Search Results

Search found 3674 results on 147 pages for 'floppy drives'.

Page 140/147 | < Previous Page | 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147  | Next Page >

• Create a Persistent Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Don’t feel like reinstalling an antivirus program every time you boot up your Ubuntu flash drive? We’ll show you how to create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive that will remember your settings, installed programs, and more! Previously, we showed you how to create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive that would reset to its initial state every time you booted it up. This is great if you’re worried about messing something up, and want to start fresh every time you start tinkering with Ubuntu. However, if you’re using the Ubuntu flash drive to diagnose and solve problems with your PC, you might find that a lot of problems require guess-and-test cycles. It would be great if the settings you change in Ubuntu and the programs you install stay installed the next time you boot it up. Fortunately, Universal USB Installer, a great little program from Pen Drive Linux, can do just that! Note: You will need a USB drive at least 2 GB large. Make sure you back up any files on the flash drive because this process will format the drive, removing any files currently on it. Once Ubuntu has been installed on the flash drive, you can move those files back if there is enough space. Put Ubuntu on your flash drive Universal-USB-Installer.exe does not need to be installed, so just double click on it to run it wherever you downloaded it. Click Yes if you get a UAC prompt, and you will be greeted with this window. Click I Agree. In the drop-down box on the next screen, select Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop i386. Don’t worry if you normally use 64-bit operating systems – the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 9.10 will still work fine. Some useful tools do not have 64-bit versions, so unless you’re planning on switching to Ubuntu permanently, the 32-bit version will work best. If you don’t have a copy of the Ubuntu 9.10 CD downloaded, then click on the checkbox to Download the ISO. You’ll be prompted to launch a web browser; click Yes. The download should start immediately. When it’s finished, return the the Universal USB Installer and click on Browse to navigate to the ISO file you just downloaded. Click OK and the text field will be populated with the path to the ISO file. Select the drive letter that corresponds to the flash drive that you would like to use from the dropdown box. If you’ve backed up the files on this drive, we recommend checking the box to format the drive. Finally, you have to choose how much space you would like to set aside for the settings and programs that will be stored on the flash drive. Considering that Ubuntu itself only takes up around 700 MB, 1 GB should be plenty, but we’re choosing 2 GB in this example because we have lots of space on this USB drive. Click on the Create button and then make yourself a sandwich – it will take some time to install no matter how fast your PC is. Eventually it will finish. Click Close. Now you have a flash drive that will boot into a fully capable Ubuntu installation, and any changes you make will persist the next time you boot it up! Boot into Ubuntu If you’re not sure how to set your computer to boot using the USB drive, then check out the How to Boot Into Ubuntu section of our previous article on creating bootable USB drives, or refer to your motherboard’s manual. Once your computer is set to boot using the USB drive, you’ll be greeted with splash screen with some options. Press Enter to boot into Ubuntu. The first time you do this, it may take some time to boot up. Fortunately, we’ve found that the process speeds up on subsequent boots. You’ll be greeted with the Ubuntu desktop. Now, if you change settings like the desktop resolution, or install a program, those changes will be permanently stored on the USB drive! We installed avast! Antivirus, and on the next boot, found that it was still in the Accessories menu where we left it. Conclusion We think that a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive is a great tool to have around in case your PC has problems booting otherwise. By having the changes you make persist, you can customize your Ubuntu installation to be the ultimate computer repair toolkit! Download Universal USB Installer from Pen Drive Linux Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveReset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista SetupHow To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Test Drive Windows 7 Online Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site Spyware Blaster v4.3 Yes, it’s Patch Tuesday Generate Stunning Tag Clouds With Tagxedo Install, Remove and HIDE Fonts in Windows 7

  Read the article

• CQRS &ndash; Questions and Concerns

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been doing a lot of learning on CQRS and Event Sourcing over the last little while and I have a number of questions that I haven’t been able to answer. 1. What is the benefit of CQRS when compared to a typical DDD architecture that uses Event Sourcing and properly captures intent and behavior via verb-based commands? (other than Scalability) 2. When using CQRS what do you do with complex query-based logic? I’m going to elaborate on #1 in this blog post and I’ll do a follow-up post on #2. I watched through Greg Young’s video on the business benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing and first let me say that I thought it was an excellent presentation that really drives home a lot of the benefits to this approach to architecture (I watched it twice in a row I enjoyed it so much!). But it didn’t answer some of my questions fully (I wish I had been there to ask these of Greg in person!). So let me pick apart some of the points he makes and how they relate to my first question above. I’m completely sold on the idea of event sourcing and have a clear understanding of the benefits that it brings to the table, so I’m not going to question that. But you can use event sourcing without going to a CQRS architecture, so my main question is around the benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing vs Event Sourcing + Typical DDD architecture Architecture with Event Sourcing + Commands on Left, CQRS on Right Greg talks about how the stereotypical architecture doesn’t support DDD, but is that only because his diagram shows DTO’s coming up from the client. If we use the same diagram but allow the client to send commands doesn’t that remove a lot of the arguments that Greg makes against the stereotypical architecture? We can now introduce verbs into the system. We can capture intent now (storing it still requires event sourcing, but you can implement event sourcing without doing CQRS) We can create a rich domain model (as opposed to an anemic domain model) Scalability is obviously a benefit that CQRS brings to the table, but like Greg says, very few of the systems we create truly need significant scalability Greg talks about the ability to scale your development efforts. He says CQRS allows you to split the system into 3 parts (Client, Domain/Commands, Reads) and assign 3 teams of developers to work on them in parallel; letting you scale your development efforts by 3x with nearly linear gains. But in the stereotypical architecture don’t you already have 2 separate modules that you can split your dev efforts between: The client that sends commands/queries and receives DTO’s, and the Domain which accepts commands/queries, and generates events/DTO’s. If this is true it’s not really a 3x scaling you achieve with CQRS but merely a 1.5x scaling which while great doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic (“I can do it with 10 devs in 12 months – let me hire 5 more and we can have it done in 8 months”). Making the Query side “stupid simple” such that you can assign junior developers (or even outsource it) sounds like a valid benefit, but I have some concerns over what you do with complex query-based logic/behavior. I’m going to go into more detail on this in a follow-up blog post shortly. He also seemed to focus on how “stupid-simple” it is doing queries against the de-normalized data store, but I imagine there is still significant complexity in the event handlers that interpret the events and apply them to the de-normalized tables. It sounds like Greg suggests that because we’re doing CQRS that allows us to apply Event Sourcing when we otherwise wouldn’t be able to (~33:30 in the video). I don’t believe this is true. I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to apply Event Sourcing without separating out the Commands and Queries. The queries would just operate against the domain model instead of the database. But you’d still get the benefits of Event Sourcing. Without CQRS the queries would only be able to operate against the current state rather than the event history, but even in CQRS the domain behaviors can only operate against the current state and I don’t see that being a big limiting factor. If some query needs to operate against something that is not captured by the current state you would just have to update the domain model to capture that information (no different than if that statement were made about a Command under CQRS). Some of the benefits I do see being applicable are that your domain model might end up being simpler/smaller since it only needs to represent the state needed to process commands and not worry about the reads (like the Deactivate Inventory Item and associated comment example that Greg provides). And also commands that can be handled in a Transaction Script style manner by the command handler simply generating events and not touching the domain model. It also makes it easier for your senior developers to focus on the command behavior and ignore the queries, which is usually going to be a better use of their time. And of course scalability. If anybody out there has any thoughts on this and can help educate me further, please either leave a comment or feel free to get in touch with me via email:

  Read the article

• Make a Drive Image Using an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Cloning a hard drive is useful, but what if you have to make several copies, or you just want to make a complete backup of a hard drive? Drive images let you put everything, and we mean everything, from your hard drive in one big file. With an Ubuntu Live CD, this is a simple process – the versatile tool dd can do this for us right out of the box. We’ve used dd to clone a hard drive before. Making a drive image is very similar, except instead of copying data from one hard drive to another, we copy from a hard drive to a file. Drive images are more flexible, as you can do what you please with the data once you’ve pulled it off the source drive. Your drive image is going to be a big file, depending on the size of your source drive – dd will copy every bit of it, even if there’s only one tiny file stored on the whole hard drive. So, to start, make sure you have a device connected to your computer that will be large enough to hold the drive image. Some ideas for places to store the drive image, and how to connect to them in an Ubuntu Live CD, can be found at this previous Live CD article. In this article, we’re going to make an image of a 1GB drive, and store it on another hard drive in the same PC. Note: always be cautious when using dd, as it’s very easy to completely wipe out a drive, as we will show later in this article. Creating a Drive Image Boot up into the Ubuntu Live CD environment. Since we’re going to store the drive image on a local hard drive, we first have to mount it. Click on Places and then the location that you want to store the image on – in our case, a 136GB internal drive. Open a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and navigate to the newly mounted drive. All mounted drives should be in /media, so we’ll use the command cd /media and then type the first few letters of our difficult-to-type drive, press tab to auto-complete the name, and switch to that directory. If you wish to place the drive image in a specific folder, then navigate to it now. We’ll just place our drive image in the root of our mounted drive. The next step is to determine the identifier for the drive you want to make an image of. In the terminal window, type in the command sudo fdisk -l Our 1GB drive is /dev/sda, so we make a note of that. Now we’ll use dd to make the image. The invocation is sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=./OldHD.img This means that we want to copy from the input file (“if”) /dev/sda (our source drive) to the output file (“of”) OldHD.img, which is located in the current working directory (that’s the “.” portion of the “of” string). It takes some time, but our image has been created…Let’s test to make sure it works. Drive Image Testing: Wiping the Drive Another interesting thing that dd can do is totally wipe out the data on a drive (a process we’ve covered before). The command for that is sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda This takes some random data as input, and outputs it to our drive, /dev/sda. If we examine the drive now using sudo fdisk –l, we can see that the drive is, indeed, wiped. Drive Image Testing: Restoring the Drive Image We can restore our drive image with a call to dd that’s very similar to how we created the image. The only difference is that the image is going to be out input file, and the drive now our output file. The exact invocation is sudo dd if=./OldHD.img of=/dev/sda It takes a while, but when it’s finished, we can confirm with sudo fdisk –l that our drive is back to the way it used to be! Conclusion There are a lots of reasons to create a drive image, with backup being the most obvious. Fortunately, with dd creating a drive image only takes one line in a terminal window – if you’ve got an Ubuntu Live CD handy! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayHow to Browse Without a Trace with an Ubuntu Live CDWipe, Delete, and Securely Destroy Your Hard Drive’s Data the Easy WayClone a Hard Drive Using an Ubuntu Live CD TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter Download Songs From MySpace

  Read the article

• HR According to Batman

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Any idea who that guy is running alongside the Caped Crusader? That’s Nightwing, but you may know him as Robin…well, the first Robin anyway. There were actually like 5 Robin’s according to Wikipedia: Dick Grayson, the original, who’s parents were circus performers killed by a gangster. Jason Todd, who was caught trying to steal tires off of the Batmobile. Tim Drake, who saw Dick’s parents die and figured out who Batman and Robin were. and a few others that get into recent time travel/altered reality storylines. What does this have to do with HR? Well, it somewhat ties in with an article by Alex Papadimoulis from 2008. In the article he talks about the “Cravath System”. The Craveth system was developed by a law firm called Cravath, Swaine & Moore back in the 19th century. In a nutshell, they believed in hiring the best and brightest straight out of school. These aspiring lawyers would then begin a fight for survival in the firm, with the strong surviving. In what’s termed the “Up and Out” rule, employees needed to be promoted within 3 years or leave the company. They should achieve partner within 7 – 8 years and no later than 10 after initially coming on board (read all about the system on Wikipedia here). Back to Alex’s article, he quotes from a book published in 1947 about the lawfirm: Under the “Cravath system” of taking a substantial number of men annually and keeping a current constantly moving up in the office, and its philosophy of tenure, men are constantly leaving… it is often difficult to keep the best men long enough to determine whether they shall be made partners, for Cravath-trained men are always in demand, usually at premium salaries. And so we see a pattern forming here: 1. Hire a whole whack of smart college graduates 2. Put them to work 3. The ones that stick around should move up the ladder. The ones that don’t stick around served the company well and left to expound the quality of the Cravath firm. Those that didn’t fall into either of those categories were just let go. There’s some interesting undercurrents to these ideas. If you stick around, you better keep your feet moving! I was at a Microsoft shindig a few months back, and was talking to a Microsoft employee. He shared that at MS you have 5 years to achieve a “senior” position within the company. Once you hit that mark, you can stay there for the rest of your career (he told about a guy who’s a “senior” developer and has been for the last 20+ years working on audio drivers for Windows), but you *must* hit that mark within the timeframe. What we see with Microsoft is Cravath’s system in action, whether intentional or not: bring in smart young people and see which ones stick. You need to give people something to work towards. Saying “You must reach this level or else!” is one way to look at it. The other way is to see achieving a higher rank in the organization as something for ambitious employees to reach towards. It’s important for an organization to always have the next generation of executives waiting in the wings, and unless you’re encouraging that early on you may find yourself in a position of needing to fill positions that nobody has been working towards. Now, you might suggest that this isn’t that big of a deal because you could just hire someone from outside the organization, but the Cravath system holds to the tenet of promoting internally; develop your own talent, since your business is the best place for the future leadership to learn teh business from. It’s OK for people to quit. Alex’s article really drives this point home, but its worth noting here also: its OK for your people to quit. In fact its inevitable…and more inevitable that it’ll be good people that leave. Some will stay and work towards the internal awards of promotion, but a number will get experience, serve the organization well, and then move on to something else. This should be expected and treated as a natural business occurrence. The idea of an alumni of an organization begins to come into play here: “That guy used to work for <insert company here>”. There’s a benefit in that: those best and brightest will be drawn to your organization and your reputation will permeate your market through former staff that are sought after because of how well you nurtured them. The Batman Hook All of this brings us back to Batman and his HR practice: when Dick decided he’d had enough of the Robin schtick, he quit and became his own…but he was always associated with Batman and people understood where his training had come from. To the Dark Knight’s credit, he continued training partners under the Robin brand. Luckily he didn’t have to worry about firing any of them (the ship sort of sails when you reveal a secret identity), although there was that unfortunate “quitting” of the second Robin when the Joker blew him up…but regardless, we see the Cravath system at work: bring in talent, expect great things, and be ok with whatever they decide for their careers. It’s an interesting way to approach HR, and luckily for us our business isn’t as dangerous or over-the-top as the caped crusader’s.

