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• SQL Sentry First Impressions

  - by AjarnMark

  After struggling to defend my SQL Servers from a political attack recently, I realized that I needed better tools to back me up, and SQL Sentry is the leading candidate. A couple of weeks ago, seemingly from out of nowhere, complaints from the business users started coming in that one of the core internal applications was running dramatically slower than normal, and fingers were being pointed at the SQL Server.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a production DBA whose entire job is to monitor and maintain our SQL Servers.  The responsibility falls to me to do the best I can, investing only a small portion of my time, because there are so many other responsibilities to take care of, and our industry is still deep in recession.  I inherited these SQL Servers and have made significant improvements in process and procedure, but I had not yet made the time to take real baseline measurements or keep a really close eye on the performance.  Like many DBAs, I wrote several of my own tools and used the “built-in tools” like Profiler, PerfMon, and sp_who2 (did I mention most of our instances are SQL Server 2000?).  These have all served me well for in-the-moment troubleshooting and maintenance, but they really fell down on the job when I was called upon to “prove” that SQL Server performance was acceptable and more importantly had not degraded recently (i.e. historical comparisons).  I really didn’t have anything from a historical comparison perspective, but I was able to show that current performance was acceptable, and deflect attention back onto other components (which in fact turned out to be the real culprit). That experience dramatically illustrated the need for better monitoring tools.  Coincidentally, I had been talking recently to my boss about the mini nightmare of monitoring several critical and interdependent overnight jobs that operate on separate instances of SQL Server.  Among other tools, I had been using Idera’s SQL Job Manager which is a free tool and did a nice job of showing me job schedules and histories in a nice calendar view.  This worked fairly well, and for the money (did I mention it was free?) it couldn’t be beat.  But it is based on the stored job history in MSDB, and there were other performance problems that we ran into when we started changing the settings for how much job history to retain, in order to be able to look back a month or more in the calendar view.  Another coincidence (if you believe in such things) was that when we had some of those performance challenges, I posted a couple of questions to the #sqlhelp hashtag on Twitter and Greg Gonzalez (@SQLSensei) suggested I check out SQL Sentry’s Event Manager.  At the time, I just thought he worked there, but later found out that he founded the company.  When I took a quick look at the features & benefits, the one that really jumped out at me is Chaining and Queueing which sounded like it would really help with our “interdependent jobs on different servers” issue. I know that is a lot of background story and coincidences, but hopefully you have stuck with me so far, and now we have arrived at the point where last week I downloaded and installed the 30-day trial of the SQL Sentry Power Suite, which is Event Manager plus Performance Advisor.  And I must say that I really like what I see so far.  Here are a few highlights: Great Support.  I had two issues getting the trial setup and monitoring a handful of our servers.  One of which was entirely my fault (missed a security setting in SQL 2008) and the other was mostly my fault (late change to some config settings that were apparently cached and did not get refreshed properly).  In both cases, the support staff at SQL Sentry were very responsive and rather quickly figured out what the cause and fix was for each of them.  This left me with a great impression of the company.  Kudos to them! Chaining and Queueing.  While I have not yet activated this feature, I am very excited about the possibilities.  We have jobs on three different instances of SQL Server that have to be run in a certain order, and each has to finish before the next can successfully begin, and I believe this feature will ensure just that.  It has been a real pain in the backside when one of those jobs runs just a little too long and does not finish before the job on another instance starts, thus triggering a chain reaction of either outright job failures, or worse, successful completion of completely invalid processing. Calendar View.  I really, really like the Event Manager calendar view where I can see all jobs and events across all instances and identify potential resource contention as well as windows of opportunity for maintenance activity.  Very well done, and based on Event Manager’s own database of accumulated historical information rather than querying the source instances every time. Performance Advisor Dashboard History View.  This view let’s me quickly select a date and time range and it displays graphs of key SQL Server and Windows metrics.  This is exactly the thing I needed to answer the “has performance changed recently” question at the beginning of this post. Reporting Services Subscription Jobs with Report Name.  This was a big and VERY pleasant surprise.  If you have ever looked at the list of SQL Server jobs that SQL Server Reporting Services creates when you make a Subscription, you will notice that they all have some sort of GUID as the name of the job.  This is really ugly, and really annoying because when you are just looking at the SQL Agent and Job Activity Monitor, if you see that Job X failed, you really do not have any indication in the name or the properties of the Job itself, as to what Report that was for.  But with SQL Sentry Event Manager you do.  The Jobs list in the Navigator pane in SQL Sentry, amazingly, displays the name of the Report that the Subscription Job is for.  And when you open it to see more details, it shows you the full Reporting Services path to that Report, so you can immediately track it down in the Report Manager in case you want to identify/notify the owner or edit the Subscription information.  I did not expect this at all, but I sure do like it.  HOORAY! That is just my first impressions from using the tools for a few days.  And I haven’t even gotten into how it showed me where I was completely mistaken about one aspect of my SQL Server disk configurations.  I’ll share that lesson in another blog entry.  But I have to say it again, the combination of Event Manager and Performance Advisor working together have really made me a fan.

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• Use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a Boxee Remote

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you a Boxee user looking for a remote control solution? Well, you might not need to look any further than your pocket. The free Boxee Remote App turns your iPhone or iPod Touch into a a simple and easy-to-use Boxee remote. The Boxee Remote App works over WiFi, so there is no need for to buy or install additional hardware on your PC. Plus, you don’t even need to be within the line of sight for it to work. Using the Boxee Remote App Download the free Boxee Remote App from the App Store and install it on your iPhone or iPod Touch. See download link below. Next, make sure you have Boxee running on your PC. Select the Boxee icon to open the App.   The first time you log in you’ll be greeted by an introduction screen that will explain the two modes. Click Continue. When opened in “Button” mode, you’ll be presented with 4 directional buttons, an “OK” button, and a back arrow button that works like the Esc key does in Boxee. Button mode performs just as a normal remote. Touching the directional buttons moves your on screen selection right, left, up, and down. Tap the OK button to open or select an item. To enter “Gesture” mode, tap the Gesture button along the top of the Screen. Gesture mode works similar to a touch pad or trackball on a laptop. You drag the Boxee icon with your thumb or finger across the screen to move around within Boxee. The icon will turn red while being dragged or touched. Simply tap the icon to select.   The Settings button allows you to manually add or delete a host computer, or adjust the sensitivity of the controls.     If you need to enter text, such as enter logon credentials for an App, the on screen keyboard will pop up. While watching a video you’ll have on-screen Stop and Pause buttons along with a volume slider.   The Boxee Remote App is simple and easy to use. As long as you can connect via WiFi, you can use it to control any instance of Boxee running on any computer on your network. Download the Boxee Remote App Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Why Wait? Amazing New Add-on Turns Your iPhone into an iPad! [Comic]Getting Started with BoxeeIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Watch Netflix Instant Movies in BoxeeWin a Free iPod Touch in the How-To Geek Facebook Giveaway! TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Out of band Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 Cool Looking Screensavers for Windows SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) If it were only this easy Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook

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• Eclipse no longer useful

  - by dgood1

  When I got my Eclipse from the Ubuntu Software Center, it was good and worked fine. I could work on Java projects fine. This week I was required to add ADT and tried the ADT-bundle, assuming it had everthing I needed, seeing that the SDK had more steps. So now, I can create Android apps using the ADT-bundle. I tried to work on my java projects again and I now discovered: I can't run my java projects: "The selection cannot be launched. And there are no recent launches." error. I also believe Eclipse doesn't know it's a java program because it all in black and white. Not the usual green/blue/red/black things when making comments, variables and Strings. I can't make new projects of ANYTHING unless I use the adt-bundle. New project only offers CVS (whatever that is) My perspectives seem limited. I remembered more choices and now I'm limited to [Java], Resource, CVS Repository, debug, Team Sync. I was told to be able to use perspectives to swap between Android and Java developing. Even after the ADT installation using "Install new Software",nothing. I can't uninstall/purge/remove Eclipse via the terminal. I tried removing it then reinstalling it via the Ubuntu Software Cetner. No results other than it's temporary removal. (Possibly unrelated) A large number of repositories are not found when updating Eclipse. (See Step 8 in Summary of what I did...) Although, on checking the versions and installation history, I confirmed Android and Java are installed. It probably just doesn't know it's there. Eclipse Indigo: Version: 3.7.2 Build id: I20110613-1736 Summary of what I did before and during the problem: Downloaded adt-bundle. Attempted instructions from teacher. (Install new Software) (Failed but other than an annoying "can't find repository" during each update, no damage to report) (Fixed) Ran "eclipse" executable from the adt-bundle. Updated Eclipse. (After restart, I noticed the problem) NOTE: other than window arrangement, I had no customizations. Played around with the Windowspreferences and Projectpropertied. Restored to default settings after no results. Tried "apt-get purge eclipse". Couldn't find Eclipse so, nothing happened. Used Software center. No results. Tried swapping workspaces. I tried different folder, deeper folder, renaming. All return the same problem. Deleted adt-bundle (browsed folders then delete). Got Adt-sdk only. Installed. Can't find any changes other than some disk space usage. Of course, I can't make Android apps until I unzip the bundle again. WindowsPreferencesInstall/UpdateAvailable Software Sites, Checked as many repositories as possible, then updated. Still nothing. I'm about to get a second try on uninstalling it, because I think my last action will just be taking up space. But I'll wait for tomorrow, in case the answer will help. Any thoughts?

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• Not attending the LUGM mini-meetup - 05. Oct 2013

