. Video: Oracle Spatial and Graph Overview Oracle spatial is embeded on oracle database product. So ,we can use oracle installer (OUI).The Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) is used to install Oracle Database software. OUI is a graphical user interface utility that enables you to view the Oracle software that is installed on your machine, install new Oracle Database software, and delete Oracle software that you no longer need to use. Online Help is available to guide you through the installation process. One of the installation options is to create a database. If you select database creation, OUI automatically starts Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) to guide you through the process of creating and configuring a database. If you do not create a database during installation, you must invoke DBCA after you have installed the software to create a database. You can also use DBCA to create additional databases. For installing Oracle Database 12c you may check the Installing Oracle Database Software and Creating a Database tutorial under the Oracle Database 12c 2-Day DBA Series.You can always check if spatial is available in your database using  "select comp_id, version, status, comp_name from dba_registry where comp_id='SDO';"   One of the most notable improvements with Oracle Spatial and Graph 12c can be seen in performance increases in vector data operations. Enabling the Spatial Vector Acceleration feature (available with the Spatial option) dramatically improves the performance of commonly used vector data operations, such as sdo_distance, sdo_aggr_union, and sdo_inside. With 12c, these operations also run more efficiently in parallel than in prior versions through the use of metadata caching. For organizations that have been facing processing limitations, these enhancements enable developers to make a small set of configuration changes and quickly realize significant performance improvements. Results include improved index performance, enhanced geometry engine performance, optimized secondary filter optimizations for Spatial operators, and improved CPU and memory utilization for many advanced vector functions. Vector performance acceleration is especially beneficial when using Oracle Exadata Database Machine and other large-scale systems. Oracle Spatial and Graph vector performance acceleration builds on general improvements available to all SDO_GEOMETRY operations in these areas: Caching of index metadata, Concurrent update mechanisms, and Optimized spatial predicate selectivity and cost functions. These optimizations enable more efficient use of: CPU, Memory, and Partitioning Resulting in substantial query performance improvements.UsageTo accelerate the performance of spatial operators, it is recommended that you set the SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION database system parameter to the value TRUE. (This parameter is authorized for use only by licensed Oracle Spatial users, and its default value is FALSE.) You can set this parameter for the whole system or for a single session. To set the value for the whole system, do either of the following:Enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SYSTEM SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;Add the following to the database initialization file (xxxinit.ora):   SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;To set the value for the current session, enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SESSION SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE; Checkout the complete list of new features on Oracle.com @ http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/spatialandgraph/overview/index.html Spatial and Graph Data Sheet (PDF) Spatial and Graph White Paper (PDF)

