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  • SSAS Tabular Workshop online and other upcoming dates (and updates!) #ssas #tabular

    - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)
    After many conferences and travels, this summer I had some time to write and prepare new sessions for the next wave of conferences. In reality I am just doing that, even if I already restarted traveling for consulting and training. So expect new content about DAX and Tabular coming in the next months! Starting to see real customer adopting Tabular is showing many new challenges and there is still a lot to learn and to create. If you still didn’t started working on Tabular, well, you should. As I always say, as a BI developer you should be able to choose between Tabular and Multidimensional, and in order to do that you should know both of them! One thing that I don’t like very much about marketing is that “Tabular is simpler”, because it’s often translated in “Tabular is for simple projects” when this last statement is not true. Actually, I see a lot of good reasons to adopt Tabular in complex data models, especially in non-traditional scenarios. I know, this is because I love to understand what are the actual limits of a technology, and I’m learning that there is simple a lot of space of improvement also for Tabular. It’s already fast, but it could be faster! How can you start? Well, first of all, by reading our book. Then, by attending to our SSAS Tabular workshop. There is an online edition of the workshop on September 3-4, 2012 (hurry up if you want to register), and there are already several dates planned for the next months (and others will be added soon!). And, of course, by installing SQL Server 2012 and trying to create models over your databases. If you are too lazy, just start with PowerPivot. As soon as you start working with Tabular or PowerPivot, you will see that there is one important skill you need: learning DAX. In the next few days I should publish an article that I’m finishing these days about best practices using SUMMARIZE and ADDCOLUMNS. If only someone published this article one year ago, I would have saved many hours of my life. But, you know, flight manuals are written in blood… and someone has to write! Stay tuned.

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  • OpenWorld Day 1

    - by Antony Reynolds
    A Day in the Life of an OpenWorld Attendee Part I Lots of people are blogging insightfully about OpenWorld so I thought I would provide some non-insightful remarks to buck the trend! With 50,000 attendees I didn’t expect to bump into too many people I knew, boy was I wrong!  I walked into the registration area and immediately was hailed by a couple of customers I had worked with a few months ago.  Moving to the employee registration area in a different hall I bumped into a colleague from the UK who was also registering.  As soon as I got my badge I bumped into a friend from Ireland!  So maybe OpenWorld isn’t so big after all! First port of call was Larrys Keynote.  As always Larry was provocative and thought provoking.  His key points were announcing the Oracle cloud offering in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, pointing out that Fusion Apps are cloud enabled and finally announcing the 12c Database, making a big play of its new multi-tenancy features.  His contention was that multi-tenancy will simplify cloud development and provide better security by providing DB level isolation for applications and customers. Next day, Monday, was my first full day at OpenWorld.  The first session I attended was on monitoring of OSB, very interesting presentation on the benefits achieved by an Illinois area telco – US Cellular.  Great discussion of why they bought the SOA Management Packs and the benefits they are already seeing from their investment in terms of improved provisioning and time to market, as well as better performance insight and assistance with capacity planning. Craig Blitz provided a nice walkthrough of where Coherence has been and where it is going. Last night I attended the BOF on Managed File Transfer where Dave Berry replayed Oracles thoughts on providing dedicated Managed File Transfer as part of the 12c SOA release.  Dave laid out the perceived requirements and solicited feedback from the audience on what if anything was missing.  He also demoed an early version of the functionality that would simplify setting up MFT in SOA Suite and make tracking activity much easier. So much for Day 1.  I also ran into scores of old friends and colleagues and had a pleasant dinner with my friend from Ireland where I caught up on the latest news from Oracle UK.  Not bad for Day 1!

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  • 2013 Predictions for Retail

    - by David Dorf
    Its that time of year to roll out the predictions for next year.  I can't say I've really nailed it in the past, but feel free to look back at my 2012, 2011, and 2010 predictions.  I'm not expecting anything earth-shattering this year; just continued maturation of several technologies that are finally taking hold. 1. Next day delivery -- Amazon finally decided it wasn't worth fighting state taxes and instead decided to place distribution centers everywhere so they can potentially offer next-day deliveries.  Not to be outdone, Walmart is looking to leverage its huge physical presence to offer the same.  Clubs like ShopRunner are pushing delivery barriers as well, so the norm is shifting to free shipping in a few days or relatively cheap shipping overnight.  Retailers need be thinking about how to ship from physical stores. 2. Bring your own device -- Earlier this year Intuit bought AisleBuyer, a mobile self-checkout start-up, at least somewhat validating the BYOD approach.  Grocery stores, especially in Europe, have been supporting in-aisle self-scanning for a while and I'm betting it will find a home in certain verticals in the US too.  There's also the BYOD concept for employees.  Some retailers are considering issuing mobile devices at hiring along side the shirt and name-tag.  Employees become responsible for the hardware until they leave. 3. TV shopping -- Will Apple finally release a TV product in 2013?  Who knows?  But the industry isn't standing still. Companies like QVC and HSN are already successfully combining the TV and online experiences for shopping.  Comcast is partnering with Tivo to allow viewers to interact with ads with Paypal handing payment.  This will be a slow maturation, but expect TVs to get smarter and eventually become a new selling channel (pun intended) for retailers. 4. Privacy backlash -- It only takes one big incident to stir the public, and I'm betting we have one in 2013.  Facebook, Google, or Apple will test the boundaries of what the public is willing to accept.  It could involve a retailer using geo-location technology, or possibly video analytics.  And as is always the case, the offender will apologize, temporarily remove the technology, and wait 2-3 years for it to be generally accepted.  Privacy is a moving target. 5. More NFC -- I've come to the conclusion that adoption of any banking technology is going to be slow.  It was slow for credit cards, ATMs, and online billpay so why should it be any different for NFC?  Maybe, just maybe the iPhone 5S will have an NFC chip, but we're not going to see mainstream uptake for years.  Next year we'll continue to see incremental improvements from Isis, Google, and Paypal and a plethora of new startups, but don't toss your magstripe cards just yet. 6. In-store location -- The technologies for tracking people inside stores is really improving.  Retailers can track people using video cameras, infrared, and by the WiFi radios in mobile phones.  We're getting closer to the point where accuracy could be a shelf-facing, which will help retailers understand how people shop, where they spend time, and what displays attract them.  Expect CPG companies to get involved and partner with retailers, since the data benefits both parties.  Consumers will benefit by being directed right to the products they seek.  (In 2013 ARTS is forming a workteam to develop new standards in this area.) 7. M&A -- Looking back at 2012 there were some really big deals involving IBM, Oracle, JDA, and NCR and I expect that trend will likely continue as vendors add assets to bolster their portfolios.  Many retailers are due for an IT transformation to support anywhere, anytime shoppers, and one-stop-vendors can minimize complexity and costs. Predictions from other sources: Independent Retailer Stores Magazine IDC Insights Mobile Commerce Daily

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  • Where can you find the Oracle Applications User Experience team in the next several months?

