david peek - Page 133 - Developer IT

Looking for personal scheduling software / todo list with rather particular requirements

- by Cthulhu

I've been scouring the web for a couple of (my boss') hours, looking for a piece of software that can organize my tasks in two ways. First, I have a list of bullet points / todo items I can do at any given time. Think of stuff like solve issue X, ask X about Y, write documentation about Z, etcetera. Second, I have a number of running projects I'd like to organize better, as in schedule for a certain part of a day of the week. Ideally (I think), my day would be organized as 50% spent on projects and 50% on the other small things. Now, I don't like most calendar applications (such as Outlook & friends), their UI is too 'official', not really easy to move stuff around (in my experience). I don't like most todo lists either, too static and things. I like new, fast and hip software. I've looked at GTD versions of Tiddlywiki, and I like mGSD for one particular feature. You can make lists of tasks and basically give them one of three statusses - Now (nothing required, you can do it right away), Waiting (you need someone or something before you can work on this), or the most gratifying of all, Done. I like that feature because it's a simple todo list, but indicates more accurately the things you can do right now and the things you depend on someone else for to do. Anyways, that's just a small aspect of that program - most of the other things in there I can't find a particularly good use for. If there's something like that (maybe something that works even snappier, cleaner UI), combined with an easy to use bit of scheduling software (optionally separated into two applications, but preferrably not), I think I'd like that. (Besides something like that, I also use several instances of Trac to monitor tasks and bugs and things for the various clients and projects I have to serve, and TaskCoach to monitor the amount of time I spend on each task / each client. An easy / low-maintenance time tracking software would be neat too) Of course, the software has to be free to use. I don't like shareware, trials, limited software and the like. I could develop my own too, but I'm lazy like that and there's a dozen other projects I'd like to do in my free time (neither of which I actually do). Edit: I like David Seah's printable CEO stuff, if something like that (with some video game / instant achievement / gratification) exists in software, it'd be awesome.

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understanding my site's DNS records

- by DaveM

firstly apologies for using the word 'pointage' this is the word my french domain registrar uses so I may have used to wrong term. OK I would like to better understand what is going on on my 'pointage' record on my domain registrars site. for my (currently empty) web site it reports the following details... Type : Host : Destination A : www.mydomain.org : 62.210.176.146 A : mail.mydomain.org : 84.246.225.176 Mx : .mydomain.org : mail.mydomain.org I think I understand the MX record, that simply relays anything onto the mail.mydomain.org location. However why are the destination for the www and mail domains different. Even more confusing (for me) is the fact that if I ping either of www.mydomain.org or mail.mydomain.org the ping returns a different IP address. This IP address is consistent with that of my server (ie 92.39.247.92). So what exactly is going on ? I'm sure I could find the information on the web,I've read a few thing on the debianhelp site regarding DNS records, and it seems to suggest that the record should be a reverse lookup, but certains isn't the reverse of my servers IP ? but I don't what I should be looking for, so links to docs and search terms for google will be happily accepteed (even though they go against the grain of SO answers to question). thanks in advance. David. ps. I should add that everything seems to work just fine, and I've just descovered this part of the management page of my registrar. Edit: Addition of DNS records and ping results. The DNS record for the site. From what I've read there should only realy be a single 'A' record, so has something gone wrong ? should I change it (remove the extras and then just point www.facilitee.org - .facilitee.org and mail.facilitee.org - .facilitee.org here is the DNS record A www.facilitee.org ? 92.39.247.92 A .facilitee.org ? 92.39.247.92 A mail.facilitee.org ? 92.39.247.92 A webmail.facilitee.org ? 92.39.247.92 MX .facilitee.org ? mail.facilitee.org ping results... ~$ ping www.facilitee.org PING www.facilitee.org (92.39.247.92) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from vps4576-cloud.dns26.com (92.39.247.92): ~$ ping mail.facilitee.org PING mail.facilitee.org (92.39.247.92) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from vps4576-cloud.dns26.com (92.39.247.92): So the DNS and the ping correspond, but the 'pointage' doesn't. ~ how can I get a report of the pointage records other than from my registrar ?

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The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials

- by Ross

The Apple iPad is the latest new toy, and we’ve put together a comprehensive list of every tip, trick, and tutorial that we could find to help you get the most out of it—and we’re even giving one away to one lucky reader. So read on! Note: We’ll be keeping this page updated as we find more great articles, so you should bookmark this page for future reference. Want Your Own iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away! All you have to do to enter is become a fan of our Facebook page, and we’ll pick a random fan to win the prize. Win an iPad on the How-To Geek Facebook Fan Page Disable the “clicking sound” on the iPad Keyboard Does the clicking sound when you tap the iPad keyboard bother you? Thankfully it’s easy to disable with a couple of taps. How to disable the “clicking sound” on your iPad’s keyboard Enable and add bookmarks to the Safari Bookmarks Bar on your iPad By default, Safari doesn’t display the Bookmarks Bar. This tip shows you how to change that. How to enable and add bookmarks to the Safari Bookmarks Bar on your iPad Clear the Cache, History and Cookies in Safari for the iPad You’re probably used to clearing this kind of data right from within the browser. Not so with Safari on the iPad – but here’s how you can. How to clear the cache, history and cookies in Safari for iPad How to add more Apps to your iPad Dock The iPad has four icons in its ‘dock’. Did you know it can hold 6? How to add more Apps to your iPad Dock Convert PDF files to ePub files to read on your iPad with iBooks ePub is the format that iBooks are in. So for those of you with large eBook collections in PDF, here’s how you convert them to read in iBooks. How to convert PDF files to ePub files to read on your iPad with iBooks How to force your iPad to restart Has an app caused your iPad to freeze up, and you can’t escape? This tip shows you how to force your iPad to restart. How to force your iPad to restart How to export Keynote for iPad presentations to your Mac or PC Exporting Keynote presentations from your iPad to your Mac or PC isn’t as straight forward as you might have expected. This tutorial shows you how. How to export Keynote for iPad presentations to your Mac or PC How to import presentations to Keynote on your iPad Having trouble getting your presentations onto your iPad? How to import presentations to Keynote on your iPad How to import documents to Pages on your iPad This guide shows you how to transfer documents (MS Word or Pages) from your Mac/PC to your iPad. How to import documents to Pages on your iPad How to insert photos in a Pages document using iPad and share it as a PDF Want to spice up that doc with a picture you just took? This tutorial will show you how – and how to export that document as a PDF. How to insert photos in a Pages document using iPad and share it as a PDF How to lock your iPad If you have kids or co-workers/friends who think it’s funny to mess with your iPad – lock it. How to lock your iPad How to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature from outgoing email on your iPad Does everyone need to know you just sent that email from your iPad? Probably not. This guide shows you how to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature and replace it with your own (or none). How to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature from outgoing email on your iPad How To Sync Multiple Calendars to the iPad With Google Sync This tutorial will show you a workaround on how to sync multiple calendars on your iPad using Google Sync. How to Sync Multiple Calendars to the iPad With Google Sync How to determine the MAC address of your iPad If your network restricts connections via MAC address – this guide will show you how to determine what yours is. How to determine the MAC address of your iPad How to take a screenshot of your iPad Do you need to take a screenshot of your iPad? This quick tip shows you how to do just that. How to take a screenshot of your iPad How to delete apps from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad Anyone who had an iPod Touch or iPhone before they had an iPad won’t need this tutorial. But if you’re new to the experience, this one will help. How to delete apps from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad How to determine the iPad ECID on Windows and Mac iPadintosh shows us how to determine the iPad’s ECID code – something you’ll want to have come Jailbreak time. How to grab the iPad ECID in Windows or OS X iPad Apps: Twitter and social networking essentials Enggadget has you covered with reviews of the first slew of iPad specific Twitter and other social networking apps. iPad Apps: Twitter and social networking essentials What does your website look like on an iPad? iPad Peek is a web based tool that allows you to enter any given URL, and it will display that page the same way Safari on the iPad does. Great for web site owners who don’t have access to an iPad. iPadPeek Stream Music and Videos to your iPad Gizmodo reviews the iPad app StreamToMe, which allows you to stream media from your Mac to your iPad across your local network. Their feelings in a nutshell – worth the $3, but not perfect. Review: StreamToMe for the iPad Apple iPad : Change links in Google Reader to point to full HTML webpage How to change links in Safari for iPad so that Google Reader points to a full HTML webpage How to connect an iPad to your existing wireless keyboard This video will show you how to connect your iPad to a wireless keyboard if you’re having any problems – and from the sound of things, quite a few folks are. via TUAW How to get started with the iPad Mashable has a very entry-level guide that will help you set up your iPad for the first time. Mashable’s Guide to Setting up the iPad Essential iPad Apps Downloadsquad gives mini-reviews to 8 iPad apps that you should install as soon as you get your iPad. iPad App Buyers Guide: Essential Apps you should get on day one Videos: The Official iPad Guided Tours From none other than Apple! Great getting started videos for all the included iPad apps. The Official iPad Guided Tours The Official iPad Manual When you buy an iPad, you don’t get a manual. But that’s not to say there isn’t one. Apple provides a 150 guide for your iPad in PDF format. The Official iPad Manual (pdf) How to print from your iPad Sure, it’s actually just an App (PrintCentral – $9.99 USD), but as of right now, it’s the only way. PrintCentral How to make your own iPad Wallpaper A perfectly detailed tutorial on how to make your own wallpaper for your iPad. The author also provides a really nice sample wallpaper, published under the Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. How to make your own iPad Wallpaper Got any more tips? Share them in the comments, and we’ll update the post with the links, or just the tip itself. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Want an iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away!Why Wait? Amazing New Add-on Turns Your iPhone into an iPad! [Comic]Clear the Auto-Complete Email Address Cache in OutlookAsk the Readers: Share Your Tips for Defeating Viruses and MalwareStupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos

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Week in Geek: US Govt E-card Scam Siphons Confidential Data Edition

- by Asian Angel

This week we learned how to “back up photos to Flickr, automate repetitive tasks, & normalize MP3 volume”, enable “stereo mix” in Windows 7 to record audio, create custom papercraft toys, read up on three alternatives to Apple’s flaky iOS alarm clock, decorated our desktops & app docks with Google icon packs, and more. Photo by alexschlegel. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week on the security & malware fronts and we have a roundup of the latest news to help keep you updated. Photo by TopTechWriter.US. US govt e-card scam hits confidential data A fake U.S. government Christmas e-card has managed to siphon off gigabytes of sensitive data from a number of law enforcement and military staff who work on cybersecurity matters, many of whom are involved in computer crime investigations. Security tool uncovers multiple bugs in every browser Michal Zalewski reports that he discovered the vulnerability in Internet Explorer a while ago using his cross_fuzz fuzzing tool and reported it to Microsoft in July 2010. Zalewski also used cross_fuzz to discover bugs in other browsers, which he also reported to the relevant organisations. Microsoft to fix Windows holes, but not ones in IE Microsoft said that it will release two security bulletins next week fixing three holes in Windows, but it is still investigating or working on fixing holes in Internet Explorer that have been reportedly exploited in attacks. Microsoft warns of Windows flaw affecting image rendering Microsoft has warned of a Windows vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer if the user is logged on with administrative rights. Windows 7 Not Affected by Critical 0-Day in the Windows Graphics Rendering Engine While confirming that details on a Critical zero-day vulnerability have made their way into the wild, Microsoft noted that customers running the latest iteration of Windows client and server platforms are not exposed to any risks. Microsoft warns of Office-related malware Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center issued a warning this week that it has spotted malicious code on the Internet that can take advantage of a flaw in Word and infect computers after a user does nothing more than read an e-mail. *Refers to a flaw that was addressed in the November security patch releases. Make sure you have all of the latest security updates installed. Unpatched hole in ImgBurn disk burning application According to security specialist Secunia, a highly critical vulnerability in ImgBurn, a lightweight disk burning application, can be used to remotely compromise a user’s system. Hole in VLC Media Player Virtual Security Research (VSR) has identified a vulnerability in VLC Media Player. In versions up to and including 1.1.5 of the VLC Media Player. Flash Player sandbox can be bypassed Flash applications run locally can read local files and send them to an online server – something which the sandbox is supposed to prevent. Chinese auction site touts hacked iTunes accounts Tens of thousands of reportedly hacked iTunes accounts have been found on Chinese auction site Taobao, but the company claims it is unable to take action unless there are direct complaints. What happened in the recent Hotmail outage Mike Schackwitz explains the cause of the recent Hotmail outage. DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info The U.S. Justice Department has obtained a court order directing Twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic politician, a legendary Dutch hacker, and a U.S. computer programmer. Google gets court to block Microsoft Interior Department e-mail win The U.S. Federal Claims Court has temporarily blocked Microsoft from proceeding with the $49.3 million, five-year DOI contract that it won this past November. Google Apps customers get email lockdown Companies and organisations using Google Apps are now able to restrict the email access of selected users. LibreOffice Is the Default Office Suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Matthias Klose has announced some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release. Sysadmin Geek Tips Photo by Filomena Scalise. How to Setup Software RAID for a Simple File Server on Ubuntu Do you need a file server that is cheap and easy to setup, “rock solid” reliable, and has Email Alerting? This tutorial shows you how to use Ubuntu, software RAID, and SaMBa to accomplish just that. How to Control the Order of Startup Programs in Windows While you can specify the applications you want to launch when Windows starts, the ability to control the order in which they start is not available. However, there are a couple of ways you can easily overcome this limitation and control the startup order of applications. Random TinyHacker Links Using Opera Unite to Send Large Files A tutorial on using Opera Unite to easily send huge files from your computer. WorkFlowy is a Useful To-do List Tool A cool to-do list tool that lets you integrate multiple tasks in one single list easily. Playing Flash Videos on iOS Devices Yes, you can play flash videos on jailbroken iPhones. Here’s a tutorial. Clear Safari History and Cookies On iPhone A tutorial on clearing your browser history on iPhone and other iOS devices. Monitor Your Internet Usage Here’s a cool, cross-platform tool to monitor your internet bandwidth. Super User Questions See what the community had to say on these popular questions from Super User this week. Why is my upload speed much less than my download speed? Where should I find drivers for my laptop if it didn’t come with a driver disk? OEM Office 2010 without media – how to reinstall? Is there a point to using theft tracking software like Prey on my laptop, if you have login security? Moving an “all-in-one” PC when turned on/off How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles from this past week. How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? Did You Know Facebook Has Built-In Shortcut Keys? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy looking through our latest gathering of retro article goodness. Learning Windows 7: Create a Homegroup & Join a New Computer To It How To Disconnect a Machine from a Homegroup Use Remote Desktop To Access Other Computers On a Small Office or Home Network How To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista Allow Users To Run Only Specified Programs in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week and we hope your first week back at work or school has gone very well now that the holidays are over. Know a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by Pamela Machado. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Arctic Theme for Windows 7 Gives Your Desktop an Icy Touch Install LibreOffice via PPA and Receive Auto-Updates in Ubuntu Creative Portraits Peek Inside the Guts of Modern Electronics Scenic Winter Lane Wallpaper to Create a Relaxing Mood Access Your Web Apps Directly Using the Context Menu in Chrome The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video]