  Read the article

• Going to the Score Cards - Exceptional DBA Awards 2011

  - by Rodney

  This year marks my 4th year as a judge for the Exceptional DBA Awards, founded by Red Gate in 2008 to "recognize the essential but often overlooked contributions of DBAs, the unsung heroes of the IT community." As a professional DBA myself I have been honored to participate as a judge. It is not an easy job because there is a voluminous amount of nominees from all over the world. Each judge has to read through every word of the nominee's answers, deciding what makes each person special and stand out amongst their peers. What drives them? What single element of their submission will shine above all others? It is my hope that what I am about to divulge to you as a judge will prompt you to think about yourself or someone you know and decide that you may be the exceptional DBA who can take home the gold at this year's award ceremony in Seattle. We are more than a few weeks into the nomination process and there are quite a number of submissions already. I can not tell you how many as that would not be fair. I can say it is not 1 million or more. I can also say that it is not 100,000. But that is all I can say about that. However, I can tell you that it is enough this year that we are breaking records on the number of people who have been influenced, inspired or intrigued by the awards in the past. I remember them all like it were yesterday. fuzzy thought cloud here. It was a rainy day in Seattle (all memories for each award ceremony will start thusly) and I was in the hotel going over my notes on what I wanted to say about the winner of the 2008 Red Gate Exceptional DBA Award. The notes were on index cards that I had either bought or stolen from my wife, I do not recall, but I was nervous which was unlike me. This was, after all, a big night for the winner. Of course, we, the judges and the SQL community, had already decided the winner and now all that remained was to present the award. The room was packed. It was Casino night, sponsored by sqlservercentral.com. Money (fake), drinks (not fake) and camaraderie flowed through the room. Dan McClain won the award that year. He worked for Anheuser-Busch at the time. I promise that did not influence my decision. We presented Dan with the award. He was very proud of this achievement, rightfully so, as was the SQL community for him. I spoke with Dan throughout the conference and realized how huge this award was for him, not just personally but professionally. It was a rainy day in Seattle in 2009 and I was nervous. I was asked to speak to a group of people again as a judge for the Exceptional DBA Awards. This year, Josef Richberg would be the recipient of the award, but he would not be able to attend. We all prayed for him as he fought through an illness and congratulated him for his accomplishments as a DBA for his company. He got better and sallied forth and continued to give back to the SQL community that he saw as one big family. In 2010, and I am getting ahead of myself, he was asked to be a judge himself for the very award he had just received the year before. It was a sunny day in Seattle and I missed it, because it was in July and I was not there. It was a rainy day in Seattle and it is 2010 and Tracy Hamlin enters a submission that blows this judge away. She is managing a 50 Terabyte distributed database ("50 Gigabytes! Are you kidding me!!!", Rodney jokes.)  and loves her daily job as a DBA working with developers, mentoring them and teaching them best practices with kindness and patience. She is a people person who just happens to have 10+ years experience with RDBMS'. She wins the award and goes on to be recognized as famous at PASS. It will be a rainy day in Seattle this year when I sit amongst my old constituent judges and friends, Brad McGehee, http://www.simple-talk.com/books/sql-books/how-to-become-an-exceptional-dba,-2nd-edition/, Steve Jones, whom we all know and love at http://www.sqlservercentral.com and a young upstart to the SQL Community, this cat named Brent Ozar to announce the 2011 winner. I personally have not heard of Brent but I am told I have interviewed him for a DBA position several years ago and turned him down, http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2011/05/exceptional-dba-contest/ . I hope that did not jeopardize his future in the SQL world. I am a big hearted oaf and would feel horrible. Hopefully I will meet him at PASS and we can work this all out and I can help him get a DBA job. The rain has stopped and a new year is upon us. The stakes are high...the competition is fierce...the rewards are incredible. The entry form awaits you. http://www.exceptionaldba.com/ I very much look forward to meeting you and presenting the award to you in front of hundreds of your envious but proud peers as the new Exceptional DBA for 2011 at the PASS Summit. Here is what you could win: The Exceptional DBA of the Year receives full conference registration for the 2011 PSS Summit in Seattle, where the awards ceremony will take place, four nights' hotel accommodation, and $300 towards travel expenses. They will also be featured on Simple-Talk. Are you ready? Are you nervous?

  Read the article

• How to Increase the VMWare Boot Screen Delay

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  If you’ve wanted to try out a bootable CD or USB flash drive in a virtual machine environment, you’ve probably noticed that VMWare’s offerings make it difficult to change the boot device. We’ll show you how to change these options. You can do this either for one boot, or permanently for a particular virtual machine. Even experienced users of VMWare Player or Workstation may not recognize the screen above – it’s the virtual machine’s BIOS, which in most cases flashes by in the blink of an eye. If you want to boot up the virtual machine with a CD or USB key instead of the hard drive, then you’ll need more than an eye’s-blink to press Escape and bring up the Boot Menu. Fortunately, there is a way to introduce a boot delay that isn’t exposed in VMWare’s graphical interface – you have to edit the virtual machine’s settings file (a .vmx file) manually. Editing the Virtual Machine’s .vmx Find the .vmx file that contains the settings for your virtual machine. You chose a location for this when you created the virtual machine – in Windows, the default location is a folder called My Virtual Machines in your My Documents folder. In VMWare Workstation, the location of the .vmx file is listed on the virtual machine’s tab. If in doubt, search your hard drive for .vmx files. If you don’t want to use Windows default search, an awesome utility that locates files instantly is Everything. Open the .vmx file with any text editor. Somewhere in this file, enter in the following line… save the file, then close out of the text editor: bios.bootdelay = 20000 This will introduce a 20 second delay when the virtual machine loads up, giving you plenty of time to press the Escape button and access the boot menu. The number in this line is just a value in milliseconds, so for a five second boot delay, enter 5000, and so on. Change Boot Options Temporarily Now, when you boot up your virtual machine, you’ll have plenty of time to enter one of the keystrokes listed at the bottom of the BIOS screen on boot-up. Press Escape to bring up the Boot Menu. This allows you to select a different device to boot from – like a CD drive. Your selection will be forgotten the next time you boot up this virtual machine. Change Boot Options Permanently When the BIOS screen comes up, press F2 to enter the BIOS Setup menu. Switch to the Boot tab, and change the ordering of the items by pressing the “+” key to move items up on the list, and the “-” key to move items down the list. We’ve switched the order so that the CD-ROM Drive boots first. Once you make this change permanent, you may want to re-edit the .vmx file to remove the boot delay. Boot from a USB Flash Drive One thing that is noticeably missing from the list of boot options is a USB device. VMWare’s BIOS just does not allow this, but we can get around that limitation using the PLoP Boot Manager that we’ve previously written about. And as a bonus, since everything is virtual anyway, there’s no need to actually burn PLoP to a CD. Open the settings for the virtual machine you want to boot with a USB drive. Click on Add… at the bottom of the settings screen, and select CD/DVD Drive. Click Next. Click the Use ISO Image radio button, and click Next. Browse to find plpbt.iso or plpbtnoemul.iso from the PLoP zip file. Ensure that Connect at power on is checked, and then click Finish. Click OK on the main Virtual Machine Settings page. Now, if you use the steps above to boot using that CD/DVD drive, PLoP will load, allowing you to boot from a USB drive! Conclusion We’re big fans of VMWare Player and Workstation, as they let us try out a ton of geeky things without worrying about harming our systems. By introducing a boot delay, we can add bootable CDs and USB drives to the list of geeky things we can try out. Download PLoP Boot Manager Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Switch to Console Mode for Ubuntu VMware GuestHack: Turn Off Debug Mode in VMWare Workstation 6 BetaStart Your Computer More Quickly by Delaying the Startup of a Service in VistaEnable Hidden BootScreen in Windows VistaEnable Copy and Paste from Ubuntu VMware Guest TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error

  Read the article

• SOA, Empowerment and Continuous Improvement

  - by Tanu Sood

  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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick will be hosting the IT Leader Editorial on a regular basis. I met my twin at Open World. We share backgrounds, experiences and even names. I hosted an invitation-only AppAdvantage Leadership Forum with an overcapacity 85 participants: 55 customers, 15 from the Oracle AppAdvantage team and 15 Partners. It was a lively, open and positive discussion of pace layered architectures and Oracle’s AppAdvantage approach to a unified view of Applications and Middleware. Rick Hassman from Pella was one of the customer panelists and during the pre event prep, Rick and I shared backgrounds and found that we had both been plant managers and led ERP deployments prior to leading IT itself. During the panel conversation I explored this with him, discussing the unique perspectives that this provides to CIO’s. He then hit on a point that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until a week later. First though, some background. The week after the Forum, one of the participants emailed me with the following thoughts: “I am 150% behind this concept……but we are struggling with the concept of web services and the potential use of the Oracle Service Bus technology let alone moving into using the full SOA/BPM/BAM software to extend our JD Edwards application to both integrate and support business processes”. After thinking a bit I responded this way: While I certainly appreciate the degree of change and effort involved, perhaps I could offer the following: One of the underlying principles behind Oracle AppAdvantage is that more often than not, the choice between changing a business process and invasively customizing ERP represents a Hobson's Choice: neither is acceptable. In this case the third option, moving the process out of ERP, is the only acceptable one. Providing this choice typically requires end to end, real time interoperability across applications and/or services. This real time interoperability, to be sustainable over time requires a service oriented architecture. There's just no way around this. SOA adaptation is admittedly tough at the beginning. New skills, new technology and new headaches. But, like any radically new technology, it has a learning curve that drives cost down rather dramatically over time. Tough choices to be sure, but not entirely different than we face with every major technology cycle. Good points of course, but I felt that something was missing. The points were convincing, perhaps even a bit insightful, but they didn’t get at the heart of what Oracle AppAdvantage is focused upon: how the optimization of technology, applications, processes and relationships can change the very way that organizations operate. And then I thought back to the panel discussion with Rick Hassman at Oracle OpenWorld. Rick stressed that Continuous Improvement is a fundamental business strategy at Pella. I remember Continuous Improvement well as I suspect does everyone who was in American manufacturing during the 80’s. Pioneered by W. Edwards Deming in Japan (and still known alternatively as Kaizen), Continuous Improvement sets in place the business culture that we must not become complacent with success and resistant to the ongoing need for change. Many believe that this single handedly drove the renaissance in American manufacturing through the last two decades, which had become complacent during the 70’s and early 80’s. But what exactly does this have to do with SOA? It was Rick’s next point. He drew the connection that moving those business processes that need to continually change over time out of ERP and into edge applications and services enables continuous improvement by empowering people to continually strive for better ways of doing things rather than be being bound by workflows that cannot change. A compelling connection: that SOA, and the overall Oracle AppAdvantage framework of which it is an integral part, can empower people towards continuous improvement in business processes and as a result drive business leadership and business excellence. What better a case for technology innovation?

  Read the article

• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Martijn Verburg

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  JavaOne Rock Stars, conceived in 2005, are the top-rated speakers at each JavaOne Conference. They are awarded by their peers, who, through conference surveys, recognize them for their outstanding sessions and speaking ability. Over the years many of the world’s leading Java developers have been so recognized. Martijn Verburg has, in recent years, established himself as an important mover and shaker in the Java community. His “Diabolical Developer” session at the JavaOne 2011 Conference got people’s attention by identifying some of the worst practices Java developers are prone to engage in. Among other things, he is co-leader and organizer of the thriving London Java User Group (JUG) which has more than 2,500 members, co-represents the London JUG on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, and leads the global effort for the Java User Group “Adopt a JSR” and “Adopt OpenJDK” programs. Career highlights include overhauling technology stacks and SDLC practices at Mizuho International, mentoring Oracle on technical community management, and running off shore development teams for AIG. He is currently CTO at jClarity, a start-up focusing on automating optimization for Java/JVM related technologies, and Product Advisor at ZeroTurnaround. He co-authored, with Ben Evans, "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" published by Manning and, as a leading authority on technical team optimization, he is in high demand at major software conferences.Verburg is participating in five sessions, a busy man indeed. Here they are: CON6152 - Modern Software Development Antipatterns (with Ben Evans) UGF10434 - JCP and OpenJDK: Using the JUGs’ “Adopt” Programs in Your Group (with Csaba Toth) BOF4047 - OpenJDK Building and Testing: Case Study—Java User Group OpenJDK Bugathon (with Ben Evans and Cecilia Borg) BOF6283 - 101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters (with Bruno Souza and Heather Vancura-Chilson) HOL6500 - Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks (with Heinz Kabutz, Kirk Pepperdine, Ellen Kraffmiller and Henri Tremblay) When I asked Verburg about the biggest mistakes Java developers tend to make, he listed three: A lack of communication -- Software development is far more a social activity than a technical one; most projects fail because of communication issues and social dynamics, not because of a bad technical decision. Sadly, many developers never learn this lesson. No source control -- Developers simply storing code in local filesystems and emailing code in order to integrate Design-driven Design -- The need for some developers to cram every design pattern from the Gang of Four (GoF) book into their source code All of which raises the question: If these practices are so bad, why do developers engage in them? “I've seen a wide gamut of reasons,” said Verburg, who lists them as: * They were never taught at high school/university that their bad habits were harmful.* They weren't mentored in their first professional roles.* They've lost passion for their craft.* They're being deliberately malicious!* They think software development is a technical activity and not a social one.* They think that they'll be able to tidy it up later.A couple of key confusions and misconceptions beset Java developers, according to Verburg. “With Java and the JVM in particular I've seen a couple of trends,” he remarked. “One is that developers think that the JVM is a magic box that will clean up their memory, make their code run fast, as well as make them cups of coffee. The JVM does help in a lot of cases, but bad code can and will still lead to terrible results! The other trend is to try and force Java (the language) to do something it's not very good at, such as rapid web development. So you get a proliferation of overly complex frameworks, libraries and techniques trying to get around the fact that Java is a monolithic, statically typed, compiled, OO environment. It's not a Golden Hammer!”I asked him about the keys to running a good Java User Group. “You need to have a ‘Why,’” he observed. “Many user groups know what they do (typically, events) and how they do it (the logistics), but what really drives users to join your group and to stay is to give them a purpose. For example, within the LJC we constantly talk about the ‘Why,’ which in our case is several whys:* Re-ignite the passion that developers have for their craft* Raise the bar of Java developers in London* We want developers to have a voice in deciding the future of Java* We want to inspire the next generation of tech leaders* To bring the disparate tech groups in London together* So we could learn from each other* We believe that the Java ecosystem forms a cornerstone of our society today -- we want to protect that for the futureLooking ahead to Java 8 Verburg expressed excitement about Lambdas. “I cannot wait for Lambdas,” he enthused. “Brian Goetz and his group are doing a great job, especially given some of the backwards compatibility that they have to maintain. It's going to remove a lot of boiler plate and yet maintain readability, plus enable massive scaling.”Check out Martijn Verburg at JavaOne if you get a chance, and, stay tuned for a longer interview yours truly did with Martijn to be publish on otn/java some time after JavaOne. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