    - by mvaughan
    By Misha Vaughan, Applications User ExperienceNovember is one of my favorite times of year at Oracle. The blast of OpenWorld work is over, and it’s time to get down to business and start taking our messages and our work on the road out to the user groups. We’re in the middle of planning all of that right now, so we decided to provide a snapshot of where you can see us and hear about the Oracle Applications User Experience – whether it’s Fusion Applications, PeopleSoft, or what we’re planning for the next-generation of Oracle Applications.On the road with Apps UX...In December, you can find us at UKOUG 2012 in Birmingham, UK: UKOUG, UK Oracle User Group Conference 2012?December 3 – 5, 2012?ICC, Birmingham, UKIn March, we will be at Alliance 2013 in Indianapolis, and our fingers are crossed for OBUG Connect 2013 in Antwerp:? Alliance 2013March 17 - 20, 2013 ?Indianapolis, IndianaOBUG Benelux Connect 2013?March 26, 2013?Antwerp, Belgium?? In April, you will see us at COLLABORATE13 in Denver:? Collaborate13April 7 - April 11, 2013 ?Denver, Colorado?? And in June, we round out the kick-off to summer at OHUG 2013 in Dallas and Kscope13 in New Orleans:? OHUG 2013June 9 -13, 2013?Dallas, Texas ODTUG Kscope13?June 23-27, 2013 ?New Orleans, LA? The Labs & DemosAs always, a hallmark of our team is our mobile usability labs. If you haven’t seen them, they are a great way for customers and partners to get a peek at what Oracle is working on next, and a chance for you to provide your candid perspective. Based on the interest and enthusiasm from customers last year at Collaborate, we are adding more demo-stations to our user group presence in the year ahead. If you want to see some of the work we are doing first-hand but don’t have a lot of time, the demo stations are a great way to get a quick update on the latest wow-factor we are researching. I can promise that you will see whatever we think is new and interesting at the demo stations first. Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Apps UX DemostationFor Applications DevelopersMore and more, I get asked the question, “How do I build an application that looks like a Fusion?” My answer is Fusion Applications Design Patterns. You can find out more about how Fusion Applications developers can leverage ADF and the user experience best practices we developed for Fusion at sessions lead by Ultan O’Broin, Director of Global User Experience, in the year ahead. Ultan O'Broin, On Fusion Design Patterns Building mobile applications are also top of mind these days. If you want to understand how Oracle is approaching this strategy, check out our session on Mobile user experience design patterns with Mobile ADF.  In many cases, this will be presented by Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, Senior Manager of Mobile User Experiences, and in a few cases our ever-ready traveler Ultan O’Broin will be on deck. Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, on Mobile User Experience Design PatternsApplications User ExperiencesFusion Applications continues to evolve, and you will see the new face of Fusion Applications at our executive sessions in the year ahead, which are led by vice president Jeremy Ashley or a hand-picked presenter, such as one of our Fusion User Experience Advocates.  Edward Roske, CEO InterRel Consulting & Fusion User Experience AdvocateAs always, our strategy is to take our lessons learned and spread them across the Applications product lines. A great example is the enhancements coming in the PeopleSoft user experience, which you can hear about from Harris Kravatz, Senior Manager, PeopleSoft User Experience. Fusion Applications ExtensibilityWe can’t talk about Fusion Applications without talking about how to make it look like your business. If tailoring Fusion applications is a question in your mind, and it should be, you should hit one of these sessions. These sessions will be lead by our own Killian Evers, Senior Director, Tim Dubois, User Experience Architect, and some well-trained Fusion User Experience Advocates.Find out moreIf you want to stay on top of where and when we will be, you can always sign up for our newsletter or check out the events page of usableapps.

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  • My Experience at Oracle !!! By Ayush Gupta

    - by Nadiya
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Hi! My name is Ayush, a Gratuate from BITS Pilani and now working and living in Bangalore. I joined Oracle in August 2013 as a Senior Consultant (SC) and would like to share my experiences over the first couple of months with you.It has been a wonderful journey so far. The last two months have been very exciting for me. First of all I would like to mention that the training program at Oracle that we went through really prepared us well. It matured us and allowed us to go from developing small applications in college to big enterprise products. Two months of initial training has had a lasting impact for me. I am also really enjoying the knowledge I have gained so far and also learning new things in the form of product training. It's really fun to work here. We are treated like adults and we are responsible for our own workloads.With that I can't keep from mentioning the fun times we as a team have in the form of Young Leadership programme in Hotel Fortune Trinity which included Luxurious buffet lunch too. Wishing it could happen more frequently.  Oracle provides one of the best opportunities to learn various technologies across different platforms. What I like best about working at Oracle is the work life balance. With the option of flexible timings, one can easily enjoy planned evenings with friends or maybe working out at the fitness centre in your building. Be it the birthday celebrations at office or the day long team outing at a resort, It’s all together a different experience. Overall, you get to take full ownership of your project and they give you a free leash on how you design your enhancements/changes.As one of the largest international companies, Oracle is obviously an expert on exploring the potential and possibility of inexperienced new hires. We were taught how to make an outstanding team work in a group training session at the first few weeks. From this experience I realized that perfect cooperation is not about where you come from or what your study background is, everyone can find his or her own role to support the team. Even though I am not that skilled in technology, my background has significantly helped me in learning new technologies in Oracle.My idea and suggestion is: for new joiners, the will to learn is be more important than what you have learnt before. Colleagues here at Oracle are professionals in their field, always friendly and glad to help. So don’t worry, all you need to do is just be confident, and have a nice attitude, Oracle will let you fully display your talent. Come and join us, here you can always find a tailor made role for you! /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Why a graduate program in South Africa?

    - by anca.rosu
    South Africa, like many other countries, is desperate for skills. Good, solid, technical skills – together with a get-up-and-go attitude – and the desire to work for a world-class organization that is leading the way! In addition, we have made a commitment in South Africa that we need to transform our organization and develop and empower Black individuals who historically have not had the opportunity to participate in the global economy. It is through this investment in our country's people that we contribute to the development of a nation capable of competing on the global stage. This makes for an exciting recipe! We have: Plenty of young and talented individuals who are eager to get stuck in and learn. Formal, recognized qualifications that form the basis for further development. A huge big global organization – Oracle – that is committed to developing these graduates and giving them an opportunity that is out of this world! Mix the above ‘ingredients’ together Tackle and remove potential “lumps & bumps” along the way as we learn and grow together Nurture and care for each other in a warm but tough environment What have we achieved? In most cases, the outcome is an awesome bunch of new talent that is well equipped to face the IT world. Where we have the opportunity and suitable headcount available to employ these graduates at Oracle we snap them up – alternatively our business partners and customers are always eager to recruit Oracle graduates into their organizations! These individuals go through real-life work place experience whilst at Oracle. In some cases they get to travel internationally. The excitement and buzz gets into their system and their blood becomes truly RED! Oracle RED! This is valuable talent and expertise to have in our eco-system and it’s an exciting program to be a part of not only as a graduate but as an Oracle employee too!   If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com. Technorati Tags: South Africa,technical skills,graduate program,opportunity,global organization,new talent

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  • The theory of evolution applied to software

    - by Michel Grootjans
    I recently realized the many parallels you can draw between the theory of evolution and evolving software. Evolution is not the proverbial million monkeys typing on a million typewriters, where one of them comes up with the complete works of Shakespeare. We would have noticed by now, since the proverbial monkeys are now blogging on the Internet ;-) One of the main ideas of the theory of evolution is the balance between random mutations and natural selection. Random mutations happen all the time: millions of mutations over millions of years. Most of them are totally useless. Some of them are beneficial to the evolved species. Natural selection favors the beneficially mutated species. Less beneficial mutations die off. The mutated rabbit doesn't have to be faster than the fox. It just has to be faster than the other rabbits.   Theory of evolution Evolving software Random mutations happen all the time. Most of these mutations are so bad, the new species dies off, or cannot reproduce. Developers write new code all the time. New ideas come up during the act of writing software. The really bad ones don't get past the stage of idea. The bad ones don't get committed to source control. Natural selection favors the beneficial mutated species Good ideas and new code gets discussed in group during informal peer review. Less than good code gets refactored. Enhanced code makes it more readable, maintainable... A good set of traits makes the species superior to others. It becomes widespread A good design tends to make it easier to add new features, easier to understand the current implementations, easier to optimize for performance...thus superior. The best designs get carried over from project to project. They appear in blogs, articles and books about principles, patterns and practices.   Of course the act of writing software is deliberate. This can hardly be called random mutations. Though it sometimes might seem that code evolves through a will of its own ;-) Does this mean that evolving software (evolution) is better than a big design up front (creationism)? Not necessarily. It's a false idea to think that a project starts from scratch and everything evolves from there. Everyone carries his experience of what works and what doesn't. Up front design is necessary, but is best kept simple and minimal, just enough to get you started. Let the good experiences and ideas help to drive the process, whether they come from you or from others, from past experience or from the most junior developer on your team. Once again, balance is the keyword. Balance design up front with evolution on a daily basis. How do you know what balance is right? Through your own experience of what worked and what didn't (here's evolution again). Notes: The evolution of software can quickly degenerate without discipline. TDD is a discipline that leaves little to chance on that part. Write your test to describe the new behavior. Write just enough code to make it behave as specified. Refactor to evolve the code to a higher standard. The responsibility of good design rests continuously on each developers' shoulders. Promiscuous pair programming helps quickly spreading the design to the whole team.