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GZip/Deflate Compression in ASP.NET MVC

- by Rick Strahl

A long while back I wrote about GZip compression in ASP.NET. In that article I describe two generic helper methods that I've used in all sorts of ASP.NET application from WebForms apps to HttpModules and HttpHandlers that require gzip or deflate compression. The same static methods also work in ASP.NET MVC. Here are the two routines:/// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } The first method checks whether the client sending the request includes the accept-encoding for either gzip or deflate, and if if it does it returns true. The second function uses IsGzipSupported() to decide whether it should encode content and uses an Response Filter to do its job. Basically response filters look at the Response output stream as it's written and convert the data flowing through it. Filters are a bit tricky to work with but the two .NET filter streams for GZip and Deflate Compression make this a snap to implement. In my old code and even now in MVC I can always do:public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); …} to encode my content. And that works just fine. The proper way: Create an ActionFilterAttribute However in MVC this sort of thing is typically better handled by an ActionFilter which can be applied with an attribute. So to be all prim and proper I created an CompressContentAttribute ActionFilter that incorporates those two helper methods and which looks like this:/// <summary> /// Attribute that can be added to controller methods to force content /// to be GZip encoded if the client supports it /// </summary> public class CompressContentAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute { /// <summary> /// Override to compress the content that is generated by /// an action method. /// </summary> /// <param name="filterContext"></param> public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { GZipEncodePage(); } /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } } It's basically the same code wrapped into an ActionFilter attribute, which intercepts requests MVC requests to Controller methods and lets you hook up logic before and after the methods have executed. Here I want to override OnActionExecuting() which fires before the Controller action is fired. With the CompressContentAttribute created, it can now be applied to either the controller as a whole:[CompressContent] public class ClassifiedsController : ClassifiedsBaseController { … } or to one of the Action methods:[CompressContent] public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { … } The former applies compression to every action method, while the latter is selective and only applies it to the individual action method. Is the attribute better than the static utility function? Not really, but it is the standard MVC way to hook up 'filter' content and that's where others are likely to expect to set options like this. In fact, you have a bit more control with the utility function because you can conditionally apply it in code, but this is actually much less likely in MVC applications than old WebForms apps since controller methods tend to be more focused. Compression Caveats Http compression is very cool and pretty easy to implement in ASP.NET but you have to be careful with it - especially if your content might get transformed or redirected inside of ASP.NET. A good example, is if an error occurs and a compression filter is applied. ASP.NET errors don't clear the filter, but clear the Response headers which results in some nasty garbage because the compressed content now no longer matches the headers. Another issue is Caching, which has to account for all possible ways of compression and non-compression that the content is served. Basically compressed content and caching don't mix well. I wrote about several of these issues in an old blog post and I recommend you take a quick peek before diving into making every bit of output Gzip encoded. None of these are show stoppers, but you have to be aware of the issues. Related Posts GZip Compression with ASP.NET Content ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET MVC Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Test All Features of Windows Phone 7 On Your PC

- by Matthew Guay

Are you developer or just excited about the upcoming Windows Phone 7, and want to try it out now? Thanks to free developer tools from Microsoft and a new unlocked emulator rom, you can try out most of the exciting features today from your PC. Last week we showed you how to try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC and get started developing for the upcoming new devices. We noticed, however, that the emulator only contains Internet Explorer Mobile and some settings. This is still interesting to play around with, but it wasn’t the full Windows Phone 7 experience. Some enterprising tweakers discovered that more applications were actually included in the emulator, but were simply hidden from users. Developer Dan Ardelean then figured out how to re-enable these features, and released a tweaked emulator rom so everyone can try out all of the Windows Phone 7 features for themselves. Here we’ll look at how you can run this new emulator image on your PC, and then look at some interesting features in Windows Phone 7. Editor Note: This modified emulator image is not official, and isn’t sanctioned by Microsoft. Use your own judgment when choosing to download and use the emulator. Setting Up Emulator Rom To test-drive Windows Phone 7 on your PC, you must first download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (link below). Follow the steps we showed you last week at: Try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC today. Once it’s installed, go ahead and run the default emulator as we showed to make sure everything works ok. Once the Windows Phone Developer Tools are installed and running, download the new emulator rom from XDA Forums (link below). This will be a zip file, so extract it first. Note where you save the file, as you will need the address in the next step. Now, to run our new emulator image, we need to open the emulator in command line and point to the new rom image. To do this, browse to the correct directory, depending on whether you’re running the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Windows: 32 bit: C:\Program Files\Microsoft XDE\1.0\ 64 bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\1.0\ Hold your Shift key down and right-click in the folder. Choose Open Command Window here. At the command prompt, enter XDE.exe followed by the location of your new rom image. Here, we downloaded the rom to our download folder, so at the command prompt we entered: XDE.exe C:\Users\Matthew\Downloads\WM70Full\WM70Full.bin The emulator loads … with the full Windows Phone 7 experience! To make it easier, let’s make a shortcut on our desktop to load the emulator with the new rom directly. Right-click on your desktop (or any folder you want to create the shortcut in), select New, and then Shortcut. Now, in the box, we need to enter the path for the emulator followed by the location of our rom. Both items must be in quotes. So, in our test, we entered the following: 32 bit: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft XDE\1.0\” “C:\Users\Matthew\Downloads\WM70Full\WM70Full.bin” 64 bit: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\1.0\” “C:\Users\Matthew\Downloads\WM70Full\WM70Full.bin” Make sure to enter the correct location of the new emulator rom for your computer, and keep both items in separate quotes. Click next when you’ve entered the location. Name the shortcut; we named it Windows Phone 7, but simply enter whatever you’d like. Click Finish when you’re done. You should now have a nice Windows Phone icon and your fully functional shortcut! Double-click it to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator as above. Features in the Unlocked Windows Phone 7 Emulator So let’s look at what you can do with this new emulator. Almost everything you’ve seen in demos from the Mobile World Conference and Mix’10 are right here for you to play with. Here’s the application menu, which you can access by clicking on the arrow on the top of the home screen, which shows how much stuff they’ve got in this! And, of course, even the home screen itself shows much more activity than it did in the original emulator. Let’s check out some of these sections. Here’s Zune running on Windows Phone 7, and the Zune Marketplace. The animations are beautiful, so be sure to check this out yourself. The new picture hub is much nicer than any picture viewer included with Windows Mobile in the past… Stay productive, and on schedule with the new Calendar. The XBOX hub gives us only a hint of things to come, and the links to games now are simply placeholders. Here’s a look at the Office hub. This doesn’t show up on the homescreen right now, but you can access it in the applications menu. Office obviously still has a lot of work left on it, but even at a glance here it looks like it includes a lot more functionality than Office Mobile in Windows Mobile 6. Here’s a look at each of the three apps: Word, Excel, and OneNote, and the formatting pallet in Office apps. This emulator also includes a lot more settings than the default one, including settings for individual applications. You can even activate the screen lock, and try out the lift-to-peek-or-unlock feature… Finally, this version of Windows Phone 7 includes a very nice SystemInfo app with an advanced task manager. We hope this is still available when the actual phones are released. Conclusion If you’re excited about the upcoming Windows Phone 7 series, or simply want to learn more about what’s coming, this is a great way to test it out. With these exciting new hubs and applications, there’s something here for everyone. Let us know what you like most about Windows Phone 7 and what your favorite app or hub is. Links Please note: These roms are not officially supported by Microsoft, and could be taken down. Download the unlocked Windows Phone 7 emulator from XDA Forums – click the link in this post to download How the unlocked emulator image was created Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC todayGet stats on your Ruby on Rails codeDisable Windows Vista’s Built-in CD/DVD Burning FeaturesWeek in Geek – The Slick Windows 7 File Copy Animation EditionGeek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Get Better Windows Search With UltraSearch Scan News With NY Times Article Skimmer SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10

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Session memory – who’s this guy named Max and what’s he doing with my memory?

- by extended_events

SQL Server MVP Jonathan Kehayias (blog) emailed me a question last week when he noticed that the total memory used by the buffers for an event session was larger than the value he specified for the MAX_MEMORY option in the CREATE EVENT SESSION DDL. The answer here seems like an excellent subject for me to kick-off my new “401 – Internals” tag that identifies posts where I pull back the curtains a bit and let you peek into what’s going on inside the extended events engine. In a previous post (Option Trading: Getting the most out of the event session options) I explained that we use a set of buffers to store the event data before we write the event data to asynchronous targets. The MAX_MEMORY along with the MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE defines how big each buffer will be. Theoretically, that means that I can predict the size of each buffer using the following formula: max memory / # of buffers = buffer size If it was that simple I wouldn’t be writing this post. I’ll take “boundary” for 64K Alex For a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this blog, we create event buffers in 64K chunks. The result of this is that the buffer size indicated by the formula above is rounded up to the next 64K boundary and that is the size used to create the buffers. If you think visually, this means that the graph of your max_memory option compared to the actual buffer size that results will look like a set of stairs rather than a smooth line. You can see this behavior by looking at the output of dm_xe_sessions, specifically the fields related to the buffer sizes, over a range of different memory inputs: Note: This test was run on a 2 core machine using per_cpu partitioning which results in 5 buffers. (Seem my previous post referenced above for the math behind buffer count.) input_memory_kb total_regular_buffers regular_buffer_size total_buffer_size 637 5 130867 654335 638 5 130867 654335 639 5 130867 654335 640 5 196403 982015 641 5 196403 982015 642 5 196403 982015 This is just a segment of the results that shows one of the “jumps” between the buffer boundary at 639 KB and 640 KB. You can verify the size boundary by doing the math on the regular_buffer_size field, which is returned in bytes: 196403 – 130867 = 65536 bytes 65536 / 1024 = 64 KB The relationship between the input for max_memory and when the regular_buffer_size is going to jump from one 64K boundary to the next is going to change based on the number of buffers being created. The number of buffers is dependent on the partition mode you choose. If you choose any partition mode other than NONE, the number of buffers will depend on your hardware configuration. (Again, see the earlier post referenced above.) With the default partition mode of none, you always get three buffers, regardless of machine configuration, so I generated a “range table” for max_memory settings between 1 KB and 4096 KB as an example. start_memory_range_kb end_memory_range_kb total_regular_buffers regular_buffer_size total_buffer_size 1 191 NULL NULL NULL 192 383 3 130867 392601 384 575 3 196403 589209 576 767 3 261939 785817 768 959 3 327475 982425 960 1151 3 393011 1179033 1152 1343 3 458547 1375641 1344 1535 3 524083 1572249 1536 1727 3 589619 1768857 1728 1919 3 655155 1965465 1920 2111 3 720691 2162073 2112 2303 3 786227 2358681 2304 2495 3 851763 2555289 2496 2687 3 917299 2751897 2688 2879 3 982835 2948505 2880 3071 3 1048371 3145113 3072 3263 3 1113907 3341721 3264 3455 3 1179443 3538329 3456 3647 3 1244979 3734937 3648 3839 3 1310515 3931545 3840 4031 3 1376051 4128153 4032 4096 3 1441587 4324761 As you can see, there are 21 “steps” within this range and max_memory values below 192 KB fall below the 64K per buffer limit so they generate an error when you attempt to specify them. Max approximates True as memory approaches 64K The upshot of this is that the max_memory option does not imply a contract for the maximum memory that will be used for the session buffers (Those of you who read Take it to the Max (and beyond) know that max_memory is really only referring to the event session buffer memory.) but is more of an estimate of total buffer size to the nearest higher multiple of 64K times the number of buffers you have. The maximum delta between your initial max_memory setting and the true total buffer size occurs right after you break through a 64K boundary, for example if you set max_memory = 576 KB (see the green line in the table), your actual buffer size will be closer to 767 KB in a non-partitioned event session. You get “stepped up” for every 191 KB block of initial max_memory which isn’t likely to cause a problem for most machines. Things get more interesting when you consider a partitioned event session on a computer that has a large number of logical CPUs or NUMA nodes. Since each buffer gets “stepped up” when you break a boundary, the delta can get much larger because it’s multiplied by the number of buffers. For example, a machine with 64 logical CPUs will have 160 buffers using per_cpu partitioning or if you have 8 NUMA nodes configured on that machine you would have 24 buffers when using per_node. If you’ve just broken through a 64K boundary and get “stepped up” to the next buffer size you’ll end up with total buffer size approximately 10240 KB and 1536 KB respectively (64K * # of buffers) larger than max_memory value you might think you’re getting. Using per_cpu partitioning on large machine has the most impact because of the large number of buffers created. If the amount of memory being used by your system within these ranges is important to you then this is something worth paying attention to and considering when you configure your event sessions. The DMV dm_xe_sessions is the tool to use to identify the exact buffer size for your sessions. In addition to the regular buffers (read: event session buffers) you’ll also see the details for large buffers if you have configured MAX_EVENT_SIZE. The “buffer steps” for any given hardware configuration should be static within each partition mode so if you want to have a handy reference available when you configure your event sessions you can use the following code to generate a range table similar to the one above that is applicable for your specific machine and chosen partition mode. DECLARE @buf_size_output table (input_memory_kb bigint, total_regular_buffers bigint, regular_buffer_size bigint, total_buffer_size bigint) DECLARE @buf_size int, @part_mode varchar(8) SET @buf_size = 1 -- Set to the begining of your max_memory range (KB) SET @part_mode = 'per_cpu' -- Set to the partition mode for the table you want to generate WHILE @buf_size <= 4096 -- Set to the end of your max_memory range (KB) BEGIN BEGIN TRY IF EXISTS (SELECT * from sys.server_event_sessions WHERE name = 'buffer_size_test') DROP EVENT SESSION buffer_size_test ON SERVER DECLARE @session nvarchar(max) SET @session = 'create event session buffer_size_test on server add event sql_statement_completed add target ring_buffer with (max_memory = ' + CAST(@buf_size as nvarchar(4)) + ' KB, memory_partition_mode = ' + @part_mode + ')' EXEC sp_executesql @session SET @session = 'alter event session buffer_size_test on server state = start' EXEC sp_executesql @session INSERT @buf_size_output (input_memory_kb, total_regular_buffers, regular_buffer_size, total_buffer_size) SELECT @buf_size, total_regular_buffers, regular_buffer_size, total_buffer_size FROM sys.dm_xe_sessions WHERE name = 'buffer_size_test' END TRY BEGIN CATCH INSERT @buf_size_output (input_memory_kb) SELECT @buf_size END CATCH SET @buf_size = @buf_size + 1 END DROP EVENT SESSION buffer_size_test ON SERVER SELECT MIN(input_memory_kb) start_memory_range_kb, MAX(input_memory_kb) end_memory_range_kb, total_regular_buffers, regular_buffer_size, total_buffer_size from @buf_size_output group by total_regular_buffers, regular_buffer_size, total_buffer_size Thanks to Jonathan for an interesting question and a chance to explore some of the details of Extended Event internals. - Mike