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• NDepend 4 – First Steps

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction Thanks to Patrick Smacchia I had the chance to test NDepend 4. I can only say: awesome! This will be the first of a series of posts on NDepend, where I will talk about my discoveries. Keep in mind that I am just starting to use it, so more experienced users may find these too basic, I just hope I don’t say anything foolish! I must say that I am in no way affiliated with NDepend and I never actually met Patrick. Installation No installation program – a curious decision, I’m not against it -, just unzip the files to a folder and run the executable. It will optionally register itself with Visual Studio 2008, 2010 and 11 as well as RedGate’s Reflector; also, it automatically looks for updates. NDepend can either be used as a stand-alone program (with or without a GUI) or from within Visual Studio or Reflector. Getting Started One thing that really pleases me is the Getting Started section of the stand-alone, with links to pages on NDepend’s web site, featuring detailed explanations, which usually include screenshots and small videos (<5 minutes). There’s also an How do I with hierarchical navigation that guides us to through the major features so that we can easily find what we want. Usage There are two basic ways to use NDepend: Analyze .NET solutions, projects or assemblies; Compare two versions of the same assembly. I have so far not used NDepend to compare assemblies, so I will first talk about the first option. After selecting a solution and some of its projects, it generates a single HTML page with an highly detailed report of the analysis it produced. This includes some metrics such as number of lines of code, IL instructions, comments, types, methods and properties, the calculation of the cyclomatic complexity, coupling and lots of others indicators, typically grouped by type, namespace and assembly. The HTML also includes some nice diagrams depicting assembly dependencies, type and method relative proportions (according to the number of IL instructions, I guess) and assembly analysis relating to abstractness and stability. Useful, I would say. Then there’s the rules; NDepend tests the target assemblies against a set of more than 120 rules, grouped in categories Code Quality, Object Oriented Design, Design, Architecture and Layering, Dead Code, Visibility, Naming Conventions, Source Files Organization and .NET Framework Usage. The full list can be configured on the application, and an explanation of each rule can be found on the web site. Rules can be validated, violated and violated in a critical manner, and the HTML will contain the violated rules, their queries – more on this later - and results. The HTML uses some nice JavaScript effects, which allow paging and sorting of tables, so its nice to use. Similar to the rules, there are some queries that display results for a number (about 200) questions grouped as Object Oriented Design, API Breaking Changes (for assembly version comparison), Code Diff Summary (also for version comparison) and Dead Code. The difference between queries and rules is that queries are not classified as passes, violated or critically violated, just present results. The queries and rules are expressed through CQLinq, which is a very powerful LINQ derivative specific to code analysis. All of the included rules and queries can be enabled or disabled and new ones can be added, with intellisense to help. Besides the HTML report file, the NDepend application can be used to explore all analysis results, compare different versions of analysis reports and to run custom queries. Comparison to Other Analysis Tools Unlike StyleCop, NDepend only works with assemblies, not source code, so you can’t expect it to be able to enforce brackets placement, for example. It is more similar to FxCop, but you don’t have the option to analyze at the IL level, that is, other that the number of IL instructions and the complexity. What’s Next In the next days I’ll continue my exploration with a real-life test case. References The NDepend web site is http://www.ndepend.com/. Patrick keeps an updated blog on http://codebetter.com/patricksmacchia/ and he regularly monitors StackOverflow for questions tagged NDepend, which you can find on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ndepend. The default list of CQLinq rules, queries and statistics can be found at http://www.ndepend.com/DefaultRules/webframe.html. The syntax itself is described at http://www.ndepend.com/Doc_CQLinq_Syntax.aspx and its features at http://www.ndepend.com/Doc_CQLinq_Features.aspx.

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• Need a Holistic view of your Concurrent Processing?

  - by cwarticki

  Need a Holistic view of your Concurrent Processing? Choose CP AnalyzerGo to Doc 1411723.1 for more details and script download. The Concurrent Processing Analyzer is a Self-Service Health-Check script which reviews the overall Concurrent Processing Footprint, analyzes the current configurations and settings for the environment providing feedback and recommendations on Best Practices. This is a non-invasive script which provides recommended actions to be performed on the instance it was run on.  For production instances, always apply any changes to a recent clone to ensure an expected outcome. E-Business Applications Concurrent Processing Analyzer Overview E-Business Applications Concurrent Request Analysis E-Business Applications Concurrent Manager Analysis Identifies Concurrent System Setup and configurations Identifies and recommends Concurrent Best Practices Easy to add Tool for regular Concurrent Maintenance Execute Analysis anytime to compare trending from past outputs Feedback welcome!

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• Reminder: For a Complete View Of Your Concurrent Processing Take A Look At The CP Analyzer!

  - by LuciaC

  For a complete view of your Concurrent Processing take a look at the CP Analyzer!  Doc ID 1411723.1 has the script to download and a 9 min video. The Concurrent Processing Analyzer is a Self-Service Health-Check script which reviews the overall Concurrent Processing Footprint, analyzes the current configurations and settings for the environment providing feedback and recommendations on Best Practices.This is a non-invasive script which provides recommended actions to be performed on the instance it was run on.  For production instances, always apply any changes to a recent clone to ensure an expected outcome. E-Business Applications Concurrent Processing Analyzer Overview E-Business Applications Concurrent Request Analysis E-Business Applications Concurrent Manager Analysis Identifies Concurrent System Setup and configurations Identifies and recommends Concurrent Best Practices Easy to add Tool for regular Concurrent Maintenance Execute Analysis anytime to compare trending from past outputs Feedback welcome!