  Not attending a meeting of the LUGM can be fun, too. It's getting a bit of a habit that Ish is organising small gatherings, aka mini-meetups, of the Linux User Group Mauritius/Meta (LUGM) almost every Saturday. There they mainly discuss and talk about various elements of using Linux as ones main operating systems and the possibilities you are going to have. On top of course, some tips & tricks about mastering the command line and initial steps in scripting or even writing HTML. In general, sounds like a good portion of fun and great spirit of community. Unfortunately, I'm usually quite busy with private and family matters during the weekend and so I already signalised that I wouldn't be around. Well, at least not physically... But this Saturday a couple of things worked out faster than expected and so I was hanging out on my machine. I made virtual contact with one of Pawan's messages over on Facebook... And somehow that kicked off some kind of an online game fun on basic configuration of Apache HTTPd 2.2.x, PHP 5.x and how to improve the overall performance of a newly installed blog based on WordPress. Default configuration files Nitin's website finally came alive and despite the dark theme and the hidden Apple 'fanboy' advertisement I was more interested in the technical situation. As with any new installation there is usually quite some adjustment to be done. And Nitin's page was no exception. Unfortunately, out of the box installations of Apache httpd and PHP are too verbose and expose too much information under the hood. You might think that this isn't really a problem at all, well, think about it again after completely reading this article. First, I checked the HTTP response headers - using either Chrome Developer Tools or Firefox Web Developer extension - of Nitin's page and based on that I advised him to lower the noise levels a little bit. It's not really necessary that detailed information about web server software and scripting language has to be published in every response made. Quite a number of script kiddies and exploits actually check for version specifics prior to an attack. So, removing at least version details hardens the system a little bit. In particular, I'm talking about these response values: Server X-Powered-By How to achieve that? By tweaking the configuration files... Namely, we are going to look into the following ones: apache2.conf httpd.conf .htaccess php.ini The above list contains some additional files, I'm talking about in the next paragraphs. Anyway, those are the ones involved. Tweaking Apache Open your favourite text editor and start to modify the apache2.conf. Eventually, you might like to have a quick peak at the file to see whether it is necessary to adjust it or not. Following is a handy combination of commands to get an overview of your active directives: # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf | grep -v '^$' | less There you keep an eye on those two Apache directives: ServerSignature Off ServerTokens Prod If that's not the case, change them as highlighted above. In order to activate your modifications you have to restart Apache httpd server. On Debian and Ubuntu you might use apache2ctl for that, on other distributions you might have to use service or run the init-scripts again: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Refresh your website and check the HTTP response header. Tweaking PHP5 (a little bit) Next, check your php.ini file with the following statement: # sudo grep -v ';' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini | grep -v '^$' | less And check the value of expose_php = Off Again, if it's not as highlighted, change it... Some more Apache love Okay, back to Apache it might also be interesting to improve the situation about browser caching and removing more obsolete information. When you run your website against the usual performance checks like Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow you might see those check points with bad grades on a standard, default configuration. Well, this can be done easily. Configure entity tags (ETags) ETags are only interesting when you run your websites on a farm of multiple web servers. Removing this data for your static resources is very simple in Apache. As we are going to deal with the HTTP response header information you have to ensure that Apache is capable to manipulate them. First, check your enabled modules: # sudo ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep headers And in case that the 'headers' module is not listed, you have to enable it from the available ones: # sudo a2enmod headers Second, check your httpd.conf file (in case it exists): # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/httpd.conf | grep -v '^$' | less In newer (better said fresh) installations you might have to create a new configuration file below your conf.d folder with your favourite text editor like so: # sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf.d/headers.conf Then, in order to tweak your HTTP responses either check for those lines or add them: Header unset ETagFileETag None In case that your file doesn't exist or those lines are missing, feel free to create/add them. Afterwards, check your Apache configuration syntax and restart your running instances as already shown above: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Add Expires headers To improve the loading performance of your website, you should take some care into the proper configuration of how to leverage the browser's ability to cache certain resources and files. This is done by adding an Expires: value to the HTTP response header. Generally speaking it is advised that you specify a near-future, read: 1 week or a little bit more, for your static content like JavaScript files or Cascading Style Sheets. One solution to adjust this is to put some instructions into the .htaccess file in the root folder of your web site. Of course, this could also be placed into a more generic location of your Apache installation but honestly, I'd like to keep this at the web site level. Following some adjustments I'm currently using on this blog site: # Turn on Expires and set default to 0ExpiresActive OnExpiresDefault A0 # Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">ExpiresDefault A29030400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 1 week<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">ExpiresDefault A604800Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 31 days<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$">ExpiresDefault A2678400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> As we are editing the .htaccess files, it is not necessary to restart Apache. In case that your web site doesn't load anymore or you're experiencing an error while trying to restart your httpd, check that the 'expires' module is actually an enabled module: # ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep expires# sudo a2enmod expires Of course, the instructions above a re not feature complete but I hope that they might provide a better default configuration for your LAMP stack. Resume of the day Within a couple of hours, and while being occupied with an eLearning course on SQL Server 2012, I had some good fun in helping and assisting other LUGM members while they were some kilometers away at Bagatelle. According to other blog articles it seems that Nitin had quite some moments of desperation. Just for the records: At no time it was my intention to either kick his butt or pull a leg on him. Simply, providing some input based on the lessons I've learned over the last couple of years configuring Apache HTTPd and PHP. Check out the other blogs, too: LUGM mini-meetup... Epic! Superb Saturday Linux Meetup And last but not least, the man himself: The end of a new beginning Cheers, and happy community'ing! Updates Due to our weekly Code & Coffee sessions in the MSCC community, I had a chance to talk to Nitin directly and he showed me the problems directly on his machine. This led to update this article hence the paragraphs on enabling the modules 'headers' and 'expires'.

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• Refactoring Part 1 : Intuitive Investments

  - by Wes McClure

  Fear, it’s what turns maintaining applications into a nightmare.  Technology moves on, teams move on, someone is left to operate the application, what was green is now perceived brown.  Eventually the business will evolve and changes will need to be made.  The approach to those changes often dictates the long term viability of the application.  Fear of change, lack of passion and a lack of interest in understanding the domain often leads to a paranoia to do anything that doesn’t involve duct tape and bailing twine.  Don’t get me wrong, those have a place in the short term viability of a project but they don’t have a place in the long term.  Add to it “us versus them” in regards to the original team and those that maintain it, internal politics and other factors and you have a recipe for disaster.  This results in code that quickly becomes unmanageable.  Even the most clever of designs will eventually become sub optimal and debt will amount that exponentially makes changes difficult.  This is where refactoring comes in, and it’s something I’m very passionate about.  Refactoring is about improving the process whereby we make change, it’s an exponential investment in the process of change. Without it we will incur exponential complexity that halts productivity. Investments, especially in the long term, require intuition and reflection.  How can we tackle new development effectively via evolving the original design and paying off debt that has been incurred? The longer we wait to ask and answer this question, the more it will cost us.  Small requests don’t warrant big changes, but realizing when changes now will pay off in the long term, and especially in the short term, is valuable. I have done my fair share of maintaining applications and continuously refactoring as needed, but recently I’ve begun work on a project that hasn’t had much debt, if any, paid down in years.  This is the first in a series of blog posts to try to capture the process which is largely driven by intuition of smaller refactorings from other projects. Signs that refactoring could help: Testability How can decreasing test time not pay dividends? One of the first things I found was that a very important piece often takes 30+ minutes to test.  I can only imagine how much time this has cost historically, but more importantly the time it might cost in the coming weeks: I estimate at least 10-20 hours per person!  This is simply unacceptable for almost any situation.  As it turns out, about 6 hours of working with this part of the application and I was able to cut the time down to under 30 seconds!  In less than the lost time of one week, I was able to fix the problem for all future weeks! If we can’t test fast then we can’t change fast, nor with confidence. Code is used by end users and it’s also used by developers, consider your own needs in terms of the code base.  Adding logic to enable/disable features during testing can help decouple parts of an application and lead to massive improvements.  What exactly is so wrong about test code in real code?  Often, these become features for operators and sometimes end users.  If you cannot run an integration test within a test runner in your IDE, it’s time to refactor. Readability Are variables named meaningfully via a ubiquitous language? Is the code segmented functionally or behaviorally so as to minimize the complexity of any one area? Are aspects properly segmented to avoid confusion (security, logging, transactions, translations, dependency management etc) Is the code declarative (what) or imperative (how)?  What matters, not how.  LINQ is a great abstraction of the what, not how, of collection manipulation.  The Reactive framework is a great example of the what, not how, of managing streams of data. Are constants abstracted and named, or are they just inline? Do people constantly bitch about the code/design? If the code is hard to understand, it will be hard to change with confidence.  It’s a large undertaking if the original designers didn’t pay much attention to readability and as such will never be done to “completion.”  Make sure not to go over board, instead use this as you change an application, not in lieu of changes (like with testability). Complexity Simplicity will never be achieved, it’s highly subjective.  That said, a lot of code can be significantly simplified, tidy it up as you go.  Refactoring will often converge upon a simplification step after enough time, keep an eye out for this. Understandability In the process of changing code, one often gains a better understanding of it.  Refactoring code is a good way to learn how it works.  However, it’s usually best in combination with other reasons, in effect killing two birds with one stone.  Often this is done when readability is poor, in which case understandability is usually poor as well.  In the large undertaking we are making with this legacy application, we will be replacing it.  Therefore, understanding all of its features is important and this refactoring technique will come in very handy. Unused code How can deleting things not help? This is a freebie in refactoring, it’s very easy to detect with modern tools, especially in statically typed languages.  We have VCS for a reason, if in doubt, delete it out (ok that was cheesy)! If you don’t know where to start when refactoring, this is an excellent starting point! Duplication Do not pray and sacrifice to the anti-duplication gods, there are excellent examples where consolidated code is a horrible idea, usually with divergent domains.  That said, mediocre developers live by copy/paste.  Other times features converge and aren’t combined.  Tools for finding similar code are great in the example of copy/paste problems.  Knowledge of the domain helps identify convergent concepts that often lead to convergent solutions and will give intuition for where to look for conceptual repetition. 80/20 and the Boy Scouts It’s often said that 80% of the time 20% of the application is used most.  These tend to be the parts that are changed.  There are also parts of the code where 80% of the time is spent changing 20% (probably for all the refactoring smells above).  I focus on these areas any time I make a change and follow the philosophy of the Boy Scout in cleaning up more than I messed up.  If I spend 2 hours changing an application, in the 20%, I’ll always spend at least 15 minutes cleaning it or nearby areas. This gives a huge productivity edge on developers that don’t. Ironically after a short period of time the 20% shrinks enough that we don’t have to spend 80% of our time there and can move on to other areas.   Refactoring is highly subjective, never attempt to refactor to completion!  Learn to be comfortable with leaving one part of the application in a better state than others.  It’s an evolution, not a revolution.  These are some simple areas to look into when making changes and can help get one started in the process.  I’ve often found that refactoring is a convergent process towards simplicity that sometimes spans a few hours but often can lead to massive simplifications over the timespan of weeks and months of regular development.