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  • Sony VAIO is booting directly into Windows without showing grub

    - by Rohan Dhruva
    I bought a new Sony Vaio S series laptop. It uses Insyde H2O BIOS EFI, and trying to install Linux on it is driving me crazy. root@kubuntu:~# parted /dev/sda print Model: ATA Hitachi HTS72756 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 640GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 274MB 273MB fat32 EFI system partition hidden 2 274MB 20.8GB 20.6GB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag 3 20.8GB 21.1GB 273MB fat32 EFI system partition boot 4 21.1GB 21.3GB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres 5 21.3GB 342GB 320GB ntfs Basic data partition 6 342GB 358GB 16.1GB ext4 Basic data partition 7 358GB 374GB 16.1GB ntfs Basic data partition 8 374GB 640GB 266GB ntfs Basic data partition What is surprising is that there are 2 EFI system partitions on the disk. The sda2 partition is a 20gb recovery partition which loads windows with a basic recovery interface. This is accessible by pressing the "ASSIST" button as opposed to the normal power button. I presume that the sda1 EFI System Partition (ESP) loads into this recovery. The sda3 ESP has more fleshed out entries for Microsoft Windows, which actually goes into Windows 7 (as confirmed by bcdedit.exe on Windows). Ubuntu is installed on sda6, and while installation I chose sda3 as my boot partition. The installer correctly created a sda3/EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi application. The real problem: for the life of me, I can't set it to be the default! I tried creating a sda3/startup.nsh which called grubx64.efi, but it didn't help -- on rebooting, the system still boots into windows. I tried using efibootmgr, and that shows as it it worked: root@kubuntu:~# efibootmgr BootCurrent: 0000 BootOrder: 0000,0001 Boot0000* EFI USB Device Boot0001* Windows Boot Manager root@kubuntu:~# efibootmgr --create --gpt --disk /dev/sda --part 3 --write-signature --label "GRUB2" --loader "\\EFI\\ubuntu\\grubx64.efi" BootCurrent: 0000 BootOrder: 0002,0000,0001 Boot0000* EFI USB Device Boot0001* Windows Boot Manager Boot0002* GRUB2 root@kubuntu:~# efibootmgr BootCurrent: 0000 BootOrder: 0002,0000,0001 Boot0000* EFI USB Device Boot0001* Windows Boot Manager Boot0002* GRUB2 However, on rebooting, as you guessed, the machine rebooted directly back into Windows. The only things I can think of are: The sda1 partition is somehow being used Overwrite /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi and /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi with grubx64.efi [but this seems really radical]. Can anyone please help me out? Thanks -- any help is greatly appreciated, as this issue is driving me crazy!

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  • Somewhere to get inspiration - Pair up the creative with the tech

    - by Morten Bergfall
    I am a somewhat green developer; some work experience, last year of school. As most of you, I am constantly working on an assortment of personal projects. Since my mind often has a somewhat drifting characteristic; I am not always able to keep the projects in check. After some time they all exhibit the moral fiber of Vikings, harlots and chain-letter-knitters. This includes constant forking, round-abouting, eating of school assignments of rather mundane, and hence pretty yawn-inducing, specifications, and of course quite a bit of gathering of folder dust. Well, on to my question....is there a place, forum... or something with the purpose of linking people with ideas to the people actually being able to bring said ideas to life? Of course, I know of the professional ones, like rent-a-coder and such. And there seem to be a lot of open source projects available for participation. What I'm looking for doesn't really fit into any of those categories....the form would be somewhat like rent-a-coder, but this is ideas&inspiration, not bubble-sort-my-quarterly-for-a-buck. The possibilities for developing bonds, spicy code, and plain old fun seem quite possible.As I see it, the main benefit would be that we (that is the tech-flipside of the proverbial eCoin) get something worthwhile to do, rather than squeeze the last creative grain out of our code-heavy brains.To give it some perspective...: My last project consists of an absurd jQuery-plugin that includes animated png-robots migrating from Google Earth to drag a html-element of your choosing onto the map, where it gets color, for so to be dragged back by this poorly animated robot.... Often, the line between the creative and the tech is blurred, to say the least. I wouldn't think that would be a problem. Think someone who has developed a nifty little windows application, then sees possibility for a broader use, perhaps some sort of networking functionality. This fellow sadly lacks the skill to implememet this. So he, she or it would then seek a developer with the know-how and they could complete this project together. So, do any of you know of such a place, or can nudge in the right direction? And yes, I understand completely that I should be dedicating myself to doing school work, or applying for mundane developer positions, so please.... :-) UPDATE Sadly, I'm situated in Oslo, Norway, and the number of developers are somewhat limited...and I have had quite some ahem personality issues with the ones who are available ;-) So I feel I must go deeper; search the multitude of the web...

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  • Desktop Fun: Vacation and Travel Icon Packs

    - by Asian Angel
    Do you have an upcoming vacation, place that you would like to travel to, or a favorite destination that you have visited in the past? With an appropriate wallpaper you can help set the mood for your desktop with our Vacation and Travel Icon Packs collection. Note: To customize the icon setup on your Windows 7 & Vista systems see our article here. Using Windows XP? We have you covered here. Sneak Preview After seeing “Tiki Time! 1.0” set shown below we just could not resist putting together a nice sunset beach desktop as an example to share with you. That is definitely so relaxing to look at… Note: Wallpaper can be found here. Looking very nice close up… At the Beach *.ico format only Download Sea Shells *.ico format only Download Beach Icon Collection *.ico and .png format Download Tiki Time! 1.0 *.ico format only Download Underwater Icons *.ico format only Download Shutter Shades Icon Pack *.ico and .png format Download Life Saver *.ico format only Download Les 12 Maisons *.ico format only Download Back In Time *.ico format only Download Tourism *.ico and .png format Download The Lovely Bones *.ico format only Download Japanicons Pack *.ico and .png format, also has bonus wallpaper included! Here is what the included 1280*1024 wallpaper looks like. Download Ukrainian Motifs *.ico format only Download Las Vegas Icons *.ico format only Download Las Vegas 2 *.ico format only Download Be sure to visit our new Desktop Fun section for more customization goodness! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Desktop Fun: Video Game Icon PacksDesktop Fun: Sci-Fi Icons Packs Series 2Restore Missing Desktop Icons in Windows 7 or VistaAdd Home Directory Icon to the Desktop in Windows 7 or VistaQuick Help: Downloadable Show Desktop Icon for XP 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 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010 Daily Motivator (Firefox) FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows

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  • MaxTotalSizeInBytes - Blind spots in Usage file and Web Analytics Reports