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Building extensions for Expression Blend 4 using MEF

- by Timmy Kokke

Introduction Although it was possible to write extensions for Expression Blend and Expression Design, it wasn’t very easy and out of the box only one addin could be used. With Expression Blend 4 it is possible to write extensions using MEF, the Managed Extensibility Framework. Until today there’s no documentation on how to build these extensions, so look thru the code with Reflector is something you’ll have to do very often. Because Blend and Design are build using WPF searching the visual tree with Snoop and Mole belong to the tools you’ll be using a lot exploring the possibilities. Configuring the extension project Extensions are regular .NET class libraries. To create one, load up Visual Studio 2010 and start a new project. Because Blend is build using WPF, choose a WPF User Control Library from the Windows section and give it a name and location. I named mine DemoExtension1. Because Blend looks for addins named *.extension.dll you’ll have to tell Visual Studio to use that in the Assembly Name. To change the Assembly Name right click your project and go to Properties. On the Application tab, add .Extension to name already in the Assembly name text field. To be able to debug this extension, I prefer to set the output path on the Build tab to the extensions folder of Expression Blend. This means that everything that used to go into the Debug folder is placed in the extensions folder. Including all referenced assemblies that have the copy local property set to false. One last setting. To be able to debug your extension you could start Blend and attach the debugger by hand. I like it to be able to just hit F5. Go to the Debug tab and add the the full path to Blend.exe in the Start external program text field. Extension Class Add a new class to the project. This class needs to be inherited from the IPackage interface. The IPackage interface can be found in the Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility namespace. To get access to this namespace add Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility.dll to your references. This file can be found in the same folder as the (Expression Blend 4 Beta) Blend.exe file. Make sure the Copy Local property is set to false in this reference. After implementing the interface the class would look something like: using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility; namespace DemoExtension1 { public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { public void Load(IServices services) { } public void Unload() { } } } These two methods are called when your addin is loaded and unloaded. The parameter passed to the Load method, IServices services, is your main entry point into Blend. The IServices interface exposes the GetService<T> method. You will be using this method a lot. Almost every part of Blend can be accessed thru a service. For example, you can use to get to the commanding services of Blend by calling GetService<ICommandService>() or to get to the Windowing services by calling GetService<IWindowService>(). To get Blend to load the extension we have to implement MEF. (You can get up to speed on MEF on the community site or read the blog of Mr. MEF, Glenn Block.) In the case of Blend extensions, all that needs to be done is mark the class with an Export attribute and pass it the type of IPackage. The Export attribute can be found in the System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace which is part of the .NET 4 framework. You need to add this to your references. using System.ComponentModel.Composition; using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility; namespace DemoExtension1 { [Export(typeof(IPackage))] public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { Blend is able to find your addin now. Adding UI The addin doesn’t do very much at this point. The WPF User Control Library came with a UserControl so lets use that in this example. I just drop a Button and a TextBlock onto the surface of the control to have something to show in the demo. To get the UserControl to work in Blend it has to be registered with the WindowService. Call GetService<IWindowService>() on the IServices interface to get access to the windowing services. The UserControl will be used in Blend on a Palette and has to be registered to enable it. This is done by calling the RegisterPalette on the IWindowService interface and passing it an identifier, an instance of the UserControl and a caption for the palette. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(); windowService.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } After hitting F5 to start debugging Expression Blend will start. You should be able to find the addin in the Window menu now. Activating this window will show the “Demo Extension” palette with the UserControl, style according to the settings of Blend. Now what? Because little is publicly known about how to access different parts of Blend adding breakpoints in Debug mode and browsing thru objects using the Quick Watch feature of Visual Studio is something you have to do very often. This demo extension can be used for that purpose very easily. Add the click event handler to the button on the UserControl. Change the contructor to take the IServices interface and store this in a field. Set a breakpoint in the Button_Click method. public partial class UserControl1 : UserControl { private readonly IServices _services; public UserControl1(IServices services) { _services = services; InitializeComponent(); } private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { } } Change the call to the constructor in the load method and pass it the services property. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService service = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(services); service.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } Hit F5 to compile and start Blend. Got to the window menu and start show the addin. Click on the button to hit the breakpoint. Now place the carrot text _services text in the code window and hit Shift+F9 to show the Quick Watch window. Now start exploring and discovering where to find everything you need. More Information The are no official resources available yet. Microsoft has released one extension for expression Blend that is very useful as a reference, the Microsoft Expression Blend® Add-in Preview for Windows® Phone. This will install a .extension.dll file in the extension folder of Blend. You can load this file with Reflector and have a peek at how Microsoft is building his addins. Conclusion I hope this gives you something to get started building extensions for Expression Blend. Until Microsoft releases the final version, which hopefully includes more information about building extensions, we’ll have to work on documenting it in the community.

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Why won't fetchmail work all of a sudden?

- by SirCharlo

I ran a chmod 777 * on my home folder. (I know, I know. I'll never do it again.) Ever since then, fetchmail seems to be broken. I use it to fetch mail from an Exchange 2003 mailbox through DAVMail and OWA. The problem is that fetchmail complains about an "expunge mismatch" whenever I get a new message. It deletes the message from the Exchange mailbox, yet it never forwards it. There seems to be a problem somwhere along the mail processing, but I haven't been able to pinpoint where. Any help would be appreciated. Here are the relevant config files. ~/fetchmailrc: set no bouncemail defaults: antispam -1 batchlimit 100 poll localhost with protocol imap and port 1143 user domain\\user password Password is root no rewrite mda "/usr/bin/procmail -f %F -d %T"; ~/procmailrc: :0 * ^Subject.*ack | expand | sed -e 's/[ ]*$//g' | sed -e 's/^/ /' > /usr/local/nagios/libexec/mail_acknowledgement ~/.forward: | "/usr/bin/procmail" And here is the output when I run fetchmail -f /root/.fetchmailrc -vv: fetchmail: WARNING: Running as root is discouraged. Old UID list from localhost: <empty> Scratch list of UIDs: <empty> fetchmail: 6.3.19 querying localhost (protocol IMAP) at Tue 03 Jul 2012 09:46:36 AM EDT: poll started Trying to connect to 127.0.0.1/1143...connected. fetchmail: IMAP< * OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4REV1 AUTH=LOGIN] IMAP4rev1 DavMail 3.9.7-1870 server ready fetchmail: IMAP> A0001 CAPABILITY fetchmail: IMAP< * CAPABILITY IMAP4REV1 AUTH=LOGIN fetchmail: IMAP< A0001 OK CAPABILITY completed fetchmail: Protocol identified as IMAP4 rev 1 fetchmail: GSSAPI error gss_inquire_cred: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more information fetchmail: GSSAPI error gss_inquire_cred: fetchmail: No suitable GSSAPI credentials found. Skipping GSSAPI authentication. fetchmail: If you want to use GSSAPI, you need credentials first, possibly from kinit. fetchmail: IMAP> A0002 LOGIN "domain\\user" * fetchmail: IMAP< A0002 OK Authenticated fetchmail: selecting or re-polling default folder fetchmail: IMAP> A0003 SELECT "INBOX" fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 EXISTS fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 RECENT fetchmail: IMAP< * OK [UIDVALIDITY 1] fetchmail: IMAP< * OK [UIDNEXT 344] fetchmail: IMAP< * FLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded Junk) fetchmail: IMAP< * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Deleted \Draft \Flagged \Seen $Forwarded Junk)] fetchmail: IMAP< A0003 OK [READ-WRITE] SELECT completed fetchmail: 1 message waiting after first poll fetchmail: IMAP> A0004 EXPUNGE fetchmail: IMAP< A0004 OK EXPUNGE completed fetchmail: 1 message waiting after expunge fetchmail: IMAP> A0005 SEARCH UNSEEN fetchmail: IMAP< * SEARCH 1 fetchmail: 1 is unseen fetchmail: IMAP< A0005 OK SEARCH completed fetchmail: 1 is first unseen 1 message for domain\user at localhost. fetchmail: IMAP> A0006 FETCH 1 RFC822.SIZE fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 FETCH (UID 343 RFC822.SIZE 1350) fetchmail: IMAP< A0006 OK FETCH completed fetchmail: IMAP> A0007 FETCH 1 RFC822.HEADER fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 FETCH (UID 343 RFC822.HEADER {1350} reading message domain\user@localhost:1 of 1 (1350 header octets) fetchmail: about to deliver with: /usr/bin/procmail -f '[email protected]' -d 'root' # fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< Bonne journ=E9e.. fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< Company Name fetchmail: IMAP< My Name fetchmail: IMAP< IT fetchmail: IMAP< Tel: (XXX) XXX-XXXX xXXX fetchmail: IMAP< www.domain.com=20 fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< -----Message d'origine----- fetchmail: IMAP< De=A0: User [mailto:[email protected]]=20 fetchmail: IMAP< Envoy=E9=A0: 2 juillet 2012 15:50 fetchmail: IMAP< =C0=A0: Informatique fetchmail: IMAP< Objet=A0: PROBLEM: photo fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< Notification Type: PROBLEM fetchmail: IMAP< Author:=20 fetchmail: IMAP< Comment:=20 fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< Host: Photos fetchmail: IMAP< Hostname: photo fetchmail: IMAP< State: DOWN fetchmail: IMAP< Address: XXX.XX.X.XX fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< Date/Time: Mon Jul 2 15:49:38 EDT 2012 fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< Info: CRITICAL - XXX.XX.X.XX: rta nan, lost 100% fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< fetchmail: IMAP< ) fetchmail: IMAP< A0007 OK FETCH completed fetchmail: IMAP> A0008 FETCH 1 BODY.PEEK[TEXT] fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 FETCH (UID 343 BODY[TEXT] {539} (539 body octets) ******************************* fetchmail: IMAP< ) fetchmail: IMAP< A0008 OK FETCH completed flushed fetchmail: IMAP> A0009 STORE 1 +FLAGS (\Seen \Deleted) fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 FETCH (UID 343 FLAGS (\Seen \Deleted)) fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 EXPUNGE fetchmail: IMAP< A0009 OK STORE completed fetchmail: IMAP> A0010 EXPUNGE fetchmail: IMAP< A0010 OK EXPUNGE completed fetchmail: mail expunge mismatch (0 actual != 1 expected) fetchmail: IMAP> A0011 LOGOUT fetchmail: IMAP< * BYE Closing connection fetchmail: IMAP< A0011 OK LOGOUT completed fetchmail: client/server synchronization error while fetching from domain\user@localhost fetchmail: 6.3.19 querying localhost (protocol IMAP) at Tue 03 Jul 2012 09:46:36 AM EDT: poll completed Merged UID list from localhost: <empty> fetchmail: Query status=7 (ERROR) fetchmail: normal termination, status 7