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• What classes are useful for an aspiring software developer? [closed]

  - by Anonymouse

  I'm a freshman in college trying to graduate in 3 years with a Math/CS dual major, and I don't have a lot of time to be fooling around with useless classes. I've tested out of most of my gen eds and science-y courses, but I need to know: what math and cs courses are most important for someone interested in algorithm development? Math courses already taken: Calc I-III,Linear Algebra, Discrete Math. CS courses taken: Java. Math courses I'm planning to take: ODE, Linear Algebra II, Vector calc, Logic, (Analysis or Algebra), Stats, probability CS courses I'm planning to take: C(required), Data Structures, Numerical Methods, Intro to Analysis of Algorithms. Which is better, analysis or algebra? Did I take enough CS courses? Am I missing out on anything? Thanks.

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• Need a Holistic view of your Concurrent Processing? Choose CP Analyzer

  - by user793044

  The Concurrent Processing Analyzer is a Self-Service Health-Check script which reviews the overall Concurrent Processing Footprint, analyzes the current configurations and settings for the environment providing feedback and recommendations on Best Practices. This is a non-invasive script which provides recommended actions to be performed on the instance it was run on.  For production instances, always apply any changes to a recent clone to ensure an expected outcome. Benefits include: E-Business Applications Concurrent Processing Analyzer Overview E-Business Applications Concurrent Request Analysis E-Business Applications Concurrent Manager Analysis Identifies Concurrent System Setup and configurations Identifies and recommends Concurrent Best Practices Easy to add Tool for regular Concurrent Maintenance Execute Analysis anytime to compare trending from past outputs Go to Doc ID 1411723.1 for more details and script download. Feedback welcome!

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• ANN for decompiler?

  - by Rhythmic Algorithm

  Has there ever been any attempts at utilizing artificial neural networks in decompilation? It would be nice if it was possible to provide the trimmed semantics of source along with the code in to a neural network so it could learn the connection between the two. I assume this would likely lose it's effectiveness when there is optimizations and maybe work better for high level languages too but I'm interested in hearing any attempts anyone has had at this.

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• Google street view URL question:

  - by Rhythmic Algorithm

  Hi I have the address of a property and my application can launch a browser to go to http://maps.google.com?q=searchStringHere. If a good match is found it will take it directly there. Is there any thing I can append to the url to make it switch to streetview without having the exact coordinates? I dont't want to code any javascript or flash.

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• Change save to file name but from the client

  - by Rhythmic Algorithm

  This question asks about file name the servers sends and the fix was quite simply a content-disposition header in the http response. What I interested in is does anyone know of any way to do this from the client side if the file name is already known? Is there any special javascript to do this for example? A site I have to use but not mine has a FileDownload.aspx but it doesn't send the content-disposition header. I know the filename and would like to be able to create a firefox extensions to use for the poorly coded web site. Thanks

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• C++ .NET DLL vs C# Managed Code ? (File Encrypting AES-128+XTS)

  - by Ranhiru

  I need to create a Windows Mobile Application (WinMo 6.x - C#) which is used to encrypt/decrypt files. However it is my duty to write the encryption algorithm which is AES-128 along with XTS as the mode of operation. RijndaelManaged just doesn't cut it :( Very much slower than DES and 3DES CryptoServiceProviders :O I know it all depends on how good I am at writing the algorithm in the most efficient way. (And yes I my self have to write it from scratch but i can take a look @ other implementations) Nevertheless, does writing a C++ .NET DLL to create the encryption/decryption algorithm + all the file handling and using it from C# have a significant performance advantage OVER writing the encryption algorithm + file handling in completely managed C# code? If I use C++ .NET to create the encryption algorithm, should I use MFC Smart Device DLL or ATL? What is the difference and is there any impact on which one I choose? And can i just add a reference to the C++ DLL from C# or should I use P/Invoke? I am fairly competent with C# than C++ but performance plays a major role as I have convinced my lecturers that AES is a very efficient cryptographic algorithm for resource constrained devices. Thanx a bunch :)