    - by Gino Abraham
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GinoAbraham/archive/2013/10/28/maxtotalsizeinbytes---blind-spots-in-usage-file-and-web-analytics.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint_strategery/archive/2012/04/16/usage-file-and-web-analytics-reports-with-blind-spots.aspx In my previous post (Troubleshooting SharePoint 2010 Web Analytics), I referenced a problem that can occur when exceeding the daily partition size for the LoggingDB, which generates the ULS message “[Partition] has exceeded the max bytes”. Below, I wanted to provide some additional info on this particular issue and help identify some options if this occurs. As an aside, this post only applies if you are missing portions of Usage data - think blind spots on intermittent days or user activity regularly sparse for the afternoon/evening. If this fits your scenario - read on. But if Usage logs are outright missing, go check out my Troubleshooting post first.  Background on the problem:The LoggingDB database has a default maximum size of ~6GB. However, SharePoint evenly splits this total size into fixed sized logical partitions – and the number of partitions is defined by the number of days to retain Usage data (by default 14 days). In this case, 14 partitions would be created to account for the 14 days of retention. If the retention were halved to 7 days, the LoggingDBwould be split into 7 corresponding partitions at twice the size. In other words, the partition size is generally defined as [max size for DB] / [number of retention days].Going back to the default scenario, the “max size” for the LoggingDB is 6200000000 bytes (~6GB) and the retention period is 14 days. Using our formula, this would be [~6GB] / [14 days], which equates to 444858368 bytes (~425MB) per partition per day. Again, if the retention were halved to 7 days (which halves the number of partitions), the resulting partition size becomes [~6GB] / [7 days], or ~850MB per partition.From my experience, when the partition size for any given day is exceeded, the usage logging for the remainder of the day is essentially thrown away because SharePoint won’t allow any more to be written to that day’s partition. The only clue that this is occurring (beyond truncated usage data) is an error such as the following that gets reported in the ULS:04/08/2012 09:30:04.78    OWSTIMER.EXE (0x1E24)    0x2C98    SharePoint Foundation    Health    i0m6     High    Table RequestUsage_Partition12 has 444858368 bytes that has exceeded the max bytes 444858368It’s also worth noting that the exact bytes reported (e.g. ‘444858368’ above) may slightly vary among farms. For example, you may instead see 445226812, 439123456, or something else in the ballpark. The exact number itself doesn't matter, but this error message intends to indicates that the reporting usage has exceeded the partition size for the given day.What it means:The error itself is easy to miss, which can lead to substantial gaps in the reporting data (your mileage may vary) if not identified. At this point, I can only advise to periodically check the ULS logs for this message. Down the road, I plan to explore if [Developing a Custom Health Rule] could be leveraged to identify the issue (If you've ever built Custom Health Rules, I'd be interested to hear about your experiences). Overcoming this issue also poses a challenge, with workaround options including:Lower the retentionBecause the partition size is generally defined as [max size] / [number of retention days], the first option is to lower the number of days to retain the data – the lower the retention, the lower the divisor and thus a bigger partition. For example, halving the retention from 14 to 7 days would halve the number of partitions, but double the partition size to ~850MB (e.g. [6200000000 bytes] / [7 days] = ~850GB partitions). Lowering it to 2 days would result in two ~3GB partitions… and so on.Recreate the LoggingDB with an increased sizeThe property MaxTotalSizeInBytes is exposed by OM code for the SPUsageDefinition object and can be updated with the example PowerShell snippet below. However, updating this value has no immediate impact because this size only applies when creating a LoggingDB. Therefore, you must create a newLoggingDB for the Usage Service Application. The gotcha: this effectively deletes all prior Usage databecause the Usage Service Application can only have a single LoggingDB.Here is an example snippet to update the "Page Requests" Usage Definition:$def=Get-SPUsageDefinition -Identity "page requests" $def.MaxTotalSizeInBytes=12400000000 $def.update()Create a new Logging database and attach to the Usage Service Application using the following command: Get-spusageapplication | Set-SPUsageApplication -DatabaseServer <dbServer> -DatabaseName <newDBname> Updated (5/10/2012): Once the new database has been created, you can confirm the setting has truly taken by running the following SQL Query (be sure to replace the database name in the following query with the name provided in the PowerShell above)SELECT * FROM [WSS_UsageApplication].[dbo].[Configuration] WITH (nolock) WHERE ConfigName LIKE 'Max Total Bytes - RequestUsage'

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  • Take a chance !

    - by Hartmut Wiese
    Hi everybody, Later today I am going to reach out to the JDE Partner in EMEA I am already in contact with and ask for participation and collaboration within the new EMEA JDE Partner Community. I am very excited about this community and I really believe we will have much more success in the future selling and implementing JDEdwards in this large region. For those who don´t know me yet ... I am really a long time in the JDEdwards business. I have been a JDE PreSales Consultant and joined JDEdwards in 1998 in Germany. After JDEdwards/PeopleSoft was aquired by Oracle I changed my role and become responsible on an EMEA level for the Oracle Accelerate and the Oracle Business Accelerator program. A lot of you are already know me ... and hopefully believe and trust me as well. Within the last five months I talked to approx. 60 partners already face-to-face during the various events I attended. We had two PreSales Universities delievered already and I have been to one JDE Exsite event, a JDE Executive Forum, two User groups events and one JDE Partner Event. Again approximately 60+ partner discussions and everybody likes the idea of the community and how I am going to run this in the future. At the JDEdwards UK User Group event (NOV 13) there was an external speaker talking about risk. It was a very good speech. One key element of his speech was that a sequence of (small) failures might lead to a big success. He gave very good examples from the history not software related at all but as a results some of the well done individuals everybody knows today started very small and they failed several times before they become successful. But these persons did not gave up and in the long run they win and succeeded. I really spent some time reflecting this to our business as of today. My intention to write these lines is to convince each partner out there to think about investing in JDEdwards TODAY. There are currently a number of potential investment ideas on the table for you. We have a very strong and powerful ERP System. We have advantages against all our competitors. Each partner has the ability to create his own SaaS model and deliver individual services to the customers. We also have three Business Accelerators available which really speeds up the implementation by still having full flexibility to change for example any processing option if needed. A huge number of customers are on old releases globally and think about upgrading. New technology makes new business processes available (e.g. iPad). Oracle is a pretty much forward looking company and we build tools and products. In the area of JDEdwards our partners are combining the Oracle tools and products and bringing the value to the customers. At one point in time you have decided to run your business on your own and to become a JDE/PSFT/ORCL partner. This was a risk of course at that point of time. You did not fail and this is very good of course. Business has changed and Oracle has the product and tools for you to become even more successful in the future but it is a very good time for you to take a risk again. I am not able to promise you anything but the situation is very good. You might not win every deal or increase your margin immediately but I truly believe you will find new ways of doing your business in the future by adopting some of our ideas. The only person who can stop you ... is you. Please try something new/different. Success sometimes needs some time and initial failures but if you never failed - you have never lived. To get support during this phase please share your doubts, thoughts, experiences inside the new JDEdwards community and learn from others who went to similar processes. Please join here. Take care and best regards Hartmut Wiese

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  • Friday Fun: Play Your Favorite 8-Bit NES Games Online

    - by Mysticgeek
    We finally made it to another Friday and once again we bring you some NES fun to waste the rest of the day before the weekend. Today we take a look at a site that contains a lot of classic NES games you can play online. vNES VirtualNES.com contains hundreds of vintage NES games you can play online. If you’re old enough to remember, when the NES came out, it breathed life back into home console gaming. Here we will take a look at a few of the games they offer that will certainly bring back memories. Super Mario Bros 3 which is a personal favorite from the 8-bit era.   Play Super Mario Bros 3 Excite Bike was one of the coolest dirt bike racing games at the time as it even allowed you to create your own tracks.   Play ExciteBike Of course The Legend of Zelda was one of the first fantasy games many an hour have been spent on. Play The Legend of Zelda We’d be remiss if we didn’t bring up Pac-man since the game recently celebrated it’s 30th anniversary. Play Pac-Man If you don’t like the default keyboard controls you can change them on the Options page. Join their forum and more…this site will definitely bring you back to the good old 8-bit NES days.   The site contains hundreds of different games for you to get on your old school NES fix. If you’re sick of waiting for the whistle to blow, this site will bring you back to the good old days when you had nothing to do but mash buttons all day. Play NES Games at virtualnes.com Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Friday Fun: Get Your Mario OnFriday Fun: Go Retro with PacmanFriday Fun: Five More Time Wasting Online GamesFriday Fun: Online Flash Games to Usher in the WeekendFriday Fun: Online Sports Flash Games 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 Awesome World Cup Soccer Calendar Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version

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  • Windows Azure Training Kit October 2012 Release

