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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Contributing to emerging Cloud standards

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Contributed by Tony Di Cenzo, Director for Standards Strategy and Architecture, and Mark Carlson, Principal Cloud Architect, for Oracle's Systems Management and Storage Products Groups . As one would expect of an industry leader, Oracle's participation in industry standards bodies is extensive. We participate in dozens of organizations that produce open standards which apply to our products, and our commitment to the success of these organizations is manifest in several way - we support them financially through our memberships; our senior engineers are active participants, often serving in leadership positions on boards, technical working groups and committees; and when it makes good business sense we contribute our intellectual property. We believe supporting the development of open standards is fundamental to Oracle meeting customer demands for product choice, seamless interoperability, and lowering the cost of ownership. Nowhere is this truer than in the area of cloud standards, and for the most recent release of our flagship management product, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (EM Cloud Control 12c). There is a fundamental rule that standards follow architecture. This was true of distributed computing, it was true of service-oriented architecture (SOA), and it's true of cloud. If you are familiar with Enterprise Manager it is likely to be no surprise that EM Cloud Control 12c is a source of technology that can be considered for adoption within cloud management standards. The reason, quite simply, is that the Oracle integrated stack architecture aligns with the cloud architecture models being adopted by the industry, and EM Cloud Control 12c has been developed to manage this architecture. EM Cloud Control 12c has facilities for managing the various underlying capabilities of the integrated stack in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS clouds, and enables essential characteristics such as on-demand self-service provisioning, centralized policy-based resource management, integrated chargeback, and capacity planning, and complete visibility of the physical and virtual environment from applications to disk. Our most recent contribution in support of cloud management standards to come out of the EM Cloud Control 12c work was the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API. Oracle contributed the Elemental Resource Model API to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) in 2011 where it was assigned to DMTF's Cloud Management Working Group (CMWG). The CMWG is considering the Oracle specification and those of several other vendors in their effort to produce a best practices specification for managing IaaS clouds. DMTF's Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface specification, called CIMI for short, is currently out for public review and expected to be released by DMTF later this year. We are proud to be playing an important role in the development of what is expected to become a major cloud standard. You can find more information on DMTF CIMI at http://dmtf.org/standards/cloud. You can find the work-in-progress release of CIMI at http://dmtf.org/content/cimi-work-progress-specifications-now-available-public-comment . The Oracle Cloud API specification is available on the Oracle Technology Network. You can find more information about the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API on the Oracle Technical Network (OTN), including a webcast featuring the API engineering manager Jack Yu (see TechCast Live: Inside the Oracle Cloud Resource Model API). If you have not seen this video we recommend you take the time to view it. Simply hover your cursor over the webcast title and control+click to follow the embedded link. If you have a question about the Oracle Cloud API or want to learn more about Oracle's participation in cloud management standards efforts drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. The Enterprise Manager Standards Blogs are written by Tony Di Cenzo, Director for Standards Strategy and Architecture, and Mark Carlson, Principal Cloud Architect, for Oracle's Systems Management and Storage Products Groups. They can be reached at Tony.DiCenzo at Oracle.com and Mark.Carlson at Oracle.com respectively. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• concurrency::accelerator

  - by Daniel Moth

  Overview An accelerator represents a "target" on which C++ AMP code can execute and where data can reside. Typically (but not necessarily) an accelerator is a GPU device. Accelerators are represented in C++ AMP as objects of the accelerator class. For many scenarios, you do not need to obtain an accelerator object, since the runtime has a notion of a default accelerator, which is what it thinks is the best one in the system. Examples where you need to deal with accelerator objects are if you need to pick your own accelerator (based on your specific criteria), or if you need to use more than one accelerators from your app. Construction and operator usage You can query and obtain a std::vector of all the accelerators on your system, which the runtime discovers on startup. Beyond enumerating accelerators, you can also create one directly by passing to the constructor a system-wide unique path to a device if you know it (i.e. the “Device Instance Path” property for the device in Device Manager), e.g. accelerator acc(L"PCI\\VEN_1002&DEV_6898&SUBSYS_0B001002etc"); There are some predefined strings (for predefined accelerators) that you can pass to the accelerator constructor (and there are corresponding constants for those on the accelerator class itself, so you don’t have to hardcode them every time). Examples are the following: accelerator::default_accelerator represents the default accelerator that the C++ AMP runtime picks for you if you don’t pick one (the heuristics of how it picks one will be covered in a future post). Example: accelerator acc; accelerator::direct3d_ref represents the reference rasterizer emulator that simulates a direct3d device on the CPU (in a very slow manner). This emulator is available on systems with Visual Studio installed and is useful for debugging. More on debugging in general in future posts. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::direct3d_ref); accelerator::direct3d_warp represents a target that I will cover in future blog posts. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::direct3d_warp); accelerator::cpu_accelerator represents the CPU. In this first release the only use of this accelerator is for using the staging arrays technique that I'll cover separately. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::cpu_accelerator); You can also create an accelerator by shallow copying another accelerator instance (via the corresponding constructor) or simply assigning it to another accelerator instance (via the operator overloading of =). Speaking of operator overloading, you can also compare (for equality and inequality) two accelerator objects between them to determine if they refer to the same underlying device. Querying accelerator characteristics Given an accelerator object, you can access its description, version, device path, size of dedicated memory in KB, whether it is some kind of emulator, whether it has a display attached, whether it supports double precision, and whether it was created with the debugging layer enabled for extensive error reporting. Below is example code that accesses some of the properties; in your real code you'd probably be checking one or more of them in order to pick an accelerator (or check that the default one is good enough for your specific workload): void inspect_accelerator(concurrency::accelerator acc) { std::wcout << "New accelerator: " << acc.description << std::endl; std::wcout << "is_debug = " << acc.is_debug << std::endl; std::wcout << "is_emulated = " << acc.is_emulated << std::endl; std::wcout << "dedicated_memory = " << acc.dedicated_memory << std::endl; std::wcout << "device_path = " << acc.device_path << std::endl; std::wcout << "has_display = " << acc.has_display << std::endl; std::wcout << "version = " << (acc.version >> 16) << '.' << (acc.version & 0xFFFF) << std::endl; } accelerator_view In my next blog post I'll cover a related class: accelerator_view. Suffice to say here that each accelerator may have from 1..n related accelerator_view objects. You can get the accelerator_view from an accelerator via the default_view property, or create new ones by invoking the create_view method that creates an accelerator_view object for you (by also accepting a queuing_mode enum value of deferred or immediate that we'll also explore in the next blog post). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Create a Social Community of Trust Along With Your Federal Digital Services Governance

  - by TedMcLaughlan

  The Digital Services Governance Recommendations were recently released, supporting the US Federal Government's Digital Government Strategy Milestone Action #4.2 to establish agency-wide governance structures for developing and delivering digital services. Figure 1 - From: "Digital Services Governance Recommendations" While extremely important from a policy and procedure perspective within an Agency's information management and communications enterprise, these recommendations only very lightly reference perhaps the most important success enabler - the "Trusted Community" required for ultimate usefulness of the services delivered. By "ultimate usefulness", I mean the collection of public, transparent properties around government information and digital services that include social trust and validation, social reach, expert respect, and comparative, standard measures of relative value. In other words, do the digital services meet expectations of the public, social media ecosystem (people AND machines)? A rigid governance framework, controlling by rules, policies and roles the creation and dissemination of digital services may meet the expectations of direct end-users and most stakeholders - including the agency information stewards and security officers. All others who may share comments about the services, write about them, swap or review extracts, repackage, visualize or otherwise repurpose the output for use in entirely unanticipated, social ways - these "stakeholders" will not be governed, but may observe guidance generated by a "Trusted Community". As recognized members of the trusted community, these stakeholders may ultimately define the right scope and detail of governance that all other users might observe, promoting and refining the usefulness of the government product as the social ecosystem expects. So, as part of an agency-centric governance framework, it's advised that a flexible governance model be created for stewarding a "Community of Trust" around the digital services. The first steps follow the approach outlined in the Recommendations: Step 1: Gather a Core Team In addition to the roles and responsibilities described, perhaps a set of characteristics and responsibilities can be developed for the "Trusted Community Steward/Advocate" - i.e. a person or team who (a) are entirely cognizant of and respected within the external social media communities, and (b) are trusted both within the agency and outside as practical, responsible, non-partisan communicators of useful information. The may seem like a standard Agency PR/Outreach team role - but often an agency or stakeholder subject matter expert with a public, active social persona works even better. Step 2: Assess What You Have In addition to existing, agency or stakeholder decision-making bodies and assets, it's important to take a PR/Marketing view of the social ecosystem. How visible are the services across the social channels utilized by current or desired constituents of your agency? What's the online reputation of your agency and perhaps the service(s)? Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a facet of external communications/publishing lifecycles? Who are the public champions, instigators, value-adders for the digital services, or perhaps just influential "communicators" (i.e. with no stake in the game)? You're essentially assessing your market and social presence, and identifying the actors (including your own agency employees) in the existing community of trust. Step 3: Determine What You Want The evolving Community of Trust will most readily absorb, support and provide feedback regarding "Core Principles" (Element B of the "six essential elements of a digital services governance structure") shared by your Agency, and obviously play a large, though probably very unstructured part in Element D "Stakeholder Input and Participation". Plan for this, and seek input from the social media community with respect to performance metrics - these should be geared around the outcome and growth of the trusted communities actions. How big and active is this community? What's the influential reach of this community with respect to particular messaging or campaigns generated by the Agency? What's the referral rate TO your digital services, FROM channels owned or operated by members of this community? (this requires governance with respect to content generation inclusive of "markers" or "tags"). At this point, while your Agency proceeds with steps 4 ("Build/Validate the Governance Structure") and 5 ("Share, Review, Upgrade"), the Community of Trust might as well just get going, and start adding value and usefulness to the existing conversations, existing data services - loosely though directionally-stewarded by your trusted advocate(s). Why is this an "Enterprise Architecture" topic? Because it's increasingly apparent that a Public Service "Enterprise" is not wholly contained within Agency facilities, firewalls and job titles - it's also manifested in actual, perceived or representative forms outside the walls, on the social Internet. An Agency's EA model and resulting investments both facilitate and are impacted by the "Social Enterprise". At Oracle, we're very active both within our Enterprise and outside, helping foster social architectures that enable truly useful public services, digital or otherwise.