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• How to Identify Which Hardware Component is Failing in Your Computer

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Concluding that your computer has a hardware problem is just the first step. If you’re dealing with a hardware issue and not a software issue, the next step is determining what hardware problem you’re actually dealing with. If you purchased a laptop or pre-built desktop PC and it’s still under warranty, you don’t need to care about this. Have the manufacturer fix the PC for you — figuring it out is their problem. If you’ve built your own PC or you want to fix a computer that’s out of warranty, this is something you’ll need to do on your own. Blue Screen 101: Search for the Error Message This may seem like obvious advice, but searching for information about a blue screen’s error message can help immensely. Most blue screens of death you’ll encounter on modern versions of Windows will likely be caused by hardware failures. The blue screen of death often displays information about the driver that crashed or the type of error it encountered. For example, let’s say you encounter a blue screen that identified “NV4_disp.dll” as the driver that caused the blue screen. A quick Google search will reveal that this is the driver for NVIDIA graphics cards, so you now have somewhere to start. It’s possible that your graphics card is failing if you encounter such an error message. Check Hard Drive SMART Status Hard drives have a built in S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) feature. The idea is that the hard drive monitors itself and will notice if it starts to fail, providing you with some advance notice before the drive fails completely. This isn’t perfect, so your hard drive may fail even if SMART says everything is okay. If you see any sort of “SMART error” message, your hard drive is failing. You can use SMART analysis tools to view the SMART health status information your hard drives are reporting. Test Your RAM RAM failure can result in a variety of problems. If the computer writes data to RAM and the RAM returns different data because it’s malfunctioning, you may see application crashes, blue screens, and file system corruption. To test your memory and see if it’s working properly, use Windows’ built-in Memory Diagnostic tool. The Memory Diagnostic tool will write data to every sector of your RAM and read it back afterwards, ensuring that all your RAM is working properly. Check Heat Levels How hot is is inside your computer? Overheating can rsult in blue screens, crashes, and abrupt shut downs. Your computer may be overheating because you’re in a very hot location, it’s ventilated poorly, a fan has stopped inside your computer, or it’s full of dust. Your computer monitors its own internal temperatures and you can access this information. It’s generally available in your computer’s BIOS, but you can also view it with system information utilities such as SpeedFan or Speccy. Check your computer’s recommended temperature level and ensure it’s within the appropriate range. If your computer is overheating, you may see problems only when you’re doing something demanding, such as playing a game that stresses your CPU and graphics card. Be sure to keep an eye on how hot your computer gets when it performs these demanding tasks, not only when it’s idle. Stress Test Your CPU You can use a utility like Prime95 to stress test your CPU. Such a utility will fore your computer’s CPU to perform calculations without allowing it to rest, working it hard and generating heat. If your CPU is becoming too hot, you’ll start to see errors or system crashes. Overclockers use Prime95 to stress test their overclock settings — if Prime95 experiences errors, they throttle back on their overclocks to ensure the CPU runs cooler and more stable. It’s a good way to check if your CPU is stable under load. Stress Test Your Graphics Card Your graphics card can also be stress tested. For example, if your graphics driver crashes while playing games, the games themselves crash, or you see odd graphical corruption, you can run a graphics benchmark utility like 3DMark. The benchmark will stress your graphics card and, if it’s overheating or failing under load, you’ll see graphical problems, crashes, or blue screens while running the benchmark. If the benchmark seems to work fine but you have issues playing a certain game, it may just be a problem with that game. Swap it Out Not every hardware problem is easy to diagnose. If you have a bad motherboard or power supply, their problems may only manifest through occasional odd issues with other components. It’s hard to tell if these components are causing problems unless you replace them completely. Ultimately, the best way to determine whether a component is faulty is to swap it out. For example, if you think your graphics card may be causing your computer to blue screen, pull the graphics card out of your computer and swap in a new graphics card. If everything is working well, it’s likely that your previous graphics card was bad. This isn’t easy for people who don’t have boxes of components sitting around, but it’s the ideal way to troubleshoot. Troubleshooting is all about trial and error, and swapping components out allows you to pin down which component is actually causing the problem through a process of elimination. This isn’t a complete guide to everything that could likely go wrong and how to identify it — someone could write a full textbook on identifying failing components and still not cover everything. But the tips above should give you some places to start dealing with the more common problems. Image Credit: Justin Marty on Flickr     

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• first install for windows eight.....da beta

  - by raysmithequip

  The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it.  I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field.  The OS took like a fish to water.  I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck sub 200g wd sata drive, a half working dvd burner and an asus fanless nvidia vid card, not a great one but Sub 50.00 on newey eggey...I did have to hunt the ms forums for a key and of course to activate the thing, if dos would of needed this outmoded ritual, we would still be on cpm and osborne would be a household name, of course little do people know that this ritual was common as far back as the seventies on att unix installs....not, but it was possible, I used to joke about when I ran a bbs, what hell would of been wrought had dos 3.2 machines been required to dial into my bbs to send fido mail to ms and wait for an acknowledgement.  All in all the thing was pushing a seven on the ms richter scale, not including the vid card, sadly it came in at just a tad over three....I wanted to evaluate it for a possible replacement on critical machines that in the past went down due to a vid card fan failure....you have no idea what a customer thinks when you show them a failed vid card fan..."you mean that little plastic piece of junk caused all this!!??!!!"...yea man.  Some production machines don't need any sort of vid, I will at least keep it on the maybe list for those, MTBF is a very important factor, some big box stores should put percentage of failure rate within 24 month estimates on the outside of the carton for sure.  And a warning that the power supplies are already at their limit.  Let's face it, today even 550w can be iffy.A few neat eye candy improvements over the earlier windows is nice, the metro screen is nice, anyone who has used a newer phone recently will intuitively drag their fingers across the screen....lot of good that was with no mouse or touch screen though.  Lucky me, I have been using windows since day one, I still have a copy of win 2.0 (and every other version) for no good reason.  Still the old ix collection of disks is much larger, recompiling any kernal is another silly ritual, same machine, different day, same recompile...argh. Rh is my all time fav, mandrake was always missing something, like it rewrote the init file or something, novell is ok as long as you stay on the beaten path and of course ubuntu normally recompiles with the same errors consistantly....makes life easy that way....no errors on windows eight, just a screen that did not match the installed hardware, natuarally I alt tabbed right out of it, then hit the flag key to find the start menu....no start button. I miss the start button already. Keyboard cowboy funnin and I was browsing the harddrive, nothing stunning there, I like that, means I can find stuff. Only I can't find what I want, the start button....the start menu is that first screen for touch tablets. No biggie for useruser, that is where they will want to be, I can see that. Admins won't want to be there, it is easy enough to get the control panel a bazzilion other ways though, just not the start button. (see a pattern here?). Personally, from the keyboard I find it fun to hit the carets along the location bar at the top of the explorer screen with tabs and arrows and choose SHOW ALL CONTROL PANEL ITEMS, or thereabouts. Bottom line, I love seven and I'll love eight even more!...very happy I did not have to follow the normal rule of thumb (a customer watching me build a system and asking questions said "oh I get it, so every piece you put in there is basically a hundred bucks, right?)...ok, sure, pretty much, more or less, well, ya dude.  It will be WAY past october till I get a real touch screen but I did pick up a pair of cheap tatungs so I can try the NEW main start screen, I parse a lot of folders and have a vision of how a pair of touch screens will be easier than landing a rover on mars.  Ok.  fine, they are way smallish, and I don't expect multitouch to work but we are talking a few percent of a new 21 inch viewsonic touch screen.  Will this OS be a game changer?  I don't know.  Bottom line with all the pads and droids in the world, it is more of a catch up move at first glance.  Not something ms is used to.  An app store?  I can see ms's motivation, the others have it.  I gather there will not be gadgets there, go ahead and see what ms did  to the once populated gadget page...go ahead, google gadgets and take a gander, used to hundreds of gadgets, they are already gone.  They replaced gadgets?  sort of, I'll drop that, it's a bit of a sore point for me.  More of interest was what happened when I downloaded stuff off codeplex and some other normal programs that I like, like orbitron, top o' my list!!...cardware it is...anyways, click on the exe, get a screen, normal for windows, this one indicated that I was not running a normal windows program and had a button for  exit the install, naw, I hit details, a hidden run program anyways came into view....great, my path to the normal windows has detected a program tha.....yea ok, acl is on, fine, moving along I got orbitron installed in record time and was tracking the iss on the newest Microsoft OS, beta of course, felt like the first time I setup bsd all those year ago...FUN!!...I suppose I gotta start to think about budgeting for the real os when it comes out in october, by then I should have a rasberry pi and be done with fedora remixed.  Of course that sounds like fun too!!  I would use this OS on a tablet or phone.  I don't like the idea of being hearded to an app store, don't like that on anything, we are americans and want real choices not marketed hype, lest you are younger with opm (other peoples money).   This os would be neat on a zune, but I suspect the zune is a gonner, I am rooting for microsoft, after all their default password is not admin anymore, nor alpine,  it's blank. Others force a password, my first fawn password was so long I could not even log into it with the password in front of me, who the heck uses %$# anyways, and if I was writing a brute force attack what the heck kinda impasse is that anyways at .00001 microseconds of a code execution cycle (just a non qualified number, not a real clock speed)....AI is where it will be before too long, MS is on that path, perhaps soon someone will sit down and write an app for the kinect that watches your eyes while you scan the new main start screen, clicking on the big E icon when you blink.....boy is that going to be fun!!!! sure. Blink,dammit,blink,dammit...... OPM no doubt.I like windows eight, we are moving forwards, better keep a close eye on ubuntu.  The real clinch comes when open source becomes paid source......don't blink, I already see plenty of very expensive 'ix apps, some even in app stores already.  more to come.......

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• Enterprise Manager in EPM 11.1.2.x...a game of hide and seek!

  - by THE

  Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} guest article: Maurice Bauhahn: Users of Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management 11.1.2.0 and 11.1.2.1 may puzzle why the URL http://<servername>:7001/em may not conjure up Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. This powerful tool has been installed by default...but WebLogic may not have been 'Extended' to allow you to call it up (we are hopeful this ‘Extend’  step will not be needed with 11.1.2.2). The explanation is on pages 425 and following of the following document: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/epm-tips-issues-1-72-427329.pdf A close look at the screen dumps in that section reveals a somewhat scary prospect, however: the non-AdminServer servlets had all failed (see the red down-arrow icons to the right of their names) after the configuration! Of course you would want to avoid that scenario! A rephrasing of the instructions might help: Ensure the WebLogic AdminServer is not running (in a default scenario that would mean port 7001 is not active). Ensure you have logged into the computer as the installing owner of EPM. Since Enterprise Manager uses a LOT of resources, be sure that there is adequate free RAM to accommodate the added load. On the machine where WebLogic AdminServer is set up (typically the Foundation Services machine), run \Oracle\Middleware\wlserver_10.3\common\bin\config (config.sh on Unix). Select the 'Extend an existing WebLogic domain' option, and click the 'Next' button. Select the domain being used by EPM System. - Typically, the default domain is created under /Oracle/Middleware/user_projects/domains and is named EPMSystem. - Click 'Next'. Under 'Extend my domain automatically to support the following added products' - place a check mark before 'Oracle Enterprise Manager - 11.1.1.0 [oracle_common]' to select it. - Continue accepting the defaults by clicking 'Next' on each page until - on the last page you click 'Extend'. - The system will grind for a few minutes while it configures (deploys?) EM. - Start the AdminServer. Sometimes there is contention in the startup order of the various servlets (resulting in some not coming up). To avoid that problem on Microsoft Windows machines you may start and stop services via the following analogous command line commands to those run on Linux/Unix (these more carefully space out timings of these events): Ensure EPM is up:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\epmsystem1\bin\start.bat Ensure WebLogic is up:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\EPMSystem\bin\startWebLogic.cmd Shut down WebLogic:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\EPMSystem\bin\stopWebLogic.cmd Shut down EPM:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\epmsystem1\bin\stop.bat  Now you should be able to more successfully troubleshoot with the EM tool:

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• The Presentation Isn't Over Until It's Over