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September Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) Regional Events:

- by Mandy Ho

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} September 5, 2012 – Denver, CO Oracle 11g Database Upgrade Seminar Join Roy Swonger, Senior Director of software development at Oracle to learn about upgrading to Oracle Database 11g. Topics include: All the required preparatory steps Database upgrade strategies Post-upgrade performance analysis Helpful tips and common pitfalls to watch out for http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=152242&src=7598177&src=7598177&Act=4 September 6, 2012 – Salt Lake City, UT Fall Symposium 2012 Plan to join us for our annual fall event on Sept 6. They day will be filled with learning and networking with tracks focused on Applications, APEX, BI, Development and DBA Topics. This event is free for UTOUG members to attend, but please register. http://www.utoug.org/apex/f?p=972:2:6686308836668467::::P2_EVENT_ID:121 September 6, 2012 – Portland, OR Oracle’s Hands on Workshop Series focused on providing Defense-in-Depth Solutions to secure data at the source, reduce risk and simplify compliance The Oracle Database Security Workshop is a one-day hands-on session for IT Managers, IT Security Architects and Oracle DBAs who are looking for solutions to address their information protection, privacy, and accountability challenges within their Oracle database environment. Most security programs offered today fail toadequately address database security. Customers continue to be challenged tosecure information against loss and protect the integrity of sensitiveinformation like critical financial data, personally identifiable information(PII) and credit card data for PCI compliance. http://nwoug.org/content.aspx?page_id=87&club_id=165905&item_id=241082 September 11, 2012 – Montreal, QC APEXposed! For APEX aficionados – join ODTUG in Montreal, September 11-12 for APEXposed! Topics will include Dynamic Actions, Plug-ins, Tuning, and Building Mobile Apps. The cost is $399 US and early registration ends August 15th. For more information: http://www.odtugapextraining.com September 11, 2012 – Philadelphia, PA Big Data & What are we still doing wrong with Tom Kyte Tom Kyte is a Senior Technical Architect in Oracle's Server Technology Division. Tom is the Tom behind the AskTom column in Oracle Magazine and is also the author of Expert Oracle Database Architecture (Apress, 2005/2009) among other books Abstract: Big Data The term "big data" draws a lot of attention, but behind the hype there's a simple story. For decades, companies have been making business decisions based on transactional data stored in relational databases. However, beyond that critical data is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. This presentation will take a look at what Big Data is and means - and Oracle's strategy for handling it Abstract: What are we still doing wrong? I've given many best practices presentations in the last 10 years. I've given many worst practices presentations in the last 10 years. I've seen some things change over the last ten years and many other things stay exactly the same. In this talk - we'll be taking a look at the good and the bad - what we do right and what we continue to do wrong over and over again. We'll look at why "Why" is probably the right initial answer to most any question. We'll look at how we get to "Know what we Know", and why that can be both a help and a hindrance. We'll peek at "Best Practices" and tie them into what I term "Worst Practices". In short, a talk on the good and the bad. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} http://ioug.itconvergence.com/pls/apex/f?p=207:27:3669516430980563::NO September 12, 2012- New York, NY NYOUG Fall General Meeting “Trends in Database Administration and Why the Future of Database Administration is the Vdba” http://www.nyoug.org/upcoming_events.htm#General_Meeting1 September 21, 2012 – Cleveland, OH Oracle Database 11g for Developers: What You need to know or Oracle Database 11g New Features for Developers Attendees are introduced to the new and improved features of Oracle 11g (both Oracle 11g R1 and Oracle 11g R2) that directly impact application development. Special emphasis is placed on features that reduce development time, make development simpler, improve performance, or speed deployment. Specific topics include: New SQL functions, virtual columns, result caching, XML improvements, pivot statements, JDBC improvements, and PL/SQL enhancements such as compound triggers. http://www.neooug.org/ September 24, 2012 – Ottawa, ON Introduction to Oracle Spatial The free Oracle Locator functionality, and the Oracle Spatial option which dramatically extends Locator, are very useful, but poorly understood capabilities of the database. In the afternoon we will extend into additional areas selected from: storage and performance; answering business problems with spatial queries; using Oracle Maps in OBIEE; an overview and capabilities of Oracle Topology; under the covers with GeoCoding. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} http://www.oug-ottawa.org/pls/htmldb/f?p=327:27:4209274028390246::NO

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WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF–Part 2: The Service

- by Your DisplayName here!

OK – so let’s first start with a simple WCF service and connect that to ADFS 2 for authentication. The service itself simply echoes back the user’s claims – just so we can make sure it actually works and to see how the ADFS 2 issuance rules emit claims for the service: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "urn:leastprivilege:samples")] public interface IService { [OperationContract] List<ViewClaim> GetClaims(); } public class Service : IService { public List<ViewClaim> GetClaims() { var id = Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity as IClaimsIdentity; return (from c in id.Claims select new ViewClaim { ClaimType = c.ClaimType, Value = c.Value, Issuer = c.Issuer, OriginalIssuer = c.OriginalIssuer }).ToList(); } } The ViewClaim data contract is simply a DTO that holds the claim information. Next is the WCF configuration – let’s have a look step by step. First I mapped all my http based services to the federation binding. This is achieved by using .NET 4.0’s protocol mapping feature (this can be also done the 3.x way – but in that scenario all services will be federated): <protocolMapping> <add scheme="http" binding="ws2007FederationHttpBinding" /> </protocolMapping> Next, I provide a standard configuration for the federation binding: <bindings> <ws2007FederationHttpBinding> <binding> <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential"> <message establishSecurityContext="false"> <issuerMetadata address="https://server/adfs/services/trust/mex" /> </message> </security> </binding> </ws2007FederationHttpBinding> </bindings> This binding points to our ADFS 2 installation metadata endpoint. This is all that is needed for svcutil (aka “Add Service Reference”) to generate the required client configuration. I also chose mixed mode security (SSL + basic message credential) for best performance. This binding also disables session – you can control that via the establishSecurityContext setting on the binding. This has its pros and cons. Something for a separate blog post, I guess. Next, the behavior section adds support for metadata and WIF: <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior> <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="true" /> <federatedServiceHostConfiguration /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> The next step is to add the WIF specific configuration (in <microsoft.identityModel />). First we need to specify the key material that we will use to decrypt the incoming tokens. This is optional for web applications but for web services you need to protect the proof key – so this is mandatory (at least for symmetric proof keys, which is the default): <serviceCertificate> <certificateReference storeLocation="LocalMachine" storeName="My" x509FindType="FindBySubjectDistinguishedName" findValue="CN=Service" /> </serviceCertificate> You also have to specify which incoming tokens you trust. This is accomplished by registering the thumbprint of the signing keys you want to accept. You get this information from the signing certificate configured in ADFS 2: <issuerNameRegistry type="...ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry"> <trustedIssuers> <add thumbprint="d1 … db" name="ADFS" /> </trustedIssuers> </issuerNameRegistry> The last step (promised) is to add the allowed audience URIs to the configuration – WCF clients use (by default – and we’ll come back to this) the endpoint address of the service: <audienceUris> <add value="https://machine/soapadfs/service.svc" /> </audienceUris> OK – that’s it – now we have a basic WCF service that uses ADFS 2 for authentication. The next step will be to set-up ADFS to issue tokens for this service. Afterwards we can explore various options on how to use this service from a client. Stay tuned… (if you want to have a look at the full source code or peek at the upcoming parts – you can download the complete solution here)

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Dec 5th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Silverlight, Visual Studio

- by ScottGu

Here is the latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series for another on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET ASP.NET Code Samples Collection: J.D. Meier has a great post that provides a detailed round-up of ASP.NET code samples and tutorials from a wide variety of sources. Lots of useful pointers. Slash your ASP.NET compile/load time without any hard work: Nice article that details a bunch of optimizations you can make to speed up ASP.NET project load and compile times. You might also want to read my previous blog post on this topic here. 10 Essential Tools for Building ASP.NET Websites: Great article by Stephen Walther on 10 great (and free) tools that enable you to more easily build great ASP.NET Websites. Highly recommended reading. Optimize Images using the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework: A nice article by 4GuysFromRolla that discusses how to use the open-source ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework (one of the tools recommended by Stephen in the previous article). You can use this to significantly improve the load-time of your pages on the client. Formatting Dates, Times and Numbers in ASP.NET: Scott Mitchell has a great article that discusses formatting dates, times and numbers in ASP.NET. A very useful link to bookmark. Also check out James Michael’s DateTime is Packed with Goodies blog post for other DateTime tips. Examining ASP.NET’s Membership, Roles and Profile APIs (Part 18): Everything you could possibly want to known about ASP.NET’s built-in Membership, Roles and Profile APIs must surely be in this tutorial series. Part 18 covers how to store additional user info with Membership. ASP.NET with jQuery An Introduction to jQuery Templates: Stephen Walther has written an outstanding introduction and tutorial on the new jQuery Template plugin that the ASP.NET team has contributed to the jQuery project. Composition with jQuery Templates and jQuery Templates, Composite Rendering, and Remote Loading: Dave Ward has written two nice posts that talk about composition scenarios with jQuery Templates and some cool scenarios you can enable with them. Using jQuery and ASP.NET to Build a News Ticker: Scott Mitchell has a nice tutorial that demonstrates how to build a dynamically updated “news ticker” style UI with ASP.NET and jQuery. Checking All Checkboxes in a GridView using jQuery: Scott Mitchell has a nice post that covers how to use jQuery to enable a checkbox within a GridView’s header to automatically check/uncheck all checkboxes contained within rows of it. Using jQuery to POST Form Data to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service: Rick Strahl has a nice post that discusses how to capture form variables and post them to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service (.asmx). ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Diagnostics Using NuGet: Phil Haack has a nice post that demonstrates how to easily install a diagnostics page (using NuGet) that can help identify and diagnose common configuration issues within your apps. ASP.NET MVC 3 JsonValueProviderFactory: James Hughes has a nice post that discusses how to take advantage of the new JsonValueProviderFactory support built into ASP.NET MVC 3. This makes it easy to post JSON payloads to MVC action methods. Practical jQuery Mobile with ASP.NET MVC: James Hughes has another nice post that discusses how to use the new jQuery Mobile library with ASP.NET MVC to build great mobile web applications. Credit Card Validator for ASP.NET MVC 3: Benjii Me has a nice post that demonstrates how to build a [CreditCard] validator attribute that can be used to easily validate credit card numbers are in the correct format with ASP.NET MVC. Silverlight Silverlight FireStarter Keynote and Sessions: A great blog post from John Papa that contains pointers and descriptions of all the great Silverlight content we published last week at the Silverlight FireStarter. You can watch all of the talks online. More details on my keynote and Silverlight 5 announcements can be found here. 31 Days of Windows Phone 7: 31 great tutorials on how to build Windows Phone 7 applications (using Silverlight). Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit Update: David Anson has a nice post that discusses some of the additional controls provided with the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. Visual Studio JavaScript Editor Extensions: A nice (and free) Visual Studio plugin built by the web tools team that significantly improves the JavaScript intellisense support within Visual Studio. HTML5 Intellisense for Visual Studio: Gil has a blog post that discusses a new extension my team has posted to the Visual Studio Extension Gallery that adds HTML5 schema support to Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Team Build + Web Deployment + Web Deploy + VS 2010 = Goodness: Visual blogs about how to enable a continuous deployment system with VS 2010, TFS 2010 and the Microsoft Web Deploy framework. Visual Studio 2010 Emacs Emulation Extension and VIM Emulation Extension: Check out these two extensions if you are fond of Emacs and VIM key bindings and want to enable them within Visual Studio 2010. Hope this helps, Scott

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Form, function and complexity in rule processing