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• Big Data – Various Learning Resources – How to Start with Big Data? – Day 20 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned how to become a Data Scientist for Big Data. In this article we will go over various learning resources related to Big Data. In this series we have covered many of the most essential details about Big Data. At the beginning of this series, I have encouraged readers to send me questions. One of the most popular questions is - “I want to learn more about Big Data. Where can I learn it?” This is indeed a great question as there are plenty of resources out to learn about Big Data and it is indeed difficult to select on one resource to learn Big Data. Hence I decided to write here a few of the very important resources which are related to Big Data. Learn from Pluralsight Pluralsight is a global leader in high-quality online training for hardcore developers.  It has fantastic Big Data Courses and I started to learn about Big Data with the help of Pluralsight. Here are few of the courses which are directly related to Big Data. Big Data: The Big Picture Big Data Analytics with Tableau NoSQL: The Big Picture Understanding NoSQL Data Analysis Fundamentals with Tableau I encourage all of you start with this video course as they are fantastic fundamentals to learn Big Data. Learn from Apache Resources at Apache are single point the most authentic learning resources. If you want to learn fundamentals and go deep about every aspect of the Big Data, I believe you must understand various concepts in Apache’s library. I am pretty impressed with the documentation and I am personally referencing it every single day when I work with Big Data. I strongly encourage all of you to bookmark following all the links for authentic big data learning. Haddop - The Apache Hadoop® project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. Ambari: A web-based tool for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters which include support for Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, HCatalog, HBase, ZooKeeper, Oozie, Pig and Sqoop. Ambari also provides a dashboard for viewing cluster health such as heat maps and ability to view MapReduce, Pig and Hive applications visually along with features to diagnose their performance characteristics in a user-friendly manner. Avro: A data serialization system. Cassandra: A scalable multi-master database with no single points of failure. Chukwa: A data collection system for managing large distributed systems. HBase: A scalable, distributed database that supports structured data storage for large tables. Hive: A data warehouse infrastructure that provides data summarization and ad hoc querying. Mahout: A Scalable machine learning and data mining library. Pig: A high-level data-flow language and execution framework for parallel computation. ZooKeeper: A high-performance coordination service for distributed applications. Learn from Vendors One of the biggest issues with about learning Big Data is setting up the environment. Every Big Data vendor has different environment request and there are lots of things require to set up Big Data framework. Many of the users do not start with Big Data as they are afraid about the resources required to set up framework as well as a time commitment. Here Hortonworks have created fantastic learning environment. They have created Sandbox with everything one person needs to learn Big Data and also have provided excellent tutoring along with it. Sandbox comes with a dozen hands-on tutorial that will guide you through the basics of Hadoop as well it contains the Hortonworks Data Platform. I think Hortonworks did a fantastic job building this Sandbox and Tutorial. Though there are plenty of different Big Data Vendors I have decided to list only Hortonworks due to their unique setup. Please leave a comment if there are any other such platform to learn Big Data. I will include them over here as well. Learn from Books There are indeed few good books out there which one can refer to learn Big Data. Here are few good books which I have read. I will update the list as I will learn more. Ethics of Big Data Balancing Risk and Innovation Big Data for Dummies Head First Data Analysis: A Learner’s Guide to Big Numbers, Statistics, and Good Decisions If you search on Amazon there are millions of the books but I think above three books are a great set of books and it will give you great ideas about Big Data. Once you go through above books, you will have a clear idea about what is the next step you should follow in this series. You will be capable enough to make the right decision for yourself. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will wrap up this series of Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• SQL SERVER – Columnstore Index and sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats

  - by pinaldave

  As you know I have been writing on Columnstore Index for quite a while. Recently my friend Vinod Kumar wrote about  SQL Server 2012: ColumnStore Characteristics. A fantastic read on the subject if you have yet not caught up on that subject. After the blog post I called him and asked what should I write next on this subject. He suggested that I should write on DMV script which I have prepared related to Columnstore when I was writing our SQL Server Questions and Answers book. When we were writing this book SQL Server 2012 CTP versions were available. I had written few scripts related to SQL Server columnstore Index. I like Vinod’s idea and I decided to write about DMV, which we did not cover in the book as SQL Server 2012 was not released yet. We did not want to talk about the product which was not yet released. The first script which I had written was with DMV - sys.column_store_index_stats. This DMV was displaying the statistics of the columnstore indexes. When I attempted to run it on SQL Server 2012 RTM it gave me error suggesting that this DMV does not exists. Here is the script which I ran: SELECT * FROM sys.column_store_index_stats; It generated following error: Msg 208, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Invalid object name ‘column_store_index_stats’. I was pretty confident that this DMV was available when I had written the scripts. The next reaction was to type ‘sys.’ only in SSMS and wait for intelisense to popup DMV list. I scrolled down and noticed that above said DMV did not exists there as well. Now this is not bug or missing feature. This was indeed something can happen because the version which I was practicing was early CTP version. If you go to the page of the DMV here, it clearly stats notice on the top of the page. This documentation is for preview only, and is subject to change in later releases. Now this was not alarming but my next thought was if this DMV is not there where can I find the information which this DMV was providing. Well, while I was thinking about this, I noticed that my another friend Balmukund Lakhani was online on personal messenger. Well, Balmukund is “Know All” kid. I have yet to find situation where I have not got my answers from him. I immediately pinged him and asked the question regarding where can I find information of ‘column_store_index_stats’. His answer was very abrupt but enlightening for sure. Here is our conversation: Pinal: Where can I find information of column_store_index_stats? Balmukund: Assume you have never worked with CTP before and now try to find the information which you are trying to find. Honestly  it was fantastic response from him. I was confused as I have played extensively with CTP versions of SQL Server 2012. Now his response give me big hint. I should have not looked for DMV but rather should have focused on what I wanted to do. I wanted to retrieve the statistics related to the index. In SQL Server 2008/R2, I was able to retrieve the statistics of the index from the DMV - sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats. I used the same DMV on SQL Server 2012 and it did retrieved the necessary information for me. Here is the updated script which gave me all the necessary information I was looking for. Matter of the fact, if I have used my earlier SQL Server 2008 R2 script this would have just worked fine. SELECT DB_NAME(Database_ID) DBName, SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id) AS SchemaName, OBJECT_NAME(ius.OBJECT_ID) ObjName, i.type_desc, i.name, user_seeks, user_scans, user_lookups, user_updates,* FROM sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats ius INNER JOIN sys.indexes i ON i.index_id = ius.index_id AND ius.OBJECT_ID = i.OBJECT_ID INNER JOIN sys.tables t ON t.OBJECT_ID = i.OBJECT_ID GO Let us see the resultset of above query. You will notice that column Type_desc describes the type of the index. You can additionally write WHERE condition on the column and only retrieve only selected type of Index. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 1 &ndash; The failed Sprint