  - by Phil Factor

  The senior corporate dignitaries settled into their seats looking important in a blue-suited sort of way. The lights dimmed as I strode out in front to give my presentation.  I had ten vital minutes to make my pitch.  I was about to dazzle the top management of a large software company who were considering the purchase of my software product. I would present them with a dazzling synthesis of diagrams, graphs, followed by  a live demonstration of my software projected from my laptop.  My preparation had been meticulous: It had to be: A year’s hard work was at stake, so I’d prepared it to perfection.  I stood up and took them all in, with a gaze of sublime confidence. Then the laptop expired. There are several possible alternative plans of action when this happens     A. Stare at the smoking laptop vacuously, flapping ones mouth slowly up and down     B. Stand frozen like a statue, locked in indecision between fright and flight.     C. Run out of the room, weeping     D. Pretend that this was all planned     E. Abandon the presentation in favour of a stilted and tedious dissertation about the software     F. Shake your fist at the sky, and curse the sense of humour of your preferred deity I started for a few seconds on plan B, normally referred to as the ‘Rabbit in the headlamps of the car’ technique. Suddenly, a little voice inside my head spoke. It spoke the famous inane words of Yogi Berra; ‘The game isn't over until it's over.’ ‘Too right’, I thought. What to do? I ran through the alternatives A-F inclusive in my mind but none appealed to me. I was completely unprepared for this. Nowadays, longevity has since taught me more than I wanted to know about the wacky sense of humour of fate, and I would have taken two laptops. I hadn’t, but decided to do the presentation anyway as planned. I started out ignoring the dead laptop, but pretending, instead that it was still working. The audience looked startled. They were expecting plan B to be succeeded by plan C, I suspect. They weren’t used to denial on this scale. After my introductory talk, which didn’t require any visuals, I came to the diagram that described the application I’d written.  I’d taken ages over it and it was hot stuff. Well, it would have been had it been projected onto the screen. It wasn’t. Before I describe what happened then, I must explain that I have thespian tendencies.  My  triumph as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady at the local operatic society is now long forgotten, but I remember at the time of my finest performance, the moment that, glancing up over the vast audience of  moist-eyed faces at the during the poignant  scene between Eliza and Higgins at the end, I  realised that I had a talent that one day could possibly  be harnessed for commercial use I just talked about the diagram as if it was there, but throwing in some extra description. The audience nodded helpfully when I’d done enough. Emboldened, I began a sort of mime, well, more of a ballet, to represent each slide as I came to it. Heaven knows I’d done my preparation and, in my mind’s eye, I could see every detail, but I had to somehow project the reality of that vision to the audience, much the same way any actor playing Macbeth should do the ghost of Banquo.  My desperation gave me a manic energy. If you’ve ever demonstrated a windows application entirely by mime, gesture and florid description, you’ll understand the scale of the challenge, but then I had nothing to lose. With a brief sentence of description here and there, and arms flailing whilst outlining the size and shape of  graphs and diagrams, I used the many tricks of mime, gesture and body-language  learned from playing Captain Hook, or the Sheriff of Nottingham in pantomime. I set out determinedly on my desperate venture. There wasn’t time to do anything but focus on the challenge of the task: the world around me narrowed down to ten faces and my presentation: ten souls who had to be hypnotized into seeing a Windows application:  one that was slick, well organized and functional I don’t remember the details. Eight minutes of my life are gone completely. I was a thespian berserker.  I know however that I followed the basic plan of building the presentation in a carefully controlled crescendo until the dazzling finale where the results were displayed on-screen.  ‘And here you see the results, neatly formatted and grouped carefully to enhance the significance of the figures, together with running trend-graphs!’ I waved a mime to signify an animated  window-opening, and looked up, in my first pause, to gaze defiantly  at the audience.  It was a sight I’ll never forget. Ten pairs of eyes were gazing in rapt attention at the imaginary window, and several pairs of eyes were glancing at the imaginary graphs and figures.  I hadn’t had an audience like that since my starring role in  Beauty and the Beast.  At that moment, I realized that my desperate ploy might work. I sat down, slightly winded, when my ten minutes were up.  For the first and last time in my life, the audience of a  ‘PowerPoint’ presentation burst into spontaneous applause. ‘Any questions?’ ‘Yes,  Have you got an agent?’ Yes, in case you’re wondering, I got the deal. They bought the software product from me there and then. However, it was a life-changing experience for me and I have never ever again trusted technology as part of a presentation.  Even if things can’t go wrong, they’ll go wrong and they’ll kill the flow of what you’re presenting.  if you can’t do something without the techno-props, then you shouldn’t do it.  The greatest lesson of all is that great presentations require preparation and  ‘stage-presence’ rather than fancy graphics. They’re a great supporting aid, but they should never dominate to the point that you’re lost without them.

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• What are some good questions (and good/bad answers) to ask at an interview to gauge the competency of the company/team?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm already familiar with the Joel Test, but it's been my experience that some of the questions there have the answers "massaged" to make the company seem better than it is. I've had several jobs in the past that, for instance, claimed they had a QA process and did unit testing, and what they really meant is "The programmers test the app, and test with the debugger and via trial-and-error."; they said they used SVN but they just lumped everything into one giant repository and had no concept of branching/merging or anything more complicated than updating and committing; said they can build in one step and what they really mean is it's "one step" to copy dozens of files by hand from the programmer's PC to the live server. How do you go about properly gauging a company's environment to make sure that it's a well-evolved company and not stuck on doing things a certain way because they've done it for years and they're ignorant of change? You can almost never ask to see their source code, so you're stuck trying to figure out if the interviewer's answer is accurate or BS to make the company seem good. Besides the Joel Test what are some other good questions to get the proper feel for a company, and more importantly what are some good and bad answers that could indicate a good or bad company? I mean something like (take at face value, please, it's all I could think of at short notice): Question: How does the software team apply the SOLID principles and Inversion of Control to their code? Good Answer: We adhere to SOLID wherever possible; we use TDD so it kind of forces us to write abstract, testable code. We use Ninject for our IoC container because it's fairly easy to configure - it was that or StructureMap but I find Ninject a bit more intuitive, and who doesn't like ninjas? You're not a pirate, are you? Bad Answer: Our code is pretty secure, yeah. And what's this Inversion of Control thing? I've never heard of it before. You see what I did there. The "good" answer uses facts to back it up and has a bit of "in crowd" humor; the bad answer shows complete ignorance of the question - not necessarily a bad thing if you are interviewing for a manger/director position, but a terrible answer and a huge red flag if you're interviewing as a developer and talking to a senior developer or manager! My biggest problem at the moment is being able to take a generic response and gauge whether it's the good or bad answer; more often than not it's the bad kind and I find myself frustrated almost from day one at the new job. I suppose I could name drop if I ask about specific things (e.g. "Do you write unit tests?" and if the answer is yes, ask if they use NUnit, MbUnit or something else; if they mention data access ask if they use a clean ORM like NHibernate or something more coupled like EF or Linq) but is there another way short of being resolute to actually call the interview on things (which will almost certainly result in not getting the job, but if they are skirting the question it's probably not a job I want).

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• How to Recover From a Virus Infection: 3 Things You Need to Do

  - by Chris Hoffman

  If your computer becomes infected with a virus or another piece of malware, removing the malware from your computer is only the first step. There’s more you need to do to ensure you’re secure. Note that not every antivirus alert is an actual infection. If your antivirus program catches a virus before it ever gets a chance to run on your computer, you’re safe. If it catches the malware later, you have a bigger problem. Change Your Passwords You’ve probably used your computer to log into your email, online banking websites, and other important accounts. Assuming you had malware on your computer, the malware could have logged your passwords and uploaded them to a malicious third party. With just your email account, the third party could reset your passwords on other websites and gain access to almost any of your online accounts. To prevent this, you’ll want to change the passwords for your important accounts — email, online banking, and whatever other important accounts you’ve logged into from the infected computer. You should probably use another computer that you know is clean to change the passwords, just to be safe. When changing your passwords, consider using a password manager to keep track of strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication to prevent people from logging into your important accounts even if they know your password. This will help protect you in the future. Ensure the Malware Is Actually Removed Once malware gets access to your computer and starts running, it has the ability to do many more nasty things to your computer. For example, some malware may install rootkit software and attempt to hide itself from the system. Many types of Trojans also “open the floodgates” after they’re running, downloading many different types of malware from malicious web servers to the local system. In other words, if your computer was infected, you’ll want to take extra precautions. You shouldn’t assume it’s clean just because your antivirus removed what it found. It’s probably a good idea to scan your computer with multiple antivirus products to ensure maximum detection. You may also want to run a bootable antivirus program, which runs outside of Windows. Such bootable antivirus programs will be able to detect rootkits that hide themselves from Windows and even the software running within Windows. avast! offers the ability to quickly create a bootable CD or USB drive for scanning, as do many other antivirus programs. You may also want to reinstall Windows (or use the Refresh feature on Windows 8) to get your computer back to a clean state. This is more time-consuming, especially if you don’t have good backups and can’t get back up and running quickly, but this is the only way you can have 100% confidence that your Windows system isn’t infected. It’s all a matter of how paranoid you want to be. Figure Out How the Malware Arrived If your computer became infected, the malware must have arrived somehow. You’ll want to examine your computer’s security and your habits to prevent more malware from slipping through in the same way. Windows is complex. For example, there are over 50 different types of potentially dangerous file extensions that can contain malware to keep track of. We’ve tried to cover many of the most important security practices you should be following, but here are some of the more important questions to ask: Are you using an antivirus? – If you don’t have an antivirus installed, you should. If you have Microsoft Security Essentials (known as Windows Defender on Windows 8), you may want to switch to a different antivirus like the free version of avast!. Microsoft’s antivirus product has been doing very poorly in tests. Do you have Java installed? – Java is a huge source of security problems. The majority of computers on the Internet have an out-of-date, vulnerable version of Java installed, which would allow malicious websites to install malware on your computer. If you have Java installed, uninstall it. If you actually need Java for something (like Minecraft), at least disable the Java browser plugin. If you’re not sure whether you need Java, you probably don’t. Are any browser plugins out-of-date? – Visit Mozilla’s Plugin Check website (yes, it also works in other browsers, not just Firefox) and see if you have any critically vulnerable plugins installed. If you do, ensure you update them — or uninstall them. You probably don’t need older plugins like QuickTime or RealPlayer installed on your computer, although Flash is still widely used. Are your web browser and operating system set to automatically update? – You should be installing updates for Windows via Windows Update when they appear. Modern web browsers are set to automatically update, so they should be fine — unless you went out of your way to disable automatic updates. Using out-of-date web browsers and Windows versions is dangerous. Are you being careful about what you run? – Watch out when downloading software to ensure you don’t accidentally click sketchy advertisements and download harmful software. Avoid pirated software that may be full of malware. Don’t run programs from email attachments. Be careful about what you run and where you get it from in general. If you can’t figure out how the malware arrived because everything looks okay, there’s not much more you can do. Just try to follow proper security practices. You may also want to keep an extra-close eye on your credit card statement for a while if you did any online-shopping recently. As so much malware is now related to organized crime, credit card numbers are a popular target.     