- by Charles Young

Tim Bass posted on ‘Orwellian Event Processing’. I was involved in a heated exchange in the comments, and he has more recently published a post entitled ‘Disadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1)’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of our exchange, it clearly failed to generate any agreement or understanding of our different positions. I don't particularly want to promote further argument of that kind, but I do want to take the opportunity of offering a different perspective on rule-processing and an explanation of my comments. For me, the ‘red rag’ lay in Tim’s claim that “...rules alone are highly inefficient for most classes of (not simple) problems” and a later paragraph that appears to equate the simplicity of form (‘IF-THEN-ELSE’) with simplicity of function. It is not the first time Tim has expressed these views and not the first time I have responded to his assertions. Indeed, Tim has a long history of commenting on the subject of complex event processing (CEP) and, less often, rule processing in ‘robust’ terms, often asserting that very many other people’s opinions on this subject are mistaken. In turn, I am of the opinion that, certainly in terms of rule processing, which is an area in which I have a specific interest and knowledge, he is often mistaken. There is no simple answer to the fundamental question ‘what is a rule?’ We use the word in a very fluid fashion in English. Likewise, the term ‘rule processing’, as used widely in IT, is equally difficult to define simplistically. The best way to envisage the term is as a ‘centre of gravity’ within a wider domain. That domain contains many other ‘centres of gravity’, including CEP, statistical analytics, neural networks, natural language processing and so much more. Whole communities tend to gravitate towards and build themselves around some of these centres. The term 'rule processing' is associated with many different technology types, various software products, different architectural patterns, the functional capability of many applications and services, etc. There is considerable variation amongst these different technologies, techniques and products. Very broadly, a common theme is their ability to manage certain types of processing and problem solving through declarative, or semi-declarative, statements of propositional logic bound to action-based consequences. It is generally important to be able to decouple these statements from other parts of an overall system or architecture so that they can be managed and deployed independently. As a centre of gravity, ‘rule processing’ is no island. It exists in the context of a domain of discourse that is, itself, highly interconnected and continuous. Rule processing does not, for example, exist in splendid isolation to natural language processing. On the contrary, an on-going theme of rule processing is to find better ways to express rules in natural language and map these to executable forms. Rule processing does not exist in splendid isolation to CEP. On the contrary, an event processing agent can reasonably be considered as a rule engine (a theme in ‘Power of Events’ by David Luckham). Rule processing does not live in splendid isolation to statistical approaches such as Bayesian analytics. On the contrary, rule processing and statistical analytics are highly synergistic. Rule processing does not even live in splendid isolation to neural networks. For example, significant research has centred on finding ways to translate trained nets into explicit rule sets in order to support forms of validation and facilitate insight into the knowledge stored in those nets. What about simplicity of form? Many rule processing technologies do indeed use a very simple form (‘If...Then’, ‘When...Do’, etc.) However, it is a fundamental mistake to equate simplicity of form with simplicity of function. It is absolutely mistaken to suggest that simplicity of form is a barrier to the efficient handling of complexity. There are countless real-world examples which serve to disprove that notion. Indeed, simplicity of form is often the key to handling complexity. Does rule processing offer a ‘one size fits all’. No, of course not. No serious commentator suggests it does. Does the design and management of large knowledge bases, expressed as rules, become difficult? Yes, it can do, but that is true of any large knowledge base, regardless of the form in which knowledge is expressed. The measure of complexity is not a function of rule set size or rule form. It tends to be correlated more strongly with the size of the ‘problem space’ (‘search space’) which is something quite different. Analysis of the problem space and the algorithms we use to search through that space are, of course, the very things we use to derive objective measures of the complexity of a given problem. This is basic computer science and common practice. Sailing a Dreadnaught through the sea of information technology and lobbing shells at some of the islands we encounter along the way does no one any good. Building bridges and causeways between islands so that the inhabitants can collaborate in open discourse offers hope of real progress.

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L2TP connection fails!

- by a.toraby

I've installed l2tp-ipsec-vpn but when I try to connect to the vpn server I get error 500. Here are the logs: Jun 17 12:54:37.449 ipsec_setup: Stopping Openswan IPsec... Jun 17 12:54:38.858 Stopping xl2tpd: xl2tpd. Jun 17 12:54:38.859 xl2tpd[1511]: death_handler: Fatal signal 15 received Jun 17 12:54:38.872 ipsec_setup: Starting Openswan IPsec U2.6.37/K3.2.0-23-generic... Jun 17 12:54:39.027 ipsec__plutorun: Starting Pluto subsystem... Jun 17 12:54:39.033 ipsec__plutorun: adjusting ipsec.d to /etc/ipsec.d Jun 17 12:54:39.037 recvref[30]: Protocol not available Jun 17 12:54:39.038 xl2tpd[2442]: This binary does not support kernel L2TP. Jun 17 12:54:39.038 xl2tpd[2444]: xl2tpd version xl2tpd-1.3.1 started on atp-ThinkPad-SL410 PID:2444 Jun 17 12:54:39.038 xl2tpd[2444]: Written by Mark Spencer, Copyright (C) 1998, Adtran, Inc. Jun 17 12:54:39.038 xl2tpd[2444]: Forked by Scott Balmos and David Stipp, (C) 2001 Jun 17 12:54:39.038 xl2tpd[2444]: Inherited by Jeff McAdams, (C) 2002 Jun 17 12:54:39.039 xl2tpd[2444]: Forked again by Xelerance (www.xelerance.com) (C) 2006 Jun 17 12:54:39.039 xl2tpd[2444]: Listening on IP address 0.0.0.0, port 1701 Jun 17 12:54:39.040 Starting xl2tpd: xl2tpd. Jun 17 12:54:39.062 ipsec__plutorun: 002 added connection description "L2TP" Jun 17 12:55:30.753 104 "L2TP" #1: STATE_MAIN_I1: initiate Jun 17 12:55:30.754 010 "L2TP" #1: STATE_MAIN_I1: retransmission; will wait 20s for response Jun 17 12:55:30.754 010 "L2TP" #1: STATE_MAIN_I1: retransmission; will wait 40s for response Jun 17 12:55:30.754 003 "L2TP" #1: ignoring Vendor ID payload [MS NT5 ISAKMPOAKLEY 00000008] Jun 17 12:55:30.754 003 "L2TP" #1: received Vendor ID payload [RFC 3947] method set to=109 Jun 17 12:55:30.754 003 "L2TP" #1: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-02_n] meth=106, but already using method 109 Jun 17 12:55:30.755 003 "L2TP" #1: ignoring Vendor ID payload [FRAGMENTATION] Jun 17 12:55:30.755 003 "L2TP" #1: ignoring Vendor ID payload [MS-Negotiation Discovery Capable] Jun 17 12:55:30.755 003 "L2TP" #1: ignoring Vendor ID payload [IKE CGA version 1] Jun 17 12:55:30.755 106 "L2TP" #1: STATE_MAIN_I2: sent MI2, expecting MR2 Jun 17 12:55:30.755 010 "L2TP" #1: STATE_MAIN_I2: retransmission; will wait 20s for response Jun 17 12:55:30.755 003 "L2TP" #1: NAT-Traversal: Result using RFC 3947 (NAT-Traversal): i am NATed Jun 17 12:55:30.755 108 "L2TP" #1: STATE_MAIN_I3: sent MI3, expecting MR3 Jun 17 12:55:30.756 004 "L2TP" #1: STATE_MAIN_I4: ISAKMP SA established {auth=OAKLEY_PRESHARED_KEY cipher=oakley_3des_cbc_192 prf=oakley_sha group=modp1024} Jun 17 12:55:30.756 117 "L2TP" #2: STATE_QUICK_I1: initiate Jun 17 12:55:30.756 010 "L2TP" #2: STATE_QUICK_I1: retransmission; will wait 20s for response Jun 17 12:55:30.756 003 "L2TP" #2: ignoring informational payload, type IPSEC_RESPONDER_LIFETIME msgid=6b03ff69 Jun 17 12:55:30.756 003 "L2TP" #2: NAT-Traversal: received 2 NAT-OA. ignored because peer is not NATed Jun 17 12:55:30.756 003 "L2TP" #2: our client subnet returned doesn't match my proposal - us:192.168.1.3/32 vs them:109.162.174.235/32 Jun 17 12:55:30.757 003 "L2TP" #2: Allowing questionable proposal anyway [ALLOW_MICROSOFT_BAD_PROPOSAL] Jun 17 12:55:30.757 004 "L2TP" #2: STATE_QUICK_I2: sent QI2, IPsec SA established transport mode {ESP=>0x23af21f8 <0xdb4a87b6 xfrm=AES_128-HMAC_SHA1 NATOA=none NATD=none DPD=none} Jun 17 12:55:31.759 xl2tpd[2444]: Connecting to host x.x.x.x, port 1701 Jun 17 12:55:32.021 xl2tpd[2444]: Connection established to x.x.x.x, 1701. Local: 4720, Remote: 200 (ref=0/0). Jun 17 12:55:32.023 xl2tpd[2444]: Calling on tunnel 4720 Jun 17 12:55:32.454 xl2tpd[2444]: Call established with x.x.x.x, Local: 9667, Remote: 3, Serial: 1 (ref=0/0) Jun 17 12:55:32.456 xl2tpd[2444]: start_pppd: I'm running: Jun 17 12:55:32.456 xl2tpd[2444]: "/usr/sbin/pppd" Jun 17 12:55:32.457 xl2tpd[2444]: "passive" Jun 17 12:55:32.458 xl2tpd[2444]: "nodetach" Jun 17 12:55:32.458 xl2tpd[2444]: ":" Jun 17 12:55:32.459 xl2tpd[2444]: "file" Jun 17 12:55:32.459 xl2tpd[2444]: "/etc/ppp/L2TP.options.xl2tpd" Jun 17 12:55:32.460 xl2tpd[2444]: "ipparam" Jun 17 12:55:32.461 xl2tpd[2444]: "x.x.x.x" Jun 17 12:55:32.462 xl2tpd[2444]: "/dev/pts/1" Jun 17 12:55:32.583 pppd[2711]: Plugin passprompt.so loaded. Jun 17 12:55:32.583 pppd[2711]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Jun 17 12:55:32.619 pppd[2711]: Using interface ppp0 Jun 17 12:55:32.620 pppd[2711]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/1 Jun 17 12:55:33.693 pppd[2711]: /usr/bin/L2tpIPsecVpn exited with code 0 Jun 17 12:55:34.454 [ERROR 404] Authentication failed: closing connection to 'L2TP' Jun 17 12:55:34.456 pppd[2711]: MS-CHAP authentication failed: E=691 Authentication failure Jun 17 12:55:34.457 pppd[2711]: CHAP authentication failed Jun 17 12:55:34.461 Stopping xl2tpd: xl2tpd. Jun 17 12:55:34.462 xl2tpd[2444]: death_handler: Fatal signal 15 received Jun 17 12:55:34.463 pppd[2711]: Modem hangup Jun 17 12:55:34.463 pppd[2711]: Connection terminated. Jun 17 12:55:34.474 ipsec_setup: Stopping Openswan IPsec... Jun 17 12:55:34.482 pppd[2711]: Exit. Jun 17 12:55:35.587 ipsec_setup: ERROR: Module xfrm4_mode_transport is in use Jun 17 12:55:35.665 ipsec_setup: ERROR: Module esp4 is in use I had this problem by ubuntu 11.10 though I can easily connect to the server from windows. I use ubuntu 12.0 64bit

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ODI 12c's Mapping Designer - Combining Flow Based and Expression Based Mapping

- by Madhu Nair

post by David Allan ODI is renowned for its declarative designer and minimal expression based paradigm. The new ODI 12c release has extended this even further to provide an extended declarative mapping designer. The ODI 12c mapper is a fusion of ODI's new declarative designer with the familiar flow based designer while retaining ODI’s key differentiators of: Minimal expression based definition, The ability to incrementally design an interface and to extract/load data from any combination of sources, and most importantly Backed by ODI’s extensible knowledge module framework. The declarative nature of the product has been extended to include an extensible library of common components that can be used to easily build simple to complex data integration solutions. Big usability improvements through consistent interactions of components and concepts all constructed around the familiar knowledge module framework provide the utmost flexibility. Here is a little taster: So what is a mapping? A mapping comprises of a logical design and at least one physical design, it may have many. A mapping can have many targets, of any technology and can be arbitrarily complex. You can build reusable mappings and use them in other mappings or other reusable mappings. In the example below all of the information from an Oracle bonus table and a bonus file are joined with an Oracle employees table before being written to a target. Some things that are cool include the one-click expression cross referencing so you can easily see what's used where within the design. The logical design in a mapping describes what you want to accomplish (see the animated GIF here illustrating how the above mapping was designed) . The physical design lets you configure how it is to be accomplished. So you could have one logical design that is realized as an initial load in one physical design and as an incremental load in another. In the physical design below we can customize how the mapping is accomplished by picking Knowledge Modules, in ODI 12c you can pick multiple nodes (on logical or physical) and see common properties. This is useful as we can quickly compare property values across objects - below we can see knowledge modules settings on the access points between execution units side by side, in the example one table is retrieved via database links and the other is an external table. In the logical design I had selected an append mode for the integration type, so by default the IKM on the target will choose the most suitable/default IKM - which in this case is an in-built Oracle Insert IKM (see image below). This supports insert and select hints for the Oracle database (the ANSI SQL Insert IKM does not support these), so by default you will get direct path inserts with Oracle on this statement. In ODI 12c, the mapper is just that, a mapper. Design your mapping, write to multiple targets, the targets can be in the same data server, in different data servers or in totally different technologies - it does not matter. ODI 12c will derive and generate a plan that you can use or customize with knowledge modules. Some of the use cases which are greatly simplified include multiple heterogeneous targets, multi target inserts for Oracle and writing of XML. Let's switch it up now and look at a slightly different example to illustrate expression reuse. In ODI you can define reusable expressions using user functions. These can be reused across mappings and the implementations specialized per technology. So you can have common expressions across Oracle, SQL Server, Hive etc. shielding the design from the physical aspects of the generated language. Another way to reuse is within a mapping itself. In ODI 12c expressions can be defined and reused within a mapping. Rather than replicating the expression text in larger expressions you can decompose into smaller snippets, below you can see UNIT_TAX AMOUNT has been defined and is used in two downstream target columns - its used in the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT plus its used in the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT (a recording of the calculation). You can see the columns that the expressions depend on (upstream) and the columns the expression is used in (downstream) highlighted within the mapper. Also multi selecting attributes is a convenient way to see what's being used where, below I have selected the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT in the target datastore and the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT in UNIT_CALC. You can now see many expressions at once now and understand much more at the once time without needlessly clicking around and memorizing information. Our mantra during development was to keep it simple and make the tool more powerful and do even more for the user. The development team was a fusion of many teams from Oracle Warehouse Builder, Sunopsis and BEA Aqualogic, debating and perfecting the mapper in ODI 12c. This was quite a project from supporting the capabilities of ODI in 11g to building the flow based mapping tool to support the future. I hope this was a useful insight, there is so much more to come on this topic, this is just a preview of much more that you will see of the mapper in ODI 12c.