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I recently had a conversation with a product owner that wanted to have the Scrum team broken up into smaller units so that less time was wasted on the Scrum Ceremonies! Their complaint was around the need in Scrum to have the entire “Team” (7+-2) involved in the sizing of the work during the “Sprint Planning Meeting”.  The standard flippant answer of all Scrum professionals, “Well that's not Scrum”, does not get you any brownie points in these situations. The response could be “Well we are not doing Scrum then” which in turn leads to “We are doing Scrum…But, we have split the scrum team into units of 2/3 so that they can concentrate on a specific area of work”. While this may work, it is not Scrum and should not be called so… It is just a form of Agile. Don’t get me wrong at this stage, there is nothing wrong with Agile, just don’t call it Scrum. The reason that the Product Owner wants to do this is that, in effect, through a number of miscommunications and failings in our implementation of Scrum, there was NO unit of potentially Shippable software at the end of the first sprint. It does not matter to them that most Scrum teams will fail the first Sprint, even those that are high performing teams. Remember it is the product owners their money! We should NOT break up scrum teams into smaller units for the purpose of having less people tied up in the Scrum Ceremonies. The amount of backlog the Team selects is solely up to the Team… Only the Team can assess what it can accomplish over the upcoming Sprint. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org The entire team must accept the work and in order to understand what they can accept they must be free to size it as a team. This both encourages common understanding and increases visibility on why team members think a task is of a particular size. This has the benefit of increasing the knowledge of the entire team in the problem domain. A new Team often first realizes that it will either sink or swim as a Team, not individually, in this meeting. The Team realizes that it must rely on itself. As it realizes this, it starts to self-organize to take on the characteristics and behaviour of a real Team. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org This paragraph goes to the why of having the whole team at the meeting; The goal of Scrum it to produce a unit of potentially shippable software at the end of every Sprint. In order to achieve this we need high performing teams and this is what Scrum as a framework has been optimised to produce. I think that our Product Owner is understandably upset over loosing two weeks work and is losing sight the end goal of Scrum in the failures of the moment. As the man spending the money, I completely understand his perspective and I think that we should not have started Scrum on an internal project, but selected a customer  that is open to the ideas and complications of Scrum. So, what should we have NOT done on our first Scrum project: Should not have had 3 interns as the only on site resource – This lead to bad practices as the experienced guys were not there helping and correcting as they usually would. Should not have had the only experienced guys offsite – With both the experienced technical guys in completely different time zones it was difficult to get time for questions. Helping the guys on site was just plain impossible. Should not have used a part time ScrumMaster – Although the ScrumMaster attended all of the Ceremonies, because they are only in 2 full days of the week it makes it difficult for the team to raise impediments as they go. Should not have used a proxy product owner. – This was probably the worst decision that was made. Mainly because the proxy product owner did not have the same vision as the product owner. While Scrum does not explicitly reject the idea of a Proxy Product Owner, I do not think it works very well in practice. The “single wringable neck” needs to contain both the Money and the Vision as well as attending the required meetings. I will be brining all of these things up at the Sprint Retrospective and we will learn from our mistakes and move on. Do, Inspect then Adapt…   Technorati Tags: Scrum,Sprint Planing,Sprint Retrospective,Scrum.org,Scrum Guide,Scrum Ceremonies,Scrummaster,Product Owner Need Help? Professional Scrum Developer Training SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

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• Implementing synchronous MediaTypeFormatters in ASP.NET Web API

  - by cibrax

  One of main characteristics of MediaTypeFormatter’s in ASP.NET Web API is that they leverage the Task Parallel Library (TPL) for reading or writing an model into an stream. When you derive your class from the base class MediaTypeFormatter, you have to either implement the WriteToStreamAsync or ReadFromStreamAsync methods for writing or reading a model from a stream respectively. These two methods return a Task, which internally does all the serialization work, as it is illustrated bellow. public abstract class MediaTypeFormatter { public virtual Task WriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, Stream writeStream, HttpContent content, TransportContext transportContext); public virtual Task<object> ReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, Stream readStream, HttpContent content, IFormatterLogger formatterLogger); }   .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } However, most of the times, serialization is a safe operation that can be done synchronously. In fact, many of the serializer classes you will find in the .NET framework only provide sync methods. So the question is, how you can transform that synchronous work into a Task ?. Creating a new task using the method Task.Factory.StartNew for doing all the serialization work would be probably the typical answer. That would work, as a new task is going to be scheduled. However, that might involve some unnecessary context switches, which are out of our control and might be affect performance on server code specially.   If you take a look at the source code of the MediaTypeFormatters shipped as part of the framework, you will notice that they actually using another pattern, which uses a TaskCompletionSource class. public Task WriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, Stream writeStream, HttpContent content, TransportContext transportContext) {   var tsc = new TaskCompletionSource<AsyncVoid>(); tsc.SetResult(default(AsyncVoid));   //Do all the serialization work here synchronously   return tsc.Task; }   /// <summary> /// Used as the T in a "conversion" of a Task into a Task{T} /// </summary> private struct AsyncVoid { } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } They are basically doing all the serialization work synchronously and using a TaskCompletionSource for returning a task already done. To conclude this post, this is another approach you might want to consider when using serializers that are not compatible with an async model. Update: Henrik Nielsen from the ASP.NET team pointed out the existence of a built-in media type formatter for writing sync formatters. BufferedMediaTypeFormatter http://t.co/FxOfeI5x

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• Closing the gap between strategy and execution with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

  - by manan.goel(at)oracle.com

  Wikipedia defines strategy as a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. An example of this is General Electric's acquisitions and divestiture strategy (plan) designed to propel GE to number 1 or 2 place (goal) in every business segment that it operated in. Execution on the other hand can be defined as the actions taken to getting things done. In GE's case execution will be steps followed for mergers/acquisitions or divestiture. Business press has written extensively about the importance of both strategy and execution in achieving desired business objectives. Perhaps the quote from Thomas Edison says it best - "vision without execution is hallucination". Conversely, it can be said that "execution without vision" is well may be "wishful thinking". Research overwhelmingly point towards the wide gap between strategy and execution. According to a published study, 49% of surveyed executives perceive a gap between their organizations' ability to develop and communicate sound strategies and their ability to implement those strategies. Further, of these respondents, 64% don't have full confidence that their companies will be able to close the gap. Having established the severity and importance of the problem let's talk about the reasons for the strategy-execution gap. The common reasons include: -        Lack of clearly defined goals -        Lack of consistent measure of success -        Lack of ownership -        Lack of alignment -        Lack of communication -        Lack of proper execution -        Lack of monitoring       There are multiple approaches to solving the problem including organizational development practices, technology enablement etc. In most cases a combination of approaches is required to achieve the desired result. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll focus on technology.  Imagine an integrated closed loop technology platform that automates the entire management cycle from defining strategy to assigning ownership to communicating goals to achieving alignment to collaboration to taking actions to monitoring progress and achieving mid course corrections. Besides, for best ROI and lowest TCO such a system should also have characteristics like:  Complete -        Full functionality -        Rich end user access Open -        Any data source -        Any business application -        Any technology stack  Integrated -        Common metadata -        Common security -        Common system management From a capabilities perspective the system should provide the following capabilities: Define -        Strategy -        Objectives -        Ownership -        KPI's Communicate -        Pervasive -        Collaborative -        Role based -        Secure Execute -        Integrated -        Intuitive -        Secure -        Ubiquitous Monitor -        Multiple styles and formats -        Exception based -        Push & Pull Having talked about the business problem and outlined the blueprint for a technology solution, let's talk about how Oracle Business Intelligence 11g can help. Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive business intelligence solution for reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards. Oracle's best in class BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation that provides a unified end user experience and features a Common Enterprise Information Model, with common security, query request generation and optimization, and system management. The BI platform is ·         Complete - meaning it delivers all modes and styles of BI including reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards with a rich end user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, alerts and notifications, search and mobile access. ·         Open - meaning the BI platform integrates with any data source, ETL tool, business application, application server, security infrastructure, portal technology as well as any ODBC compliant third party analytical tool. The suite accesses data from multiple heterogeneous sources--including popular relational and multidimensional data sources and major ERP and CRM applications from Oracle and SAP. ·         Integrated - meaning the BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation built on an open, standards based service oriented architecture.  The platform features a common enterprise information model, common security model and a common configuration, deployment and systems management framework. To summarize, Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive, integrated BI platform that lets you define strategy, identify objectives, assign ownership, define KPI's, collaborate, take action, monitor, report and do course corrections all form a single interface and a single system. The platform's integrated metadata model and task based design ensures that the entire workflow from defining strategy to execution to monitoring is completely integrated delivering end to end visibility, transparency and agility. Click here to learn more about Oracle BI 11g. 

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• When is my View too smart?