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• PECL OCI8 2.0 Production Release Announcement

  - by cj

  The PHP OCI8 2.0.6 extension for Oracle Database is now "production" status. The source code is available on PECL. This can be used immediately to update your OCI8 extension in PHP 5.2 and later versions. The extension compiles with Oracle 10.2 or later client libraries. Oracle's standard cross-version database connectivity applies. OCI8 2.0 and PHP 5.5.5 RPMs for Oracle and Red Hat Linux are available from oss.oracle.com. Windows DLLs are available on PECL for PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5. OCI8 2.0 source code will also be automatically included in the next major version of PHP. New Functionality Oracle Database 12c Implicit Result Set support. IRS's make it easy to pass query results back from stored PL/SQL procedures or anonymous PL/SQL blocks. Individual IRS statement resources, each corresponding to a single query, can be obtained with the new function oci_get_implicit_resultset(). These 'child' statement resources can be passed to any oci_fetch_* function. See Using PHP and Oracle Database 12c Implicit Result Sets and the PHP Manual: oci_get_implicit_resultset(). DTrace Dynamic Trace static probes. This well respected DTrace tracing framework is available on a number of platforms, including Oracle Linux. PHP OCI8 static user-space probes can be enabled with PHP's --enable-dtrace configuration option. See Using PHP DTrace on Oracle Linux. Documentation is also available in the PHP Manual OCI8 and DTrace Dynamic Tracing Improved Functionality Using oci_execute($s, OCI_NO_AUTO_COMMIT) for a SELECT no longer unnecessarily initiates an internal ROLLBACK during connection close. This can improve overall scalability by reducing "round trips" between PHP and the database. Changed Functionality PHP OCI8 2.0's minimum pre-requisites are now PHP 5.2 and Oracle client library 10.2. Later versions of both are usable and, in fact, recommended. Use the older PHP OCI8 1.4.10 extension when using PHP 4.3.9 through to PHP 5.1.x, or when only Oracle Database 9.2 client libraries are available. oci_set_*($connection, ...) meta data setting call error handling is fixed so that oci_error($connection) works for these calls. Note: The old, deprecated function aliases like ocilogon still exist but are not recommended for new applications. Phpinfo() Changes Some cosmetic changes were made to the output of php --ri oci8 and the phpinfo() function. The oci8.event and oci8.connection_class values are now shown only when the Oracle client libraries support the respective functionality. Connection statistics are now in a separate phpinfo() table. Temporary LOB and Collection support status lines in phpinfo() output were removed. These two features have always been enabled since 2007. Oci_internal_debug() Changes The oci_internal_debug() function is now a no-op. Use PHP's --enable-dtrace functionality with DTrace or SystemTap instead. References OCI8 Extension source code and Windows DLLs http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8 Oracle Linux RPMs oss.oracle.com PHP Manual for OCI8 OCI8 and DTrace Dynamic Tracing Oracle OpenWorld Conference paper What's New in Oracle Database 12c for PHP

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• Corsair Hackers Reboot

  It wasn't easy for me to attend but it was absolutely worth to go. The Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM) organised another get-together for any open source enthusiast here on the island. Strangely named "Corsair Hackers Reboot" but it stands for a positive cause: "Corsair Hackers Reboot Event A collaborative activity involving LUGM, UoM Computer Club, Fortune Way Shopping Mall and several geeks from around the island, striving to put FOSS into homes & offices. The public is invited to discover and explore Free Software & Open Source." And it was a good opportunity for me and the kids to visit the east coast of Mauritius, too. Perfect timing It couldn't have been better... Why? Well, for two important reasons (in terms of IT): End of support for Microsoft Windows XP - 08.04.2014 Release of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support - 17.04.2014 Quite funnily, those two IT dates weren't the initial reasons and only during the weeks of preparations we put those together. And therefore it was even more positive to promote the use of Linux and open source software in general to a broader audience. Getting there ... Thanks to the new motor way M3 and all the additional road work which has been completed recently it was very simple to get across the island in a very quick and relaxed manner. Compared to my trips in the early days of living in Mauritius (and riding on a scooter) it was very smooth and within less than an hour we hit Centrale de Flacq. Well, being in the city doesn't necessarily mean that one has arrived at the destination. But thanks to modern technology I had a quick look on Google Maps, and we finally managed to get a parking behind the huge bus terminal in Flacq. From there it was just a short walk to Fortune Way. The children were trying to count the number of buses... Well, lots and lots of buses - really impressive actually. What was presented? There were different areas set up. Right at the entrance one's attention was directly drawn towards the elevated hacker's stage. Similar to rock stars performing their gig there was bunch of computers, laptops and networking equipment in order to cater the right working conditions for coding/programming challenge(s) on the one hand and for the pen-testing or system hacking competition on the other hand. Personally, I was very impresses that actually Nitin took care of the pen-testing competition. He hardly started one year back with Linux in general, and Kali Linux specifically. Seeing his personal development from absolute newbie to a decent Linux system administrator within such a short period of time, is really impressive. His passion to open source software made him a living. Next, clock-wise seen, was the Kid's Corner with face-painting as the main attraction. Additionally, there were numerous paper print outs to colour. Plus a decent workstation with the educational suite GCompris. Of course, my little ones were into that. They already know GCompris since a while as they are allowed to use it on an IGEL thin client terminal here at home. To simplify my life, I set up GCompris as full-screen guest session on the server, and they can pass the login screen without any further obstacles. And because it's a thin client hooked up to a XDMCP remote session I don't have to worry about the hardware on their desk, too. The next section was the main attraction of the event: BYOD - Bring Your Own Device Well, compared to the usual context of BYOD the corsairs had a completely different intention. Here, you could bring your own laptop and a team of knowledgeable experts - read: geeks and so on - offered to fully convert your system on any Linux distribution of your choice. And even though I came later, I was told that the USB pen drives had been in permanent use. From being prepared via dd command over launching LiveCD session to finally installing a fresh Linux system on bare metal. Most interestingly, I did a similar job already a couple of months ago, while upgrading an existing Windows XP system to Xubuntu 13.10. So far, the female owner is very happy and enjoys her system almost every evening to go shopping online, checking mails, and reading latest news from the Anime world. Back to the Hackers event, Ish told me that they managed approximately 20 conversion during the day. Furthermore, Ajay and others gladly assisted some visitors with some tricky issues and by the end of the day you can call is a success. While I was around, there was a elderly male visitor that got a full-fledged system conversion to a Linux system running completely in French language. A little bit more to the centre it was Yasir's turn to demonstrate his Arduino hardware that he hooked up with an experimental electrical circuit board connected to an LCD matrix display. That's the real spirit of hacking, and he showed some minor adjustments on the fly while demo'ing the system. Also, very interesting there was a thermal sensor around. Personally, I think that platforms like the Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi have a great potential at a very affordable price in order to bring a better understanding of electronics as well as computer programming to a broader audience. It would be great to see more of those experiments during future activities. And last but not least there were a small number of vendors. Amongst them was Emtel - once again as sponsor of the general internet connectivity - and another hardware supplier from Riche Terre shopping mall. They had a good collection of Android related gimmicks, like a autonomous web cam that can convert any TV with HDMI connector into an online video chat system given WiFi. It's actually kind of awesome to have a Skype or Google hangout video session on the big screen rather than on the laptop. Some pictures of the event LUGM: Great conversations on Linux, open source and free software during the Corsair Hackers Reboot LUGM: Educational workstation running GCompris suite attracted the youngest attendees of the day. Of course, face painting had to be done prior to hacking... LUGM: Nadim demoing some Linux specifics to interested visitors. Everyone was pretty busy during the whole day LUGM: The hacking competition, here pen-testing a wireless connection and access point between multiple machines LUGM: Well prepared workstations to be able to 'upgrade' visitors' machines to any Linux operating system Final thoughts Gratefully, during the preparations of the event I was invited to leave some comments or suggestions, and the team of the LUGM did a great job. The outdoor banner was a eye-catcher, the various flyers and posters for the event were clearly written and as far as I understood from the quick chats I had with Ish, Nadim, Nitin, Ajay, and of course others all were very happy about the event execution. Great job, LUGM! And I'm already looking forward to the next Corsair Hackers Reboot event ... Crossing fingers: Very soon and hopefully this year again :) Update: In the media The event had been announced in local media, too. L'Express: Salon informatique: Hacking Challenge à Flacq

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• Platform jumping problems with AABB collisions

  - by Vee

  See the diagram first: When my AABB physics engine resolves an intersection, it does so by finding the axis where the penetration is smaller, then "push out" the entity on that axis. Considering the "jumping moving left" example: If velocityX is bigger than velocityY, AABB pushes the entity out on the Y axis, effectively stopping the jump (result: the player stops in mid-air). If velocityX is smaller than velocitY (not shown in diagram), the program works as intended, because AABB pushes the entity out on the X axis. How can I solve this problem? Source code: public void Update() { Position += Velocity; Velocity += World.Gravity; List<SSSPBody> toCheck = World.SpatialHash.GetNearbyItems(this); for (int i = 0; i < toCheck.Count; i++) { SSSPBody body = toCheck[i]; body.Test.Color = Color.White; if (body != this && body.Static) { float left = (body.CornerMin.X - CornerMax.X); float right = (body.CornerMax.X - CornerMin.X); float top = (body.CornerMin.Y - CornerMax.Y); float bottom = (body.CornerMax.Y - CornerMin.Y); if (SSSPUtils.AABBIsOverlapping(this, body)) { body.Test.Color = Color.Yellow; Vector2 overlapVector = SSSPUtils.AABBGetOverlapVector(left, right, top, bottom); Position += overlapVector; } if (SSSPUtils.AABBIsCollidingTop(this, body)) { if ((Position.X >= body.CornerMin.X && Position.X <= body.CornerMax.X) && (Position.Y + Height/2f == body.Position.Y - body.Height/2f)) { body.Test.Color = Color.Red; Velocity = new Vector2(Velocity.X, 0); } } } } } public static bool AABBIsOverlapping(SSSPBody mBody1, SSSPBody mBody2) { if(mBody1.CornerMax.X <= mBody2.CornerMin.X || mBody1.CornerMin.X >= mBody2.CornerMax.X) return false; if (mBody1.CornerMax.Y <= mBody2.CornerMin.Y || mBody1.CornerMin.Y >= mBody2.CornerMax.Y) return false; return true; } public static bool AABBIsColliding(SSSPBody mBody1, SSSPBody mBody2) { if (mBody1.CornerMax.X < mBody2.CornerMin.X || mBody1.CornerMin.X > mBody2.CornerMax.X) return false; if (mBody1.CornerMax.Y < mBody2.CornerMin.Y || mBody1.CornerMin.Y > mBody2.CornerMax.Y) return false; return true; } public static bool AABBIsCollidingTop(SSSPBody mBody1, SSSPBody mBody2) { if (mBody1.CornerMax.X < mBody2.CornerMin.X || mBody1.CornerMin.X > mBody2.CornerMax.X) return false; if (mBody1.CornerMax.Y < mBody2.CornerMin.Y || mBody1.CornerMin.Y > mBody2.CornerMax.Y) return false; if(mBody1.CornerMax.Y == mBody2.CornerMin.Y) return true; return false; } public static Vector2 AABBGetOverlapVector(float mLeft, float mRight, float mTop, float mBottom) { Vector2 result = new Vector2(0, 0); if ((mLeft > 0 || mRight < 0) || (mTop > 0 || mBottom < 0)) return result; if (Math.Abs(mLeft) < mRight) result.X = mLeft; else result.X = mRight; if (Math.Abs(mTop) < mBottom) result.Y = mTop; else result.Y = mBottom; if (Math.Abs(result.X) < Math.Abs(result.Y)) result.Y = 0; else result.X = 0; return result; }

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• Ask the Readers: Would You Be Willing to Give Windows Up and Use a Different O.S.?