  Read the article

• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Martijn Verburg

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  JavaOne Rock Stars, conceived in 2005, are the top-rated speakers at each JavaOne Conference. They are awarded by their peers, who, through conference surveys, recognize them for their outstanding sessions and speaking ability. Over the years many of the world’s leading Java developers have been so recognized. Martijn Verburg has, in recent years, established himself as an important mover and shaker in the Java community. His “Diabolical Developer” session at the JavaOne 2011 Conference got people’s attention by identifying some of the worst practices Java developers are prone to engage in. Among other things, he is co-leader and organizer of the thriving London Java User Group (JUG) which has more than 2,500 members, co-represents the London JUG on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, and leads the global effort for the Java User Group “Adopt a JSR” and “Adopt OpenJDK” programs. Career highlights include overhauling technology stacks and SDLC practices at Mizuho International, mentoring Oracle on technical community management, and running off shore development teams for AIG. He is currently CTO at jClarity, a start-up focusing on automating optimization for Java/JVM related technologies, and Product Advisor at ZeroTurnaround. He co-authored, with Ben Evans, "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" published by Manning and, as a leading authority on technical team optimization, he is in high demand at major software conferences.Verburg is participating in five sessions, a busy man indeed. Here they are: CON6152 - Modern Software Development Antipatterns (with Ben Evans) UGF10434 - JCP and OpenJDK: Using the JUGs’ “Adopt” Programs in Your Group (with Csaba Toth) BOF4047 - OpenJDK Building and Testing: Case Study—Java User Group OpenJDK Bugathon (with Ben Evans and Cecilia Borg) BOF6283 - 101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters (with Bruno Souza and Heather Vancura-Chilson) HOL6500 - Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks (with Heinz Kabutz, Kirk Pepperdine, Ellen Kraffmiller and Henri Tremblay) When I asked Verburg about the biggest mistakes Java developers tend to make, he listed three: A lack of communication -- Software development is far more a social activity than a technical one; most projects fail because of communication issues and social dynamics, not because of a bad technical decision. Sadly, many developers never learn this lesson. No source control -- Developers simply storing code in local filesystems and emailing code in order to integrate Design-driven Design -- The need for some developers to cram every design pattern from the Gang of Four (GoF) book into their source code All of which raises the question: If these practices are so bad, why do developers engage in them? “I've seen a wide gamut of reasons,” said Verburg, who lists them as: * They were never taught at high school/university that their bad habits were harmful.* They weren't mentored in their first professional roles.* They've lost passion for their craft.* They're being deliberately malicious!* They think software development is a technical activity and not a social one.* They think that they'll be able to tidy it up later.A couple of key confusions and misconceptions beset Java developers, according to Verburg. “With Java and the JVM in particular I've seen a couple of trends,” he remarked. “One is that developers think that the JVM is a magic box that will clean up their memory, make their code run fast, as well as make them cups of coffee. The JVM does help in a lot of cases, but bad code can and will still lead to terrible results! The other trend is to try and force Java (the language) to do something it's not very good at, such as rapid web development. So you get a proliferation of overly complex frameworks, libraries and techniques trying to get around the fact that Java is a monolithic, statically typed, compiled, OO environment. It's not a Golden Hammer!”I asked him about the keys to running a good Java User Group. “You need to have a ‘Why,’” he observed. “Many user groups know what they do (typically, events) and how they do it (the logistics), but what really drives users to join your group and to stay is to give them a purpose. For example, within the LJC we constantly talk about the ‘Why,’ which in our case is several whys:* Re-ignite the passion that developers have for their craft* Raise the bar of Java developers in London* We want developers to have a voice in deciding the future of Java* We want to inspire the next generation of tech leaders* To bring the disparate tech groups in London together* So we could learn from each other* We believe that the Java ecosystem forms a cornerstone of our society today -- we want to protect that for the futureLooking ahead to Java 8 Verburg expressed excitement about Lambdas. “I cannot wait for Lambdas,” he enthused. “Brian Goetz and his group are doing a great job, especially given some of the backwards compatibility that they have to maintain. It's going to remove a lot of boiler plate and yet maintain readability, plus enable massive scaling.”Check out Martijn Verburg at JavaOne if you get a chance, and, stay tuned for a longer interview yours truly did with Martijn to be publish on otn/java some time after JavaOne.

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – Storing Data and Files in Cloud – Dropbox – Personal Technology Tip

  - by pinaldave

  I thought long and hard about doing a Personal Technology Tips series for this blog.  I have so many tips I’d like to share.  I am on my computer almost all day, every day, so I have a treasure trove of interesting tidbits I like to share if given the chance.  The only thing holding me back – which tip to share first?  The first tip obviously has the weight of seeming like the most important.  But this would mean choosing amongst my favorite tricks and shortcuts.  This is a hard task. Source: Dropbox.com My Dropbox I have finally decided, though, and have determined that the first Personal Technology Tip may not be the most secret or even trickier to master – in fact, it is probably the easiest.  My today’s Personal Technology Tip is Dropbox. I hope that all of you are nodding along in recognition right now.  If you do not use Dropbox, or have not even heard of it before, get on the internet and find their site.  You won’t be disappointed.  A quick recap for those in the dark: Dropbox is an online storage site with a lot of additional syncing and cloud-computing capabilities.  Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s explore some of my favorite options in Dropbox. Collaborate with All The first thing I love about Dropbox is the ability it gives you to collaborate with others.  You can share files easily with other Dropbox users, and they can alter them, share them with you, all while keeping track of different versions in on easy place.  I’d like to see anyone try to accomplish that key idea – “easily” – using e-mail versions and multiple computers.  It’s even difficult to accomplish using a shared network. Afraid that this kind of ease looks too good to be true?  Afraid that maybe there isn’t enough storage space, or the user interface is confusing?  Think again.  There is plenty of space – you can get 2 GB with just a free account, and upgrades are inexpensive and go up to 100 GB of storage.  And the user interface is so easy that anyone can learn to use it. What I use Dropbox for I love Dropbox because I give a lot of presentations and often they are far from home.  I can keep my presentations on Dropbox and have easy access to them anywhere, without needing to have my whole computer with me.  This is just one small way that you can use Dropbox. You can sync your entire hard drive, or hard drives if you have multiple computers (home, work, office, shared), and you can set Dropbox to automatically sync files on a certain timeline, or whenever Dropbox notices that they’ve been changed. Why I love Dropbox Dropbox has plenty of storage, but 2 GB still has a hard time competing with the average desktop’s storage space.  So what if you want to sync most of your files, but only the ones you use the most and share between work and home, and not all your files (especially large files like pictures and videos)?  You can use selective sync to choose which files to sync. Above all, my favorite feature is LanSync.  Dropbox will search your Local Area Network (LAN) for new files and sync them to Dropbox, as well as downloading the new version to all the shared files across the network.  That means that if move around on different computers at work or at home, you will have the same version of the file every time.  Or, other users on the LAN will have access to the new version, which makes collaboration extremely easy. Ref: rzfeeser.com Dropbox has so many other features that I feel like I could create a Personal Technology Tips series devoted entirely to Dropbox.  I’m going to create a bullet list here to make things shorter, but I strongly encourage you to look further into these into options if it sounds like something you would use. Theft Recover Home Security File Hosting and Sharing Portable Dropbox Sync your iCal calendar Password Storage What is your favorite tool and why? I could go on and on, but I will end here.  In summary – I strongly encourage everyone to investigate Dropbox to see if it’s something they would find useful.  If you use Dropbox and know of a great feature I failed to mention, please share it with me, I’d love to hear how everyone uses this program. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Personal Technology