    - by Clint Edmonson
    The Windows Azure Technical Evangelism team have been busy bees lately and we want to share with you what they’ve been working on. As you know we release the Windows Azure Training Kit on a regular cadence, so I’m pleased to announce the Windows Azure Training Kit October 2012 Release. This update of the training kit includes 47 hands-on labs, 24 demos and 38 presentations designed to help you learn how to build applications that use Windows Azure services, including updated hands-on labs to use the latest version of Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8, new demos and presentations. Essential Links: Windows Azure Training Kit Download Windows Azure Training Kit Github [Issues] Updated Presentations With Speaker Notes Your voices were heard loud and clear! I am excited to announce Speaker Notes have been added to a the majority of the content we have available. Find the new updated decks which contain speaker notes below: Foundation SQL Federation Virtual Machine Overview Virtual Networks Windows 8 and Windows Azure Web Sites Windows Azure Cloud Services Windows Azure Overview Windows Azure Service Bus Deploying Active Directory Building Apps With IaaS and PaaS Identity and Access Control Linux Virtual Machines Managing Virtual Machines PowerShell Migrating Apps and Workloads Scalable Global and Highly Available Apps Security and Identity SQL Database SQL Database Migration Cloud Service Life Cycle DevCamps Cloud Services iOS, Android and Windows Azure Windows 8 and Windows Azure Web Sites Windows 8 and Windows Azure Mobile Services Added Localized Content Due to the excitement in the community surrounding the mobile services launch, it was apparent that we needed to make localized content available to continue to deliver the exciting message around Windows Azure Mobile Services. Localized content is available in the following languages: French Japanese German Chinese (Taiwan) Spanish Italian Korean Portuguese (Brazilian) Russian Updated Hands-On Labs To support those who have upgraded to Visual Studio 2012 or those trying out the Visual Studio 2012 Express Editions, we have made sure that the content is available and supported (selected labs only) in Visual Studio 2012 Express and up. Visual Studio 2012 Windows Azure Traffic Manager Introduction to Cloud Services Service Bus Messaging Introduction to Access Control Service This adds a significant amount of additional content, so we have revamped the Hands-On Lab Navigation page to include subsections for Visual Studio 2012 Labs, Visual Studio 2010 Labs, Open Source Labs, Scenario Labs, All Labs. Added Demos Demos are available for a number of presentations which are available in Foundation, DevCamp, ITPro Event & Device + Service DevCamps. You can browse through the demos on the respective Demo Navigation page or on Github (links provided in Demo listing below). HelloASP Connecting Cloud Services Service Bus Relay Windows 8 and Mobile Services URL Shortener iOS Client Migrating a Web Farm Deploying Active Directory URL Shortener Service  (PHP) Geo-Location Service (PHP) Geo-Location Android Client Getting Started with VMs Load Balancing Availability Deploying Hybrid Apps Migrate VM AppController Geo-Location iOS Client Scale Up/Down Using CSUpload URL Shortener Android Client Imaging Virtual Machines The Windows Azure Training Kit is open source and available on GitHub, enabling you in the community to Report Issues or Fork and either extend the solution or commit bug fixes back to the Training Kit. You can find out more details about  the training kit from our GitHub Page including guidelines on how to commit back to the project. Stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows Azure and other Microsoft announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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  • Windows Azure Recipe: Social Web / Big Media

    - by Clint Edmonson
    With the rise of social media there’s been an explosion of special interest media web sites on the web. From athletics to board games to funny animal behaviors, you can bet there’s a group of people somewhere on the web talking about it. Social media sites allow us to interact, share experiences, and bond with like minded enthusiasts around the globe. And through the power of software, we can follow trends in these unique domains in real time. Drivers Reach Scalability Media hosting Global distribution Solution Here’s a sketch of how a social media application might be built out on Windows Azure: Ingredients Traffic Manager (optional) – can be used to provide hosting and load balancing across different instances and/or data centers. Perfect if the solution needs to be delivered to different cultures or regions around the world. Access Control – this service is essential to managing user identity. It’s backed by a full blown implementation of Active Directory and allows the definition and management of users, groups, and roles. A pre-built ASP.NET membership provider is included in the training kit to leverage this capability but it’s also flexible enough to be combined with external Identity providers including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. The provider model has extensibility points to hook into other identity providers as well. Web Role – hosts the core of the web application and presents a central social hub users. Database – used to store core operational, functional, and workflow data for the solution’s web services. Caching (optional) – as a web site traffic grows caching can be leveraged to keep frequently used read-only, user specific, and application resource data in a high-speed distributed in-memory for faster response times and ultimately higher scalability without spinning up more web and worker roles. It includes a token based security model that works alongside the Access Control service. Tables (optional) – for semi-structured data streams that don’t need relational integrity such as conversations, comments, or activity streams, tables provide a faster and more flexible way to store this kind of historical data. Blobs (optional) – users may be creating or uploading large volumes of heterogeneous data such as documents or rich media. Blob storage provides a scalable, resilient way to store terabytes of user data. The storage facilities can also integrate with the Access Control service to ensure users’ data is delivered securely. Content Delivery Network (CDN) (optional) – for sites that service users around the globe, the CDN is an extension to blob storage that, when enabled, will automatically cache frequently accessed blobs and static site content at edge data centers around the world. The data can be delivered statically or streamed in the case of rich media content. Training These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and resources where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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  • Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software

    - by Laila
    I would like to tell you how to revolutionize your software development process </marketing hyperbole> On a more serious note, we (Red Gate's .NET Development team) recently rolled a new tool into our development process which has made our lives dramatically easier AND improved the quality of our software, and I (& one of our developers, Alex Davies) just wanted to take a quick moment to share the love. I work with a development team that takes pride in what they ship, so we take software testing rather seriously. For every development project we run, we allocate at least one software tester for every two developers, and we never ship software without first shipping early access releases and betas to get user feedback. And therein lies the challenge -encouraging users to provide consistent, useful feedback is a headache, but without that feedback, improving the software is. tricky. Until fairly recently, we used the standard (if long-winded) approach of receiving bug reports of variable quality via email or through our support forums. If that didn't give us enough information to reproduce the problem - which was most of the time - we had to enter into a time-consuming to-and-fro conversation with the end-user, to get scrape together the data we needed to work out where the problem lay. As I'm sure you're aware, this is painfully slow. To the delight of the team, we recently got to work with SmartAssembly, which lets us embed automated exception and error reporting into our software with very little pain, and we decided to do a little dogfooding. As a result, we've have made a really handy (if perhaps slightly obvious) discovery: As soon as we release a beta, or indeed any release of software, we now get tonnes of customer feedback through automated error reports. Making this process easier for our users has dramatically increased the amount (and quality) of feedback we get. From their point of view, they get an experience similar to Microsoft's error reporting, and process is essentially idiot-proof. From our side of things, we can now react much faster to the information we get, fixing the bugs and shipping a new-and-improved release, which our users rather appreciate. Smiles and hugs all round. Even more so because, as we're use SmartAssembly's Automated Error Reporting, we get to avoid having to spend weeks building an exception reporting mechanism. It takes just a few minutes to add reporting to a project, and we get a bunch of useful information back, like a stack trace and the values of all the local variables, which we can use to fix bugs. Happily, "Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software" can actually be read two ways: we've found that we not only ship higher quality software, but we also release within a shorter time. We can ship stable software that our users are happy to upgrade to, and we then bask in the glory of lots of positive customer feedback. Once we'd starting working with SmartAssembly, we were curious to know how widespread error reporting was as a practice. Our product manager ran a survey in autumn last year, and found that 40% of software developers never really considered deploying error reporting. Considering how we've now got plenty of experience on the subject, one of our dev guys, Alex Davies, thought we should share what we've learnt, and he's kindly offered to host a webinar on delivering robust software with Automated Error Reporting. Drawing on our own in-house development experiences, he'll cover how to add error reporting to your program, how to actually use the error reports to fix bugs (don't snigger, not everyone's as bright as you), how to customize the error report dialog that your users see, and how to automatically get log files from your users' machine. The webinar will take place on Jan 25th (that's next week). It's free to attend, but you'll still need to register to hear Alex's dulcet tones.