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract   Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA.   Introduction   A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders.   Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc.   Purpose of Reference Architecture   In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness.   Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices.   Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level:   ·       Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise ·       Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. ·       Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles ·       Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc ·       A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information ·       Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security ·       Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. ·       Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets ·       Has a shorter implementation time and cost   Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO).     Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers   Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider:   ·       In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. ·       Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. ·       Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. ·       Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. ·       Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. ·       Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. ·       Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems   However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape.   Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture   Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges.   “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum.   The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture:   ·       Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements ·       Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. ·       Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) ·       Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services ·       Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem ·       (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks ·       Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products ·       Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products   Drivers of Reference Architecture   The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure.   Telecom reference architectures are today expected to:   ·       Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems ·       Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services ·       Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure ·       Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. ·       Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g.  Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. ·       Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations ·       Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) ·       Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management ·       Lower operating costs to drive profitability   Enterprise Reference Architecture   The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA.   • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture   Telecom Reference Architecture   Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements:   ·       The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. ·       The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. ·       The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. ·       The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes.   NGOSS Architecture Standards are:   ·       Centralized data ·       Loosely coupled distributed systems ·       Application components/re-use  ·       A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations ·       Interoperability to service provider data/processes ·       Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios ·       Workflow automation   The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers,   ·       Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. ·       Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. ·       Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. ·       Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility.   Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture   The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows:   1. Customer Relationship Management   CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.   CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.   The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are   ·       Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. ·       Create and manage customer profiles. ·       Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. ·       Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. ·       Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. ·       Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). ·       Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.   CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing.   2. Billing and Revenue Management   Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. ·       To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. ·       To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. ·       Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. ·       Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. ·       Support prepaid and post-paid rating. ·       Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. ·       Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. ·       Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. ·       Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. ·       Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc.   Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.   3. Mediation   Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.   ·       Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. ·       Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. ·       Validate Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. ·       Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. ·       Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. ·       Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. ·       Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window.   4. Fulfillment   This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; ·       Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; ·       Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; ·       Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; ·       Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; ·       Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; ·       Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and ·       Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer.   These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.   5. Enterprise Management   This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that   ·       Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.;   ·       Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business;   ·       Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc.     (i) Enterprise Risk Management:   Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are:   ·       Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o   Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o   Interconnect bill verification. o   Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o   Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o   Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o   Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized.   ·       Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.   The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows:   o   Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o   Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o   The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o   The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems   (ii) Knowledge Management   This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.   Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to   ·       Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. ·       Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse ·       Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. ·       Run report generator. ·       Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc.   (iii) Document Management   It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system.   (iv) Data Management   It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management.   Key responsibilities of Data Management are   ·       Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. ·       Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) ·       Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. ·       Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.   (v) Business Intelligence   It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:   ·       It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. ·       It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. ·       It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. ·       It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. ·       It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. ·       It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions.   It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer   ·       It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.   (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management   It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations.   (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning   It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.   The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:   ·        It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. ·       It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. ·       It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. ·       It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. ·       It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.   6. External Interfaces/Touch Points   The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including:   ·       Exchange of emails or faxes ·       Call Centers ·       Web Portals ·       Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions   These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.   Typical characteristics of these touch points are   ·       Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine ·       Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment ·       Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application   These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses.   7. Middleware   The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.   ·       As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces ·       Provide a web service framework with service registry. ·       Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. ·       Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. ·       Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. ·       Use standard XML for data exchange. ·       Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. ·       Provide a tracking until the response completion. ·       Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. ·       Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. ·       Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. ·       Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component.   8. Network Elements   The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.   Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.   Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.   9. 3rd Party Applications   3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government.   Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done.   10. Service Delivery Platform   A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction.   SOA Reference Architecture   SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques.   In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:   ·       The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services ·       Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface ·       A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs ·       Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services ·       Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change ·       Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services   ·       A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis   The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits.   Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers.   COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives.   The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers.   The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1.          Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation.   ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc.   CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc.   Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components:   ·       Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges ·       Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured.   MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data.     2.          Enterprise Component Layer:   This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing.   Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are:   ·       Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc.   ·       Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query.   ·       Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design.   Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc.   3.          Integration Layer:   This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime.   • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework.   4.          Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains.   5.          Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services.   6.          Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications.   7.          Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications.   8.          Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance.     9.          EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices:   EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology).   Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey.   Conclusions   Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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• while(true) and loop-breaking - anti-pattern?