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Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC Review

- by Ben Griswold

A few years back I started dallying with test-driven development, but I never fully committed to the practice. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the value of TDD; it was more a matter of not completely understanding how to incorporate “test first” into my everyday development. Back in my web forms days, I could point fingers at the framework for my ignorance and laziness. After all, web forms weren’t exactly designed for testability so who could blame me for not embracing TDD in those conditions, right? But when I switched to ASP.NET MVC and quickly found myself fresh out of excuses and it became instantly clear that it was time to get my head around red-green-refactor once and for all or I would regretfully miss out on one of the biggest selling points the new framework had to offer. I have previously written about how I learned ASP.NET MVC. It was primarily hands on learning but I did read a couple of ASP.NET MVC books along the way. The books I read dedicated a chapter or two to TDD and they certainly addressed the benefits of TDD and how MVC was designed with testability in mind, but TDD was merely an afterthought compared to, well, teaching one how to code the model, view and controller. This approach made some sense, and I learned a bunch about MVC from those books, but when it came to TDD the books were just a teaser and an opportunity missed. But then I got lucky – Jonathan McCracken contacted me and asked if I’d review his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, and it was just what I needed to get over the TDD hump. As the title suggests, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC takes a different approach to learning MVC as it focuses on testing right from the very start. McCracken wastes no time and swiftly familiarizes us with the framework by building out a trivial Quote-O-Matic application and then dedicates the better part of his book to testing first – first by explaining TDD and then coding a full-featured Getting Organized application inspired by David Allen’s popular book, Getting Things Done. If you are a learn-by-example kind of coder (like me), you will instantly appreciate and enjoy McCracken’s style – its fast-moving, pragmatic and focused on only the most relevant information required to get you going with ASP.NET MVC and TDD. The book continues with the test-first theme but McCracken moves away from the sample application and incorporates other practical skills like persisting models with NHibernate, leveraging Inversion of Control with the IControllerFactory and building a RESTful web service. What I most appreciated about this section was McCracken’s use of and praise for open source libraries like Rhino Mocks, SQLite and StructureMap (to name just a few) and productivity tools like ReSharper, Web Platform Installer and ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard. McCracken’s emphasis on real world, pragmatic development was clearly demonstrated in every tool choice, straight-forward code block and developer tip. Whether one is already familiar with the tools/tips or not, McCracken’s thought process is easily understood and appreciated. The final section of the book walks the reader through security and deployment – everything from error handling and logging with ELMAH, to ASP.NET Health Monitoring, to using MSBuild with automated builds, to the deployment of ASP.NET MVC to various web environments. These chapters, like those prior, offer enough information and explanation to simply help you get the job done. Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will turn you into an expert MVC developer overnight? Well, no. I don’t think any book can make that claim. If that were possible, I think book list prices would skyrocket! That said, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC provides a solid foundation and a unique (and dare I say necessary) approach to learning ASP.NET MVC. Along the way McCracken shares loads of very practical software development tips and references numerous tools and libraries. The bottom line is it’s a great ASP.NET MVC primer – if you’re new to ASP.NET MVC it’s just what you need to get started. Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will give you everything you need to start employing TDD in your everyday development? Well, I used to think that learning TDD required a lot of practice and, if you’re lucky enough, the guidance of a mentor or coach. I used to think that one couldn’t learn TDD from a book alone. Well, I’m still no pro, but I’m testing first now and Jonathan McCracken and his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, played a big part in making this happen. If you are an MVC developer and a TDD newb, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC is just the book for you.

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Copying Columns from Grid to Clipboard in SQL Developer

- by thatjeffsmith

There are several ways to get data from a query or a table|view to the clipboard. You know the tried and true, copy and paste. But what if you only want one or more columns, not every column? There are several ways to do this, let’s see if we can’t identify all of them. Write your query to only include the data you want Obvious? Yes. Needed to be said? Definitely. The best tuning tip is to only ask for the data you need, only when you absolutely need it. But let’s look at a few more practical ways to do this. Hide the unwanted columns Mouse right click on an column header. In the context menu, select ‘Columns.’ Hide the columns you don’t want. Copy and paste. WYSIWYG Grids, Hide Columns and Filter Rows Mouse select the columns Obvious, but a bit painful. For a very large dataset, you’ll be holding down the Shift and PageDown buttons – but it works. Remember to use Ctrl+Shift+C to get the column headers with the data. Use the Export Wizard This used to be called ‘Unload’ – agreed, not a great name. So, we changed it. In a grid, right mouse click on the data, and on the context menu, select ‘Export…’ Select your format – I suggest ‘delimited’ or ‘fixed’ for copying data to the clipboard. You can export to the clipboard, yes you can! Click ‘Next.’ Click in the Columns dialog, and choose the columns you want copied. Trim the columns you don't want copied Click ‘Finish.’ Alt or Ctrl tab to your window or application of choice. And Paste! "FIRST_NAME" "LAST_NAME" "Donald" "OConnell" "Douglas" "Grant" "Jennifer" "Whalen" "Pat" "Fay" "Susan" "Mavris" "William" "Gietz" "Alexander" "Hunold" "Bruce" "Ernst" "David" "Austin" "Valli" "Pataballa" "Diana" "Lorentz" "Daniel" "Faviet" "John" "Chen" "Ismael" "Sciarra" "Jose Manuel" "Urman" "Luis" "Popp" "Alexander" "Khoo" "Shelli" "Baida" "Sigal" "Tobias" "Guy" "Himuro" "Karen" "Colmenares" "Matthew" "Weiss" "Adam" "Fripp" "Payam" "Kaufling" "Shanta" "Vollman" "Kevin" "Mourgos" "Julia" "Nayer" "Irene" "Mikkilineni" ... There’s probably at least 2 or 3 more ways, but… But, try these and let me know how we can improve things. I’ve already gotten a request to be able to include the SQL text used to populate the dataset on the the copy to clipboard, and it’s now on our to-do list

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Silverlight Firestarter Wrap Up and WCF RIA Services Talk Sample Code

- by dwahlin

I had a great time attending and speaking at the Silverlight Firestarter event up in Redmond on December 2, 2010. In addition to getting a chance to hang out with a lot of cool people from Microsoft such as Scott Guthrie, John Papa, Tim Heuer, Brian Goldfarb, John Allwright, David Pugmire, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Handley, Yavor Georgiev, Jossef Goldberg, Mike Cook and many others, I also had a chance to chat with a lot of people attending the event and hear about what projects they’re working on which was awesome. If you didn’t get a chance to look through all of the new features coming in Silverlight 5 check out John Papa’s post on the subject. While at the Silverlight Firestarter event I gave a presentation on WCF RIA Services and wanted to get the code posted since several people have asked when it’d be available. The talk can be viewed by clicking the image below. Code from the talk follows as well as additional links. I had a few people ask about the green bracelet on my left hand since it looks like something you’d get from a waterpark. It was used to get us access down a little hall that led backstage and allowed us to go backstage during the event. I thought it looked kind of dorky but it was required to get through security. Sample Code from My WCF RIA Services Talk (To login to the 2 apps use “user” and “P@ssw0rd”. Make sure to do a rebuild of the projects in Visual Studio before running them.) View All Silverlight Firestarter Talks and Scott Guthrie’s Keynote WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta for Silverlight 4 WCF RIA Services Code Samples (including some SP1 samples) Improved binding support in EntitySet and EntityCollection with SP1 (Kyle McClellan’s Blog) Introducing an MVVM-Friendly DomainDataSource: The DomainCollectionView (Kyle McClellan’s Blog) I’ve had the chance to speak at a lot of conferences but never with as many cameras, streaming capabilities, people watching live and overall hype involved. Over 1000 people registered to attend the conference in person at the Microsoft campus and well over 15,000 to watch it through the live stream. The event started for me on Tuesday afternoon with a flight up to Seattle from Phoenix. My flight was delayed 1 1/2 hours (I seem to be good at booking delayed flights) so I didn’t get up there until almost 8 PM. John Papa did a tech check at 9 PM that night and I was scheduled for 9:30 PM. We basically plugged in my laptop backstage (amazing number of servers, racks and audio devices back there) and made sure everything showed up properly on the projector and the machines recording the presentation. In addition to a dedicated show director, there were at least 5 tech people back stage and at least that many up in the booth running lights, audio, cameras, and other aspects of the show. I wish I would’ve taken a picture of the backstage setup since it was pretty massive – servers all over the place. I definitely gained a new appreciation for how much work goes into these types of events. Here’s what the room looked like right before my tech check– not real exciting at this point. That’s Yavor Georgiev (who spoke on WCF Services at the Firestarter) in the background. We had plenty of monitors to reference during the presentation. Two monitors for slides (right and left side) and a notes monitor. The 4th monitor showed the time and they’d type in notes to us as we talked (such as “You’re over time!” in my case since I went around 4 minutes over :-)). Wednesday morning I went back on campus at Microsoft and watched John Papa film a few Silverlight TV episodes with Dave Campbell and Ryan Plemons. Next I had the chance to watch the dry run of the keynote with Scott Guthrie and John Papa. We were all blown away by the demos shown since they were even better than expected. Starting at 1 PM on Wednesday I went over to Building 35 and listened to Yavor Georgiev (WCF Services), Jaime Rodriguez (Windows Phone 7), Jesse Liberty (Data Binding) and Jossef Goldberg and Mike Cook (Silverlight Performance) give their different talks and we all shared feedback with each other which was a lot of fun. Jeff Handley from the RIA Services team came afterwards and listened to me give a dry run of my WCF RIA Services talk. He had some great feedback that I really appreciated getting. That night I hung out with John Papa and Ward Bell and listened to John walk through his keynote demos. I also got a sneak peak of the gift given to Dave Campbell for all his work with Silverlight Cream over the years. It’s a poster signed by all of the key people involved with Silverlight: Thursday morning I got up fairly early to get to the event center by 8 AM for speaker pictures. It was nice and quiet at that point although outside the room there was a huge line of people waiting to get in. At around 8:30 AM everyone was let in and the main room was filled quickly. Two other overflow rooms in the Microsoft conference center (Building 33) were also filled to capacity. At around 9 AM Scott Guthrie kicked off the event and all the excitement started! From there it was all a blur but it was definitely a lot of fun. All of the sessions for the Silverlight Firestarter were recorded and can be watched here (including the keynote). Corey Schuman, John Papa and I also released 11 lab exercises and associated videos to help people get started with Silverlight. Definitely check them out if you’re interested in learning more! Level 100: Getting Started Lab 01 - WinForms and Silverlight Lab 02 - ASP.NET and Silverlight Lab 03 - XAML and Controls Lab 04 - Data Binding Level 200: Ready for More Lab 05 - Migrating Apps to Out-of-Browser Lab 06 - Great UX with Blend Lab 07 - Web Services and Silverlight Lab 08 - Using WCF RIA Services Level 300: Take me Further Lab 09 - Deep Dive into Out-of-Browser Lab 10 - Silverlight Patterns: Using MVVM Lab 11 - Silverlight and Windows Phone 7

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Visualising data a different way with Pivot collections