  - by Kyle Burns

  In this posting, I will discuss the motivation behind keeping View code as thin as possible when using patterns such as MVC, MVVM, and MVP.  Once the motivation is identified, I will examine some ways to determine whether a View contains logic that belongs in another part of the application.  While the concepts that I will discuss are applicable to most any pattern which favors a thin View, any concrete examples that I present will center on ASP.NET MVC. Design patterns that include a Model, a View, and other components such as a Controller, ViewModel, or Presenter are not new to application development.  These patterns have, in fact, been around since the early days of building applications with graphical interfaces.  The reason that these patterns emerged is simple – the code running closest to the user tends to be littered with logic and library calls that center around implementation details of showing and manipulating user interface widgets and when this type of code is interspersed with application domain logic it becomes difficult to understand and much more difficult to adequately test.  By removing domain logic from the View, we ensure that the View has a single responsibility of drawing the screen which, in turn, makes our application easier to understand and maintain. I was recently asked to take a look at an ASP.NET MVC View because the developer reviewing it thought that it possibly had too much going on in the view.  I looked at the .CSHTML file and the first thing that occurred to me was that it began with 40 lines of code declaring member variables and performing the necessary calculations to populate these variables, which were later either output directly to the page or used to control some conditional rendering action (such as adding a class name to an HTML element or not rendering another element at all).  This exhibited both of what I consider the primary heuristics (or code smells) indicating that the View is too smart: Member variables – in general, variables in View code are an indication that the Model to which the View is being bound is not sufficient for the needs of the View and that the View has had to augment that Model.  Notable exceptions to this guideline include variables used to hold information specifically related to rendering (such as a dynamically determined CSS class name or the depth within a recursive structure for indentation purposes) and variables which are used to facilitate looping through collections while binding. Arithmetic – as with member variables, the presence of arithmetic operators within View code are an indication that the Model servicing the View is insufficient for its needs.  For example, if the Model represents a line item in a sales order, it might seem perfectly natural to “normalize” the Model by storing the quantity and unit price in the Model and multiply these within the View to show the line total.  While this does seem natural, it introduces a business rule to the View code and makes it impossible to test that the rounding of the result meets the requirement of the business without executing the View.  Within View code, arithmetic should only be used for activities such as incrementing loop counters and calculating element widths. In addition to the two characteristics of a “Smart View” that I’ve discussed already, this View also exhibited another heuristic that commonly indicates to me the need to refactor a View and make it a bit less smart.  That characteristic is the existence of Boolean logic that either does not work directly with properties of the Model or works with too many properties of the Model.  Consider the following code and consider how logic that does not work directly with properties of the Model is just another form of the “member variable” heuristic covered earlier: @if(DateTime.Now.Hour < 12) {     <div>Good Morning!</div> } else {     <div>Greetings</div> } This code performs business logic to determine whether it is morning.  A possible refactoring would be to add an IsMorning property to the Model, but in this particular case there is enough similarity between the branches that the entire branching structure could be collapsed by adding a Greeting property to the Model and using it similarly to the following: <div>@Model.Greeting</div> Now let’s look at some complex logic around multiple Model properties: @if (ModelPageNumber + Model.NumbersToDisplay == Model.PageCount         || (Model.PageCount != Model.CurrentPage             && !Model.DisplayValues.Contains(Model.PageCount))) {     <div>There's more to see!</div> } In this scenario, not only is the View code difficult to read (you shouldn’t have to play “human compiler” to determine the purpose of the code), but it also complex enough to be at risk for logical errors that cannot be detected without executing the View.  Conditional logic that requires more than a single logical operator should be looked at more closely to determine whether the condition should be evaluated elsewhere and exposed as a single property of the Model.  Moving the logic above outside of the View and exposing a new Model property would simplify the View code to: @if(Model.HasMoreToSee) {     <div>There’s more to see!</div> } In this posting I have briefly discussed some of the more prominent heuristics that indicate a need to push code from the View into other pieces of the application.  You should now be able to recognize these symptoms when building or maintaining Views (or the Models that support them) in your applications.

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• Top Questions and Answers for Pluging into Oracle Database as a Service

  - by David Swanger

  Yesterday we hosted a comprehensive online forum that shared a comprehensive path to help your organization design, deploy, and deliver a Database as a Service cloud. If you missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand by registering here. We received numerous questions.  Below are highlights of the most informative: DBaaS requires a lengthy and careful design efforts. What is the minimum requirements of setting up a scaled-down environment and test it out? You should have an OEM 12c environment for DBaaS administration and then a target database deployment platform that has the key characteristics of what your production environment will look like. This could be a single server or it could be a small pool of hosts if your production DBaaS will be larger and you want to test a more robust / real world configuration with Zones and Pools or DR capabilities for example. How does this benefit companies having their own data center? This allows companies to transform their internal IT to a service delivery model for the database. The benefits to the company are significant cost savings, improved business agility and reduced risk. The benefits to the consumers (internal) of services if much fast provisioning, and response to change in business requirements. From a deployment perspective, is DBaaS's job solely DBA's job? The best deployment model enables the DBA (or end-user) to control the entire process. All resources required to deploy the service are pre-provisioned, and there are no external dependencies (on network, storage, sysadmins teams). The service is created either via a self-service portal or by the DBA. The purpose of self service seems to be that the end user does not rely on the DBA. I just need to give him a template. He decides how much AMM he needs. Why shall I set it one by one. That doesn't seem to be the purpose of self service. Most customers we have worked with define a standardized service catalog, with a few (2 to 5) different classes of service. For each of these classes, there is a pre-defined deployment template, and the user has the ability to select from some pre-defined service sizes. The administrator only has to create this catalog once. Each user then simply selects from the options offered in the catalog.  Looking at DBaaS service definition, it seems to be no different from a service definition provided by a well defined DBA team. Why do you attribute it to DBaaS? There are a couple of perspectives. First, some organizations might already be operating with a high level of standardization and a higher level of maturity from an ITIL or Service Management perspective. Their journey to DBaaS could be shorter and their Service Definition will evolve less but they still might need to add capabilities such as Self Service and Metering/Chargeback. Other organizations are still operating in highly siloed environments with little automation and their formal Service Definition (if they have one) will be a lot less mature today. Therefore their future state DBaaS will look a lot different from their current state, as will their Service Definition. How database as a service impact or help with "Click to Compute" or deploying "Database in cloud infrastructure" DBaaS enables Click to Compute. Oracle DBaaS can be implemented using three architecture models: Oracle Multitenant 12c, native consolidation using Oracle Database and consolidation using virtualization in infrastructure cloud. As Deploy session showed, you get higher consolidating density and efficiency using Multitenant and higher isolation using infrastructure cloud. Depending upon your business needs, DBaaS can be implemented using any of these models. How exactly is the DBaaS different from the traditional db? Storage/OS/DB all together to 'transparently' provide service to applications? Will there be across-databases access by application/user. Some key differences are: 1) The services run on a shared platform. 2) The services can be rapidly provisioned (< 15 minutes). 3) The services are dynamic and can be relocated, grown, shrunk as needed to meet business needs without disruption and rapidly. 4) The user is able to provision the services directly from a standardized service catalog.. With 24x7x365 databases its difficult to find off peak hrs to do basic admin tasks such as gathering stats, running backups, batch jobs. How does pluggable database handle this and different needs/patching downtime of apps databases might be serving? You can gather stats in Oracle Multitenant the same way you had been in regular databases. Regarding patching/upgrading, Oracle Multitenant makes patch/upgrade very efficient in that you can pre-provision a new version/patched multitenant db in a different ORACLE_HOME and then unplug a PDB from its CDB and plug it into the newer/patched CDB in seconds.  Thanks for all the great questions!  If you'd like to learn more and missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand here.

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• What Counts for a DBA: Humility

  - by drsql

  In football (the American sort, naturally,) there are a select group of players who really hope to never have their names called during the game. They are members of the offensive line, and their job is to protect other players so they can deliver the ball to the goal to score points. When you do hear their name called, it is usually because they made a mistake and the player that they were supposed to protect ended up flat on his back admiring the clouds in the sky instead of advancing towards the goal to scoring point. Even on the rare occasion their name is called for a good reason, it is usually because they were making up for a teammate who had made a mistake and they covered up for them. The role of offensive lineman is a very good analogy for the role of the admin DBA. As a DBA, you are called on to be barely visible and rarely heard, protecting the company data assets tenaciously, even though the enemies to our craft surround us on all sides:. Developers: Cries of ‘foul!’ often ensue when the DBA says that they want data integrity to be stringently enforced and that documentation is needed so they can support systems, mostly because every error occurrence in the enterprise will be initially blamed on the database and fall to the DBA to troubleshoot. Insisting too loudly may bring those cries of ‘foul’ that somewhat remind you of when your 2 year old daughter didn't want to go to bed. The result of this petulance is that the next "enemy" gets involved. Managers: The concerns that motivate DBAs to argue will not excite the kind of manager who gets his technical knowledge from a glossy magazine filled with buzzwords, charts, and pretty pictures. However, the other programmers in the organization will tickle the buzzword void with a stream of new-sounding ideas and technologies constantly, along with warnings that if we did care about data integrity and document things, the budget would explode! In contrast, the arguments for integrity of data and supportability tend to be about as exciting as watching grass grow, and far too many manager types seem to prefer to smoke it than watch it. Packaged Applications: The DBA is rarely given a chance to review a new application that is being demonstrated for the enterprise, and rarer still is the DBA that gets a veto of an application because the database it uses has clearly been created by an architect that won't read a data modeling book because he is already married. More often than not this leads to hours of work for the DBA trying to performance-tune a database with a menagerie of rules that must be followed to stay within the  application support agreement, such as no changing indexes on a third party schema even though there are 10 billion rows instead of the 10 thousand when the system was last optimized. Hardware Failures: Physical disks, networking devices, memory, and backup devices all come with a measure known as ‘mean time before failure’ and it is never listed in centuries or eons. More like years, and the term ‘mean’ indicates that half of the devices are expected to fail before that, which by my calendar means any hour of any day that it wants to fail it will. But the DBA sucks it up and does the task at hand with a humility that makes them nearly invisible to all but the most observant person in the organization. The best DBAs I know are so proactive in their relentless pursuit of perfection that they detect many of the bugs (which they seldom caused) in the system well before they become a problem. In the end the DBA gets noticed for one of same two reasons as the offensive lineman. You make a mistake, like dropping a critical production database that had never been backed up; or when a system crashes for any reason whatsoever and they are on the spot with troubleshooting and system restoration plans that have been well thought out, tested, and tested again. Not because there is any glory in it, but because it is what they do.   Note: The characteristics of the professions referred to in this blog are meant to be overstated stereotypes for humorous effect, and even some DBAs aren't quite this perfect. If you are reading this far and haven’t hand written a 10 page flaming comment about how you are a _______ and you aren’t like this, that is awesome. Not every situation applies to everyone, but if you have never worked with a bad packaged app, a magazine trained manager, programmers that aren’t team players, or hardware that occasionally failed, relax and go have a unicorn sandwich before you wake up.