  - by KeithS

  Consider the following code: public void doSomething(int input) { while(true) { TransformInSomeWay(input); if(ProcessingComplete(input)) break; DoSomethingElseTo(input); } } Assume that this process involves a finite but input-dependent number of steps; the loop is designed to terminate on its own as a result of the algorithm, and is not designed to run indefinitely (until cancelled by an outside event). Because the test to see if the loop should end is in the middle of a logical set of steps, the while loop itself currently doesn't check anything meaningful; the check is instead performed at the "proper" place within the conceptual algorithm. I was told that this is bad code, because it is more bug-prone due to the ending condition not being checked by the loop structure. It's more difficult to figure out how you'd exit the loop, and could invite bugs as the breaking condition might be bypassed or omitted accidentally given future changes. Now, the code could be structured as follows: public void doSomething(int input) { TransformInSomeWay(input); while(!ProcessingComplete(input)) { DoSomethingElseTo(input); TransformInSomeWay(input); } } However, this duplicates a call to a method in code, violating DRY; if TransformInSomeWay were later replaced with some other method, both calls would have to be found and changed (and the fact that there are two may be less obvious in a more complex piece of code). You could also write it like: public void doSomething(int input) { var complete = false; while(!complete) { TransformInSomeWay(input); complete = ProcessingComplete(input); if(!complete) { DoSomethingElseTo(input); } } } ... but you now have a variable whose only purpose is to shift the condition-checking to the loop structure, and also has to be checked multiple times to provide the same behavior as the original logic. For my part, I say that given the algorithm this code implements in the real world, the original code is the most readable. If you were going through it yourself, this is the way you'd think about it, and so it would be intuitive to people familiar with the algorithm. So, which is "better"? is it better to give the responsibility of condition checking to the while loop by structuring the logic around the loop? Or is it better to structure the logic in a "natural" way as indicated by requirements or a conceptual description of the algorithm, even though that may mean bypassing the loop's built-in capabilities?

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• Elfsign Object Signing on Solaris