- by Rob Farley

Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for clients, including making Pivot collections based on students at a school, and using it to browse PDF invoices by their various properties. We had actual commercial work based on Pivot collections back then, and it was all kinds of fun. Later, we made some collections for events that were happening, and even got featured in the TechEd Australia keynote. But I’m getting ahead of myself... let me explain the concept. A Pivot collection is an XML file (with .cxml extension) which lists Items, each linking to an image that’s stored in a Deep Zoom format (this means that it contains tiles like Bing Maps, so that the browser can request only the ones of interest according to the zoom level). This collection can be shown in a Silverlight application that uses the PivotViewer control, or in the Pivot Browser that’s available from getpivot.com. Filtering and sorting the items according to their facets (attributes, such as size, age, category, etc), the PivotViewer rearranges the way that these are shown in a very dynamic way. To quote Gary Flake, this lets us “see patterns which are otherwise hidden”. This browsing mechanism is very suited to a number of different methods, because it’s just that – browsing. It’s not searching, it’s more akin to window-shopping than doing an internet search. When we decided to put something together for the conferences such as TechEd Australia 2010 and the PASS Summit 2010, we did some screen-scraping to provide a different view of data that was already available online. Nick Hodge and Michael Kordahi from Microsoft liked the idea a lot, and after a bit of tweaking, we produced one that Michael used in the TechEd Australia keynote to show the variety of talks on offer. It’s interesting to see a pattern in this data: The Office track has the most sessions, but if the Interactive Sessions and Instructor-Led Labs are removed, it drops down to only the sixth most popular track, with Cloud Computing taking over. This is something which just isn’t obvious when you look an ordinary search tool. You get a much better feel for the data when moving around it like this. The more observant amongst you will have noticed some difference in the collection that Michael is demonstrating in the picture above with the screenshots I’ve shown. That’s because it’s been extended some more. At the SQLBits conference in the UK this year, I had some interesting discussions with the guys from Xpert360, particularly Phil Carter, who I’d met in 2009 at an earlier SQLBits conference. They had got around to producing a Pivot collection based on the SQLBits data, which we had been planning to do but ran out of time. We discussed some of ways that Pivot could be used, including the ways that my old friend Howard Dierking had extended it for the MSDN Magazine. I’m not suggesting I influenced Xpert360 at all, but they certainly inspired us with some of their posts on the matter So with LobsterPot guys David Gardiner and Roger Noble both having dabbled in Pivot collections (and Dave doing some for clients), I set Roger to work on extending it some more. He’s used various events and so on to be able to make an environment that allows us to do quick deployment of new collections, as well as showing the data in a grid view which behaves as if it were simply a third view of the data (the other two being the array of images and the ‘histogram’ view). I see PivotViewer as being a significant step in data visualisation – so much so that I feature it when I deliver talks on Spatial Data Visualisation methods. Any time when there is information that can be conveyed through an image, you have to ask yourself how best to show that image, and whether that image is the focal point. For Spatial data, the image is most often a map, and the map becomes the central mode for navigation. I show Pivot with postcode areas, since I can browse the postcodes based on their data, and many of the images are recognisable (to locals of South Australia). Naturally, the images could link through to the map itself, and so on, but generally people think of Spatial data in terms of navigating a map, which doesn’t always gel with the information you’re trying to extract. Roger’s even looking into ways to hook PivotViewer into the Bing Maps API, in a similar way to the Deep Earth project, displaying different levels of map detail according to how ‘zoomed in’ the images are. Some of the work that Dave did with one of the schools was generating the Deep Zoom tiles “on the fly”, based on images stored in a database, and Roger has produced a collection which uses images from flickr, that lets you move from one search term to another. Pulling the images down from flickr.com isn’t particularly ideal from a performance aspect, and flickr doesn’t store images in a small-enough format to really lend itself to this use, but you might agree that it’s an interesting concept which compares nicely to using Maps. I’m looking forward to future versions of the PivotViewer control, and hope they provide many more events that can be used, and even more hooks into it. Naturally, LobsterPot could help provide your business with a PivotViewer experience, but you can probably do a lot of it yourself too. There’s a thorough guide at getpivot.com, which is how we got into it. For some examples of what we’ve done, have a look at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au. I’d like to see PivotViewer really catch on a data visualisation tool.

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top Tweets SOA Partner Community – May 2012

- by JuergenKress

Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity SOA Community BPMN2.0 Oracle notations poster from eaiesb http://wp.me/p10C8u-pu Torsten WinterbergLook out for new Oracle #BPM edition coming up soon: The Oracle BPM Standard edtion! Great news for easy entry, small licence fees. Yes! Danilo Schmiedel Had a great chat with customer yesterday about #OracleBPM. Next step will be a 5day event combining modeling and implementation @soacommunity Frank Nimphius Still reading "Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g Handbook". Excellent resource for a non-SOA but ADF guy like me ;-) Oracle New webcast: Maximize #Oracle #WebLogic Server ROI with Oracle #Enterprise #Manager 12c on May 2 at 10 am PT. Register http://bit.ly/JFUrR9 OTNArchBeat@OTNArchBeat BPM in Financial Services Industry | Sanjeev Sharma http://bit.ly/HCCxui JDeveloper & ADF BPEL 11.1.1.6 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12.1.3 SOA Integrations http://dlvr.it/1V9SxR Oracle UPK & Tutor Collaborate Attendees: Visit the UPK demo pod, SIGS, and sessions: If you are attending Collaborate 2012 - Sun. http://bit.ly/J39z65 Heidi Buelow see #fmw track RT @demed: Are you going to #KSCOPE12 in San Antonio, June 24-28? http://kscope12.com/component/ seminar/seminarslist?topicsid=6 Use promo code Fusion for discount! Sabine Leitner #SIG #Middleware 15.05. Frankfurt #Oracle #DOAG Planung & Aufbau WebLogic Server #WLS http://bit.ly/HKsCWV @OracleWebLogic @soacommunity SOA Community MDS explorer by Red Samurai http://wp.me/p10C8u-pp Biemond ® Retrieve or set a HTTP header from Oracle BPEL: With Oracle SOA Suite 11g patch 12928372 you can finally retrie http://bit.ly/JejTHC Lucas Jellema Call for papers for UKOUG 2012 has opened: http://techandebs.ukoug.org /default.asp?p=9306 (deadline 1st of June) OTNArchBeat BPM API usage: List all BPM Processes for a user | Kavitha Srinivasan http://bit.ly/IJKVfj demed SOA, Cloud + Service Tech symposium (London, Sep 24-25) call for paper is open http://www.servicetechsymposium. com /call2012.php @techsymp #oraclesoa OracleBlogs Lessons learned configuring OER 11g Workflows http://ow.ly/1iMsKh OTNArchBeat Scripting WebLogic Admin Server Startup | Antony Reynolds http://bit.ly/IH5ciU orclateamsoa A-Team Blog #ateam: BPM API usage: List all BPM Processes for a user http://ow.ly/1iJADp Lucas Jellema Just blogged about our Live FMW Application Development show during OBUG 2012, next Tuesday 24th April in Maastricht: OracleBlogs OEG integration with OSB/OWSM - 11g http://ow.ly/1iKx7G SOA Community SOA Community Newsletter April 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pl Frank DorstRT @whitehorsesnl: Whiteblog: BPM Process Spaces in Oracle Webcenter (Patch Set 5(http://bit.ly/Hxzh29) #soacommunity #bpm #oracle) David Shaffer The Advanced SOA suite training class next week in Redwood City is full! Learned a lot about accepting credit card payments. OTNArchBeat Running Built-In Test Simulator with SOA Suite Healthcare 11g in PS4 and PS5 | Shub Lahiri http://bit.ly/IgI8GN SOA Community Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards 2012, Call for Nominations #ofmaward #soa #bpm #soacommunity OTNArchBeat Updated SOA Documents now available in ITSO Reference Library http://bit.ly/I3Y6Sg Oracle Middleware Data Integrator & SOA - why 2 products better than one for integration? Webcast: Apr 24 10 AM PT http://bit.ly/IzmtKR Andrejus Baranovskis Red Samurai MDS Cleaner V2.0 http://fb.me/FxLVz82w SOA Community “@rluttikhuizen: Chapter 4 of SOA Made Simple book "Classification of Services" ready for collegial review” can #soacommunity get a preview? Xavier Verhaeghe #Gartner figures are out: #Oracle top in App Server market share (43.1%) and Relational #Database, too (48.8%) in 2011 Sabine Leitner WLS12c, Exa*, IDM, EM12c, DB @ Private, Public, Hybrid #Cloud Event 26.04. FFM #Oracle http://bit.ly/zcRuxi @OracleCloudZone @soacommunity Michel Schildmeijer@wlscommunity @MiddlewareMagic @OTNArchBeat @Oracle_Fusion Oracle WebLogic / SOA Suite 11g HACMP Cluster take-over http://lnkd.in/G78qMd Oracle Middleware Hear how ODI and SOA's unified approach are key to untangling your business. April 24 10AM PT http://bit.ly/IdcsUz #Oracle OTNArchBeat Using SAP Adapter with OSB 11g (PS3) | Shub Lahiri http://bit.ly/IswR9K SOA Community Integrating with Oracle Fusion Applications: Discovering Integration Artifacts https://blogs.oracle.com/governance /entry/integrating_with_oracle_fusion_ applications #soacommunity #oer #governance OracleBlogs Tuning B2B Server Engine Threads in SOA Suite 11g http://ow.ly/1iH5bx OracleBlogs Top Tweets SOA Partner Community April 2012 http://ow.ly/1iVHfA SOA Community Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management http://wp.me/p10C8u-pi Sabine Leitner WLS12c,Exa*,IDM,EM12c, DB @ Private, Public, Hybrid #Cloud Event 24.04. München #Oracle http://bit.ly/zcRuxi @OracleCloudZone @soacommunity SOA Community Testing Business Rules by Mark Nelson http://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/ 04/18/testing-business-rules/ #soacommunity #soa #rules #oracle SOA CommunityTop Tweets SOA Partner Community - April 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pn OTNArchBeat Webcast: Untangle Your Business with Oracle Unified SOA and Data Integration - April 24 http://bit.ly/IQexqT OTNArchBeat"Do more with SOA Integration: Best of Packt" contributors include @gschmutz, @llaszews, many others http://amzn.to/HVWwYt ServiceTechSymposium Symposium agenda page coming together - page launched today with keynotes, sessions to be added shortly. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com /agenda2012.php SOA Community Shipping Specialization plaques - congratulation #Fujitsu - request yours https://soacommunity.wordpress. com/2011/02/23/who-are-the-soa-experts-specialization-recognized-by-customers/ #soacommunity #OPN http://pic.twitter.com/YMRm2ion ServiceTechSymposium call for Presentations Submission Deadline Moved Up to May 21, 2012. Send your presentations submissions ASAP! ServiceTechSymposium Symposium Keynote by Vicente Navarro, European Space Agency, added to agenda: "SOA & Service-Orientation at the European Space Agency" SOA Community Running a large #soa project? Make sure you read - Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management #soacommunity #opn SOA Community List all BPM Processes for a user by Yogesh l #bpm #oracle #soacommunity For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: soacommunity, twitter,Oracle,SOA Community,Jürgen Kress,OPN,SOA,BPM

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Dynamic Data Connections

- by Tim Dexter

I have had a long running email thread running between Dan and David over at Valspar and myself. They have built some impressive connectivity between their in house apps and BIP using web services. The crux of their problem has been that they have multiple databases that need the same report executed against them. Not such an unusual request as I have spoken to two customers in the last month with the same situation. Of course, you could create a report against each data connection and just run or call the appropriate report. Not too bad if you have two or three data connections but more than that and it becomes a maintenance nightmare having to update queries or layouts. Ideally you want to have just a single report definition on the BIP server and to dynamically set the connection to be used at runtime based on the user or system that the user is in. A quick bit of digging and help from Shinji on the development team and I had an answer. Rather embarassingly, the solution has been around since the Oct 2010 rollup patch last year. Still, I grabbed the latest Jan 2011 patch - check out Note 797057.1 for the latest available patches. Once installed, I used the best web service testing tool I have yet to come across - SoapUI. Just point it at the WSDL and you can check out the available services and their parameters and then test them too. The XML packet has a new dynamic data source entry. You can set you own custom JDBC connection or just specify an existing data source name thats defined on the server. <pub:runReport> <pub:reportRequest> <pub:attributeFormat>xml</pub:attributeFormat> <pub:attributeTemplate>0</pub:attributeTemplate> <pub:byPassCache>true</pub:byPassCache> <pub:dynamicDataSource> <pub:JDBCDataSource> <pub:JDBCDriverClass></pub:JDBCDriverClass> <pub:JDBCDriverType></pub:JDBCDriverType> <pub:JDBCPassword></pub:JDBCPassword> <pub:JDBCURL></pub:JDBCURL> <pub:JDBCUserName></pub:JDBCUserName> <pub:dataSourceName>Conn1</pub:dataSourceName> </pub:JDBCDataSource> </pub:dynamicDataSource> <pub:reportAbsolutePath>/Test/Employee Report/Employee Report.xdo</pub:reportAbsolutePath> </pub:reportRequest> <pub:userID>Administrator</pub:userID> <pub:password>Administrator</pub:password> </pub:runReport> So I have Conn1 and Conn2 defined that are connections to different databases. I can just flip the name, make the WS call and get the appropriate dataset in my report. Just as an example, here's my web service call java code. Just a case of bringing in the BIP java libs to my java project. publicReportServiceService = new PublicReportServiceService(); PublicReportService publicReportService = publicReportServiceService.getPublicReportService_v11(); String userID = "Administrator"; String password = "Administrator"; ReportRequest rr = new ReportRequest(); rr.setAttributeFormat("xml"); rr.setAttributeTemplate("1"); rr.setByPassCache(true); rr.setReportAbsolutePath("/Test/Employee Report/Employee Report.xdo"); rr.setReportOutputPath("c:\\temp\\output.xml"); BIPDataSource bipds = new BIPDataSource(); JDBCDataSource jds = new JDBCDataSource(); jds.setDataSourceName("Conn1"); bipds.setJDBCDataSource(jds); rr.setDynamicDataSource(bipds); try { publicReportService.runReport(rr, userID, password); } catch (InvalidParametersException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (AccessDeniedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (OperationFailedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } Note, Im no java whiz kid or whizzy old bloke, at least not unless Ive had a coffee. JDeveloper has a nice feature where you point it at the WSDL and it creates everything to support your calling code for you. Couple of things to remember: 1. When you call the service, remember to set the bypass the cache option. Forget it and much scratching of your head and taking my name in vain will ensue. 2. My demo actually hit the same database but used two users, one accessed the base tables another views with the same name. For far too long I thought the connection swapping was not working. I was getting the same results for both users until I realized I was specifying the schema name for the table/view in my query e.g. select * from EMP.EMPLOYEES. So remember to have a generic query that will depend entirely on the connection. Its a neat feature if you want to be able to switch connections and only define a single report and call it remotely. Now if you want the connection to be set dynamically based on the user and the report run via the user interface, thats going to be more tricky ... need to think about that one!