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  • Webcast Q&A: Demystifying External Authorization

    - by B Shashikumar
    Thanks to everyone who joined us on our webcast with SANS Institute on "Demystifying External Authorization". Also a special thanks to Tanya Baccam from SANS for sharing her experiences reviewing Oracle Entitlements Server. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay of the webcast here.  Here is a compilation of the slides that were used on today's webcast.  SANS Institute Product Review: Oracle Entitlements Server We have captured the Q&A from the webcast for those who couldn't attend. Q: Is Oracle ADF integrated with Oracle Entitlements Server (OES) ? A:  In Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and later, Oracle ADF, Oracle WebCenter, Oracle SOA Suite and other middleware products are all built on Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS). OPSS privodes many security functions like authentication, audit, credential stores, token validaiton, etc. OES is the authorization solution underlying OPSS. And OES 11g unifies different authorization mechanisms including Java2/ABAC/RBAC.  Q: Which portal frameworks support the use of OES policies for portal entitlement decisions? A:  Many portals including Oracle WebCenter 11g  run natively on top of OES. The authorization engine in WebCenter is OES. Besides, OES offers out of the box integration with Microsoft SharePoint. So SharePoint sites, sub sites, web parts, navigation items, document access control can all be secured with OES. Several other portals have also been secured with OES ex: IBM websphere portal Q:  How do we enforce Seperation of Duties (SoD) rules using OES (also how does that integrate with a product like OIA) ? A:  A product like OIM or OIA can be used to set up and govern SoD policies. OES enforces these policies at run time. Role mapping policies in OES can assign roles dynamically to users under certain conditions. So this makes it simple to enforce SoD policies inside an application at runtime. Q:  Our web application has objects like buttons, text fields, drop down lists etc. is there any ”autodiscovery” capability that allows me to use/see those web page objects so you can start building policies over those objects? or how does it work? A:  There ae few different options with OES. When you build an app, and make authorization calls with the app in the test environment, you can put OES in discovery mode and have OES register those authorization calls and decisions. Instead of doing  this after the fact, an application like Oracle iFlex has built-in UI controls where when the app is running, a script can intercept authorization calls and migrate those over to OES. And in Oracle ADF, a lot of resources are protected so pages, task flows and other resources be registered without OES knowing about them. Q: Does current Oracle Fusion application use OES ? The documentation does not seem to indicate it. A:  The current version of Fusion Apps is using a preview version of OES. Soon it will be repalced with OES 11g.  Q: Can OES secure mobile apps? A: Absolutely. Nowadays users are bringing their own devices such as a a smartphone or tablet to work. With the Oracle IDM platform, we can tie identity context into the access management stack. With OES we can make use of context to enforce authorization for users accessing apps from mobile devices. For example: we can take into account different elements like authentication scheme, location, device type etc and tie all that information into an authorization decision.  Q:  Does Oracle Entitlements Server (OES) have an ESAPI implementation? A:  OES is an authorization solution. ESAPI/OWASP is something we include in our platform security solution for all oracle products, not specifically in OES Q:  ESAPI has an authorization API. Can I use that API to access OES? A:  If the API supports an interface / sspi model that can be configured to invoke an external authz system through some mechanism then yes

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  • Enhance Your Gmail Account in Chrome

    - by Asian Angel
    Are you tired of items like the Chat and Invite Boxes cluttering up your Gmail account? Then join us as we look at the Better Gmail extension for Google Chrome. Before Here are some examples of items that you may be tired of looking at in your Gmail account such as the “Footer” below your “Inbox”, the “Chat Box”, and the “Invitation Box”. Perhaps you would also like to have the “New Window, Print all, & Create a document Commands” moved elsewhere. And of course there is everyone’s “favorite” sponsored links… Time to do some cleaning up and reorganizing. Better Gmail in Action As soon as you have installed Better Gmail a new tab will automatically open and present you with the available options. Place a “checkmark” in the box for each option that you would like activated and click on “Save” when finished. Note: The final option entry is a tie-in with two other “linked” extensions (Folders4Gmail & HTML Signature) while the middle listing is a link to an article for disabling Google Buzz. Once you have saved your changes in the “Options” you will be prompted to refresh your Gmail tab to see the changes. Going back to our “Inbox Area” everything looks so much more streamlined and clean now. Goodbye clutter! The “New Window, Print all, & Create a document Commands” definitely look a lot nicer as a small toolbar above our e-mail. And the right side…you can see for yourself just how much better that looks. No more distractions there to bother you as you read your e-mail. Conclusion If you have been wanting to get rid of the undesirable elements visible in your Gmail account then hurry over to the Better Gmail page, grab the extension and enjoy the better view. Links Download the Better Gmail extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Figure out which Online accounts are selling your email to spammersAdd a Remember The Milk Task Pane to Gmail in ChromeHow to Send and Receive Hotmail from Your Gmail AccountAdd Your Gmail To Windows Live MailOpen Your Gmail Account in a Popup Window TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Windows Media Player 12: Tweak Video & Sound with Playback Enhancements Own a cell phone, or does a cell phone own you? Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet

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  • Folders in SQL Server Data Tools

    - by jamiet
    Recently I have begun a new project in which I am using SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2012. Although I have been using SSDT & SSIS fairly extensively while SQL Server 2012 was in the beta phase I usually find that you don’t learn about the capabilities and quirks of new products until you use them on a real project, hence I am hoping I’m going to have a lot of experiences to share on my blog over the coming few weeks. In this first such blog post I want to talk about file and folder organisation in SSDT. The predecessor to SSDT is Visual Studio Database Projects. When one created a new Visual Studio Database Project a folder structure was provided with “Schema Objects” and “Scripts” in the root and a series of subfolders for each schema: Apparently a few customers were not too happy with the tool arbitrarily creating lots of folders in Solution Explorer and hence SSDT has gone in completely the opposite direction; now no folders are created and new objects will get created in the root – it is at your discretion where they get moved to: After using SSDT for a few weeks I can safely say that I preferred the older way because I never used Solution Explorer to navigate my schema objects anyway so it didn’t bother me how many folders it created. Having said that the thought of a single long list of files in Solution Explorer without any folders makes me shudder so on this project I have been manually creating folders in which to organise files and I have tried to mimic the old way as much as possible by creating two folders in the root, one for all schema objects and another for Pre/Post deployment scripts: This works fine until different developers start to build their own different subfolder structures; if you are OCD-inclined like me this is going to grate on you eventually and hence you are going to want to move stuff around so that you have consistent folder structures for each schema and (if you have multiple databases) each project. Moreover new files get created with a filename of the object name + “.sql” and often people like to have an extra identifier in the filename to indicate the object type: The overall point is this – files and folders in your solution are going to change. Some version control systems (VCSs) don’t take kindly to files being moved around or renamed because they recognise the renamed/moved file simply as a new file and when they do that you lose the revision history which, to my mind, is one of the key benefits of using a VCS in the first place. On this project we have been using Team Foundation Server (TFS) and while it pains me to say it (as I am no great fan of TFS’s version control system) it has proved invaluable when dealing with the SSDT problems that I outlined above because it is integrated right into the Visual Studio IDE. Thus the advice from this blog post is: If you are using SSDT consider using an Visual-Studio-integrated VCS that can easily handle file renames and file moves I suspect that fans of other VCSs will counter by saying that their VCS weapon of choice can handle renames/file moves quite satisfactorily and if that’s the case…great…let me know about them in the comments. This blog post is not an attempt to make people use one particular VCS, only to make people aware of this issue that might rise when using SSDT. More to come in the coming few weeks! @jamiet

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  • Happy New Year! Upcoming Events in January 2011

    - by mandy.ho
    Oracle Database kicks off the New Year at the following events during the month of January. Hope to see you there and please send in your pictures and feedback! Jan 20, 2011 - San Francisco, CA LinkShare Symposium West 2011 Oracle is a proud Gold Sponsor at the LinkShare Symposium West 2011 January 20 in San Francisco, California. Year after year LinkShare has been bringing their network the opportunity to come to life. At the LinkShare Symposium online performance marketing leaders meet to optimize face-to-face during a full day of networking. Learn more by attending Oracle Breakout Session, "Omni - Channel Retailing, What is possible now?" on Thursday, January 20, 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 noon, Grand Ballroom. http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=128306&src=6954634&src=6954634&Act=397 Jan 24, 2011 - Cincinnati, OH Greater Cincinnati Oracle User Group Meeting "Tom Kyte Day" - Featuring a day of sessions presented by Senior Technical Architect, Tom Kyte. Sessions include "Top 10, no 11, new features of Oracle Database 11g Release 2" and "What do I really need to know when upgrading", plus more. http://www.gcoug.org/ Jan 25, 2011 - Vancouver, British Columbia Oracle Security Solutions Forum Featuring a Special Keynote Presentation from Tom Kyte - Complete Database Security Join us at this half-day event; Oracle Database Security Solutions: Complete Information Security. Learn how Oracle Database Security solutions help you: • Prevent external threats like SQL injection attacks from reaching your databases • Transparently encrypt application data without application changes • Prevent privileged database users and administrators from accessing data • Use native database auditing to monitor and report on database activity • Mask production data for safe use in nonproduction environments http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=126974&src=6958351&src=6958351&Act=97 Jan 26, 2011 - Halifax, Nova Scotia Oracle Database Security Technology Day Exclusive Seminar on Complete Information Security with Oracle Database 11g The amount of digital data within organizations is growing at unprecedented rates, as is the value of that data and the challenges of safeguarding it. Yet most IT security programs fail to address database security--specifically, insecure applications and privileged users. So how can you protect your mission-critical information? Avoid risky third-party solutions? Defend against security breaches and compliance violations? And resist costly new infrastructure investments? Join us at this half-day seminar, Oracle Database Security Solutions: Complete Information Security, to find out http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=126269&src=6958351&src=6958351&Act=93