  - by danx

  Elfsign Object Signing on Solaris Don't let this happen to you—use elfsign! Solaris elfsign(1) is a command that signs and verifies ELF format executables. That includes not just executable programs (such as ls or cp), but other ELF format files including libraries (such as libnvpair.so) and kernel modules (such as autofs). Elfsign has been available since Solaris 10 and ELF format files distributed with Solaris, since Solaris 10, are signed by either Sun Microsystems or its successor, Oracle Corporation. When an ELF file is signed, elfsign adds a new section the ELF file, .SUNW_signature, that contains a RSA public key signature and other information about the signer. That is, the algorithm used, algorithm OID, signer CN/OU, and time stamp. The signature section can later be verified by elfsign or other software by matching the signature in the file agains the ELF file contents (excluding the signature). ELF executable files may also be signed by a 3rd-party or by the customer. This is useful for verifying the origin and authenticity of executable files installed on a system. The 3rd-party or customer public key certificate should be installed in /etc/certs/ to allow verification by elfsign. For currently-released versions of Solaris, only cryptographic framework plugin libraries are verified by Solaris. However, all ELF files may be verified by the elfsign command at any time. Elfsign Algorithms Elfsign signatures are created by taking a digest of the ELF section contents, then signing the digest with RSA. To verify, one takes a digest of ELF file and compares with the expected digest that's computed from the signature and RSA public key. Originally elfsign took a MD5 digest of a SHA-1 digest of the ELF file sections, then signed the resulting digest with RSA. In Solaris 11.1 then Solaris 11.1 SRU 7 (5/2013), the elfsign crypto algorithms available have been expanded to keep up with evolving cryptography. The following table shows the available elfsign algorithms: Elfsign Algorithm Solaris Release Comments elfsign sign -F rsa_md5_sha1   S10, S11.0, S11.1 Default for S10. Not recommended* elfsign sign -F rsa_sha1 S11.1 Default for S11.1. Not recommended elfsign sign -F rsa_sha256 S11.1 patch SRU7+   Recommended ___ *Most or all CAs do not accept MD5 CSRs and do not issue MD5 certs due to MD5 hash collision problems. RSA Key Length. I recommend using RSA-2048 key length with elfsign is RSA-2048 as the best balance between a long expected "life time", interoperability, and performance. RSA-2048 keys have an expected lifetime through 2030 (and probably beyond). For details, see Recommendation for Key Management: Part 1: General, NIST Publication SP 800-57 part 1 (rev. 3, 7/2012, PDF), tables 2 and 4 (pp. 64, 67). Step 1: create or obtain a key and cert The first step in using elfsign is to obtain a key and cert from a public Certificate Authority (CA), or create your own self-signed key and cert. I'll briefly explain both methods. Obtaining a Certificate from a CA To obtain a cert from a CA, such as Verisign, Thawte, or Go Daddy (to name a few random examples), you create a private key and a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) file and send it to the CA, following the instructions of the CA on their website. They send back a signed public key certificate. The public key cert, along with the private key you created is used by elfsign to sign an ELF file. The public key cert is distributed with the software and is used by elfsign to verify elfsign signatures in ELF files. You need to request a RSA "Class 3 public key certificate", which is used for servers and software signing. Elfsign uses RSA and we recommend RSA-2048 keys. The private key and CSR can be generated with openssl(1) or pktool(1) on Solaris. Here's a simple example that uses pktool to generate a private RSA_2048 key and a CSR for sending to a CA: $ pktool gencsr keystore=file format=pem outcsr=MYCSR.p10 \ subject="CN=canineswworks.com,OU=Canine SW object signing" \ outkey=MYPRIVATEKEY.key $ openssl rsa -noout -text -in MYPRIVATEKEY.key Private-Key: (2048 bit) modulus: 00:d2:ef:42:f2:0b:8c:96:9f:45:32:fc:fe:54:94: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . c9:c7 publicExponent: 65537 (0x10001) privateExponent: 26:14:fc:49:26:bc:a3:14:ee:31:5e:6b:ac:69:83: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 81 prime1: 00:f6:b7:52:73:bc:26:57:26:c8:11:eb:6c:dc:cb: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . bc:91:d0:40:d6:9d:ac:b5:69 prime2: 00:da:df:3f:56:b2:18:46:e1:89:5b:6c:f1:1a:41: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . f3:b7:48:de:c3:d9:ce:af:af