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• High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

  - by BuckWoody

  Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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• Revisiting the Generations

  - by Row Henson

  I was asked earlier this year to contribute an article to the IHRIM publication – Workforce Solutions Review.  My topic focused on the reality of the Gen Y population 10 years after their entry into the workforce.  Below is an excerpt from that article: It seems like yesterday that we were all talking about the entry of the Gen Y'ers into the workforce and what a radical change that would have on how we attract, retain, motivate, reward, and engage this new, younger segment of the workforce.  We all heard and read that these youngsters would be more entrepreneurial than their predecessors – the Gen X'ers – who were said to be more loyal to their profession than their employer. And, we heard that these “youngsters” would certainly be far less loyal to their employers than the Baby Boomers or even earlier Traditionalists. It was also predicted that – at least for the developed parts of the world – they would be more interested in work/life balance than financial reward; they would need constant and immediate reinforcement and recognition and we would be lucky to have them in our employment for two to three years. And, to keep them longer than that we would need to promote them often so they would be continuously learning since their long-term (10-year) goal would be to own their own business or be an independent consultant.  Well, it occurred to me recently that the first of the Gen Y'ers are now in their early 30s and it is time to look back on some of these predictions. Many really believed the Gen Y'ers would enter the workforce with an attitude – expect everything to be easy for them – have their employers meet their demands or move to the next employer, and I believe that we can now say that, generally, has not been the case. Speaking from personal experience, I have mentored a number of Gen Y'ers and initially felt that with a 40-year career in Human Resources and Human Resources Technology – I could share a lot with them. I found out very quickly that I was learning at least as much from them! Some of the amazing attributes I found from these under-30s was their fearlessness, ease of which they were able to multi-task, amazing energy and great technical savvy. They were very comfortable with collaborating with colleagues from both inside the company and peers outside their organization to problem-solve quickly. Most were eager to learn and willing to work hard.  This brings me to the generation that will follow the Gen Y'ers – the Generation Z'ers – those born after 1998. We have come full circle. If we look at the Silent Generation or Traditionalists, we find a workforce that preceded the television and even very early telephones. We Baby Boomers (as I fall right squarely in this category) remembered the invention of the television and telephone – but laptop computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) were a thing of “StarTrek” and other science fiction movies and publications. Certainly, the Gen X'ers and Gen Y'ers grew up with the comfort of these devices just as we did with calculators. But, what of those under the age of 10 – how will the workplace look in 15 more years and what type of workforce will be required to operate in the mobile, global, virtual world. I spoke to a friend recently who had her four-year-old granddaughter for a visit. She said she found her in the den in front of the TV trying to use her hand to get the screen to move! So, you see – we have come full circle. The under-70 Traditionalist grew up in a world without TV and the Generation Z'er may never remember the TV we knew just a few years ago. As with every generation – we spend much time generalizing on their characteristics. The most important thing to remember is every generation – just like every individual – is different. The important thing for those of us in Human Resources to remember is that one size doesn’t fit all. What motivates one employee to come to work for you and stay there and be productive is very different than what the next employee is looking for and the organization that can provide this fluidity and flexibility will be the survivor for generations to come. And, finally, just when we think we have it figured out, a multitude of external factors such as the economy, world politics, industries, and technologies we haven’t even thought about will come along and change those predictions. As I reach retirement age – I do so believing that our organizations are in good hands with the generations to follow – energetic, collaborative and capable of working hard while still understanding the need for balance at work, at home and in the community! Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• What will help you get an entry-level position?

  - by Maria Sandu

  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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} “Finishing your studies and getting a great job.” Isn’t this the biggest dream of most of the young people? At the beginning you think it’s easy, but when it’s your turn, you realize that actually it’s not as easy as you thought it would be. Especially nowadays, when we’re living difficult times and finding a job is a challenge. This is why I felt lucky when I joined Oracle. Do you want to know how did I do it? My name is Markéta Kocová and I am working as a Customer Intelligence Support Intern within Oracle Prague. Before this job I have, I was focused on my studies, going also abroad for one semester in Rostock University in Germany. I decided though to gain some working experience. In November 2011, I joined Oracle, this one being my first job. I never thought I would be part of such a big company, but here I am! I have to say that I think it’s quite difficult to find a job and thus job search might be exhausting. What did help me? I think it was the networking. The more people you know, the more chances you have to find a job. This is how I’ve heard about this internship. I think internship programs are a great opportunity for young people to gain experience and also to start building a career. As companies are looking for the candidates with the best skills and some experience, it’s difficult to get a job. It’s a paradox isn’t it? You are applying for a entry-level position, but you won’t get it because they’ll be searching for someone who has experience. This is why internship is a good solution to improve your skills. You will learn many things, you might get a mentor and also perform given tasks. What else could you do? In my opinion you should invest in yourself. Try to focus on both education and skills. In order to get a good job in an international and successful company, it’s not enough a university diploma. You could learn a foreign language because it’s usually required. Employers are also looking for good computer skills, so this could be something you could take into consideration before applying to a job. There are also some personal characteristics like communication abilities, self-reliance, self-confidence or ability to solve the crisis situations that companies look at when hiring a person. You could consider attending some training in order to improve these soft skills. Getting a job is difficult, but also when you make it and get one you’ll still finding challenging to stay there. You might realize it is not the dream job, but being patient and trying to learn as much as possible will help you to achieve more. I think every experience is valuable. I’ve been through this type of situation, but the environment, my colleagues and the atmosphere in office have always been great and made me love my job! Thanks guys! If you’re searching for a job and you want to join Oracle, I recommend you to check http://campus.oracle.com

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• Perl DBD::DB2 installation failed