  Read the article

• Internet doesn't work by default

  - by Adam Martinez

  After upgrading to Precise, I am required to run 'sudo dhclient eth0' in a terminal in order to get the internet to work. Everything worked perfectly fine on Oneiric, so It's really puzzling me. I'm thinking it could possibly be something with the kernel, but who knows. Output of dmesg: [ 0.247891] system 00:01: [io 0x0290-0x030f] has been reserved [ 0.247896] system 00:01: [io 0x0290-0x0297] has been reserved [ 0.247901] system 00:01: [io 0x0880-0x088f] has been reserved [ 0.247908] system 00:01: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) [ 0.247931] pnp 00:02: [dma 4] [ 0.247935] pnp 00:02: [io 0x0000-0x000f] [ 0.247939] pnp 00:02: [io 0x0080-0x0090] [ 0.247943] pnp 00:02: [io 0x0094-0x009f] [ 0.247947] pnp 00:02: [io 0x00c0-0x00df] [ 0.248033] pnp 00:02: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0200 (active) [ 0.248125] pnp 00:03: [io 0x0070-0x0073] [ 0.248187] pnp 00:03: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0b00 (active) [ 0.248205] pnp 00:04: [io 0x0061] [ 0.248260] pnp 00:04: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0800 (active) [ 0.248277] pnp 00:05: [io 0x00f0-0x00ff] [ 0.248292] pnp 00:05: [irq 13] [ 0.248348] pnp 00:05: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c04 (active) [ 0.248583] pnp 00:06: [io 0x03f0-0x03f5] [ 0.248588] pnp 00:06: [io 0x03f7] [ 0.248597] pnp 00:06: [irq 6] [ 0.248601] pnp 00:06: [dma 2] [ 0.248690] pnp 00:06: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0700 (active) [ 0.248998] pnp 00:07: [io 0x03f8-0x03ff] [ 0.249008] pnp 00:07: [irq 4] [ 0.249122] pnp 00:07: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0501 (active) [ 0.249479] pnp 00:08: [io 0x0400-0x04bf] [ 0.249584] system 00:08: [io 0x0400-0x04bf] has been reserved [ 0.249591] system 00:08: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) [ 0.249628] pnp 00:09: [mem 0xffb80000-0xffbfffff] [ 0.249690] pnp 00:09: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs INT0800 (active) [ 0.250049] pnp 00:0a: [mem 0xe0000000-0xefffffff] [ 0.250167] system 00:0a: [mem 0xe0000000-0xefffffff] has been reserved [ 0.250173] system 00:0a: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) [ 0.250302] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0x000f0000-0x000fffff] [ 0.250307] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0x7ff00000-0x7fffffff] [ 0.250311] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0xfed00000-0xfed000ff] [ 0.250316] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0x0000046e-0x0000056d] [ 0.250320] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0x7fee0000-0x7fefffff] [ 0.250324] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0x00000000-0x0009ffff] [ 0.250328] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0x00100000-0x7fedffff] [ 0.250332] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0xfec00000-0xfec00fff] [ 0.250336] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0xfed14000-0xfed1dfff] [ 0.250341] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0xfed20000-0xfed9ffff] [ 0.250345] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0xfee00000-0xfee00fff] [ 0.250349] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0xffb00000-0xffb7ffff] [ 0.250353] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0xfff00000-0xffffffff] [ 0.250357] pnp 00:0b: [mem 0x000e0000-0x000effff] [ 0.250409] pnp 00:0b: disabling [mem 0x0000046e-0x0000056d] because it overlaps 0000:01:00.0 BAR 6 [mem 0x00000000-0x0007ffff pref] [ 0.250419] pnp 00:0b: disabling [mem 0x0000046e-0x0000056d disabled] because it overlaps 0000:03:00.0 BAR 6 [mem 0x00000000-0x0000ffff pref] [ 0.250430] pnp 00:0b: disabling [mem 0x0000046e-0x0000056d disabled] because it overlaps 0000:04:00.0 BAR 6 [mem 0x00000000-0x0001ffff pref] [ 0.250524] system 00:0b: [mem 0x000f0000-0x000fffff] could not be reserved [ 0.250530] system 00:0b: [mem 0x7ff00000-0x7fffffff] has been reserved [ 0.250536] system 00:0b: [mem 0xfed00000-0xfed000ff] has been reserved [ 0.250541] system 00:0b: [mem 0x7fee0000-0x7fefffff] could not be reserved [ 0.250547] system 00:0b: [mem 0x00000000-0x0009ffff] could not be reserved [ 0.250552] system 00:0b: [mem 0x00100000-0x7fedffff] could not be reserved [ 0.250558] system 00:0b: [mem 0xfec00000-0xfec00fff] could not be reserved [ 0.250563] system 00:0b: [mem 0xfed14000-0xfed1dfff] has been reserved [ 0.250568] system 00:0b: [mem 0xfed20000-0xfed9ffff] has been reserved [ 0.250574] system 00:0b: [mem 0xfee00000-0xfee00fff] has been reserved [ 0.250579] system 00:0b: [mem 0xffb00000-0xffb7ffff] has been reserved [ 0.250585] system 00:0b: [mem 0xfff00000-0xffffffff] has been reserved [ 0.250590] system 00:0b: [mem 0x000e0000-0x000effff] has been reserved [ 0.250596] system 00:0b: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c01 (active) [ 0.250614] pnp: PnP ACPI: found 12 devices [ 0.250617] ACPI: ACPI bus type pnp unregistered [ 0.250624] PnPBIOS: Disabled by ACPI PNP [ 0.288725] PCI: max bus depth: 1 pci_try_num: 2 [ 0.288786] pci 0000:01:00.0: BAR 6: assigned [mem 0xfb000000-0xfb07ffff pref] [ 0.288792] pci 0000:00:01.0: PCI bridge to [bus 01-01] [ 0.288797] pci 0000:00:01.0: bridge window [io 0xa000-0xafff] [ 0.288804] pci 0000:00:01.0: bridge window [mem 0xf8000000-0xfbffffff] [ 0.288811] pci 0000:00:01.0: bridge window [mem 0xd0000000-0xdfffffff 64bit pref] [ 0.288820] pci 0000:00:1c.0: PCI bridge to [bus 02-02] [ 0.288825] pci 0000:00:1c.0: bridge window [io 0x9000-0x9fff] [ 0.288833] pci 0000:00:1c.0: bridge window [mem 0xfdb00000-0xfdbfffff] [ 0.288840] pci 0000:00:1c.0: bridge window [mem 0xfd800000-0xfd8fffff 64bit pref] [ 0.288851] pci 0000:03:00.0: BAR 6: assigned [mem 0xfde00000-0xfde0ffff pref] [ 0.288856] pci 0000:00:1c.4: PCI bridge to [bus 03-03] [ 0.288861] pci 0000:00:1c.4: bridge window [io 0xd000-0xdfff] [ 0.288869] pci 0000:00:1c.4: bridge window [mem 0xfd700000-0xfd7fffff] [ 0.288876] pci 0000:00:1c.4: bridge window [mem 0xfde00000-0xfdefffff 64bit pref] [ 0.288887] pci 0000:04:00.0: BAR 6: assigned [mem 0xfdc00000-0xfdc1ffff pref] [ 0.288891] pci 0000:00:1c.5: PCI bridge to [bus 04-04] [ 0.288897] pci 0000:00:1c.5: bridge window [io 0xb000-0xbfff] [ 0.288904] pci 0000:00:1c.5: bridge window [mem 0xfdd00000-0xfddfffff] [ 0.288911] pci 0000:00:1c.5: bridge window [mem 0xfdc00000-0xfdcfffff 64bit pref] [ 0.288920] pci 0000:00:1e.0: PCI bridge to [bus 05-05] [ 0.288926] pci 0000:00:1e.0: bridge window [io 0xc000-0xcfff] [ 0.288933] pci 0000:00:1e.0: bridge window [mem 0xfda00000-0xfdafffff] [ 0.288940] pci 0000:00:1e.0: bridge window [mem 0xfd900000-0xfd9fffff 64bit pref] [ 0.288971] pci 0000:00:01.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 0.288979] pci 0000:00:01.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.288991] pci 0000:00:1c.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 0.288998] pci 0000:00:1c.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.289008] pci 0000:00:1c.4: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 0.289014] pci 0000:00:1c.4: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.289030] pci 0000:00:1c.5: PCI INT B -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 [ 0.289037] pci 0000:00:1c.5: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.289047] pci 0000:00:1e.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.289054] pci_bus 0000:00: resource 4 [io 0x0000-0x0cf7] [ 0.289058] pci_bus 0000:00: resource 5 [io 0x0d00-0xffff] [ 0.289063] pci_bus 0000:00: resource 6 [mem 0x000a0000-0x000bffff] [ 0.289067] pci_bus 0000:00: resource 7 [mem 0x000c0000-0x000dffff] [ 0.289072] pci_bus 0000:00: resource 8 [mem 0x7ff00000-0xfebfffff] [ 0.289077] pci_bus 0000:01: resource 0 [io 0xa000-0xafff] [ 0.289081] pci_bus 0000:01: resource 1 [mem 0xf8000000-0xfbffffff] [ 0.289086] pci_bus 0000:01: resource 2 [mem 0xd0000000-0xdfffffff 64bit pref] [ 0.289092] pci_bus 0000:02: resource 0 [io 0x9000-0x9fff] [ 0.289096] pci_bus 0000:02: resource 1 [mem 0xfdb00000-0xfdbfffff] [ 0.289101] pci_bus 0000:02: resource 2 [mem 0xfd800000-0xfd8fffff 64bit pref] [ 0.289106] pci_bus 0000:03: resource 0 [io 0xd000-0xdfff] [ 0.289110] pci_bus 0000:03: resource 1 [mem 0xfd700000-0xfd7fffff] [ 0.289115] pci_bus 0000:03: resource 2 [mem 0xfde00000-0xfdefffff 64bit pref] [ 0.289120] pci_bus 0000:04: resource 0 [io 0xb000-0xbfff] [ 0.289124] pci_bus 0000:04: resource 1 [mem 0xfdd00000-0xfddfffff] [ 0.289129] pci_bus 0000:04: resource 2 [mem 0xfdc00000-0xfdcfffff 64bit pref] [ 0.289134] pci_bus 0000:05: resource 0 [io 0xc000-0xcfff] [ 0.289138] pci_bus 0000:05: resource 1 [mem 0xfda00000-0xfdafffff] [ 0.289143] pci_bus 0000:05: resource 2 [mem 0xfd900000-0xfd9fffff 64bit pref] [ 0.289148] pci_bus 0000:05: resource 4 [io 0x0000-0x0cf7] [ 0.289152] pci_bus 0000:05: resource 5 [io 0x0d00-0xffff] [ 0.289157] pci_bus 0000:05: resource 6 [mem 0x000a0000-0x000bffff] [ 0.289161] pci_bus 0000:05: resource 7 [mem 0x000c0000-0x000dffff] [ 0.289166] pci_bus 0000:05: resource 8 [mem 0x7ff00000-0xfebfffff] [ 0.289233] NET: Registered protocol family 2 [ 0.289360] IP route cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes) [ 0.289754] TCP established hash table entries: 131072 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes) [ 0.290351] TCP bind hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes) [ 0.290670] TCP: Hash tables configured (established 131072 bind 65536) [ 0.290674] TCP reno registered [ 0.290680] UDP hash table entries: 512 (order: 2, 16384 bytes) [ 0.290703] UDP-Lite hash table entries: 512 (order: 2, 16384 bytes) [ 0.290868] NET: Registered protocol family 1 [ 0.290911] pci 0000:00:1a.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 0.290932] pci 0000:00:1a.0: PCI INT A disabled [ 0.290956] pci 0000:00:1a.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21 [ 0.290975] pci 0000:00:1a.1: PCI INT B disabled [ 0.290992] pci 0000:00:1a.2: PCI INT D -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 [ 0.291012] pci 0000:00:1a.2: PCI INT D disabled [ 0.291031] pci 0000:00:1a.7: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 [ 0.291068] pci 0000:00:1a.7: PCI INT C disabled [ 0.291104] pci 0000:00:1d.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 23 (level, low) -> IRQ 23 [ 0.291123] pci 0000:00:1d.0: PCI INT A disabled [ 0.291135] pci 0000:00:1d.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 [ 0.291155] pci 0000:00:1d.1: PCI INT B disabled [ 0.291166] pci 0000:00:1d.2: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 [ 0.291185] pci 0000:00:1d.2: PCI INT C disabled [ 0.291198] pci 0000:00:1d.7: PCI INT A -> GSI 23 (level, low) -> IRQ 23 [ 0.291219] pci 0000:00:1d.7: PCI INT A disabled [ 0.291258] pci 0000:01:00.0: Boot video device [ 0.291273] PCI: CLS 4 bytes, default 64 [ 0.291857] audit: initializing netlink socket (disabled) [ 0.291876] type=2000 audit(1336753420.284:1): initialized [ 0.337724] highmem bounce pool size: 64 pages [ 0.337734] HugeTLB registered 2 MB page size, pre-allocated 0 pages [ 0.349241] VFS: Disk quotas dquot_6.5.2 [ 0.349365] Dquot-cache hash table entries: 1024 (order 0, 4096 bytes) [ 0.350418] fuse init (API version 7.17) [ 0.350611] msgmni has been set to 1685 [ 0.351179] Block layer SCSI generic (bsg) driver version 0.4 loaded (major 253) [ 0.351229] io scheduler noop registered [ 0.351233] io scheduler deadline registered [ 0.351247] io scheduler cfq registered (default) [ 0.351450] pcieport 0000:00:01.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.351502] pcieport 0000:00:01.0: irq 40 for MSI/MSI-X [ 0.351585] pcieport 0000:00:1c.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.351639] pcieport 0000:00:1c.0: irq 41 for MSI/MSI-X [ 0.351728] pcieport 0000:00:1c.4: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.351779] pcieport 0000:00:1c.4: irq 42 for MSI/MSI-X [ 0.351875] pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.351927] pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: irq 43 for MSI/MSI-X [ 0.352094] pci_hotplug: PCI Hot Plug PCI Core version: 0.5 [ 0.352143] pciehp: PCI Express Hot Plug Controller Driver version: 0.4 [ 0.352311] intel_idle: MWAIT substates: 0x22220 [ 0.352315] intel_idle: does not run on family 6 model 23 [ 0.352446] input: Power Button as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0C0C:00/input/input0 [ 0.352455] ACPI: Power Button [PWRB] [ 0.352556] input: Power Button as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXPWRBN:00/input/input1 [ 0.352562] ACPI: Power Button [PWRF] [ 0.352650] ACPI: Fan [FAN] (on) [ 0.355667] thermal LNXTHERM:00: registered as thermal_zone0 [ 0.355673] ACPI: Thermal Zone [THRM] (26 C) [ 0.355750] ERST: Table is not found! [ 0.355753] GHES: HEST is not enabled! [ 0.355898] Serial: 8250/16550 driver, 32 ports, IRQ sharing enabled [ 0.376332] serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A [ 0.376582] isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards... [ 0.709133] Freeing initrd memory: 13792k freed [ 0.729743] isapnp: No Plug & Play device found [ 0.816786] 00:07: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A [ 0.832385] Linux agpgart interface v0.103 [ 0.835605] brd: module loaded [ 0.837138] loop: module loaded [ 0.837452] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: version 2.13 [ 0.837473] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: PCI INT A -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 [ 0.837480] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: MAP [ P0 P2 P1 P3 ] [ 0.837546] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.838099] scsi0 : ata_piix [ 0.838253] scsi1 : ata_piix [ 0.839183] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf900 ctl 0xf800 bmdma 0xf500 irq 19 [ 0.839192] ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf700 ctl 0xf600 bmdma 0xf508 irq 19 [ 0.839239] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.5: PCI INT A -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 [ 0.839246] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.5: MAP [ P0 -- P1 -- ] [ 0.839300] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.5: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.839708] scsi2 : ata_piix [ 0.839841] scsi3 : ata_piix [ 0.840301] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf200 ctl 0xf100 bmdma 0xee00 irq 19 [ 0.840308] ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf000 ctl 0xef00 bmdma 0xee08 irq 19 [ 0.840429] pata_acpi 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 0.840467] pata_acpi 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.840488] pata_acpi 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A disabled [ 0.841159] Fixed MDIO Bus: probed [ 0.841205] tun: Universal TUN/TAP device driver, 1.6 [ 0.841210] tun: (C) 1999-2004 Max Krasnyansky <[email protected]> [ 0.841322] PPP generic driver version 2.4.2 [ 0.841515] ehci_hcd: USB 2.0 'Enhanced' Host Controller (EHCI) Driver [ 0.841542] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 [ 0.841567] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.841573] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: EHCI Host Controller [ 0.841658] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1 [ 0.845582] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: cache line size of 4 is not supported [ 0.845610] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: irq 18, io mem 0xfdfff000 [ 0.860022] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: USB 2.0 started, EHCI 1.00 [ 0.860264] hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 0.860272] hub 1-0:1.0: 6 ports detected [ 0.860404] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: PCI INT A -> GSI 23 (level, low) -> IRQ 23 [ 0.860424] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.860430] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: EHCI Host Controller [ 0.860512] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2 [ 0.864413] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: cache line size of 4 is not supported [ 0.864438] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: irq 23, io mem 0xfdffe000 [ 0.880021] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: USB 2.0 started, EHCI 1.00 [ 0.880227] hub 2-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 0.880234] hub 2-0:1.0: 6 ports detected [ 0.880369] ohci_hcd: USB 1.1 'Open' Host Controller (OHCI) Driver [ 0.880396] uhci_hcd: USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver [ 0.880431] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 0.880443] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.880449] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: UHCI Host Controller [ 0.880529] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3 [ 0.880574] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: irq 16, io base 0x0000ff00 [ 0.880803] hub 3-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 0.880811] hub 3-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 0.880929] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21 [ 0.880940] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.880946] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: UHCI Host Controller [ 0.881039] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 4 [ 0.881081] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: irq 21, io base 0x0000fe00 [ 0.881302] hub 4-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 0.881310] hub 4-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 0.881427] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.2: PCI INT D -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 [ 0.881438] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.2: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.881443] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.2: UHCI Host Controller [ 0.881523] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 5 [ 0.881551] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.2: irq 19, io base 0x0000fd00 [ 0.881774] hub 5-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 0.881781] hub 5-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 0.881899] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 23 (level, low) -> IRQ 23 [ 0.881910] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.881915] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: UHCI Host Controller [ 0.881993] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 6 [ 0.882021] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: irq 23, io base 0x0000fc00 [ 0.882244] hub 6-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 0.882252] hub 6-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 0.882370] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 [ 0.882381] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.882386] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: UHCI Host Controller [ 0.882467] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 7 [ 0.882495] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: irq 19, io base 0x0000fb00 [ 0.882735] hub 7-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 0.882742] hub 7-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 0.882858] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 [ 0.882869] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.882875] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: UHCI Host Controller [ 0.882954] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 8 [ 0.882982] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: irq 18, io base 0x0000fa00 [ 0.883205] hub 8-0:1.0: USB hub found [ 0.883213] hub 8-0:1.0: 2 ports detected [ 0.883435] usbcore: registered new interface driver libusual [ 0.883535] i8042: PNP: No PS/2 controller found. Probing ports directly. [ 0.883926] serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1 [ 0.883936] serio: i8042 AUX port at 0x60,0x64 irq 12 [ 0.884187] mousedev: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice [ 0.884433] rtc_cmos 00:03: RTC can wake from S4 [ 0.884582] rtc_cmos 00:03: rtc core: registered rtc_cmos as rtc0 [ 0.884612] rtc0: alarms up to one month, 242 bytes nvram, hpet irqs [ 0.884719] device-mapper: uevent: version 1.0.3 [ 0.884854] device-mapper: ioctl: 4.22.0-ioctl (2011-10-19) initialised: [email protected] [ 0.884917] EISA: Probing bus 0 at eisa.0 [ 0.884921] EISA: Cannot allocate resource for mainboard [ 0.884925] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 1 [ 0.884929] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 2 [ 0.884932] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 3 [ 0.884936] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 4 [ 0.884940] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 5 [ 0.884943] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 6 [ 0.884947] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 7 [ 0.884950] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 8 [ 0.884954] EISA: Detected 0 cards. [ 0.884969] cpufreq-nforce2: No nForce2 chipset. [ 0.884973] cpuidle: using governor ladder [ 0.884976] cpuidle: using governor menu [ 0.884980] EFI Variables Facility v0.08 2004-May-17 [ 0.885476] TCP cubic registered [ 0.885708] NET: Registered protocol family 10 [ 0.886771] NET: Registered protocol family 17 [ 0.886799] Registering the dns_resolver key type [ 0.886837] Using IPI No-Shortcut mode [ 0.887028] PM: Hibernation image not present or could not be loaded. [ 0.887047] registered taskstats version 1 [ 0.902579] Magic number: 12:339:388 [ 0.902592] usb usb6: hash matches [ 0.902687] rtc_cmos 00:03: setting system clock to 2012-05-11 16:23:41 UTC (1336753421) [ 0.903185] BIOS EDD facility v0.16 2004-Jun-25, 0 devices found [ 0.903189] EDD information not available. [ 1.170710] ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 1.181439] ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 1.288020] Refined TSC clocksource calibration: 2499.999 MHz. [ 1.288028] Switching to clocksource tsc [ 1.292016] usb 1-5: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci_hcd [ 1.486745] ata2.00: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 1.486762] ata2.01: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 1.640115] ata1.00: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) [ 1.640130] ata1.01: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 1.648342] ata1.00: ATA-7: Maxtor 7Y250M0, YAR511W0, max UDMA/133 [ 1.648348] ata1.00: 490234752 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 [ 1.664325] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 1.664531] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA Maxtor 7Y250M0 YAR5 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 [ 1.664745] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 490234752 512-byte logical blocks: (251 GB/233 GiB) [ 1.664809] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0 [ 1.664838] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off [ 1.664843] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 [ 1.664884] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [ 1.691699] sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 [ 1.692348] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk [ 1.692461] Freeing unused kernel memory: 740k freed [ 1.692820] Write protecting the kernel text: 5828k [ 1.692851] Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 2376k [ 1.692854] NX-protecting the kernel data: 4412k [ 1.723980] udevd[92]: starting version 175 [ 1.865339] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M [ 1.865429] pata_jmicron 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 1.865478] pata_jmicron 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 1.867875] sky2: driver version 1.30 [ 1.867926] sky2 0000:04:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 [ 1.867942] sky2 0000:04:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 1.867979] sky2 0000:04:00.0: Yukon-2 EC chip revision 2 [ 1.868111] sky2 0000:04:00.0: irq 44 for MSI/MSI-X [ 1.868174] scsi4 : pata_jmicron [ 1.869802] sky2 0000:04:00.0: eth0: addr 00:01:29:a4:16:0a [ 1.869828] scsi5 : pata_jmicron [ 1.869943] ata5: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xdf00 ctl 0xde00 bmdma 0xdb00 irq 16 [ 1.869949] ata6: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xdd00 ctl 0xdc00 bmdma 0xdb08 irq 16 [ 1.880053] usb 4-1: new full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd [ 1.884052] FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 [ 2.032611] ata5.00: ATAPI: _NEC DVD+/-RW ND-3450A, 103C, max UDMA/33 [ 2.048585] ata5.00: configured for UDMA/33 [ 2.049777] scsi 4:0:0:0: CD-ROM _NEC DVD+-RW ND-3450A 103C PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 [ 2.051048] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 48x/48x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray [ 2.051054] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20 [ 2.051283] sr 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 [ 2.051483] sr 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5 [ 2.079838] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid [ 2.079844] usbhid: USB HID core driver [ 2.236660] EXT4-fs (sda1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) [ 12.150230] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [ 12.177342] udevd[333]: starting version 175 [ 12.195524] Adding 417684k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:417684k [ 12.278032] lp: driver loaded but no devices found [ 12.516456] logitech-djreceiver 0003:046D:C52B.0003: hiddev0,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Device [Logitech USB Receiver] on usb-0000:00:1a.1-1/input2 [ 12.520297] input: Logitech Unifying Device. Wireless PID:1024 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.1/usb4/4-1/4-1:1.2/0003:046D:C52B.0003/input/input2 [ 12.520753] logitech-djdevice 0003:046D:C52B.0004: input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Logitech Unifying Device. Wireless PID:1024] on usb-0000:00:1a.1-1:1 [ 12.523286] input: Logitech Unifying Device. Wireless PID:2011 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.1/usb4/4-1/4-1:1.2/0003:046D:C52B.0003/input/input3 [ 12.524439] logitech-djdevice 0003:046D:C52B.0005: input,hidraw2: USB HID v1.11 Keyboard [Logitech Unifying Device. Wireless PID:2011] on usb-0000:00:1a.1-1:2 [ 12.545746] type=1400 audit(1336771433.137:2): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/sbin/dhclient" pid=502 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 12.546574] type=1400 audit(1336771433.137:3): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action" pid=502 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 12.547034] type=1400 audit(1336771433.137:4): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/connman/scripts/dhclient-script" pid=502 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 12.626869] Linux video capture interface: v2.00 [ 12.649104] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (046d:081a) [ 12.668665] input: UVC Camera (046d:081a) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.7/usb1/1-5/1-5:1.0/input/input4 [ 12.668909] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo [ 12.668914] USB Video Class driver (1.1.1) [ 12.697645] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 22 [ 12.697721] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: irq 45 for MSI/MSI-X [ 12.697760] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 12.706772] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel. [ 12.706778] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint [ 12.735428] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro [ 13.350252] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 13.350267] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 13.350275] vgaarb: device changed decodes: PCI:0000:01:00.0,olddecodes=io+mem,decodes=none:owns=io+mem [ 13.351464] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86 Kernel Module 295.40 Thu Apr 5 21:28:09 PDT 2012 [ 13.356785] hda_codec: ALC889A: BIOS auto-probing. [ 13.357267] init: failsafe main process (658) killed by TERM signal [ 13.372756] input: HDA Intel Line as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input5 [ 13.373173] input: HDA Intel Front Mic as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input6 [ 13.373568] input: HDA Intel Rear Mic as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input7 [ 13.373954] input: HDA Intel Front Headphone as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input8 [ 13.374339] input: HDA Intel Line-Out Side as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input9 [ 13.374715] input: HDA Intel Line-Out CLFE as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input10 [ 13.375109] input: HDA Intel Line-Out Surround as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input11 [ 13.375724] input: HDA Intel Line-Out Front as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input12 [ 13.475252] type=1400 audit(1336771434.065:5): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/sbin/dhclient" pid=735 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 13.477026] type=1400 audit(1336771434.069:6): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action" pid=735 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 13.477695] type=1400 audit(1336771434.069:7): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/lib/connman/scripts/dhclient-script" pid=735 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 13.479048] type=1400 audit(1336771434.069:8): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm/lightdm-guest-session-wrapper" pid=734 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 13.488994] type=1400 audit(1336771434.081:9): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/mission-control-5" pid=738 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 13.489972] type=1400 audit(1336771434.081:10): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/telepathy-*" pid=738 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 13.