exponent1: 00:b9:a2:00:11:02:ed:9a:3f:9c:e4:16:ce:c7:67: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 55:50:25:70:d3:ca:b9:ab:99 exponent2: 00:c8:fc:f5:57:11:98:85:8e:9a:ea:1f:f2:8f:df: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 23:57:0e:4d:b2:a0:12:d2:f5 coefficient: 2f:60:21:cd:dc:52:76:67:1a:d8:75:3e:7f:b0:64: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 06:94:56:d8:9d:5c:8e:9b $ openssl req -noout -text -in MYCSR.p10 Certificate Request: Data: Version: 2 (0x2) Subject: OU=Canine SW object signing, CN=canineswworks.com Subject Public Key Info: Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption Public-Key: (2048 bit) Modulus: 00:d2:ef:42:f2:0b:8c:96:9f:45:32:fc:fe:54:94: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . c9:c7 Exponent: 65537 (0x10001) Attributes: Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption b3:e8:30:5b:88:37:68:1c:26:6b:45:af:5e:de:ea:60:87:ea: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 06:f9:ed:b4 Secure storage of RSA private key. The private key needs to be protected if the key signing is used for production (as opposed to just testing). That is, protect the key to protect against unauthorized signatures by others. One method is to use a PIN-protected PKCS#11 keystore. The private key you generate should be stored in a secure manner, such as in a PKCS#11 keystore using pktool(1). Otherwise others can sign your signature. Other secure key storage mechanisms include a SCA-6000 crypto card, a USB thumb drive stored in a locked area, a dedicated server with restricted access, Oracle Key Manager (OKM), or some combination of these. I also recommend secure backup of the private key. Here's an example of generating a private key protected in the PKCS#11 keystore, and a CSR. $ pktool setpin # use if PIN not set yet Enter token passphrase: changeme Create new passphrase: Re-enter new passphrase: Passphrase changed. $ pktool gencsr keystore=pkcs11 label=MYPRIVATEKEY \ format=pem outcsr=MYCSR.p10 \ subject="CN=canineswworks.com,OU=Canine SW object signing" $ pktool list keystore=pkcs11 Enter PIN for Sun Software PKCS#11 softtoken: Found 1 asymmetric public keys. Key #1 - RSA public key: MYPRIVATEKEY Here's another example that uses openssl instead of pktool to generate a private key and CSR: $ openssl genrsa -out cert.key 2048 $ openssl req -new -key cert.key -out MYCSR.p10 Self-Signed Cert You can use openssl or pktool to create a private key and a self-signed public key certificate. A self-signed cert is useful for development, testing, and internal use. The private key created should be stored in a secure manner, as mentioned above. The following example creates a private key, MYSELFSIGNED.key, and a public key cert, MYSELFSIGNED.pem, using pktool and displays the contents with the openssl command. $ pktool gencert keystore=file format=pem serial=0xD06F00D lifetime=20-year \ keytype=rsa hash=sha256 outcert=MYSELFSIGNED.pem outkey=MYSELFSIGNED.key \ subject="O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com" $ pktool list keystore=file objtype=cert infile=MYSELFSIGNED.pem Found 1 certificates. 1. (X.509 certificate) Filename: MYSELFSIGNED.pem ID: c8:24:59:08:2b:ae:6e:5c:bc:26:bd:ef:0a:9c:54:de:dd:0f:60:46 Subject: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com Issuer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com Not Before: Oct 17 23:18:00 2013 GMT Not After: Oct 12 23:18:00 2033 GMT Serial: 0xD06F00D0 Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption $ openssl x509 -noout -text -in MYSELFSIGNED.pem Certificate: Data: Version: 3 (0x2) Serial Number: 3496935632 (0xd06f00d0) Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption Issuer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com Validity Not Before: Oct 17 23:18:00 2013 GMT Not After : Oct 12 23:18:00 2033 GMT Subject: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com Subject Public Key Info: Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption Public-Key: (2048 bit) Modulus: 00:bb:e8:11:21:d9:4b:88:53:8b:6c:5a:7a:38:8b: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . bf:77 Exponent: 65537 (0x10001) Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption 9e:39:fe:c8:44:5c:87:2c:8f:f4:24:f6:0c:9a:2f:64:84:d1: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 5f:78:8e:e8 $ openssl rsa -noout -text -in MYSELFSIGNED.key Private-Key: (2048 bit) modulus: 00:bb:e8:11:21:d9:4b:88:53:8b:6c:5a:7a:38:8b: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . bf:77 publicExponent: 65537 (0x10001) privateExponent: 