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  • My search what the Cloud will mean for my Work, part 2

    - by Kay Sellenrode
    My experience with the cloud and why work will change and not disappear. Until now I have multiple experiences with the cloud, for the most good. i have worked on multiple cloud solutions in the past but let me describe them as 0.x versions. For me the 1st real serious cloud experience was a bit more than 1 year ago, when our company switched from an in house server to Microsoft BPOS as a complete replacement. Since we are a small consultancy firm and don’t have that much else to do than consulting, our IT requirements are quite simple. We need Mail and Storage space for our documents. With the in house server we had multiple outages during a year, mostly by lack of administering. Being consultants in the field and hardly having time to maintain a server, BPOS was and still is for us the right solution. Since the migration we have less outages and a much more robust solution. Have we run into issues with BPOS for our own environment? No not that I’m aware of. Based on this experience I made a stance about deploy ability of BPOS and cloud solutions, they are suitable for MKB (Dutch for Medium and Small Businesses). Most Small businesses don’t have the amount of work to hire a full time it admin. Hiring a service provider to maintain their own server might be even more costly than hiring an admin. So seeing the capabilities of BPOS and the needs of most businesses I see it as a great solution that gives the business a complete Server replacement solution for a fixed price per user. resulting in a clear budget for IT spending, something most small businesses were looking for, for a long time. So right now I’m deploying BPOS with a customer, and I run into some of the Cloud 1.0 issues. In my opinion BPOS is a good working Cloud version 1.0 solution. What do I mean with 1.0? Well 1.0 is mostly a tested solution (unlike 0.x versions) but still have quite some limitations caused by too few market experience. in my opnion this is also the reason why we don’t see that much BPOS customers yet and why I think Office 365 will make a huge difference. What I have seen of 365 shows me it is a Cloud 2.0 version, meaning it has all needed features and is much more flexible to the customer. This is also why I see changes happen in my work field, changes and not unemployment due to Cloud solutions. Cloud 1.0 solutions gave me the idea that if every customer would adopt them I would be out of work. But in reality Cloud 1.0 solutions are here just to set the market needs. The Cloud 2.0 and higher versions will give the customer much more flexibility, but also require the need for a consultant. Where the 1.0 versions are simple to setup and maintain, the 2.0 solution needs more thought upfront and afterwards. ie. BPOS in its 1.0 version brings you a very simplified Exchange 2007 solution, Suitable for some customers. Looking at Office 365 you receive almost a full blown Exchange 2010 solution. I expect this to be even more customizable in the next version. In my search for the changes to my work I try to regulary write a post with my thought around the Cloud and the impact on my work as a consultant. I'm also planning to present around this topic, so if anyone is interested to see me present around this topic, you're more than welcome to contact me.

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  • How to shoot yourself in the foot (DO NOT Read in the office)

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/21/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-do-not-read.aspxLet me make it absolutely clear - the following is:merely collated by your Geek from http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xxvery, very very funny so you read it in the presence of others at your own riskso here is the list - you have been warned!C You shoot yourself in the foot.   C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."   FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.   Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.   COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.   Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...   BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.   Forth Foot yourself in the shoot.   APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.   Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.   Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.   HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.   Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.   370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.   FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing.   Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.   BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.   Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.   Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)   APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot   Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.   Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).   Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.   COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing)   Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.   Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.   Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.   Eiffel   You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.   PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.   PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.   BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.   Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.   Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.   Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.   MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.   Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.   Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %   370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.   DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.   VMS   $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT   %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.   Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred."   Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."   Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.   CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.   DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.   MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.   Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.   Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.   dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.   DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.   SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED'   Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL.   English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.   FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore.   FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.   PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.   Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.   troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*   Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.   CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot.   MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.   Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.   Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.FirefoxLets you shoot yourself in as many feet as you'd like, while using multiple great addons! IEA moving target in terms of standard ammunition size and doesn't always work properly with non-Microsoft ammunition, so sometimes you shoot something other than your foot. However, it's the corporate world's standard foot-shooting apparatus. Hackers seem to enjoy rigging websites up to trigger cascading foot-shooting failures. Windows 98 About the same as Windows 95 in terms of overall bullet capacity and triggering mechanisms. Includes updated DirectShot API. A new version was released later on to support USB guns, Windows 98 SE.WPF:You get your baseball glove and a ball and you head out to your backyard, where you throw balls to your pitchback. Then your unkempt-haired-cargo-shorts-and-sandals-with-white-socks-wearing neighbor uses XAML to sculpt your arm into a gun, the ball into a bullet and the pitchback into your foot. By now, however, only the neighbor can get it to work and he's only around from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM. LOGO: You very carefully lay out the trajectory of the bullet. Then you start the gun, which fires very slowly. You walk precisely to the point where the bullet will travel and wait, but just before it gets to you, your class time is up and one of the other kids has already used the system to hack into Sony's PS3 network. Flash: Someone has designed a beautiful-looking gun that anyone can shoot their feet with for free. It weighs six hundred pounds. All kinds of people are shooting themselves in the feet, and sending the link to everyone else so that they can too. That is, except for the criminals, who are all stealing iOS devices that the gun won't work with.APL: Its (mostly) all greek to me. Lisp: Place ((gun in ((hand sight (foot then shoot))))) (Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses)Apple OS/X and iOS Once a year, Steve Jobs returns from sick leave to tell millions of unwavering fans how they will be able to shoot themselves in the foot differently this year. They retweet and blog about it ad nauseam, and wait in line to be the first to experience "shoot different".Windows ME Usually fails, even at shooting you in the foot. Yo dawg, I heard you like shooting yourself in the foot. So I put a gun in your gun, so you can shoot yourself in the foot while you shoot yourself in the foot. (Okay, I'm not especially proud of this joke.) Windows 2000 Now you really do have to log in, before you are allowed to shoot yourself in the foot.Windows XPYou thought you learned your lesson: Don't use Windows ME. Then, along came this new creature, built on top of Windows NT! So you spend the next couple days installing antivirus software, patches and service packs, just so you can get that driver to install, and then proceed to shoot yourself in the foot. Windows Vista Newer! Glossier! Shootier! Windows 7 The bullets come out a lot smoother. Active Directory Each bullet now has an attached Bullet Identifier, and can be uniquely identified. Policies can be applied to dictate fragmentation, and the gun will occasionally have a confusing delay after the trigger has been pulled. PythonYou try to use import foot; foot.shoot() only to realize that's only available in 3.0, to which you can't yet upgrade from 2.7 because of all those extension libs lacking support. Solaris Shoots best when used on SPARC hardware, but still runs the trigger GUI under Java. After weeks of learning the appropriate STOP command to prevent the trigger from automatically being pressed on boot, you think you've got it under control. Then the one time you ever use dtrace, it hits a bug that fires the gun. MySQL The feature that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot has been in development for about 6 years, and they are adding it into the next version, which is coming out REAL SOON NOW, promise! But you can always check it out of source control and try it yourself (just not in any environment where data integrity is important because it will probably explode.) PostgreSQLAllows you to have a smug look on your face while you shoot yourself in the foot, because those MySQL guys STILL don't have that feature. NoSQL Barrel? Who needs a barrel? Just put the bullet on your foot, and strike it with a hammer. See? It's so much simpler and more efficient that way. You can even strike multiple bullets in one swing if you swing with a good enough arc, because hammers are easy to use. Getting them to synchronize is a little difficult, though.Eclipse There are about a dozen different packages for shooting yourself in the foot, with weird interdependencies on outdated components. Once you finally navigate the morass and get one installed, you then have something to look at while you shoot yourself in the foot with that package: You can watch the screen redraw.Outlook Makes it really easy to let everyone know you shot yourself in the foot!Shooting yourself in the foot using delegates.You really need to shoot yourself in the foot but you hate firearms (you don't want any dependency on the specifics of shooting) so you delegate it to somebody else. You don't care how it is done as long is shooting your foot. You can do it asynchronously in case you know you may faint so you are called back/slapped in the face by your shooter/friend (or background worker) when everything is done.C#You prepare the gun and the bullet, carefully modeling all of the physics of a bullet traveling through a foot. Just before you're about to pull the trigger, you stumble on System.Windows.BodyParts.Foot.ShootAt(System.Windows.Firearms.IGun gun) in the extended framework, realize you just wasted the entire afternoon, and shoot yourself in the head.PHP<?phprequire("foot_safety_check.php");?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head> <!--Lower!--><title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <!--LOWER!!!--><leg> <!--OK, I made this one up...--><footer><?php echo (dungSift($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "ie"))?("Your foot is safe, but you might want to wear a hard hat!"):("<div class=\"shot\">BANG!</div>"); ?></footer></leg> </body> </html>