  Read the article

• HDFC Bank's Journey to Oracle Private Database Cloud

  - by Nilesh Agrawal

  One of the key takeaways from a recent post by Sushil Kumar is the importance of business initiative that drives the transformational journey from legacy IT to enterprise private cloud. The journey that leads to a agile, self-service and efficient infrastructure with reduced complexity and enables IT to deliver services more closely aligned with business requirements. Nilanjay Bhattacharjee, AVP, IT of HDFC Bank presented a real-world case study based on one such initiative in his Oracle OpenWorld session titled "HDFC BANK Journey into Oracle Database Cloud with EM 12c DBaaS". The case study highlighted in this session is from HDFC Bank’s Lending Business Segment, which comprises roughly 50% of Bank’s top line. Bank’s Lending Business is always under pressure to launch “New Schemes” to compete and stay ahead in this segment and IT has to keep up with this challenging business requirement. Lending related applications are highly dynamic and go through constant changes and every single and minor change in each related application is required to be thoroughly UAT tested certified before they are certified for production rollout. This leads to a constant pressure in IT for rapid provisioning of UAT databases on an ongoing basis to enable faster time to market. Nilanjay joined Sushil Kumar, VP, Product Strategy, Oracle, during the Enterprise Manager general session at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Let's watch what Nilanjay had to say about their recent Database cloud deployment. “Agility” in launching new business schemes became the key business driver for private database cloud adoption in the Bank. Nilanjay spent an hour discussing it during his session. Let's look at why Database-as-a-Service(DBaaS) model was need of the hour in this case  - Average 3 days to provision UAT Database for Loan Management Application Silo’ed UAT environment with Average 30% utilization Compliance requirement consume UAT testing resources DBA activities leads to $$ paid to SI for provisioning databases manually Overhead in managing configuration drift between production and test environments Rollout impact/delay on new business initiatives The private database cloud implementation progressed through 4 fundamental phases - Standardization, Consolidation, Automation, Optimization of UAT infrastructure. Project scoping was carried out and end users and stakeholders were engaged early on right from planning phase and including all phases of implementation. Standardization and Consolidation phase involved multiple iterations of planning to first standardize on infrastructure, db versions, patch levels, configuration, IT processes etc and with database level consolidation project onto Exadata platform. It was also decided to have existing AIX UAT DB landscape covered and EM 12c DBaaS solution being platform agnostic supported this model well. Automation and Optimization phase provided the necessary Agility, Self-Service and efficiency and this was made possible via EM 12c DBaaS. EM 12c DBaaS Self-Service/SSA Portal was setup with required zones, quotas, service templates, charge plan defined. There were 2 zones implemented - Exadata zone  primarily for UAT and benchmark testing for databases running on Exadata platform and second zone was for AIX setup to cover other databases those running on AIX. Metering and Chargeback/Showback capabilities provided business and IT the framework for cloud optimization and also visibility into cloud usage. More details on UAT cloud implementation, related building blocks and EM 12c DBaaS solution are covered in Nilanjay's OpenWorld session here. Some of the key Benefits achieved from UAT cloud initiative are - New business initiatives can be easily launched due to rapid provisioning of UAT Databases [ ~3 hours ] Drastically cut down $$ on SI for DBA Activities due to Self-Service Effective usage of infrastructure leading to  better ROI Empowering  consumers to provision database using Self-Service Control on project schedule with DB end date aligned to project plan submitted during provisioning Databases provisioned through Self-Service are monitored in EM and auto configured for Alerts and KPI Regulatory requirement of database does not impact existing project in queue This table below shows typical list of activities and tasks involved when a end user requests for a UAT database. EM 12c DBaaS solution helped reduce UAT database provisioning time from roughly 3 days down to 3 hours and this timing also includes provisioning time for database with production scale data (ranging from 250 G to 2 TB of data) - And it's not just about time to provision,  this initiative has enabled an agile, efficient and transparent UAT environment where end users are empowered with real control of cloud resources and IT's role is shifted as enabler of strategic services instead of being administrator of all user requests. The strong collaboration between IT and business community right from planning to implementation to go-live has played the key role in achieving this common goal of enterprise private cloud. Finally, real cloud is here and this cloud is accompanied with rain (business benefits) as well ! For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

  Read the article

• Cloud Computing Architecture Patterns: Don’t Focus on the Client

  - by BuckWoody

  Normally I try to put topics in the positive in other words "Do this" not "Don't do that". Sometimes its clearer to focus on what *not* to do. Popular development processes often start with screen mockups, or user input descriptions. In a scale-out pattern like Cloud Computing on Windows Azure, that's the wrong place to start. Start with the Data    Instead, I recommend that you start with the data that a process requires. That data might be temporary or persisted, but starting with the data and its requirements helps to define not only the storage engine you need but also drives everything from security to the integrity of the application. For instance, assume the requirements show that the user must enter their phone number, and that this datum is used in a contact management system further down the application chain. For that datum, you can determine what data type you need (U.S. only or International?) the security requirements, whether it needs ACID compliance, how it will be searched, indexed and so on. From one small data point you can extrapolate out your options for storing and processing the data. Here's the interesting part, which begins to break the patterns that we've used for decades: all of the data doesn't have the same requirements. The phone number might be best suited for a list, or an element, or a string, with either BASE or ACID requirements, based on how it is used. That means we don't have to dump everything into XML, an RDBMS, a NoSQL engine, or a flat file exclusively. In fact, one record might use all of those depending on the use-case requirements. Next Is Data Management  With the data defined, we can move on to how to store the data. Again, the requirements now dictate whether we need a full relational calculus or set-based operations, or we can choose another method based on the requirements for the data. And breaking another pattern its OK to store in more than once, in more than one location. We do this all the time for reporting systems and Business Intelligence systems, so this is a pattern we need to think about even for OLTP data. Move to Data Transport How does the data get around? We can use a connection-based method, sending the data along a transport to the storage engine, but in some cases we may want to use a cache, a queue, the Service Bus, or Complex Event Processing. Finally, Data Processing Most RDBMS engines, NoSQL, and certainly Big Data engines not only store data, but can process and manipulate it as well. Its doubtful that you'll calculate that phone number right? Well, if you're the phone company, you most certainly will. And so we see that even once we've chosen the data type, storage and engine, the same element can have different computing requirements based on how it is used. Sure, We Need A Front-End At Some Point Not all data is entered by human hands in fact most data isn't. We don't really need a Graphical User Interface (GUI) we need some way for a GUI to get data into and out of the systems listed earlier.   But when we do need to allow users to enter or examine data, that should be left to the GUI that best fits the device the user has. Ever tried to use an application designed for a web browser on a phone? Or one designed for a tablet on a phone? Its usually quite painful. The siren song of "We'll just write one interface for all devices" is strong, and has beguiled many an unsuspecting architect. But they just don't work out.   Instead, focus on the data, its transport and processing. Create API calls or a message system that allows for resilient transport to the device or interface, and let it do what it does best. References Microsoft Architecture Journal:   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410935.aspx Patterns and Practices:   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921345.aspx Windows Azure iOS, Android, Windows 8 Mobile Devices SDK: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/tutorials/get-started-ios/ Windows Azure Facebook SDK: http://ntotten.com/2013/03/14/using-windows-azure-mobile-services-with-the-facebook-sdk-for-windows-phone/