  - by prabhu

  Hi, We dont have root access in our local machine. I installed DBI package first and then installed DBD package. I got the below error first, In file included from DB2.h:22, from DB2.xs:7: dbdimp.h:10:22: dbivport.h: No such file or directory Then I included the DBI path in the Makefile and then I am getting the below error. DB2.xs: In function `XS_DBD__DB2__db_disconnect': DB2.xs:128: error: structure has no member named `_old_cached_kids' DB2.xs:129: error: structure has no member named `_old_cached_kids' DB2.xs:130: error: structure has no member named `_old_cached_kids' DB2.xs: In function `XS_DBD__DB2__db_DESTROY': DB2.xs:192: error: structure has no member named `_old_cached_kids' DB2.xs:193: error: structure has no member named `_old_cached_kids' DB2.xs:194: error: structure has no member named `_old_cached_kids' The versions I am trying to install are DBI-1.610_90.tar.gz DBD-DB2-1.78.tar.gz I am using perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/home/prabhu/perl_pm/lib The output for perl -V is as follows: Summary of my perl5 (revision 5 version 8 subversion 5) configuration: Platform: osname=linux, osvers=2.4.21-27.0.2.elsmp, archname=i386-linux-thread-multi uname='linux decompose.build.redhat.com 2.4.21-27.0.2.elsmp #1 smp wed jan 12 23:35:44 est 2005 i686 i686 i386 gnulinux ' config_args='-des -Doptimize=-O2 -g -pipe -m32 -march=i386 -mtune=pentium4 -Dversion=5.8.5 -Dmyhostname=localhost -Dperladmin=root@localhost -Dcc=gcc -Dcf_by=Red Hat, Inc. -Dinstallprefix=/usr -Dprefix=/usr -Darchname=i386-linux -Dvendorprefix=/usr -Dsiteprefix=/usr -Duseshrplib -Dusethreads -Duseithreads -Duselargefiles -Dd_dosuid -Dd_semctl_semun -Di_db -Ui_ndbm -Di_gdbm -Di_shadow -Di_syslog -Dman3ext=3pm -Duseperlio -Dinstallusrbinperl -Ubincompat5005 -Uversiononly -Dpager=/usr/bin/less -isr -Dinc_version_list=5.8.4 5.8.3 5.8.2 5.8.1 5.8.0' hint=recommended, useposix=true, d_sigaction=define usethreads=define use5005threads=undef useithreads=define usemultiplicity=define useperlio=define d_sfio=undef uselargefiles=define usesocks=undef use64bitint=undef use64bitall=undef uselongdouble=undef usemymalloc=n, bincompat5005=undef Compiler: cc='gcc', ccflags ='-D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE -DDEBUGGING -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -I/usr/local/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -I/usr/include/gdbm', optimize='-O2 -g -pipe -m32 -march=i386 -mtune=pentium4', cppflags='-D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE -DDEBUGGING -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/include/gdbm' ccversion='', gccversion='3.4.4 20050721 (Red Hat 3.4.4-2)', gccosandvers='' intsize=4, longsize=4, ptrsize=4, doublesize=8, byteorder=1234 d_longlong=define, longlongsize=8, d_longdbl=define, longdblsize=12 ivtype='long', ivsize=4, nvtype='double', nvsize=8, Off_t='off_t', lseeksize=8 alignbytes=4, prototype=define Linker and Libraries: ld='gcc', ldflags =' -L/usr/local/lib' libpth=/usr/local/lib /lib /usr/lib libs=-lnsl -lgdbm -ldb -ldl -lm -lcrypt -lutil -lpthread -lc perllibs=-lnsl -ldl -lm -lcrypt -lutil -lpthread -lc libc=/lib/libc-2.3.4.so, so=so, useshrplib=true, libperl=libperl.so gnulibc_version='2.3.4' Dynamic Linking: dlsrc=dl_dlopen.xs, dlext=so, d_dlsymun=undef, ccdlflags='-Wl,-E -Wl,-rpath,/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/CORE' cccdlflags='-fPIC', lddlflags='-shared -L/usr/local/lib' Characteristics of this binary (from libperl): Compile-time options: DEBUGGING MULTIPLICITY USE_ITHREADS USE_LARGE_FILES PERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT Built under linux Compiled at Aug 2 2005 04:48:47 %ENV: PERL5LIB=":/opt/india/dev/perl/XML-XPath-1.13/lib/perl5:/opt/india/dev/perl/XML-XPath- 1.13/lib/perl5/site_perl:/opt/india/dev/perl/XML-XPath-1.13/lib/perl5:/opt/india/dev/perl/XML-XPath-1.13/lib/perl5/site_perl" Could anyone help me to resolve this issue? Appreciate help in advance. Prabhu

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• System architecture: simple approach for setting up background tasks behind a web application -- wil

  - by Tim Molendijk

  I have a Django web application and I have some tasks that should operate (or actually: be initiated) on the background. The application is deployed as follows: apache2-mpm-worker; mod_wsgi in daemon mode (1 process, 15 threads). The background tasks have the following characteristics: they need to operate in a regular interval (every 5 minutes or so); they require the application context (i.e. the application packages need to be available in memory); they do not need any input other than database access, in order to perform some not-so-heavy tasks such as sending out e-mail and updating the state of the database. Now I was thinking that the most simple approach to this problem would be simply to piggyback on the existing application process (as spawned by mod_wsgi). By implementing the task as part of the application and providing an HTTP interface for it, I would prevent the overhead of another process that is holding all of the application into memory. A simple cronjob can be setup that sends a request to this HTTP interface every 5 minutes and that would be it. Since the application process provides 15 threads and the tasks are quite lightweight and only running every 5 minutes, I figure they would not be hindering the performance of the web application's user-facing operations. Yet... I have done some online research and I have seen nobody advocating this approach. Many articles suggest a significantly more complex approach based on a full-blown messaging component (such as Celery, which uses RabbitMQ). Although that's sexy, it sounds like overkill to me. Some articles suggest setting up a cronjob that executes a script which performs the tasks. But that doesn't feel very attractive either, as it results in creating a new process that loads the entire application into memory, performs some tiny task, and destroys the process again. And this is repeated every 5 minutes. Does not sound like an elegant solution. So, I'm looking for some feedback on my suggested approach as described in the paragraph before the preceeding paragraph. Is my reasoning correct? Am I overlooking (potential) problems? What about my assumption that application's performance will not be impeded?

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• Which HTTP redirect status code is best for this REST API scenario?

  - by Aseem Kishore

  I'm working on a REST API. The key objects ("nouns") are "items", and each item has a unique ID. E.g. to get info on the item with ID foo: GET http://api.example.com/v1/item/foo New items can be created, but the client doesn't get to pick the ID. Instead, the client sends some info that represents that item. So to create a new item: POST http://api.example.com/v1/item/ hello=world&hokey=pokey With that command, the server checks if we already have an item for the info hello=world&hokey=pokey. So there are two cases here. Case 1: the item doesn't exist; it's created. This case is easy. 201 Created Location: http://api.example.com/v1/item/bar Case 2: the item already exists. Here's where I'm struggling... not sure what's the best redirect code to use. 301 Moved Permanently? 302 Found? 303 See Other? 307 Temporary Redirect? Location: http://api.example.com/v1/item/foo I've studied the Wikipedia descriptions and RFC 2616, and none of these seem to be perfect. Here are the specific characteristics I'm looking for in this case: The redirect is permanent, as the ID will never change. So for efficiency, the client can and should make all future requests to the ID endpoint directly. This suggests 301, as the other three are meant to be temporary. The redirect should use GET, even though this request is POST. This suggests 303, as all others are technically supposed to re-use the POST method. In practice, browsers will use GET for 301 and 302, but this is a REST API, not a website meant to be used by regular users in browsers. It should be broadly usable and easy to play with. Specifically, 303 is HTTP/1.1 whereas 301 and 302 are HTTP/1.0. I'm not sure how much of an issue this is. At this point, I'm leaning towards 303 just to be semantically correct (use GET, don't re-POST) and just suck it up on the "temporary" part. But I'm not sure if 302 would be better since in practice it's been the same behavior as 303, but without requiring HTTP/1.1. But if I go down that line, I wonder if 301 is even better for the same reason plus the "permanent" part. Thoughts appreciated!

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• Creating a music catalog in C# and extracting first 30 seconds as soon as the first words are sung

  - by Rad

  I already read a question: Separation of singing voice from music. I don’t need this complex audio processing. I only need some detection mechanism that would detect that there is some voice/vocal playing while the music is playing (or not playing) I need to extract first 30 seconds when a vocalist starts singing along with full band music. See question 2 below. I want to create a music catalog using ASP.NET MVC 2 and Silverlight clients and C#.NET 4.0 programming language that would be front store. On the backend I would also like to create a desktop WPF/Windows application to create the music catalog from already existing music files, most of which have metadata in them ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags etc. I would possibly like to create a web service that would allow catalog contributors to upload a zipped album and trigger metadata extraction of music data and extraction of music segments as described below. I would be happy if I achieve no. 1 below. Let's say I have 1000ths of songs in mp3 (or other formats) grouped in subfolders using some classification (Genre, Artists, Albums, Composers or other groupings). I want to create tables in DB that would organize songs so they can be searched based on different criteria (year, length, above classification or by song title, description etc) like what iTune store allows to their customers. I want to extract metadata from various formats (I will try to get songs in mp3 format, but there may be other popular formats) and allow music Catalog manager person to add missing data from either desktop or web applications. He or other contributors can upload zipped music via an HTML or Silverlight upload or WPF. Can anybody suggest open source libraries, articles, code snippets that can do that in an automatic way using .NET and possibly SQL Server DB? My main questions are these. This is an audio processing challenge. I want to extract 2 segments of music (questions 1 and 2): 1. How to extract a music segment: 1-2 seconds before a vocal starts singing and up to 30 seconds from that point in time and 2. Much more challenging is to find repeating segments (One would usually find or recognize the names of the songs and songs are usually known by these refrains. How would I go about creating a list of songs that go great together like what Genius from iTune does? Is there any characteristics of music that can be used to match songs? The goal is for people quickly scan and recognize songs i.e. associate melody, words with a title/album so they can make intelligent decisions like buying a song, create similar mood songs. Thanks, Rad

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• ServiceController.Stop() doesn't appear to be stopping anything