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  • Visual Studio Extensions

    - by Scott Dorman
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2013/10/18/visual-studio-extensions.aspxAs a product, Visual Studio has been around for a long time. In fact, it’s been 18 years since the first Visual Studio product was launched. In that time, there have been some major changes but perhaps the most important (or at least influential) changes for the course of the product have been in the last few years. While we can argue over what was and wasn’t an important change or what has and hasn’t changed, I want to talk about what I think is the single most important change Microsoft has made to Visual Studio. Specifically, I’m referring to the Visual Studio Gallery (first introduced in Visual Studio 2010) and the ability for third-parties to easily write extensions which can add new functionality to Visual Studio or even change existing functionality. I know Visual Studio had this ability before the Gallery existed, but it was expensive (both from a financial and development resource) perspective for a company or individual to write such an extension. The Visual Studio Gallery changed all of that. As of today, there are over 4000 items in the Gallery. Microsoft itself has over 100 items in the Gallery and more are added all of the time. Why is this such an important feature? Simply put, it allows third-parties (companies such as JetBrains, Telerik, Red Gate, Devart, and DevExpress, just to name a few) to provide enhanced developer productivity experiences directly within the product by providing new functionality or changing existing functionality. However, there is an even more important function that it serves. It also allows Microsoft to do the same. By providing extensions which add new functionality or change existing functionality, Microsoft is not only able to rapidly innovate on new features and changes but to also get those changes into the hands of developers world-wide for feedback. The end result is that these extensions become very robust and often end up becoming part of a later product release. An excellent example of this is the new CodeLens feature of Visual Studio 2013. This is, perhaps, the single most important developer productivity enhancement released in the last decade and already has huge potential. As you can see, out of the box CodeLens supports showing you information about references, unit tests and TFS history.   Fortunately, CodeLens is also accessible to Visual Studio extensions, and Microsoft DevLabs has already written such an extension to show code “health.” This extension shows different code metrics to help make sure your code is maintainable. At this point, you may have already asked yourself, “With over 4000 extensions, how do I find ones that are good?” That’s a really good question. Fortunately, the Visual Studio Gallery has a ratings system in place, which definitely helps but that’s still a lot of extensions to look through. To that end, here is my personal list of favorite extensions. This is something I started back when Visual Studio 2010 was first released, but so much has changed since then that I thought it would be good to provide an updated list for Visual Studio 2013. These are extensions that I have installed and use on a regular basis as a developer that I find indispensible. This list is in no particular order. NuGet Package Manager for Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft CodeLens Code Health Indicator Visual Studio Spell Checker Indent Guides Web Essentials 2013 VSCommands for Visual Studio 2013 Productivity Power Tools (right now this is only for Visual Studio 2012, but it should be updated to support Visual Studio 2013.) Everyone has their own set of favorites, so mine is probably not going to match yours. If there is an extension that you really like, feel free to leave me a comment!

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  • Game Review: God of Light

    Luckily I came across this title at a very early stage. If I remember correctly, I took notice of God of Light on Twitter right on the weekend it has been published on the Play Store. "Sit back and become immersed into the world of God of Light, the game that rethinks the physics puzzle genre with its unique environment exploration gameplay, amazing graphics and exclusive soundtrack created by electronic music icon UNKLE. Join cute game mascot, Shiny, on his way to saving the universe from the impending darkness. Play through a variety of exciting game worlds and dozens of levels with mind-blowing puzzles. Your goal is to explore game levels, seek for game objects that reflect, split, combine, paint, bend and teleport rays of light energy to activate the Sources of Life and bring light back to the universe." Mastering the various reflection items in God of Light is very easy to learn and new elements are introduced during the game. Amazing puzzle game Here's the initial review I posted on the Play Store: "Great change in puzzles Fantastic and refreshing concept of puzzle solving. The effects and the music match very well, putting the player in the right mood to game. Get enlightened and grow your skills until you are a true God of Light." And it remains true, even after completing the first realm completely. Similar to Quell it took me only a couple of hours during the evening to complete all levels in the available three realms, unfortunately. God of Light currently consists of 75 levels, well it's 25 in each realm to be precise, and the challenges are increasing. Compared to the iOS version from the AppStore, God of Light is available for free on Android - at least the first realm (25 levels). Unlocking the other two remaining realms is done through an in-app purchase. The visual appearance, the sound effects and the background music provided by UNKLE makes God of Light a superb package for any puzzle gamer. Whether it is simply reflecting light over multiple mirrors, or later on bending the rays of light with black holes, or using prisms to either split, enforce, or colourise your beam, God of Light is great fun and offers a good amount of joy. Check out the following screenshots for some impressions. God of Light: Astonishing graphics and visual appeal throughout the game God of Light - Introduction to the game during the first levels. New light items are introduced at each stage during the game play God of Light: Increasing complexity and puzzle fun Hopefully, Playmous is going to provide more astonishing looking realms and interesting gimmicks in future versions. Play Store: God of Light Also, check out the latest game updates on the official web site of Playmous

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  • What do you think of the EntLib 5.0 configuration tool?

    Hello again! Its been a while, I know. Ive been busy over the last few months with several projects, some of them software related, and one of them human my son Jesse was born on 26 February 2010. Fun times! Meanwhile, back in Redmond, the p&p team has been busy working on Enterprise Library 5.0 see Grigoris announcement for details on the beta. Theres a ton of new stuff in this release, but theres one big new feature that hasnt received a lot of attention that Im keen to hear your perspectives on. The change is the biggest overhaul to the configuration tool since Enterprise Library was launched. If you havent yet grabbed the EntLib 5.0 beta, heres a before and after shot of the config tool: Enterprise Library 4.1 config tool Enterprise Library 5.0 (beta 1) config tool The tool has been rebuilt from the ground up in response to some feedback and usability studies from the previous version of the tool. But is this a step in the right direction? Id love to hear what you think. If youve downloaded EntLib 5.0 and tried out the tool, please share your thoughts on: First impressions. Is the tool easy to understand? Easy to find what youre looking for? Easy to read existing configuration? Pretty? Ease of use for real life tasks. Rather than make up your own tasks, here are a few sample scenarios you might want to try: Configure the data access block with a SQL Server connection called Audit that points to a database called Audit on a server called DB Configure the logging block so that any log entries in the Audit category are written to both the Event Log and the Audit database (see above) Configure the validation block with a ruleset called Email Address that uses an appropriate regular expression for e-mail addresses Configure the policy injection block such that any calls to classes in the MyCompany.Security namespace are logged before and after the call using the Audit category (see above) Comparison with the old config tool. What do you like better in the new tool? What did you like better in the old tool? How do you rate your level of expertise using the old tool? Keep in mind that I no longer work in the p&p team, so I cant say how any of this feedback will be used (although Im sure the team is listening!). However since Ive invested so much time in Enterprise Library, both in leading the team and using the product on real projects Im very interested to hear what you all think of the tools new direction.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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