  Read the article

• Profit's COLLABORATE 10 Session Selections

  - by Aaron Lazenby

  COLLABORATE 2010 is a mere 11 days away (thanks for the reminder @ocp_advisor). Every year I publish my a list of the sessions I think reflect some of the more interesting people/trends in enterprise IT. I should be at all of these sessions, so drop by for a chat--I'll be the guy tapping out emails on my iPad... Monday, April 19 9:15 a.m. - Keynote: Transforming Customer Value, Delivering Highest Customer Service Location: Keynote Hall I never miss Charles Phillips when he speaks--it's one of the best opportunities to get an update on Oracle product developments and strategy. And there's certainly occasion for an update: this will be Phillips' first big presentation since the Oracle + Sun Strategy Update in late January. Phillips is appearing with Oracle Executive Vice President of Development Thomas Kurian which means there should be some excellent information about how customers are using Oracle's complete software and hardware stack to address enterprise IT challenges. The session should provide some excellent context for the rest of the week's session...don't miss it. 10:45 a.m. - Oracle Fusion Applications: Functional Overview Location: South Seas FI met Basheer Khan at COLLABORATE 08 in Denver and have followed his work ever since. He's a former member of the OAUG Board of Directors, an Oracle ACE, and a charismatic enterprise IT expert. Having worked with the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, Basheer should have some fascinating insights to share about the features and interface of Oracle's Fusine Applications. This session, along with Nadia Bendjedou's "10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for the Next Generation Applications" (on Tuesday, April 20 8:00 a.m. in room 3662) should give attendees the update they need about Oracle's next-generation applications.   1:15p.m. - E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud Location: South Seas HI did my first full-fledged cloud computing coverage at last year's COLLABORATE show (check out my interview with Oracle's Bill Hodak), where I first learned about Amazon's EC2 offering. I've since talked with several people who have provisioned server space on Amazon's cloud with great results. So I'm looking forward to watching the audience configure an instance of the Oracle E-Business Suite release 12 on the cloud while Chuck Edwards from Blue Gecko drives. This session should take some of the mist and vapor out of the cloud conversation.2:30 p.m. - "Zero Sign-on" to EBS - Enabling 96000 Users to Login to EBS Without User Maintenance Location: South Seas HI'll be sitting tight in South Seas H for the next session on Monday where Doug Pepka, a ten-year veteran of communications giant Comcast, will be walking attendees through a massive single sign-on (SSO) project across the enterprise. I'm working on a story about SSO for the August issue of Profit, so this session has real practical value to me. Plus the proliferation of user account logins--both personal and professional--makes this a critical usability/change management issue for IT leaders planning for successful long-term IT implementations.   Tuesday 8:00 am  - Information Architecture for Men in Kilts Location: SURF AGetting to a 8:00 a.m. presentation is a tall order in Las Vegas, but presenter Billy Cripe will make it worth your effort. Not only is the title of this session great, but the content should appeal to any IT strategist looking to push the limits of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Cripe is a product management director of Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Content Management at Oracle, author of Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0, and a prolific blogger--he knows how information architecture is critical to and enterprise 2.0 implementation.    10:30a.m. - Oracle Virtualization: From Desktop to Data Center Location: REEF FData center virtualization is still one of the best ways to reduce the cost of running enterprise IT. With the addition of Sun products, Oracle has the industry's most comprehensive virtualization portfolio. I must admit, I'm no expert in this subject. So I'm looking forward to Monica Kumar's presentation so I can get up to speed.   Wednesday 8:00 a.m. - The Art of the Steal Location: Mandalay Bay Ballroom JMany will know Frank Abagnale from Steven Spielberg's 2002 film "Catch Me if You Can." The one-time con man and international fugitive who swindled $2.5 million in forged checks went on to help U.S. federal officials investigate fraud cases. Now the CEO of Abagnale and Associates, he has become an invaluable source to the business world on the subject of fraud and fraud protection. With identity theft and digital fraud still on the rise, this session should be an entertaining, and sobering, education on the threats facing businesses and customers around the world. A great way to start Wednesday.1:00 p.m. - Google Wave: Will it replace e-mail as we know it today? Location: SURF EBy many assessments (my own included), Google Wave is a bit of an open collaboration failure. It may seem like an odd reason for me to be excited about this session, but I'm looking forward to the chance to revisit the technology. Also, this is a great case study in connecting free, available Internet tools to existing enterprise computing environments--an issue that IT strategists must contend with as workers spreads out and choose their own productivity tools.  

  Read the article

• DVD not detected?

  - by Benjamin

  As i insert a DVD in my drive (on a laptop) using Kubuntu 12.04, the DVD is not detected. The drive takes the DVD, I can hear it munching on it for a while, and then nothing. Even ejecting the DVD becomes a hassle, I need to do that at boot time otherwise the OS won't allow me to eject. Kubuntu 12.04 used to read and mount the same DVDs just fine a week ago. Edit: since I am able to boot from CD, can I safely assume the issue is not a hardware issue? How can I fix this? wodim --devices returns: wodim: Overview of accessible drives (1 found) : ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0 dev='/dev/sg1' rwrw-- : 'Optiarc' 'DVD+-RW AD-7640A' ------------------------------------------------------------------------- sudo lshw -class disk returns: *-cdrom description: DVD-RAM writer product: DVD+-RW AD-7640A vendor: Optiarc physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@3:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/cdrom2 logical name: /dev/cdrw2 logical name: /dev/dvd2 logical name: /dev/dvdrw2 logical name: /dev/sr0 version: JD06 capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram configuration: ansiversion=5 status=open lspci returns: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary) (rev 0c) 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (secondary) (rev 0c) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03) 00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03) 00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03) 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03) 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 03) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03) 06:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01) 07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02) 08:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): O2 Micro, Inc. Firewire (IEEE 1394) (rev 02) 08:05.2 SD Host controller: O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MMC/SD Controller (rev 02) 08:05.3 Mass storage controller: O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MS/xD Controller (rev 01) and lsusb: Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0c45:63e0 Microdia Sonix Integrated Webcam Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0483:2016 SGS Thomson Microelectronics Fingerprint Reader The /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf contains: # This file lists those modules which we don't want to be loaded by # alias expansion, usually so some other driver will be loaded for the # device instead. # evbug is a debug tool that should be loaded explicitly blacklist evbug # these drivers are very simple, the HID drivers are usually preferred blacklist usbmouse blacklist usbkbd # replaced by e100 blacklist eepro100 # replaced by tulip blacklist de4x5 # causes no end of confusion by creating unexpected network interfaces blacklist eth1394 # snd_intel8x0m can interfere with snd_intel8x0, doesn't seem to support much # hardware on its own (Ubuntu bug #2011, #6810) blacklist snd_intel8x0m # Conflicts with dvb driver (which is better for handling this device) blacklist snd_aw2 # causes failure to suspend on HP compaq nc6000 (Ubuntu: #10306) blacklist i2c_i801 # replaced by p54pci blacklist prism54 # replaced by b43 and ssb. blacklist bcm43xx # most apps now use garmin usb driver directly (Ubuntu: #114565) blacklist garmin_gps # replaced by asus-laptop (Ubuntu: #184721) blacklist asus_acpi # low-quality, just noise when being used for sound playback, causes # hangs at desktop session start (Ubuntu: #246969) blacklist snd_pcsp # ugly and loud noise, getting on everyone's nerves; this should be done by a # nice pulseaudio bing (Ubuntu: #77010) blacklist pcspkr # EDAC driver for amd76x clashes with the agp driver preventing the aperture # from being initialised (Ubuntu: #297750). Blacklist so that the driver # continues to build and is installable for the few cases where its # really needed. blacklist amd76x_edac

  Read the article

• Why is my external USB hard drive sometimes completely inaccessible?

  - by Eliah Kagan

  I have an external USB hard drive, consisting of an 1 TB SATA drive in a Rosewill RX35-AT-SU SLV Aluminum 3.5" Silver USB 2.0 External Enclosure, plugged into my SONY VAIO VGN-NS310F laptop. It is plugged directly into the computer (not through a hub). The drive inside the enclosure is a 7200 rpm Western Digital, but I don't remember the exact model. I can remove the drive from the enclosure (again), if people think it's necessary to know that detail. The drive is formatted ext4. I mount it dynamically with udisks on my Lubuntu 11.10 system, usually automatically via PCManFM. (I have had Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine, and experienced all this same behavior with that too.) Every once in a while--once or twice a day--it becomes inaccessible, and difficult to unmount. Attempting to unmount it with sudo umount ... gives an error message saying the drive is in use and suggesting fuser and lsof to find out what is using it. Killing processes found to be using the drive with fuser and lsof is sometimes sufficient to let me unmount it, but usually isn't. Once the drive is unmounted or the machine is rebooted, the drive will not mount. Plugging in the drive and turning it on registers nothing on the computer. dmesg is unchanged. The drive's access light usually blinks vigorously, as though the drive is being accessed constantly. Then eventually, after I keep the drive off for a while (half an hour), I am able to mount it again. While the drive doesn't work on this machine for a while, it will work immediately on another machine running the same version of Ubuntu. Sometimes bringing it back over from the other machine seems to "fix" it. Sometimes it doesn't. The drive doesn't always stop being accessible while mounted, before becoming unmountable. Sometimes it works fine, I turn off the computer, I turn the computer back on, and I cannot mount the drive. Currently this is the only drive with which I have this problem, but I've had problems that I think are the same as this, with different drives, on different Ubuntu machines. This laptop has another external USB drive plugged into it regularly, which doesn't have this problem. Unplugging that drive before plugging in the "problem" drive doesn't fix the problem. I've opened the drive up and made sure the connections were tight in the past, and that didn't seem to help (any more than waiting the same amount of time that it took to open and close the drive, before attempting to remount it). Does anyone have any ideas about what could be causing this, what troubleshooting steps I should perform, and/or how I could fix this problem altogether? Update: I tried replacing the USB data cable (from the enclosure to the laptop), as Merlin suggested. I should've tried that long ago, since it fits the symptoms perfectly (the drive works on another machine, which would make sense because the cable would be bent at a different angle, possibly completing a circuit of frayed wires). Unfortunately, though, this did not help--I have the same problem with the new cable. I'll try to provide additional detailed information about the drive inside the enclosure, next time I'm able to get the drive working. (At the moment I don't have another machine available to attach it.) Major Update (28 June 2012) The drive seems to have deteriorated considerably. I think this is so, because I've attached it to another machine and gotten lots of errors about invalid characters, when copying files from it. I am less interested in recovering data from the drive than I am in figuring out what is wrong with it. I specifically want to figure out if the problem is the drive or the enclosure. Now, when I plug the drive into the original machine where I was having the problems, it still doesn't appear (including with sudo fdisk -l), but it is recognized by the kernel and messages are added to dmesg. Most of the message consist of errors like this, repeated many times: [ 7.707593] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled sense code [ 7.707599] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=invalid driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [ 7.707606] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [ 7.707614] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error [ 7.707621] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 [ 7.707636] end_request: critical target error, dev sdc, sector 0 [ 7.707641] Buffer I/O error on device sdc, logical block 0 Here are all the lines from dmesg starting with when the drive is recognized. Please note that: I'm back to running Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine (and perhaps that's a factor in better error messages). Now that the drive has been plugged into another machine and back into this one, and also now that this machine is back to running 12.04, the drive's access light doesn't blink as I had described. Looking at the drive, it would appear as though it is working normally, with low or no access. This behavior (the errors) occurs when rebooting the machine with the drive plugged in, and also when manually plugging in the drive. A few of the messages are about /dev/sdb. That drive is working fine. The bad drive is /dev/sdc. I just didn't want to edit anything out from the middle.