  - by Asian Angel

  When it comes to computers, Windows definitely rules the desktop in comparison to other operating systems. What we would like to know this week is if you would actually be willing to give up using Windows altogether and move to a different operating system on your computers. Note: This week’s Ask the Readers post is posing a hypothetical situation, so please refrain from starting arguments or a flame war in the comments. Good reasoned discussion is always welcome. There is no doubt that Windows is the dominant operating system in use today. Everywhere you go or look it is easy to find computers with Windows installed such as at work, home, the library, government offices, and more. For many people it is the operating system that they know and are comfortable with, which makes changing to a different operating system less appealing. Adding to the preference for Windows (or dependency based on your view) is the custom software that many businesses use on a daily basis. Throw in the high volume of people who depend on and use Microsoft Office as a standard for their business documents and it is little wonder that Windows is so dominant. So what would you use if you did decide to take a break from or permanently move away from Windows? If your choice is Linux then you have a large and wonderful variety of distributions to choose from based on what you want out of your system. Want a distribution that is easy to work with? You could choose Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or others that are engineered to be ready to go “out of the box”. Like a challenge? Perhaps Arch Linux is more your style. One of the most attractive features of all about Linux is the price…it is very hard to beat free! Maybe Mac OS X sounds like the perfect choice. It has a certain mystique and elegance associated with it and many OS X fans refuse to use anything else if given a choice. Then there is the soon to be released Chrome OS with its’ emphasis on cloud computing. This is a system that is definitely focused on being as low-maintenance and hassle-free as possible. Quick on, quick off, minimalist, and made to be portable. All of the system’s updates will occur automatically leaving you free to work and play in the cloud. But it does have its’ limitations…no installing all of those custom apps that you love using on Windows or other systems…it is literally all about the browsing window and web apps. So there you have it. If the opportunity presented itself would you, could you give Windows up and use a different operating system? Would it be easy or hard for you to do? Perhaps it would not really matter so long as you could do what you needed or wanted to do on a computer. And maybe this is the perfect time to try something new and find out…that new favorite operating system could be just an install disc away. Let us know your thoughts in the comments! How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor The Brothers Mario – Epic Gangland Style Mario Brothers Movie Trailer [Video] Score Awesome Games on the Cheap with the Humble Indie Bundle Add a Colorful Christmas Theme to Your Windows 7 Desktop This Windows Hack Changes the Blue Screen of Death to Red Edit Images Quickly in Firefox with Pixlr Grabber Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show Now Available in Chrome Web Store

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• Why Is Vertical Resolution Monitor Resolution so Often a Multiple of 360?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Stare at a list of monitor resolutions long enough and you might notice a pattern: many of the vertical resolutions, especially those of gaming or multimedia displays, are multiples of 360 (720, 1080, 1440, etc.) But why exactly is this the case? Is it arbitrary or is there something more at work? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Trojandestroy recently noticed something about his display interface and needs answers: YouTube recently added 1440p functionality, and for the first time I realized that all (most?) vertical resolutions are multiples of 360. Is this just because the smallest common resolution is 480×360, and it’s convenient to use multiples? (Not doubting that multiples are convenient.) And/or was that the first viewable/conveniently sized resolution, so hardware (TVs, monitors, etc) grew with 360 in mind? Taking it further, why not have a square resolution? Or something else unusual? (Assuming it’s usual enough that it’s viewable). Is it merely a pleasing-the-eye situation? So why have the display be a multiple of 360? The Answer SuperUser contributor User26129 offers us not just an answer as to why the numerical pattern exists but a history of screen design in the process: Alright, there are a couple of questions and a lot of factors here. Resolutions are a really interesting field of psychooptics meeting marketing. First of all, why are the vertical resolutions on youtube multiples of 360. This is of course just arbitrary, there is no real reason this is the case. The reason is that resolution here is not the limiting factor for Youtube videos – bandwidth is. Youtube has to re-encode every video that is uploaded a couple of times, and tries to use as little re-encoding formats/bitrates/resolutions as possible to cover all the different use cases. For low-res mobile devices they have 360×240, for higher res mobile there’s 480p, and for the computer crowd there is 360p for 2xISDN/multiuser landlines, 720p for DSL and 1080p for higher speed internet. For a while there were some other codecs than h.264, but these are slowly being phased out with h.264 having essentially ‘won’ the format war and all computers being outfitted with hardware codecs for this. Now, there is some interesting psychooptics going on as well. As I said: resolution isn’t everything. 720p with really strong compression can and will look worse than 240p at a very high bitrate. But on the other side of the spectrum: throwing more bits at a certain resolution doesn’t magically make it better beyond some point. There is an optimum here, which of course depends on both resolution and codec. In general: the optimal bitrate is actually proportional to the resolution. So the next question is: what kind of resolution steps make sense? Apparently, people need about a 2x increase in resolution to really see (and prefer) a marked difference. Anything less than that and many people will simply not bother with the higher bitrates, they’d rather use their bandwidth for other stuff. This has been researched quite a long time ago and is the big reason why we went from 720×576 (415kpix) to 1280×720 (922kpix), and then again from 1280×720 to 1920×1080 (2MP). Stuff in between is not a viable optimization target. And again, 1440P is about 3.7MP, another ~2x increase over HD. You will see a difference there. 4K is the next step after that. Next up is that magical number of 360 vertical pixels. Actually, the magic number is 120 or 128. All resolutions are some kind of multiple of 120 pixels nowadays, back in the day they used to be multiples of 128. This is something that just grew out of LCD panel industry. LCD panels use what are called line drivers, little chips that sit on the sides of your LCD screen that control how bright each subpixel is. Because historically, for reasons I don’t really know for sure, probably memory constraints, these multiple-of-128 or multiple-of-120 resolutions already existed, the industry standard line drivers became drivers with 360 line outputs (1 per subpixel). If you would tear down your 1920×1080 screen, I would be putting money on there being 16 line drivers on the top/bottom and 9 on one of the sides. Oh hey, that’s 16:9. Guess how obvious that resolution choice was back when 16:9 was ‘invented’. Then there’s the issue of aspect ratio. This is really a completely different field of psychology, but it boils down to: historically, people have believed and measured that we have a sort of wide-screen view of the world. Naturally, people believed that the most natural representation of data on a screen would be in a wide-screen view, and this is where the great anamorphic revolution of the ’60s came from when films were shot in ever wider aspect ratios. Since then, this kind of knowledge has been refined and mostly debunked. Yes, we do have a wide-angle view, but the area where we can actually see sharply – the center of our vision – is fairly round. Slightly elliptical and squashed, but not really more than about 4:3 or 3:2. So for detailed viewing, for instance for reading text on a screen, you can utilize most of your detail vision by employing an almost-square screen, a bit like the screens up to the mid-2000s. However, again this is not how marketing took it. Computers in ye olden days were used mostly for productivity and detailed work, but as they commoditized and as the computer as media consumption device evolved, people didn’t necessarily use their computer for work most of the time. They used it to watch media content: movies, television series and photos. And for that kind of viewing, you get the most ‘immersion factor’ if the screen fills as much of your vision (including your peripheral vision) as possible. Which means widescreen. But there’s more marketing still. When detail work was still an important factor, people cared about resolution. As many pixels as possible on the screen. SGI was selling almost-4K CRTs! The most optimal way to get the maximum amount of pixels out of a glass substrate is to cut it as square as possible. 1:1 or 4:3 screens have the most pixels per diagonal inch. But with displays becoming more consumery, inch-size became more important, not amount of pixels. And this is a completely different optimization target. To get the most diagonal inches out of a substrate, you want to make the screen as wide as possible. First we got 16:10, then 16:9 and there have been moderately successful panel manufacturers making 22:9 and 2:1 screens (like Philips). Even though pixel density and absolute resolution went down for a couple of years, inch-sizes went up and that’s what sold. Why buy a 19″ 1280×1024 when you can buy a 21″ 1366×768? Eh… I think that about covers all the major aspects here. There’s more of course; bandwidth limits of HDMI, DVI, DP and of course VGA played a role, and if you go back to the pre-2000s, graphics memory, in-computer bandwdith and simply the limits of commercially available RAMDACs played an important role. But for today’s considerations, this is about all you need to know. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Three Buckets of Knowledge

  - by BuckWoody

  As I learn more and more about SQL Server every day, I divide up my information into three “buckets”: Concepts In the first bucket are the general concepts about the topic. What is it? What does it do (or sometimes, what is is supposed to do?) How does one operation flow to another? For this information I use books, magazine articles and believe it or not – Wikipedia. I don’t always trust that last source, but I do use it to see how others lay out their thoughts around a concept. I really like graphical charts that show me the process flow if I can get it, and this is an ideal place for a good presentation. In fact, this may be the only real use for a presentation – I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. Reference The references for a topic include things like Transact-SQL (T-SQL) syntax, or the screen layout on a panel, things like that. Think Dictionary. The only reference I trust for this information is Books Online – presentations are fine, but we’re talking about a dictionary. Ever go to a movie that just reads through a dictionary? Me neither. But I have gone to presentations where people try to include tons of reference materials in their slides. Even if you give me the presentation material later, it’s not really a searchable, readable medium. How To A how-to for me is an example, or even better, a tutorial about an example. Whatever it is shows me a practical use for the concepts and of course involves the syntax. The important thing here is that you need to be able to separate out the example the person is showing you from the stuff you need to know. I can’t tell you how many times folks have told me, “well, sure, if yours is red then that works. But mine is blue.” And I have to explain, “then use “blue” for the search word here.” You get the idea. No one will do your work for you – the examples are meant as a teaching tool only. I accept that, learn what I can, and then run off to create my own thing. You might think a How To works well in a presentation, and it does, for the most part. For a complex example or tutorial, I still prefer the printed word (electronic if possible) so that I can go over the example multiple times, skip around and so on.   The order here isn’t actually that important. Most of the time I start with a concept, look at an example, and then read the reference material. But sometimes I look up an example, read a little of concepts and then check the reference. The only primary thing I try to enforce is to read something from each of them. It’s dangerous to base your work on any single example, reference or concept.  Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks&ndash;Part 1: Extensions