0a:06:0f:23:e7:1b:88:62:2c:85:d3:2d:c1:e6:6e: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 9c:e1:e0:0a:52:77:29:4a:75:aa:02:d8:af:53:24: c1 prime1: 00:ea:12:02:bb:5a:0f:5a:d8:a9:95:b2:ba:30:15: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 5b:ca:9c:7c:19:48:77:1e:5d prime2: 00:cd:82:da:84:71:1d:18:52:cb:c6:4d:74:14:be: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 5f:db:d5:5e:47:89:a7:ef:e3 exponent1: 32:37:62:f6:a6:bf:9c:91:d6:f0:12:c3:f7:04:e9: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 97:3e:33:31:89:66:64:d1 exponent2: 00:88:a2:e8:90:47:f8:75:34:8f:41:50:3b:ce:93: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . ff:74:d4:be:f3:47:45:bd:cb coefficient: 4d:7c:09:4c:34:73:c4:26:f0:58:f5:e1:45:3c:af: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . af:01:5f:af:ad:6a:09:bf Step 2: Sign the ELF File object By now you should have your private key, and obtained, by hook or crook, a cert (either from a CA or use one you created (a self-signed cert). The next step is to sign one or more objects with your private key and cert. Here's a simple example that creates an object file, signs, verifies, and lists the contents of the ELF signature. $ echo '#include <stdio.h>\nint main(){printf("Hello\\n");}'>hello.c $ make hello cc -o hello hello.c $ elfsign verify -v -c MYSELFSIGNED.pem -e hello elfsign: no signature found in hello. $ elfsign sign -F rsa_sha256 -v -k MYSELFSIGNED.key -c MYSELFSIGNED.pem -e hello elfsign: hello signed successfully. format: rsa_sha256. signer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com. signed on: October 17, 2013 04:22:49 PM PDT. $ elfsign list -f format -e hello rsa_sha256 $ elfsign list -f signer -e hello O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com $ elfsign list -f time -e hello October 17, 2013 04:22:49 PM PDT $ elfsign verify -v -c MYSELFSIGNED.key -e hello elfsign: verification of hello failed. format: rsa_sha256. signer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com. signed on: October 17, 2013 04:22:49 PM PDT. Signing using the pkcs11 keystore To sign the ELF file using a private key in the secure pkcs11 keystore, replace "-K MYSELFSIGNED.key" in the "elfsign sign" command line with "-T MYPRIVATEKEY", where MYPRIVATKEY is the pkcs11 token label. Step 3: Install the cert and test on another system Just signing the object isn't enough. You need to copy or install the cert and the signed ELF file(s) on another system to test that the signature is OK. Your public key cert should be installed in /etc/certs. Use elfsign verify to verify the signature. Elfsign verify checks each cert in /etc/certs until it finds one that matches the elfsign signature in the file. If one isn't found, the verification fails. Here's an example: $ su Password: # rm /etc/certs/MYSELFSIGNED.key # cp MYSELFSIGNED.pem /etc/certs # exit $ elfsign verify -v hello elfsign: verification of hello passed. format: rsa_sha256. signer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com. signed on: October 17, 2013 04:24:20 PM PDT. After testing, package your cert along with your ELF object to allow elfsign verification after your cert and object are installed or copied. Under the Hood: elfsign verification Here's the steps taken to verify a ELF file signed with elfsign. The steps to sign the file are similar except the private key exponent is used instead of the public key exponent and the .SUNW_signature section is written to the ELF file instead of being read from the file. Generate a digest (SHA-256) of the ELF file sections. This digest uses all ELF sections loaded in memory, but excludes the ELF header, the .SUNW_signature section, and the symbol table Extract the RSA signature (RSA-2048) from the .SUNW_signature section Extract the RSA public key modulus and public key exponent (65537) from the public key cert Calculate the expected digest as follows:     signaturepublicKeyExponent % publicKeyModulus Strip the PKCS#1 padding (most significant bytes) from the above. The padding is 0x00, 0x01, 0xff, 0xff, . . ., 0xff, 0x00. If the actual digest == expected digest, the ELF file is verified (OK). Further Information elfsign(1), pktool(1), and openssl(1) man pages. "Signed Solaris 10 Binaries?" blog by Darren Moffat (2005) shows how to use elfsign. "Simple CLI based CA on Solaris" blog by Darren Moffat (2008) shows how to set up a simple CA for use with self-signed certificates. "How to Create a Certificate by Using the pktool gencert Command" System Administration Guide: Security Services (available at docs.oracle.com)

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