  Read the article

• T-SQL Tuesday #21 - Crap!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Adam Machanic's (blog | twitter) ever popular T-SQL Tuesday series is being held on Wednesday this time, and the topic is… SHIT CRAP. No, not fecal material.  But crap code.  Crap SQL.  Crap ideas that you thought were good at the time, or were forced to do due (doo-doo?) to lack of time. The challenge for me is to look back on my SQL Server career and find something that WASN'T crap.  Well, there's a lot that wasn't, but for some reason I don't remember those that well.  So the additional challenge is to pick one particular turd that I really wish I hadn't squeezed out.  Let's see if this outline fits the bill: An ETL process on text files; That had to interface between SQL Server and an AS/400 system; That didn't use SSIS (should have) or BizTalk (ummm, no) but command-line scripting, using Unix utilities(!) via: xp_cmdshell; That had to email reports and financial data, some of it sensitive Yep, the stench smell is coming back to me now, as if it was yesterday… As to why SSIS and BizTalk were not options, basically I didn't know either of them well enough to get the job done (and I still don't).  I also had a strict deadline of 3 days, in addition to all the other responsibilities I had, so no time to learn them.  And seeing how screwed up the rest of the process was: Payment files from multiple vendors in multiple formats; Sent via FTP, PGP encrypted email, or some other wizardry; Manually opened/downloaded and saved to a particular set of folders (couldn't change this); Once processed, had to be placed BACK in the same folders with the original archived; x2 divisions that had to run separately; Plus an additional vendor file in another format on a completely different schedule; So that they could be MANUALLY uploaded into the AS/400 system (couldn't change this either, even if it was technically possible) I didn't feel so bad about the solution I came up with, which was naturally: Copy the payment files to the local SQL Server drives, using xp_cmdshell Run batch files (via xp_cmdshell) to parse the different formats using sed, a Unix utility (this was before Powershell) Use other Unix utilities (join, split, grep, wc) to process parsed files and generate metadata (size, date, checksum, line count) Run sqlcmd to execute a stored procedure that passed the parsed file names so it would bulk load the data to do a comparison bcp the compared data out to ANOTHER text file so that I could grep that data out of the original file Run another stored procedure to import the matched data into SQL Server so it could process the payments, including file metadata Process payment batches and log which division and vendor they belong to Email the payment details to the finance group (since it was too hard for them to run a web report with the same data…which they ran anyway to compare the emailed file against…which always matched, surprisingly) Email another report showing unmatched payments so they could manually void them…about 3 months afterward All in "Excel" format, using xp_sendmail (SQL 2000 system) Copy the unmatched data back to the original folder locations, making sure to match the file format exactly (if you've ever worked with ACH files, you'll understand why this sucked) If you're one of the 10 people who have read my blog before, you know that I love the DOS "for" command.  Like passionately.  Like fairy-tale love.  So my batch files were riddled with for loops, nested within other for loops, that called other batch files containing for loops.  I think there was one section that had 4 or 5 nested for commands.  It was wrong, disturbed, and completely un-maintainable by anyone, even myself.  Months, even a year, after I left the company I got calls from someone who had to make a minor change to it, and they called me to talk them out of spraying the office with an AK-47 after looking at this code.  (for you Star Trek TOS fans) The funniest part of this, well, one of the funniest, is that I made the deadline…sort of, I was only a day late…and the DAMN THING WORKED practically unchanged for 3 years.  Most of the problems came from the manual parts of the overall process, like forgetting to decrypt the files, or missing/late files, or saved to the wrong folders.  I'm definitely not trying to toot my own horn here, because this was truly one of the dumbest, crappiest solutions I ever came up with.  Fortunately as far as I know it's no longer in use and someone has written a proper replacement.  Today I would knuckle down and do it in SSIS or Powershell, even if it took me weeks to get it right. The real lesson from this crap code is to make things MAINTAINABLE and UNDERSTANDABLE.  sed scripting regular expressions doesn't fit that criteria in any way.  If you ever find yourself under pressure to do something fast at all costs, DON'T DO IT.  Stop and consider long-term maintainability, not just for yourself but for others on your team.  If you can't explain the basic approach in under 5 minutes, it ultimately won't succeed.  And while you may love to leave all that crap behind, it may follow you anyway, and you'll step in it again.   P.S. - if you're wondering about all the manual stuff that couldn't be changed, it was because the entire process had gone through Six Sigma, and was deemed the best possible way.  Phew!  Talk about stink!

  Read the article

• College Courses through distance learning

  - by Matt

  I realize this isn't really a programming question, but didn't really know where to post this in the stackexchange and because I am a computer science major i thought id ask here. This is pretty unique to the programmer community since my degree is about 95% programming. I have 1 semester left, but i work full time. I would like to finish up in December, but to make things easier i like to take online classes whenever I can. So, my question is does anyone know of any colleges that offer distance learning courses for computer science? I have been searching around and found a few potential classes, but not sure yet. I would like to gather some classes and see what i can get approval for. Class I need: Only need one C SC 437 Geometric Algorithms C SC 445 Algorithms C SC 473 Automata Only need one C SC 452 Operating Systems C SC 453 Compilers/Systems Software While i only need of each of the above courses i still need to take two more electives. These also have to be upper 400 level classes. So i can take multiple in each category. Some other classes I can take are: CSC 447 - Green Computing CSC 425 - Computer Networking CSC 460 - Database Design CSC 466 - Computer Security I hoping to take one or two of these courses over the summer. If not, then online over the regular semester would be ok too. Any help in helping find these classes would be awesome. Maybe you went to a college that offered distance learning. Some of these classes may be considered to be graduate courses too. Descriptions are listed below if you need. Thanks! Descriptions Computer Security This is an introductory course covering the fundamentals of computer security. In particular, the course will cover basic concepts of computer security such as threat models and security policies, and will show how these concepts apply to specific areas such as communication security, software security, operating systems security, network security, web security, and hardware-based security. Computer Networking Theory and practice of computer networks, emphasizing the principles underlying the design of network software and the role of the communications system in distributed computing. Topics include routing, flow and congestion control, end-to-end protocols, and multicast. Database Design Functions of a database system. Data modeling and logical database design. Query languages and query optimization. Efficient data storage and access. Database access through standalone and web applications. Green Computing This course covers fundamental principles of energy management faced by designers of hardware, operating systems, and data centers. We will explore basic energy management option in individual components such as CPUs, network interfaces, hard drives, memory. We will further present the energy management policies at the operating system level that consider performance vs. energy saving tradeoffs. Finally we will consider large scale data centers where energy management is done at multiple layers from individual components in the system to shutting down entries subset of machines. We will also discuss energy generation and delivery and well as cooling issues in large data centers. Compilers/Systems Software Basic concepts of compilation and related systems software. Topics include lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation; assemblers, loaders, linkers; debuggers. Operating Systems Concepts of modern operating systems; concurrent processes; process synchronization and communication; resource allocation; kernels; deadlock; memory management; file systems. Algorithms Introduction to the design and analysis of algorithms: basic analysis techniques (asymptotics, sums, recurrences); basic design techniques (divide and conquer, dynamic programming, greedy, amortization); acquiring an algorithm repertoire (sorting, median finding, strong components, spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum flow, string matching); and handling intractability (approximation algorithms, branch and bound). Automata Introduction to models of computation (finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines), representations of languages (regular expressions, context-free grammars), and the basic hierarchy of languages (regular, context-free, decidable, and undecidable languages). Geometric Algorithms The study of algorithms for geometric objects, using a computational geometry approach, with an emphasis on applications for graphics, VLSI, GIS, robotics, and sensor networks. Topics may include the representation and overlaying of maps, finding nearest neighbors, solving linear programming problems, and searching geometric databases.

  Read the article

• Inside Red Gate - Project teams

  - by Simon Cooper

  Within each division in Red Gate, development effort is structured around one or more project teams; currently, each division contains 2-3 separate teams. These are self contained units responsible for a particular development project. Project team structure The typical size of a development team varies, but is normally around 4-7 people - one project manager, two developers, one or two testers, a technical author (who is responsible for the text within the application, website content, and help documentation) and a user experience designer (who designs and prototypes the UIs) . However, team sizes can vary from 3 up to 12, depending on the division and project. As an rule, all the team sits together in the same area of the office. (Again, this is my experience of what happens. I haven't worked in the DBA division, and SQL Tools might have changed completely since I moved to .NET. As I mentioned in my previous post, each division is free to structure itself as it sees fit.) Depending on the project, and the other needs in the division, the tech author and UX designer may be shared between several projects. Generally, developers and testers work on one project at a time. If the project is a simple point release, then it might not need a UX designer at all. However, if it's a brand new product, then a UX designer and tech author will be involved right from the start. Developers, testers, and the project manager will normally stay together in the same team as they work on different projects, unless there's a good reason to split or merge teams for a particular project. Technical authors and UX designers will normally go wherever they are needed in the division, depending on what each project needs at the time. In my case, I was working with more or less the same people for over 2 years, all the way through SQL Compare 7, 8, and Schema Compare for Oracle. This helped to build a great sense of camaraderie wihin the team, and helped to form and maintain a team identity. This, in turn, meant we worked very well together, and so the final result was that much better (as well as making the work more fun). How is a project started and run? The product manager within each division collates user feedback and ideas, does lots of research, throws in a few ideas from people within the company, and then comes up with a list of what the division should work on in the next few years. This is split up into projects, and after each project is greenlit (I'll be discussing this later on) it is then assigned to a project team, as and when they become available (I'm sure there's lots of discussions and meetings at this point that I'm not aware of!). From that point, it's entirely up to the project team. Just as divisions are autonomous, project teams are also given a high degree of autonomy. All the teams in Red Gate use some sort of vaguely agile methodology; most use some variations on SCRUM, some have experimented with Kanban. Some store the project progress on a whiteboard, some use our bug tracker, others use different methods. It all depends on what the team members think will work best for them to get the best result at the end. From that point, the project proceeds as you would expect; code gets written, tests pass and fail, discussions about how to resolve various problems are had and decided upon, and out pops a new product, new point release, new internal tool, or whatever the project's goal was. The project manager ensures that everyone works together without too much bloodshed and that thrown missiles are constrained to Nerf bullets, the developers write the code, the testers ensure it actually works, and the tech author and UX designer ensure that people will be able to use the final product to solve their problem (after all, developers make lousy UI designers and technical authors). Projects in Red Gate last a relatively short amount of time; most projects are less than 6 months. The longest was 18 months. This has evolved as the company has grown, and I suspect is a side effect of the type of software Red Gate produces. As an ISV, we sell packaged software; we only get revenue when customers purchase the ready-made tools. As a result, we only get a sellable piece of software right at the end of a project. Therefore, the longer the project lasts, the more time and money has to be invested by the company before we get any revenue from it, and the riskier the project becomes. This drives the average project time down. Small project teams are the core of how Red Gate produces software, and are what the whole development effort of the company is built around. In my next post, I'll be looking at the office itself, and how all 200 of us manage to fit on two floors of a small office building.

  Read the article

• Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

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

  Read the article

• Problems with opening CHM Help files from Network or Internet

  - by Rick Strahl

  As a publisher of a Help Creation tool called Html Help Help Builder, I’ve seen a lot of problems with help files that won't properly display actual topic content and displays an error message for topics instead. Here’s the scenario: You go ahead and happily build your fancy, schmanzy Help File for your application and deploy it to your customer. Or alternately you've created a help file and you let your customers download them off the Internet directly or in a zip file. The customer downloads the file, opens the zip file and copies the help file contained in the zip file to disk. She then opens the help file and finds the following unfortunate result:     The help file  comes up with all topics in the tree on the left, but a Navigation to the WebPage was cancelled or Operation Aborted error in the Help Viewer's content window whenever you try to open a topic. The CHM file obviously opened since the topic list is there, but the Help Viewer refuses to display the content. Looks like a broken help file, right? But it's not - it's merely a Windows security 'feature' that tries to be overly helpful in protecting you. The reason this happens is because files downloaded off the Internet - including ZIP files and CHM files contained in those zip files - are marked as as coming from the Internet and so can potentially be malicious, so do not get browsing rights on the local machine – they can’t access local Web content, which is exactly what help topics are. If you look at the URL of a help topic you see something like this:   mk:@MSITStore:C:\wwapps\wwIPStuff\wwipstuff.chm::/indexpage.htm which points at a special Microsoft Url Moniker that in turn points the CHM file and a relative path within that HTML help file. Try pasting a URL like this into Internet Explorer and you'll see the help topic pop up in your browser (along with a warning most likely). Although the URL looks weird this still equates to a call to the local computer zone, the same as if you had navigated to a local file in IE which by default is not allowed.  Unfortunately, unlike Internet Explorer where you have the option of clicking a security toolbar, the CHM viewer simply refuses to load the page and you get an error page as shown above. How to Fix This - Unblock the Help File There's a workaround that lets you explicitly 'unblock' a CHM help file. To do this: Open Windows Explorer Find your CHM file Right click and select Properties Click the Unblock button on the General tab Here's what the dialog looks like:   Clicking the Unblock button basically, tells Windows that you approve this Help File and allows topics to be viewed.   Is this insecure? Not unless you're running a really old Version of Windows (XP pre-SP1). In recent versions of Windows Internet Explorer pops up various security dialogs or fires script errors when potentially malicious operations are accessed (like loading Active Controls), so it's relatively safe to run local content in the CHM viewer. Since most help files don't contain script or only load script that runs pure JavaScript access web resources this works fine without issues. How to avoid this Problem As an application developer there's a simple solution around this problem: Always install your Help Files with an Installer. The above security warning pop up because Windows can't validate the source of the CHM file. However, if the help file is installed as part of an installation the installation and all files associated with that installation including the help file are trusted. A fully installed Help File of an application works just fine because it is trusted by Windows. Summary It's annoying as all hell that this sort of obtrusive marking is necessary, but it's admittedly a necessary evil because of Microsoft's use of the insecure Internet Explorer engine that drives the CHM Html Engine's topic viewer. Because help files are viewing local content and script is allowed to execute in CHM files there's potential for malicious code hiding in CHM files and the above precautions are supposed to avoid any issues. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012 Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

  Read the article

• Interview with Geoff Bones, developer on SQL Storage Compress

  - by red(at)work

  How did you come to be working at Red Gate? I've been working at Red Gate for nine months; before that I had been at a multinational engineering company. A number of my colleagues had left to work at Red Gate and spoke very highly of it, but I was happy in my role and thought, 'It can't be that great there, surely? They'll be back!' Then one day I visited to catch up them over lunch in the Red Gate canteen. I was so impressed with what I found there, that, three days later, I'd applied for a role as a developer. And how did you get into software development? My first job out of university was working as a systems programmer on IBM mainframes. This was quite a while ago: there was a lot of assembler and loading programs from tape drives and that kind of stuff. I learned a lot about how computers work, and this stood me in good stead when I moved over the development in the 90s. What's the best thing about working as a developer at Red Gate? Where should I start? One of the great things as a developer at Red Gate is the useful feedback and close contact we have with the people who use our products, either directly at trade shows and other events or through information coming through the product managers. The company's whole ethos is built around assisting the user, and this is in big contrast to my previous development roles. We aim to produce tools that people really want to use, that they enjoy using, and, as a developer, this is a great thing to aim for and a great feeling when we get it right. At Red Gate we also try to cut out the things that distract and stop us doing our jobs. As a developer, this means that I can focus on the code and the product I'm working on, knowing that others are doing a first-class job of making sure that the builds are running smoothly and that I'm getting great feedback from the testers. We keep our process light and effective, as we want to produce great software more than we want to produce great audit trails. Tell us a bit about the products you are currently working on. You mean HyperBac? First let me explain a bit about what HyperBac is. At heart it's a compression and encryption technology, but with a few added features that open up a wealth of really exciting possibilities. Right now we have the HyperBac technology in just three products: SQL HyperBac, SQL Virtual Restore and SQL Storage Compress, but we're only starting to develop what it can do. My personal favourite is SQL Virtual Restore; for example, I love the way you can use it to run independent test databases that are all backed by a single compressed backup. I don't think the market yet realises the kind of things you do once you are using these products. On the other hand, the benefits of SQL Storage Compress are straightforward: run your databases but use only 20% of the disk space. Databases are getting larger and larger, and, as they do, so does your ROI. What's a typical day for you? My days are pretty varied. We have our daily team stand-up meeting and then sometimes I will work alone on a current issue, or I'll be pair programming with one of my colleagues. From time to time we give half a day up to future planning with the team, when we look at the long and short term aims for the product and working out the development priorities. I also get to go to conferences and events, which is unusual for a development role and gives me the chance to meet and talk to our customers directly. Have you noticed anything different about developing tools for DBAs rather than other IT kinds of user? It seems to me that DBAs are quite independent minded; they know exactly what the problem they are facing is, and often have a solution in mind before they begin to look for what's on the market. This means that they're likely to cherry-pick tools from a range of vendors, picking the ones that are the best fit for them and that disrupt their environments the least. When I've met with DBAs, I've often been very impressed at their ability to summarise their set up, the issues, the obstacles they face when implementing a tool and their plans for their environment. It's easier to develop products for this audience as they give such a detailed overview of their needs, and I feel I understand their problems.