  - by ToStringTheory

  I don’t know about you, but when it comes to development, I prefer my environment to be as free of clutter as possible.  It may surprise you to know that I have tried ReSharper, and did not like it, for the reason that I stated above.  In my opinion, it had too much clutter.  Don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of features that I did like about it (inversion of if blocks, code feedback), but for the most part, I actually felt that it was slowing me down. Introduction Another large factor besides intrusiveness/speed in my choice to dislike ReSharper would probably be that I have become comfortable with my current setup and extensions.  I believe I have a good collection, and am quite happy with what I can accomplish in a short amount of time.  I figured that I would share some of my tips/findings regarding Visual Studio productivity here, and see what you had to say. The first section of things that I would like to cover, are Visual Studio Extensions.  In case you have been living under a rock for the past several years, Extensions are available under the Tools menu in Visual Studio: The extension manager enables integrated access to the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery online with access to a few thousand different extensions.  I have tried many extensions, but for reasons of lack reliability, usability, or features, have uninstalled almost all of them.  However, I have come across several that I find I can not do without anymore: NuGet Package Manager (Microsoft) Perspectives (Adam Driscoll) Productivity Power Tools (Microsoft) Web Essentials (Mads Kristensen) Extensions NuGet Package Manager To be honest, I debated on whether or not to put this in here.  Most people seem to have it, however, there was a time when I didn’t, and was always confused when blogs/posts would say to right click and “Add Package Reference…” which with one of the latest updates is now “Manage NuGet Packages”.  So, if you haven’t downloaded the NuGet Package Manager yet, or don’t know what it is, I would highly suggest downloading it now! Features Simply put, the NuGet Package Manager gives you a GUI and command line to access different libraries that have been uploaded to NuGet. Some of its features include: Ability to search NuGet for packages via the GUI, with information in the detail bar on the right. Quick access to see what packages are in a solution, and what packages have updates available, with easy 1-click updating. If you download a package that requires references to work on other NuGet packages, they will be downloaded and referenced automatically. Productivity Tip If you use any type of source control in Visual Studio as well as using NuGet packages, be sure to right-click on the solution and click "Enable NuGet Package Restore". What this does is add a NuGet package to the solution so that it will be checked in along side your solution, as well as automatically grab packages from NuGet on build if needed. This is an extremely simple system to use to manage your package references, instead of having to manually go into TFS and add the Packages folder. Perspectives I can't stand developing with just one monitor. Especially if it comes to debugging. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010, is that all of the panels and windows are floatable, and can dock to other screens. The only bad thing is, I don't use the same toolset with everything that I am doing. By this, I mean that I don't use all of the same windows for debugging a web application, as I do for coding a WPF application. Only thing is, Visual Studio doesn't save the screen positions for all of the undocked windows. So, I got curious one day and decided to check and see if there was an extension to help out. This is where I found Perspectives. Features Perspectives gives you the ability to configure window positions across any or your monitors, and then to save the positions in a profile. Perspectives offers a Panel to manage different presets/favorites, and a toolbar to add to the toolbars at the top of Visual Studio. Ability to 'Favorite' a profile to add it to the perspectives toolbar. Productivity Tip Take the time to setup profiles for each of your scenarios - debugging web/winforms/xaml, coding, maintenance, etc. Try to remember to use the profiles for a few days, and at the end of a week, you may find that your productivity was never better. Productivity Power Tools Ah, the Productivity Power Tools... Quite possibly one of my most used extensions, if not my most used. The tool pack gives you a variety of enhancements ranging from key shortcuts, interface tweaks, and completely new features to Visual Studio 2010. Features I don't want to bore you with all of the features here, so here are my favorite: Quick Find - Unobtrusive search box in upper-right corner of the code window. Great for searching in general, especially in a file. Solution Navigator - The 'Solution Explorer' on steroids. Easy to search for files, see defined members/properties/methods in files, and my favorite feature is the 'set as root' option. Updated 'Add Reference...' Dialog - This is probably my favorite enhancement period... The 'Add Reference...' dialog redone in a manner that resembles the Extension/Package managers. I especially love the ability to search through all of the references. "Ctrl - Click" for Definition - I am still getting used to this as I usually try to use my keyboard for everything, but I love the ability to hold Ctrl and turn property/methods/variables into hyperlinks, that you click on to see their definitions. Great for travelling down a rabbit hole in an application to research problems. While there are other commands/utilities, I find these to be the ones that I lean on the most for the usefulness. Web Essentials If you have do any type of web development in ASP .Net, ASP .Net MVC, even HTML, I highly suggest grabbing the Web Essentials right NOW! This extension alone is great for productivity in web development, and greatly decreases my development time on new features. Features Some of its best features include: CSS Previews - I say 'previews' because of the multiple kinds of previews in CSS that you get font-family, color, background/background-image previews. This is great for just tweaking UI slightly in different ways and seeing how they look in the CSS window at a glance. Live Preview - One word - awesome! This goes well with my multi-monitor setup. I put the site on one monitor in a Live Preview panel, and then as I make changes to CSS/cshtml/aspx/html, the preview window will update with each save/build automatically. For CSS, you can even turn on live-update, so as you are tweaking CSS, the style changes in real time. Great for tweaking colors or font-sizes. Outlining - Small, but I like to be able to collapse regions/declarations that are in the way of new work, or are just distracting. Commenting Shortcuts - I don't know why it wasn't included by default, but it is nice to have the key shortcuts for commenting working in the CSS editor as well. Productivity Tip When working on a site, hit CTRL-ALT-ENTER to launch the Live Preview window. Dock it to another monitor. When you make changes to the document/css, just save and glance at the other monitor. No need to alt tab, then alt tab before continuing editing. Conclusion These extensions are only the most useful and least intrusive - ones that I use every day. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010 is the extensibility options that it gives developers to utilize. Have an extension that you use that isn't intrusive, but isn't listed here? Please, feel free to comment. I love trying new things, and am always looking for new additions to my toolset of the most useful. Finally, please keep an eye out for Part 2 on key shortcuts in Visual Studio. Also, if you are visiting my site (http://tostringtheory.com || http://geekswithblogs.net/tostringtheory) from an actual browser and not a feed, please let me know what you think of the new styling!

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• Ti Launchpad

  - by raysmithequip

  Just thought I would get a couple of notes up here for reference to anyone that is interested...it is now Feb 2011 and I have not been posting here enough to remember this blog. Back in Nov 2010 I ordered the Ti launchpad msp430, it is a little target board kit replete with a mini USB cable, two very inexpensive programmable mcu's and a couple of pin headers with a couple of led's on board, a spi connector some on board jumpers and two programmable micro switches....all for less than $5.00...INCLUDING SHIPPING!!....not bad when the ardruino's are running around 20.00 for the target board, atmega328 and cable off of eBay...I wont even mention the microchip pic right now.  Naw, for $5.00 the Ti launchpad kit is about the cheapest fun around...if-uns your a geek that is... Well, the launchpad was backordered for almost two months, came like Xmas eve in fact...I had almost forgotten it!! And really, it was way late and not my idea of an Xmas present for myself.  That would of been the web expressions 4 I bought a few weeks back.  With all the holidays, I did not even look at it till last week, in fact I passed the wrapped board around at my local ham club meeting during points of personal privilege....some oh's and ahhs but mostly duhs...I actually ordered it to avoid downloading the huge code compressor studio 4 (CCS) that was supposed to be included on the cd.  No cd.  I had already downloaded IAR  another programming IDE for these little micro bugs. In my spare time I toyed with IAR and the launchpad board but after about two days of playing delete the driver with windows I decided to just download CCS 4, the code limited version, and give that a shot......CCS 4, is a good rewrite from the earlier versions, it is based on Eclipse as an IDE and includes the drivers for the msp430 target board I received in the kit.  Once installed I quickly configured the debugger for the target chip which was already plugged into the dip socket at the factory, msp430G2131 from he drop down list and clicked ok...I was in!! The CCS4 is full of bells and whistles compared to the IAR, which I would of preferred for the simplicity.  But the code compressor studio really does have it all!!..the code limited version is free, and of all things will give you java script editor box.  The whole layout in debugger mode reminds me of any modern programmer IDE...I mean sure give me Tex anytime but you simply must admire all the boxes and options included in the GUI.  It was a simple matter to check the assembly code in the flash and ram memory that came preloaded for the launchpad kit.  Assembly.  I am right now looking for my old assembly textbooks...sure I remember how to use mov and add etc but a couple of the commands are a little more than vague anymore.  Still, these little mcu's are about 50 cents each and might just work in a couple of projects I have lined up for the near future.  I may document the code here.  Luckily, I plan to write the code in c++ for the main project but if it has to be assembly, no prob.  For reference, the program that came already on the 2131 in the kit was a temperature indicator that alternately flashed red and green leds and changed the intensity of either depending on whether the temp was rising or falling...neat.  Neat enough that it might be worthwhile banging out a little GUI in windows 7 to test the new user device system calls, maybe put a temp gauge widget up on the desktop...just to keep from getting bored.  If you see some assembly code on this blog, you know I was doing something with one of the many mcu's out there.....thats all for now, more to follow...a bit later, of course.

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• Hardware wireless switch has no effect after suspend and 13.10 upgrade

  - by blaineh

  This seems to be a fairly chronic problem, as shown by the following questions: How do I fix a "Wireless is disabled by hardware switch" error? Wireless disabled by hardware switch "Wireless disabled by hardware switch" after suspend and other hardware buttons ineffective - how can I solve this? but no good solutions have been found! Wireless works fine after a reboot, but after a suspend the hardware switch (for my laptop this is f12) has no effect on the wireless, it is just permanently off, and shows that it is with a red LED. All My rfkill list all reads: 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: yes 1: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: yes Any combination with rfkill <un>block wifi doesn't work, although one time first blocking then unblocking actually turned it on again. sudo lshw -C network reads: *-network DISABLED description: Wireless interface product: AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) vendor: Qualcomm Atheros physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 01 serial: 78:e4:00:65:2e:3f width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.11.0-12-generic firmware=N/A ip=155.99.215.79 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn resources: irq:17 memory:90100000-9010ffff *-network DISABLED description: Ethernet interface product: RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 02 serial: c8:0a:a9:89:b4:30 size: 10Mbit/s capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=half latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s resources: irq:42 ioport:2000(size=256) memory:90010000-90010fff memory:90000000-9000ffff memory:90020000-9002ffff Also, adding a /etc/pm/sleep.d/brcm.sh file as recommended here simply prevents the laptop from suspending at all, which of course is no good. This question has an answer urging to install the original driver, but it wasn't an "accepted answer" so I'd rather not take a chance on it. Also I'll admit I'm a bit lost on that and would like help doing so with the specific information I've given. xev shows that no internal event is triggered for my wireless switch (f12), but other function keys also acting as hardware switches work fine. I would be happy to provide more information, so long as you're willing to help me find it for you! This is a very annoying bug. I have a Compaq Presario CQ62. Edit. I just tried to reload bios defaults (or something) as shown by this video. Didn't work. Edit. I tried the contents of this answer, and it didn't work. Edit. I made a pastebin of dmesg. I couldn't even begin to understand the contents. Edit. Output of lspci | grep Network: 02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

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• Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management (SCM) Designs May Improve End User Productivity