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Personal search – the future of search

- by jamiet

[Four months ago I wrote a meandering blog post on another blogging site entitled Personal search – the future of search. The points I made therein are becoming more relevant to what I'm reading about and hoping to get involved in in the future so I'm re-posting here to a wider audience to hopefully get some more feedback and guage reaction to it. This has been prompted by the book Pull by David Siegel that is forming my current holiday reading (recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server) and in particular by Siegel's notion of us all in the future having a personal online data vault.] My one-time colleague Paul Dawson recently wrote an article called The Future of Search and in it he proposed some interesting ideas. Some choice quotes: The growth of Chinese search giant Baidu is an indicator that fully localised and tailored content and offerings have great traction with local audiences This trend is already driving an increase in the use of specialist searches … Look at how Farecast is now integrated into Bing for example, or how Flightstats is now integrated into Google. Search does not necessarily have to begin with a keyword, but could start instead with a click or a touch. Take a look at Retrievr. Start drawing a picture in the box and see what happens. This is certainly search without the need for typing in keywords search technology has advanced greatly in recent years. The recent launch of Microsoft Live Labs’ Pivot has given us a taste of what we can expect to see in the future This really got me thinking about where search might go in the future and as my mind wandered I realised that as the amount of data that we collect about ourselves increases so too will the need and the desire to search it. The amount of electronic data that exists about each and every person is increasing and in the near future I fully expect that we are going to be able to store personal data such as: A history of our location (in fact Google Latitude already offers this facility) Recordings of all our phone conversations Health information history (weight, blood pressure etc…) Energy usage Spending history What films we watch, what radio stations we listen to Voting history Of course, most of this stuff is already stored somewhere but crucially we don’t have easy access to it. My utilities supplier knows how much electricity I’m using but if I want to know for myself I have to go and dig through my statements (assuming I have kept them). Similarly my doctor probably has ready access to all of my health records, my bank knows exactly what I have spent my money on, my cable supplier knows what I watch on TV and my mobile phone supplier probably knows exactly where I am and where I’ve been for the past few years. Strange then that none of this electronic information is available to me in a way that I can really make use of it; after all, its MY information. Its MY data. I created it. That is set to change. As technologies mature and customers become more technically cognizant they will demand more access to the data that companies hold about them. The companies themselves will realise the benefit that they derive from giving users what they want and will embrace ways of providing it. As a result the amount of data that we store about ourselves is going to increase exponentially and the desire to search and derive value from that data is going to grow with it; we are about to enter the era of the “personal datastore” and we will want, and need, to search through it in order to make sense of it all. Its interesting then that today when we think of search we think of search engines and yet in these personal datastores we’re referring to data that search engines can’t touch because WE own it and we (hopefully) choose to keep it private. Someone, I know not who, is going to lead in this space by making it easy for us to search our data and retrieve information that we have either forgotten or maybe didn’t even know in the first place. We will learn new things about ourselves and about our habits; we will share these findings with whomever we choose; we will compare what we discover with others; we will collaborate for mutual benefit and, most of all, we will educate ourselves as to how to live our lives better. Search will be the means to that end, it will enable us to make sense of the wealth of information that we will collect day in day out. The future of search is personal, why would we be interested in anything else? @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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Personal search – the future of search

- by jamiet

[Four months ago I wrote a meandering blog post on another blogging site entitled Personal search – the future of search. The points I made therein are becoming more relevant to what I'm reading about and hoping to get involved in in the future so I'm re-posting here to a wider audience to hopefully get some more feedback and guage reaction to it. This has been prompted by the book Pull by David Siegel that is forming my current holiday reading (recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server) and in particular by Siegel's notion of us all in the future having a personal online data vault.] My one-time colleague Paul Dawson recently wrote an article called The Future of Search and in it he proposed some interesting ideas. Some choice quotes: The growth of Chinese search giant Baidu is an indicator that fully localised and tailored content and offerings have great traction with local audiences This trend is already driving an increase in the use of specialist searches … Look at how Farecast is now integrated into Bing for example, or how Flightstats is now integrated into Google. Search does not necessarily have to begin with a keyword, but could start instead with a click or a touch. Take a look at Retrievr. Start drawing a picture in the box and see what happens. This is certainly search without the need for typing in keywords search technology has advanced greatly in recent years. The recent launch of Microsoft Live Labs’ Pivot has given us a taste of what we can expect to see in the future This really got me thinking about where search might go in the future and as my mind wandered I realised that as the amount of data that we collect about ourselves increases so too will the need and the desire to search it. The amount of electronic data that exists about each and every person is increasing and in the near future I fully expect that we are going to be able to store personal data such as: A history of our location (in fact Google Latitude already offers this facility) Recordings of all our phone conversations Health information history (weight, blood pressure etc…) Energy usage Spending history What films we watch, what radio stations we listen to Voting history Of course, most of this stuff is already stored somewhere but crucially we don’t have easy access to it. My utilities supplier knows how much electricity I’m using but if I want to know for myself I have to go and dig through my statements (assuming I have kept them). Similarly my doctor probably has ready access to all of my health records, my bank knows exactly what I have spent my money on, my cable supplier knows what I watch on TV and my mobile phone supplier probably knows exactly where I am and where I’ve been for the past few years. Strange then that none of this electronic information is available to me in a way that I can really make use of it; after all, its MY information. Its MY data. I created it. That is set to change. As technologies mature and customers become more technically cognizant they will demand more access to the data that companies hold about them. The companies themselves will realise the benefit that they derive from giving users what they want and will embrace ways of providing it. As a result the amount of data that we store about ourselves is going to increase exponentially and the desire to search and derive value from that data is going to grow with it; we are about to enter the era of the “personal datastore” and we will want, and need, to search through it in order to make sense of it all. Its interesting then that today when we think of search we think of search engines and yet in these personal datastores we’re referring to data that search engines can’t touch because WE own it and we (hopefully) choose to keep it private. Someone, I know not who, is going to lead in this space by making it easy for us to search our data and retrieve information that we have either forgotten or maybe didn’t even know in the first place. We will learn new things about ourselves and about our habits; we will share these findings with whomever we choose; we will compare what we discover with others; we will collaborate for mutual benefit and, most of all, we will educate ourselves as to how to live our lives better. Search will be the means to that end, it will enable us to make sense of the wealth of information that we will collect day in day out. The future of search is personal, why would we be interested in anything else? @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up I

- by Tim Dexter

I was out in Yellowstone last week soaking up various wildlife and a bit too much rain ... good to be back until the 95F heat yesterday. Taking a little break from the Excel templates; the dev folks are planing an Excel patch in the next week or so that will add a mass of new functionality. At the risk of completely mis leading you I'm going to hang back a while. What I have written so far holds true and will continue to do so. This week, I have been mostly eating 'mapviewer' ... answers on a post card please, TV show and character. I had a request to show how BIP can call mapviewer and render a dynamic map in an output. So I hit the books and colleagues for some answers. Mapviewer is Oracle's geographic information system, hereby known as GIS. I use it a lot in our BIEE demos where the interaction with the maps is very impressive. Need a map of California and its congressional districts? I have contacts; Jerry and David with their little black box of maps. Once in my possession I can build highly interactive, clickable maps that allow the user to drill into more information using a very friendly interface driving BIEE content and navigation. But what about maps in BIP output? Bryan Wise, who has written some articles on this blog did some work a while back with the PL/SQL API interface. The extract for the report called a function that in turn called the mapviewer server, passing a set of mapping requirements, it then returned a URL to a cached copy of that map. Easy to then have BIP render that image. Thats still very doable. You need to install a couple of packages and then load the mapviewer java APIs into the database. Then you can write your function to the APIs. A little involved? Maybe, but the database is doing all the heavy lifting for you. I thought I would investigate another method for getting the maps back into BIP. There is a URL interface you can call, this involves building an XML message to be passed to the mapviewer server. It's pretty straightforward to use on the mapviewer side. On the BIP side things are little more tricksy. After some unexpected messing about I finally got the ubiquitous Hello World map to render using the URL method. Not the most exciting map in the world, lots of ocean and a rather long URL to get it to render. http://127.0.0.1:9704/mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22%20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E Notice all of the encoding in the URL string to handle the spaces, quotes, etc. All necessary to get BIP to make the call to the mapviewer server correctly without truncating the URL if it hits a real space rather than a %20. With that in mind constructing the URL was pretty simple. I'm not going to get into the content of the URL too much, for that you need to bone up on the mapviewer XML API. Check out the home page here and the documentation here. To make the template portable I used the standard CURRENT_SERVER_URL parameter from the BIP server and declared that in my template. <?param@begin:CURRENT_SERVER_URL;'myserver'?> Ignore the 'myserver', that was just a dummy value for testing at runtime it will resolve to: 'http://yourserver:port/xmlpserver' Not quite what we need as mapviewer has its own server path, in my case I needed 'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=' as the fixed path to the mapviewer request URL. A little concatenation and substringing later I came up with <?param@begin:mURL;concat(substring($CURRENT_SERVER_URL,1,22),'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=')?> Thats the basic URL that I can then build on. To get the Hello World map I need to add the following: <map_request title="Hello World" datasource="cagis" format="GIF_STREAM"/> Those angle brackets were the source of my headache, BIPs XSLT engine was attempting to process them rather than just pass them. Hok Min to the rescue ... again. I owe him lunch when I get out to HQ again! To solve the problem, I needed to escape all the characters and white space and then use native XSL to assign the string to a parameter. <xsl:param xdofo:ctx="begin"name="pXML">%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22 %20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E</xsl:param> I did not need to assign it to a parameter but I felt that if I were going to do anything more serious than Hello World like plotting points of interest on the map. I would need to dynamically build the URL, so using a set of parameters or variables that I then concatenated would be easier. Now I had the initial server string and the request all I then did was combine the two using a concat: concat($mURL,$pXML) Embedding that into an image tag: <fo:external-graphic src="url({concat($mURL,$pXML)})"/> and I was done. Notice the curly braces to get the concat evaluated prior to the image call. As you will see next time, building the XML message to go onto the URL can get quite complex but I have used it with some data. Ultimately, it would be easier to build an extension to BIP to handle the data to be plotted, it would then build the XML message, call mapviewer and return a URL to the map image for BIP to render. More on that next time ...

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IE9 not rendering box-shadow Elements inside of Table Cells

- by Rick Strahl

Ran into an annoying problem today with IE 9. Slowly updating some older sites with CSS 3 tags and for the most part IE9 does a reasonably decent job of working with the new CSS 3 features. Not all by a long shot but at least some of the more useful ones like border-radius and box-shadow are supported. Until today I was happy to see that IE supported box-shadow just fine, but I ran into a problem with some old markup that uses tables for its main layout sections. I found that inside of a table cell IE fails to render a box-shadow. Below are images from Chrome (left) and IE 9 (right) of the same content: The download and purchase images are rendered with: <a href="download.asp" style="display:block;margin: 10px;"><img src="../images/download.gif" class="boxshadow roundbox" /></a> where the .boxshadow and .roundbox styles look like this:.boxshadow { -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; } .roundbox { -moz-border-radius: 6px 6px 6px 6px; -webkit-border-radius: 6px; border-radius: 6px 6px 6px 6px; } And the Problem is… collapsed Table Borders Now normally these two styles work just fine in IE 9 when applied to elements. But the box-shadow doesn't work inside of this markup - because the parent container is a table cell.<td class="sidebar" style="border-collapse: collapse"> … <a href="download.asp" style="display:block;margin: 10px;"><img src="../images/download.gif" class="boxshadow roundbox" /></a> …</td> This HTML causes the image to not show a shadow. In actuality I'm not styling inline, but as part of my browser Reset I have the following in my master .css file:table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; } which has the same effect as the inline style. border-collapse by default inherits from the parent and so the TD inherits from table and tr - so TD tags are effectively collapsed. You can check out a test document that demonstrates this behavior here in this CodePaste.net snippet or run it here. How to work around this Issue To get IE9 to render the shadows inside of the TD tag correctly, I can just change the style explicitly NOT to use border-collapse:<td class="sidebar" style="border-collapse: separate; border-width: 0;"> Or better yet (thanks to David's comment below), you can add the border-collapse: separate to the .boxshadow style like this:.boxshadow { -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; border-collapse: separate; } With either of these approaches IE renders the shadows correctly. Do you really need border-collapse? Should you bother with border-collapse? I think so! Collapsed borders render flat as a single fat line if a border-width and border-color are assigned, while separated borders render a thin line with a bunch of weird white space around it or worse render a old skool 3D raised border which is terribly ugly as well. So as a matter of course in any app my browser Reset includes the above code to make sure all tables with borders render the same flat borders. As you probably know, IE has all sorts of rendering issues in tables and on backgrounds (opacity backgrounds or image backgrounds) most of which is caused by the way that IE internally uses ActiveX filters to apply these effects. Apparently collapsed borders are yet one more item that causes problems with rendering. There you have it. Another crappy failure in IE we have to check for now, just one more reason to hate Internet Explorer. Luckily this one has a reasonably easy workaround. I hope this helps out somebody and saves them the hour I spent trying to figure out what caused this problem in the first place. Resources Sample HTML document that demonstrates the behavior Run the Sample© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML Internet Explorer Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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