  Read the article

• Declarative Architectures in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

  - by BuckWoody

  I deal with computing architectures by first laying out requirements, and then laying in any constraints for it's success. Only then do I bring in computing elements to apply to the system. As an example, a requirement might be "world-side availability" and a constraint might be "with less than 80ms response time and full HA" or something similar. Then I can choose from the best fit of technologies which range from full-up on-premises computing to IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. I also deal in abstraction layers - on-premises systems are fully under your control, in IaaS the hardware is abstracted (but not the OS, scale, runtimes and so on), in PaaS the hardware and the OS is abstracted and you focus on code and data only, and in SaaS everything is abstracted - you merely purchase the function you want (like an e-mail server or some such) and simply use it. When you think about solutions this way, the architecture moves to the primary factor in your decision. It's problem-first architecting, and then laying in whatever technology or vendor best fixes the problem. To that end, most architects design a solution using a graphical tool (I use Visio) and then creating documents that  let the rest of the team (and business) know what is required. It's the template, or recipe, for the solution. This is extremely easy to do for SaaS - you merely point out what the needs are, research the vendor and present the findings (and bill) to the business. IT might not even be involved there. In PaaS it's not much more complicated - you use the same Application Lifecycle Management and design tools you always have for code, such as Visual Studio or some other process and toolset, and you can "stamp out" the application in multiple locations, update it and so on. IaaS is another story. Here you have multiple machines, operating systems, patches, virus scanning, run-times, scale-patterns and tools and much more that you have to deal with, since essentially it's just an in-house system being hosted by someone else. You can certainly automate builds of servers - we do this as technical professionals every day. From Windows to Linux, it's simple enough to create a "build script" that makes a system just like the one we made yesterday. What is more problematic is being able to tie those systems together in a coherent way (as a solution) and then stamp that out repeatedly, especially when you might want to deploy that solution on-premises, or in one cloud vendor or another. Lately I've been working with a company called RightScale that does exactly this. I'll point you to their site for more info, but the general idea is that you document out your intent for a set of servers, and it will deploy them to on-premises clouds, Windows Azure, and other cloud providers all from the same script. In other words, it doesn't contain the images or anything like that - it contains the scripts to build them on-premises or on a cloud vendor like Microsoft. Using a tool like this, you combine the steps of designing a system (all the way down to passwords and accounts if you wish) and then the document drives the distribution and implementation of that intent. As time goes on and more and more companies implement solutions on various providers (perhaps for HA and DR) then this becomes a compelling investigation. The RightScale information is here, if you want to investigate it further. Yes, there are other methods I've found, but most are tied to a single kind of cloud, and I'm not into vendor lock-in. Poppa Bear Level - Hands-on EvaluateRightScale at no cost.  Just bring your Windows Azurecredentials and follow the these tutorials: Sign Up for Windows Azure Add     Windows Azure to a RightScale Account Windows Azure Virtual Machines     3-tier Deployment Momma Bear Level - Just the Right level... ;0)  WindowsAzure Evaluation Guide - if you are new toWindows Azure Virtual Machines and new to RightScale, we recommend that youread the entire evaluation guide to gain a more complete understanding of theWindows Azure + RightScale solution.    WindowsAzure Support Page @ support.rightscale.com - FAQ's, tutorials,etc. for  Windows Azure Virtual Machines (Work in Progress) Baby Bear Level - Marketing WindowsAzure Page @ www.rightscale.com - find overview informationincluding solution briefs and presentation & demonstration videos   Scale     and Automate Applications on Windows Azure  Solution Brief     - how RightScale makes Windows Azure Virtual Machine even better SQL     Server on Windows Azure  Solution Brief   -       Run Highly Available SQL Server on Windows Azure Virtual Machines

  Read the article

• Oracle RightNow CX for Good Customer Experiences

  - by Andreea Vaduva

  Oracle RightNow CX is all about the customer experience, it’s about understanding what drives a good interaction and it’s about delivering a solution which works for our customers and by extension, their customers. One of the early guiding principles of Oracle RightNow was an 8-point strategy to providing good customer experiences. Establish a knowledge foundation Empowering the customer Empower employees Offer multi-channel choice Listen to the customer Design seamless experiences Engage proactively Measure and improve continuously The application suite provides all of the tools necessary to deliver a rewarding, repeatable and measurable relationship between business and customer. The Knowledge Authoring tool provides gap analysis, WYSIWIG editing (and includes HTML rich content for non-developers), multi-level categorisation, permission based publishing and Web self-service publishing. Oracle RightNow Customer Portal, is a complete web application framework that enables businesses to control their own end-user page branding experience, which in turn will allow customers to self-serve. The Contact Centre Experience Designer builds a combination of workspaces, agent scripting and guided assistances into a Desktop Workflow. These present an agent with the tools they need, at the time they need them, providing even the newest and least experienced advisors with consistently accurate and efficient information, whilst guiding them through the complexities of internal business processes. Oracle RightNow provides access points for customers to feedback about specific knowledge articles or about the support site in general. The system will generate ‘incidents’ based on the scoring of the comments submitted. This makes it easy to view and respond to customer feedback. It is vital, more now than ever, not to under-estimate the power of the social web – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – they have the ability to cause untold amounts of damage to businesses with a single post – witness musician Dave Carroll and his protest song on YouTube, posted in response to poor customer services from an American airline. The first day saw 150,000 views and is currently at 12,011,375. The Times reported that within 4 days of the post, the airline’s stock price fell by 10 percent, which represented a cost to shareholders of $180 million dollars. It is a universally acknowledged fact, that when customers are unhappy, they will not come back, and, generally speaking, it only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. The idea that customer loyalty can be regained by using social media channels was the subject of a 2011 Survey commissioned by RightNow and conducted by Harris Interactive. The survey discovered that 68% of customers who posted a negative review about a holiday on a social networking site received a response from the business. It further found that 33% subsequently posted a positive review and 34% removed the original negative review. Cloud Monitor provides the perfect mechanism for seeing what is being said about a business on public Facebook pages, Twitter or YouTube posts; it allows agents to respond proactively – either by creating an Oracle RightNow incident or by using the same channel as the original post. This leaves step 8 – Measuring and Improving: How does a business know whether it’s doing the right thing? How does it know if its customers are happy? How does it know if its staff are being productive? How does it know if its staff are being effective? Cue Oracle RightNow Analytics – fully integrated across the entire platform – Service, Marketing and Sales – there are in excess of 800 standard reports. If this were not enough, a large proportion of the database has been made available via the administration console, allowing users without any prior database experience to write their own reports, format them and schedule them for e-mail delivery to a distribution list. It handles the complexities of table joins, and allows for the manipulation of data with ease. Oracle RightNow believes strongly in the customer owning their solution, and to provide the best foundation for success, Oracle University can give you the RightNow knowledge and skills you need. This is a selection of the courses offered: RightNow Customer Service Administration Rel 12.02 (3 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course familiarises users with the tasks and concepts needed to configure and maintain their system. RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course introduces basic CP structure and how to make changes to the look, feel and behaviour of their self-service pages RightNow Analytics Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand (Release 11.11 is available as In Class and Live Virtual Class) This course equips users with the skills necessary to understand data supplied by standard reports and to create custom reports RightNow Integration and Customization For Developers Rel 12.02 (5-days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course is for experienced web developers and offers an introduction to Add-In development using the Desktop Add-In Framework and introduces the core knowledge that developers need to begin integrating Oracle RightNow CX with other systems A full list of courses offered can be found on the Oracle University website. For more information and course dates please get in contact with your local Oracle University team. On top of the Service components, the suite also provides marketing tools, complex survey creation and tracking and sales functionality. I’m a fan of the application, and I think I’ve made that clear: It’s completely geared up to providing customers with support at point of need. It can be configured to meet even the most stringent of business requirements. Oracle RightNow is passionate about, and committed to, providing the best customer experience possible. Oracle RightNow CX is the application that makes it possible. About the Author: Sarah Anderson worked for RightNow for 4 years in both in both a consulting and training delivery capacity. She is now a Senior Instructor with Oracle University, delivering the following Oracle RightNow courses: RightNow Customer Service Administration RightNow Analytics RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration RightNow Marketing and Feedback

  Read the article

• Phones, Nokia, Microsoft and More

  - by Bill Evjen

  The phone revolution that is under way at the moment is insanely interesting and continuously full of buzz about directions, failures, and promises. The movement started with Apple completely reinventing what a smart phone was all about and now we have the followers. Though – don’t dismiss the followers, they are usually the ones that come out with the leap frog products when most of the world is thinking about jumping on. Remember the often used analogy – the USA invented the TV – but it was Japan that took it to the next level and now all TVs are from somewhere else other than the USA. Really there are two camps for the phones – the Cool Kids and other kids that no one wants to hang out with anymore. When it comes to cool – for some reason, the phone is an important part of that factor. Everyone wants to show their phone and its configuration (apps installed, etc) to their friends as a sign of (1) “I have money” and (2) I have smarts/tastes/style/etc when it comes to my applications that are on my phone. For those that don’t know – the Cool Kids include: Apple – this is quite obvious as everything Apple produces is in the cool camp. Just having an Apple product on your person means you can dance. Google – this is one of the more interesting releases as they have created something called Android (which in it’s own right is a major brand in itself). Microsoft – you might be saying “Really, Microsoft is cool?”. I would argue that they are indeed cool as it is now associated with XBOX 360, Kinect, and Windows 7. Gone are the days of Bob and that silly paperclip. Well – that’s it. There is nobody else I would stick in that camp. The other kids that weren’t picked for that dodgeball team include: Nokia Motorola Palm Blackberry and many many more The sad part of all this is that no matter what this second camp does now, it won’t be able to get out of this bucket easily. They will always be associated as yesterday’s technology and that association will drive the sales of the phone purchasers of the world. For those in that group, the only possible way out is to get invited to the cool club by one of the cool club members in the hope that their coolness somehow rubs off. To me, this is the move that Nokia is making. They are at this point where they have realized that they don’t have the full scope of the required end to end solution to make this all work. They have the plants to build the phones and the reach of the retailers that sell what they have. What they are missing is the proper operating system for the new world of multi-touch form factor phones. Even the companies that come up with some sort of new operating system for this type of new device, they are still associated with the yesterday and lack the developer community behind them to be the real wave of adoption that this market needs. Think about that – this is a major different between Nokia/Blackberry when you compare it to the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. These three powerhouses having a very large and strong development community that will eagerly take on new initiatives using the skillsets that they have already cultivated over the years of already working with the company. This then results in a plethora of applications that are then placed on an app store of some kind. The developer gets a cut and then Apple/Google/Microsoft then get their cut. It is definitely a win-win. None of the other phone companies and wannabies can provide the same results. What Microsoft was missing was the major phone manufactures coming on board to create and push forward with the phones that are required to start the wave. This is where Nokia can come in and help Microsoft. They have the ability to promote the Windows Phone operating system on a new wave of phones. This does mean that Nokia will sell phones, but they lose out on the application store that they might have been thinking about making some money on as well as controlling the end to end solution. What is interesting is in questioning to oneself if Microsoft will purchase Nokia. It really depends upon how they want to compete and with whom Microsoft views as the major competitor. For instance, they can purchase Nokia and have their own hardware company and distribution network for phones – thereby taking on a model that is quite similar to Apple. On the other hand, they could just leave it up to the phone hardware companies such as Nokia and others to build and promote phones in a model that is similar to Google. Both ways have pluses and minuses. If they own the phone manufacturer, they really can put some thought into the design and technical specifications of the phone that is really designed to exactly how they want it. Microsoft has shown that they have this ability – especially with the XBOX initiative they have done over the years. Think about how good and powerful they have moved forward with XBOX – and I am not talking about just copying what others are doing, but coming up with leapfrog products that are steps ahead of everyone else. Though, if they didn’t do it themselves, they could then leave it up to the phone manufacturers to drive each other to build better and better phones that run the Microsoft OS – competition drives better products. We have seen this with the Android line of phones that are out there on the market. I have read a lot about Nokia investors really upset about the new Microsoft relationship – but really, this is a great thing. I for one am a fan of this relationship (I am also a Nokia stock holder btw). This will mean better days for Nokia.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147  | Next Page >