  - by Applications User Experience

  By Applications User Experience on March 10, 2011 Michele Molnar, Senior Usability Engineer, Applications User Experience The Challenge: The SCM User Experience team, in close collaboration with product management and strategy, completely redesigned the user experience for Oracle Fusion applications. One of the goals of this redesign was to increase end user productivity by applying design patterns and guidelines and incorporating findings from extensive usability research. But a question remained: How do we know that the Oracle Fusion designs will actually increase end user productivity? The Test: To answer this question, the SCM Usability Engineers compared Oracle Fusion designs to their corresponding existing Oracle applications using the workflow time analysis method. The workflow time analysis method breaks tasks into a sequence of operators. By applying standard time estimates for all of the operators in the task, an estimate of the overall task time can be calculated. The workflow time analysis method has been recently adopted by the Applications User Experience group for use in predicting end user productivity. Using this method, a design can be tested and refined as needed to improve productivity even before the design is coded. For the study, we selected some of our recent designs for Oracle Fusion Product Information Management (PIM). The designs encompassed tasks performed by Product Managers to create, manage, and define products for their organization. (See Figure 1 for an example.) In applying this method, the SCM Usability Engineers collaborated with Product Management to compare the new Oracle Fusion Applications designs against Oracle’s existing applications. Together, we performed the following activities: Identified the five most frequently performed tasks Created detailed task scenarios that provided the context for each task Conducted task walkthroughs Analyzed and documented the steps and flow required to complete each task Applied standard time estimates to the operators in each task to estimate the overall task completion time Figure 1. The interactions on each Oracle Fusion Product Information Management screen were documented, as indicated by the red highlighting. The task scenario and script provided the context for each task.  The Results: The workflow time analysis method predicted that the Oracle Fusion Applications designs would result in productivity gains in each task, ranging from 8% to 62%, with an overall productivity gain of 43%. All other factors being equal, the new designs should enable these tasks to be completed in about half the time it takes with existing Oracle Applications. Further analysis revealed that these performance gains would be achieved by reducing the number of clicks and screens needed to complete the tasks. Conclusions: Using the workflow time analysis method, we can expect the Oracle Fusion Applications redesign to succeed in improving end user productivity. The workflow time analysis method appears to be an effective and efficient tool for testing, refining, and retesting designs to optimize productivity. The workflow time analysis method does not replace usability testing with end users, but it can be used as an early predictor of design productivity even before designs are coded. We are planning to conduct usability tests later in the development cycle to compare actual end user data with the workflow time analysis results. Such results can potentially be used to validate the productivity improvement predictions. Used together, the workflow time analysis method and usability testing will enable us to continue creating, evaluating, and delivering Oracle Fusion designs that exceed the expectations of our end users, both in the quality of the user experience and in productivity. (For more information about studying productivity, refer to the Measuring User Productivity blog.)

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• Fixing some Visual Studio RC install issues

  - by terje

  The Visual Studio RC has shown some install issues in some cases, particularly for those who upgrades from VS 11 Beta.  I have listed the fixes known now below, and will update if there are more issues.  Note that a repair will not fix the issue, and a Windows restore and subsequent reinstall may not fix it either.  The system seems to remember too much. That was the case for me, at least.  The fixes below however, cures these issues. 1. The Team Explorer Build node doesn’t work You get an error saying System.TypeLoadException like this: To solve this do as follows: 1. Open a command prompt as administrator 2. Go to your program files directory for VS 2012 and down to  the extension folder like:   C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer 3. Run “gacutil –if Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Controls.dll     2. The SQL Editor gives loading error When you start up VS 2012 RC you get a loading error message.  The same happens if you try to go from the menu to  SQL/Transact-SQL Editor/New Query.    To solve this do as follows: 1. Open Control Panel/Programs and Features 2. Locate the “Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Data-Tier App Framework     (Note , you might find up to 4 such instances) The ones with version numbers ending in 55 is from the SQL 2012 RC, the ones ending in 60 is from the SQL 2012 RTM.  There are two of each, one for x32 and one for x64.  Which is which no one knows. 3. Right click each of them, and select Repair. (It would be nice if someone with this issue tries only the latest RTM ones, and see if that clears the error, and comment back to this post. I am out of non-functioning VS’s )   3.  Errors referring to some extension You get errors referring to some extension that can’t be loaded, or can’t be found.  Check the activity log (see below), and verify there.  If you see yellow collision warnings there, the fix here should solve those too. To solve these:    1. Open a Visual Studio 2012 command prompt 2.  Run:   devenv /resetsettings     How to check for errors using the log Do as follows to get to the activity log for Visual studio 2012 RC 1. Open a Visual Studio 2012 command prompt 2. Run:   devenv /log This starts up Visual Studio.  3. Go to %appdata%/Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0 4. Double click the file named ActivityLog.xml.  It will start up in your browser, and be formatted using the xslt in the same directory. 5.  Look for items marked in red.  Example for Issue 1 :

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• History of Mobile Technology

  - by David Dorf

  Over the last ten years, mobile phones have gone through several incremental technology leaps that have added capabilities that impact the retail industry.  I've listed the six major ones below, along with their long-lasting impact. 1. Location In the US, the FCC required mobile phones to implement E911 (emergency calls) by 2006, requiring the caller to be located to within 300 meters.  Back in 2000, GPS was opened up for civilian use, and by 2004 Qualcomm had figured out how to use GPS in mobile phones.  So mobile operators moved from cell tower triangulation to GPS, principally for E911.  But then lots of other uses became apparent, especially navigation.  The earliest mobile apps from retailers made it easy to find nearby stores, and companies are looking at ways to use WiFi triangulation inside stores. 2. Computer Vision In 1997 Philippe Kahn shared a photo of his newborn using a mobile phone thus launching the popularity of instant visual communications.  Over the years the quality of the cameras got better, reaching the point where barcodes could be read around 2008.  That's when Occipital came on the scene with their Red Laser application, which was eventually acquired by eBay.  This opened up the ability for consumers to easily price compare inside stores.  Other interesting apps included Tesco's Wine Finder and Amazon's Price Checker, both allowing products to be identified by picture. 3. Augmented Reality Once the mobile phone had GPS, a video camera, and compass functionality it was suddenly possible to overlay digital information on the screen in real-time.  Yelp, which was using GPS to find nearby merchants, created a backdoor called Monocle on the iPhone that showed nearby merchants overlayed on the video camera view.  Today AR apps are mostly used by retailers for marketing, like Moosejaw's app that undresses models in their catalog. 4. Geo-Fencing So if we're able to track the location of a mobile phone, why not use that context to offer timely information?  My first experience with geo-fencing came courtesy of North Face, the outdoor enthusiast store. When a mobile phone enters a predetermined area, like near a store, a text message is sent to phone with an offer or useful information.  Of course retailers can geo-fence their competitors as well and find out which customers are aren't so loyal. 5. Digital Wallet Mobile payments leverage different technologies such as NFC, QRCodes, bluetooth, and SMS to facilitate communication between the consumers's phone and the retailer's point-of-sale. The key here is the potential to consolidate loyalty cards, coupons, and bank cards into the mobile phone and enable faster checkout.  Nobody does this better than Starbucks today, but McDonald's and Duncan Donuts aren't far behind.  Google, Isis, Paypal, Square, and MCX are all vying for leadership in this area.  If NFC does finally take off, it will be leveraged by retailers in more places than just the POS. 6. Voice Response Mobile Phones have had the ability to interpret simple voice commands for a while, but Google and Amazon were the first to use voice to allow searches for products.  Allowing searches by text, barcode, and voice makes it easy to comparison shop in the aisles.  Walmart even uses voice to build shopping lists, and if the Siri API is even opened we could see lots more innovation in this area.

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• SSIS Debugging Tip: Using Data Viewers

  - by Jim Giercyk

  When you have an SSIS package error, it is often very helpful to see the data records that are causing the problem.  After all, if your input has 50,000 records and 1 of them has corrupt data, it can be a chore.  Your execution results will tell you which column contains the bad data, but not which record…..enter the Data Viewer. In this scenario I have created a truncation error.  The input length of [lastname] is 50, but the output table has a length of 15.  When it runs, at least one of the records causes the package to fail.     Now what?  We can tell from our execution results that there is a problem with [lastname], but we have no idea WHICH record?     Let’s identify the row that is actually causing the problem.  First, we grab the oft’ forgotten Row Count shape from our toolbar and connect it to the error output from our input query.  Remember that in order to intercept errors with the error output, you must redirect them.     The Row Count shape requires 1 integer variable.  For our purposes, we will not reference the variable, but it is still required in order for the package to run.  Typically we would use the variable to hold the number of rows in the table and refer back to it later in our process.  We are simply using the Row Count as a “Dead End” for errors.  I called my variable RowCounter.  To create a variable, with no shapes selected, right-click on the background and choose Variable.     Once we have setup the Row Count shape, we can right-click on the red line (error output) from the query, and select Data Viewers.  In the popup, we click the add button and we will see this:     There are other fancier options we can play with, but for now we just want to view the output in a grid.  WE select Grid, then click OK on all of the popup windows to shut them down.  We should now see a grid with a pair of glasses on the error output line.     So, we are ready to catch the error output in a grid and see that is causing the problem!  This time when we run the package, it does not fail because we directed the error to the Row Count.  We also get a popup window showing the error record in a grid.  If there were multiple errors we would see them all.     Indeed, the [lastname] column is longer than 15 characters.  Notice the last column in the grid, [Error Code – Description].  We knew this was a truncation error before we added the grid, but if you have worked with SSIS for any length of time, you know that some errors are much more obscure.  The description column can be very useful under those circumstances! Data viewers can be used any time we want to see the data that is actually in the pipeline;  they stop the package temporarily until we shut them.  Also remember that the Row Count shape can be used as a “Dead End”.  It is useful during development when we want to see the output from a dataflow, but don’t want to update a table or file with the data.  Data viewers are an invaluable tool for both development and debugging.  Just remember to REMOVE THEM before putting your package into production

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• Artec TV18R Tuner not working :(

  - by Antillar Maximus

  Can somebody kindly help me setup my TV Tuner stick? Make and Model: Artec TV18R USB TV Tuner OS: Ubuntu 11.10 64bit Hardware: MSI MS1656-US (GX640 barebones): i5 580M, 2xIntel X25M SSDs, Radeon HD5850M,Realtek sound. Logs and messages: antillar@antillar-MS-1656:/usr/share/dvb/atsc$ [B][COLOR=Red]sudo lsusb[/COLOR][/B] Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 003: ID ffc0:001f Bus 002 Device 005: ID 05d8:8117 Ultima Electronics Corp. [/code][code]antillar@antillar-MS-1656:/usr/share/dvb/atsc$ So, it seems that the tuner is being detected, but the light on it does not turn on? Not sure what is going on? sudo lspci [sudo] password for antillar: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 02) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 02) 00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 05) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 05) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev 05) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a5) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Broadway PRO [Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series] 01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series] 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03) 04:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): JMicron Technology Corp. IEEE 1394 Host Controller 04:00.1 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. SD/MMC Host Controller 04:00.2 SD Host controller: JMicron Technology Corp. Standard SD Host Controller 04:00.3 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. MS Host Controller 04:00.4 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. xD Host Controller 05:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300 ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 02) ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 02) ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 02) ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 02) ff:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02) ff:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02) antillar@antillar-MS-1656:/usr/share/dvb/atsc$ I have been searching for a solution to this all weekend without any luck. I remember reading that ehci_hcd is the problem, but I'm not sure if disabling it is a good idea. I don't want my USB ports to go back to v1.1. Thank you!

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