  - by peacedog

  My dev box is a Windows 7 (x64) machine. I've got some code (C#, .net 2.0) that in certain circumstances, checks to see if a service is running and then stops it. ServiceController matchedService = //My Service! //If statements and such matchedService.Stop(); matchedService.WaitForStatus(ServiceControllerStatus.Stopped); Now, I can verify MyService is in fact installed and running. I can tell you I am running Visual Studio 2008 as an administrator while debugging. I can also verify that after a couple of If statements, I wind up at the .Stop() and .WaitForStatus() portion of the programming. I do know that if step over the .Stop() call, the service itself just keeps running (looking at it in Services, though it occurs to me perhaps I should grab a better tool for this. I'm sure there's some sysinternals tool that might give me more information). As I step over the .WaitForStatus() call, I basically wind up waiting for the stopped status. . . forever. Well, I let it sit there for over 15 minutes yesterday (twice) and nothing happens. We never make it to the next line of code. It feels exactly like Bowie's Space Oddity (you know the part I am talking about). There's a lotta things about MyService you don't know anything about. Things you wouldn't understand. Things you couldn't. . . let me state this plainly. No services depend on MyService and MyService depends on no other services. Addendum MyOtherService and SonOfMyService both seem to behave correctly at this point in the code. All of these services share the same characteristics (they're our own services we hatched in a secret lab and have no dependencies). Is it possible there is something wrong with the MyService install or something? I do know that if I stop debugging at this point, MyService is still listed as running in Services (even after hitting refresh). If I try to restart it then (or run my application again and get to this point), I get a message about it not being able to accept control messages. After that, the service shows up as stopped and I can start it normally. Why isn't the service being stopped? Is this a quirk of win 7? A failing on my part to understand the ServiceController, or Win Services in general?

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• Creating a music catalog and extracting first 30 seconds as soon as the first words are sung

  - by Rad

  I already read a question: Separation of singing voice from music. I don’t need this complex audio processing. I only need some detection mechanism that would detect that there is some voice/vocal playing while the music is playing (or not playing) I need to extract first 30 seconds when a vocalist starts singing along with full band music. See question 2 below. I want to create a music catalog using ASP.NET MVC 2 and Silverlight clients and C#.NET 4.0 programming language that would be front store. On the backend I would also like to create a desktop WPF/Windows application to create the music catalog from already existing music files, most of which have metadata in them ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags etc. I would possibly like to create a web service that would allow catalog contributors to upload a zipped album and trigger metadata extraction of music data and extraction of music segments as described below. I would be happy if I achieve no. 1 below. Let's say I have 1000ths of songs in mp3 (or other formats) grouped in subfolders using some classification (Genre, Artists, Albums, Composers or other groupings). I want to create tables in DB that would organize songs so they can be searched based on different criteria (year, length, above classification or by song title, description etc) like what iTune store allows to their customers. I want to extract metadata from various formats (I will try to get songs in mp3 format, but there may be other popular formats) and allow music Catalog manager person to add missing data from either desktop or web applications. He or other contributors can upload zipped music via an HTML or Silverlight upload or WPF. Can anybody suggest open source libraries, articles, code snippets that can do that in an automatic way using .NET and possibly SQL Server DB? My main questions are these. This is an audio processing challenge. I want to extract 2 segments of music (questions 1 and 2): 1. How to extract a music segment: 1-2 seconds before a vocal starts singing and up to 30 seconds from that point in time and 2. Much more challenging is to find repeating segments (One would usually find or recognize the names of the songs and songs are usually known by these refrains. How would I go about creating a list of songs that go great together like what Genius from iTune does? Is there any characteristics of music that can be used to match songs? The goal is for people quickly scan and recognize songs i.e. associate melody, words with a title/album so they can make intelligent decisions like buying a song, create similar mood songs.

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• Using pointers, references, handles to generic datatypes, as generic and flexible as possible

  - by Patrick

  In my application I have lots of different data types, e.g. Car, Bicycle, Person, ... (they're actually other data types, but this is just for the example). Since I also have quite some 'generic' code in my application, and the application was originally written in C, pointers to Car, Bicycle, Person, ... are often passed as void-pointers to these generic modules, together with an identification of the type, like this: Car myCar; ShowNiceDialog ((void *)&myCar, DATATYPE_CAR); The 'ShowNiceDialog' method now uses meta-information (functions that map DATATYPE_CAR to interfaces to get the actual data out of Car) to get information of the car, based on the given data type. That way, the generic logic only has to be written once, and not every time again for every new data type. Of course, in C++ you could make this much easier by using a common root class, like this class RootClass { public: string getName() const = 0; }; class Car : public RootClass { ... }; void ShowNiceDialog (RootClass *root); The problem is that in some cases, we don't want to store the data type in a class, but in a totally different format to save memory. In some cases we have hundreds of millions of instances that we need to manage in the application, and we don't want to make a full class for every instance. Suppose we have a data type with 2 characteristics: A quantity (double, 8 bytes) A boolean (1 byte) Although we only need 9 bytes to store this information, putting it in a class means that we need at least 16 bytes (because of the padding), and with the v-pointer we possibly even need 24 bytes. For hundreds of millions of instances, every byte counts (I have a 64-bit variant of the application and in some cases it needs 6 GB of memory). The void-pointer approach has the advantage that we can almost encode anything in a void-pointer and decide how to use it if we want information from it (use it as a real pointer, as an index, ...), but at the cost of type-safety. Templated solutions don't help since the generic logic forms quite a big part of the application, and we don't want to templatize all this. Additionally, the data model can be extended at run time, which also means that templates won't help. Are there better (and type-safer) ways to handle this than a void-pointer? Any references to frameworks, whitepapers, research material regarding this?

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• How to develop a Jquery plugin to find the first child that match with a selector?

  - by Ivan

  I'm trying to make a Jquery plugin (findFirst()) to find the first child with a given characteristics (something in the middle of the find() and children() functions. For instance, given this markup: <div id="start"> <div> <span>Hello world</span> <ul class="valid-result"> ... </ul> <ul class="valid-result"> <li> <ul class="not-a-result"> ... </ul> </li> </ul> <div> <ul class="valid-result"> ... </ul> </div> </div> </div> If you ask for $("#start").findFirst('ul') it should return all ul lists that I have tagged with the valid-result class, but not the ul with class not-a-result. It is, this function has to find the first elements that matches with a given selector, but not the inner elements that match this selector. This is the first time I try to code a Jquery function, and what I've already read doesn't helps me too much with this. The function I have developed is this: jQuery.fn.findFirst = function (sel) { return this.map(function() { return $(this).children().map(function() { if ($(this).is(sel)) { return $(this); } else { return $(this).findFirst(sel); } }); }); } It works in the sense it tries to return the expected result, but the format it returns the result is very rare for me. I suppose the problem is something I don't understand about Jquery. Here you have the JFiddle where I'm testing. EDIT The expected result after $("#start").findFirst('ul') is a set with all UL that have the class 'valid-result' BUT it's not possible to use this class because it doesn't exist in a real case (it's just to try to explain the result). This is not equivalent to first(), because first returns only one element!

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• C++ dynamic type construction and detection

  - by KneLL

  There was an interesting problem in C++, but it concerns more likely architecture. There are many (10, 20, 40, etc) classes that describe some characteristics (mix-in classes), for exmaple: struct Base { virtual ~Base() {} }; struct A : virtual public Base { int size; }; struct B : virtual public Base { float x, y; }; struct C : virtual public Base { bool some_bool_state; }; struct D : virtual public Base { string str; } // .... Primary module declares and exports a function (for simplicity just function declarations without classes): // .h file void operate(Base *pBase); // .cpp file void operate(Base *pBase) { // .... } Any other module can has a code like this: #include "mixins.h" #include "primary.h" class obj1_t : public A, public C, public D {}; class obj2_t : public B, public D {}; // ... void Pass() { obj1_t obj1; obj2_t obj2; operate(&obj1); operate(&obj2); } The question is how to know what the real type of given object in operate() without dynamic_cast and any type information in classes (constants, etc)? Function operate() is used with big array of objects in small time periods and dynamic_cast is too slow for it. And I don't want to include constants (enum obj_type { ... }) because this is not OOP-way. // module operate.cpp void some_operate(Base *pBase) { processA(pBase); processB(pBase); } void processA(A *pA) { } void processB(B *pB) { } I cannot directly pass a pBase to these functions. And it's impossible to have all possible combinations of classes, because I can add new classes just by including new .h files. As one of solutions that comed to mind, in editor application I can use a composite container: struct CompositeObject { vector<Base *pBase> parts; }; But editor does not need a time optimization and can use dynamic_cast for parts to determine the exact type. In operate() I cannot use this solution. So, is it possible to not use a dynamic_cast and type information to solve this problem? Or maybe I should use another architecture?

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• How do I achieve lossless JPEG joining without truncation of partial MCUs?

  - by Karan

  I am working on a project for which I need to join thousands of JPEG images losslessly (I'm not talking about the Lossless JPEG/JPEG 2000/JPEG-LS formats here). Aforementioned images have varying levels of chroma subsampling (1x1, 1x2, 2x1, 2x2), resulting in varying MCU sizes (8x8, 8x16, 16x8, 16x16 px). However, in any given set of images to be joined together, each image has identical characteristics. For now, let's assume I only have 2 images. Image #1 (I1) is 256x256px in size and #2 (I2) is 239x256px in size. 2x2 subsampling is used such that MCU size is 16x16px. I2 thus obviously has partial MCUs at the right edge, since its width is not evenly divisible by 16. (I've read that so-called 'partial' MCUs actually contain the data for a complete MCU, but the image dimensions instruct the renderer to only display the relevant pixels and ignore/hide the extra ones.) Looking around for tools that could help me accomplish this, I came across a modified version of JpegTran, that contains an experimental lossless crop 'n' drop (cut & paste) feature. All the other apps I encountered that support lossless JPEG editing seem to utilise IJG's (JpegTran) code, so this seemed to be the logical choice. Also, given the sheer number of images, I wanted something that could preferably be run from the command-line so that I could automate the process with a script. Unfortunately, while everything else worked fine, it seems JpegTran truncates the partial MCUs instead of retaining them. Thus in the example above, the final joined image contains all of I1, but only 224x256px of I2. Why 224? because 239 = 14x16+15, which means there are 14 full MCUs along the width, and 1 partial MCU (just 1px short of the complete 16px). The last 15px is what is getting blanked, leading to a 495x256px image with 15px of blank (grey) pixels at the right edge. See images below (shame that imgur re-compresses them): (left )+ (right) = As you can clearly see, the red portion (15px) of I2 has been truncated by JpegTran. If the MCUs were 8px in width, the lost portion would have been the right-most 7px of I2. Similarly, joining I3 (256x239px) *below * I1 would cause the loss of 7 or 15px, depending on the MCU height of course: (top) + (bottom) = If this is better suited to some other StackExchange (or even non-SE) site/forum where JPEG/image encoding experts hang out, do let me know. Can what I am attempting even be done, or is the so-called 'lossless' JPEG crop 'n' drop only valid for images with no partial MCUs? (Maybe that is why the feature is still in an "experimental state" more than a decade after being introduced...) Until I know for sure that it is impossible, I am not interested in suggestions for lossy joining. Avoiding any generational loss whatsoever is the sole reason why I'm breaking my head over this, else I'd have had this done and dusted ages ago. Also, I am not interested in suggestions related to switching image formats. I do not control the source of the images. If it can be done, how? Please keep in mind that any alternate apps suggested must ideally be capable of automation, given the requirements stated above. (But given how it's unlikely I'm even going to receive a useful answer given the constraints, I would be happy with any app suggestion just as long as it actually works. I can always look into an AutoIT/AHK script or something later to automate it.) I understand that an odd-sized final image might cause issues, so I am fully prepared to accept any solution, even if it results in blank (preferably black) padding pixels to the right/bottom. What I mean is, I don't care if I1 + I2 is 496x256px (1px padding) or even 512x256px (17px padding) in size, as long as the final image contains all the actual image data from both source images, and the entire process is lossless. Obviously the lesser the padding (if any), the better, but at this point any solution will do. A Windows-based solution would be perfect, but a Linux-based one would be entirely acceptable.

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• Windows 7 BSOD - ntoskrnl?

  - by Ken Mason

  2 new HP Pavilion notebooks with 7 Home Premium pre-loaded with Norton. My first act was to use the Norton Removal Tool and load ZoneAlarm free and AVG Free. Frequent random BSOD's ever since...I found my way into Debug and have had various reports regarding ntoskrnl, depending on the status of symbols. It's been many years since I played with (DOS 3.x) debug, so this has been a considerable fumble. Excerpts follow and any insights would be greatly appreciated, as I am not a developer: ADDITIONAL_DEBUG_TEXT: Use '!findthebuild' command to search for the target build information. If the build information is available, run '!findthebuild -s ; .reload' to set symbol path and load symbols. MODULE_NAME: nt FAULTING_MODULE: fffff8000305d000 nt DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 4b88cfeb BUGCHECK_STR: 0x7f_8 CUSTOMER_CRASH_COUNT: 1 DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: VISTA_DRIVER_FAULT CURRENT_IRQL: 0 LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from fffff800030ccb69 to fffff800030cd600 STACK_TEXT: fffff80004d6fd28 fffff800030ccb69 : 000000000000007f 0000000000000008 0000000080050033 00000000000006f8 : nt+0x70600 fffff80004d6fd30 000000000000007f : 0000000000000008 0000000080050033 00000000000006f8 fffff80003095e58 : nt+0x6fb69 fffff80004d6fd38 0000000000000008 : 0000000080050033 00000000000006f8 fffff80003095e58 0000000000000000 : 0x7f fffff80004d6fd40 0000000080050033 : 00000000000006f8 fffff80003095e58 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 : 0x8 fffff80004d6fd48 00000000000006f8 : fffff80003095e58 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 : 0x80050033 fffff80004d6fd50 fffff80003095e58 : 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 : 0x6f8 fffff80004d6fd58 0000000000000000 : 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 : nt+0x38e58 STACK_COMMAND: kb FOLLOWUP_IP: nt+70600 fffff800`030cd600 48894c2408 mov qword ptr [rsp+8],rcx SYMBOL_STACK_INDEX: 0 SYMBOL_NAME: nt+70600 FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner IMAGE_NAME: ntoskrnl.exe BUCKET_ID: WRONG_SYMBOLS Followup: MachineOwner ...................................................................... 0: kd !lmi nt Loaded Module Info: [nt] Module: ntkrnlmp Base Address: fffff8000305d000 Image Name: ntkrnlmp.exe Machine Type: 34404 (X64) Time Stamp: 4b88cfeb Sat Feb 27 00:55:23 2010 Size: 5dc000 CheckSum: 545094 Characteristics: 22 perf Debug Data Dirs: Type Size VA Pointer CODEVIEW 25, 19c65c, 19bc5c RSDS - GUID: {7E9A3CAB-6268-45DE-8E10-816E3080A3B7} Age: 2, Pdb: ntkrnlmp.pdb CLSID 4, 19c658, 19bc58 [Data not mapped] Image Type: FILE - Image read successfully from debugger. ntkrnlmp.exe Symbol Type: PDB - Symbols loaded successfully from symbol server. d:\debugsymbols\ntkrnlmp.pdb\7E9A3CAB626845DE8E10816E3080A3B72\ntkrnlmp.pdb Load Report: public symbols , not source indexed d:\debugsymbols\ntkrnlmp.pdb\7E9A3CAB626845DE8E10816E3080A3B72\ntkrnlmp.pdb 0: kd !analyze -v * Bugcheck Analysis * * UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP (7f) This means a trap occurred in kernel mode, and it's a trap of a kind that the kernel isn't allowed to have/catch (bound trap) or that is always instant death (double fault). The first number in the bugcheck params is the number of the trap (8 = double fault, etc) Consult an Intel x86 family manual to learn more about what these traps are. Here is a portion of those codes: If kv shows a taskGate use .tss on the part before the colon, then kv. Else if kv shows a trapframe use .trap on that value Else .trap on the appropriate frame will show where the trap was taken (on x86, this will be the ebp that goes with the procedure KiTrap) Endif kb will then show the corrected stack. Arguments: Arg1: 0000000000000008, EXCEPTION_DOUBLE_FAULT Arg2: 0000000080050033 Arg3: 00000000000006f8 Arg4: fffff80003095e58 Debugging Details: BUGCHECK_STR: 0x7f_8 CUSTOMER_CRASH_COUNT: 1 DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: VISTA_DRIVER_FAULT PROCESS_NAME: System CURRENT_IRQL: 2 LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from fffff800030ccb69 to fffff800030cd600 STACK_TEXT: fffff80004d6fd28 fffff800030ccb69 : 000000000000007f 0000000000000008 0000000080050033 00000000000006f8 : nt!KeBugCheckEx fffff80004d6fd30 fffff800030cb032 : 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 : nt!KiBugCheckDispatch+0x69 fffff80004d6fe70 fffff80003095e58 : 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 : nt!KiDoubleFaultAbort+0xb2 fffff880089efc60 0000000000000000 : 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 : nt!SeAccessCheckFromState+0x58 STACK_COMMAND: kb FOLLOWUP_IP: nt!KiDoubleFaultAbort+b2 fffff800`030cb032 90 nop SYMBOL_STACK_INDEX: 2 SYMBOL_NAME: nt!KiDoubleFaultAbort+b2 FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner MODULE_NAME: nt IMAGE_NAME: ntkrnlmp.exe DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 4b88cfeb FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: X64_0x7f_8_nt!KiDoubleFaultAbort+b2 BUCKET_ID: X64_0x7f_8_nt!KiDoubleFaultAbort+b2 Followup: MachineOwner I tried running Rootkit Revealer but I don't think it works on x64 systems. Similarly Blacklight seems to have aged off. I'm running Sophos Anti-Rootkit now. So far so good...

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