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  • How Microsoft listens

    - by Stacy Vicknair
    This being my freshman year as an MVP, I had a realization that I perhaps should be embarrassed hasn’t happened sooner. The realization comes much like the iconic M&Ms commercial where the M&Ms run into Santa and exclaim, “He does exist!” My personal realization arguably has a greater implication: Microsoft does listen. This is the most important lesson that I received this year attending the MVP Summit. My hope is that I can convince you that we are empowered to make a difference. Instead of using “Man I hate how this works / doesn’t work!” as cooler conversation, we can use it as true interaction with Microsoft. We as customers to Microsoft need to stop asking the question “Will this work for me?” and instead ask “How can this work for me?” There are three quick resources that the average developer has access to today that they can use to be heard by the product teams, and by no means should you think twice if you have a concern that you’d like a real response on. MVPs MVPs are members of your community who have a deep relationship with Microsoft and will have connections to their associated product group. Don’t think of them as just a resource for answers, but also as your ambassador for getting your experiences heard. You can find your local MVPs by browsing the directory at: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx Evangelists Evangelists are employees of Microsoft who work to foster and grow communities in their assigned region. They are first-class citizens of Microsoft and are often deeply involved with the product groups. As a result, they will be more than glad to direct your questions or concerns to those who can answer them most expertly. With that said, evangelists are also very busy people (who do amazing things for the community) and might not be able to get you that conversation as quickly as a local MVP. You can find your local evangelist at the following website: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bb905078.aspx Microsoft Connect This is one of the resources that I haven’t used enough, but it cannot be understated. Connect is the starting point of the social conversation that happens between Microsoft and the community daily. Connect acts as a portal where you can provide new feedback as well as comment and rate the feedback provided by others. Power is in numbers when it comes to Connect, so the exposure that your feedback can get not only lets you know that you aren’t the only one who wants change, but also lets Microsoft know the same. https://connect.microsoft.com   Technorati Tags: Microsoft,MVP,Feedback,Connect

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  • Add Bookmarks and Notes to Delicious in IE 8

    - by Asian Angel
    Are you constantly adding bookmarks to your Delicious account while browsing but want to keep UI use to a minimum? Add bookmarks directly to your account from the context menu using the Share with Delicious accelerator. Share with Delicious in Action To add the accelerator click on Add to Internet Explorer and confirm the installation when the secondary window appears. This is going to be much better than having the Favorites Bar or a new toolbar taking up precious UI room. When you find a webpage that you would like to bookmark right click within the page, go to All Accelerators and select Share with Delicious. The form for the new bookmark will open in a new tab with the URL and title filled in. All that you need to do is add any desired notes/tags and save the bookmark. Suppose that you want notes from the page added to the bookmark. Highlight the desired text, right click on it, then go to All Accelerators and select Share with Delicious. As before the form will open in a new tab…you can see the highlighted text was entered into the notes section for the new bookmark. All that is left to do is add an appropriate tag and save. Once you save your new bookmark the tab will auto navigate to the webpage that you just saved. Returning to our account showed the new bookmark ready for future use along with a the notes for later reference. Conclusion If you add bookmarks to your Delicious account but want to save UI room, then the Share with Delicious accelerator will make a nice addition to Internet Explorer. Links Add the Share with Delicious accelerator to Internet Explorer 8 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Access and Manage Your Delicious Bookmarks the Easy WayQuickly Add Bookmarks to Delicious in FirefoxAutomate Adding Bookmarks to del.icio.usHow Many Times Has an Article Been Bookmarked on del.icio.us?Add Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress Blog 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox Filevo is a Cool File Hosting & Sharing Site Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule

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  • Big Data – Interacting with Hadoop – What is PIG? – What is PIG Latin? – Day 16 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the HIVE in Big Data Story. In this article we will understand what is PIG and PIG Latin in Big Data Story. Yahoo started working on Pig for their application deployment on Hadoop. The goal of Yahoo to manage their unstructured data. What is Pig and What is Pig Latin? Pig is a high level platform for creating MapReduce programs used with Hadoop and the language we use for this platform is called PIG Latin. The pig was designed to make Hadoop more user-friendly and approachable by power-users and nondevelopers. PIG is an interactive execution environment supporting Pig Latin language. The language Pig Latin has supported loading and processing of input data with series of transforming to produce desired results. PIG has two different execution environments 1) Local Mode – In this case all the scripts run on a single machine. 2) Hadoop – In this case all the scripts run on Hadoop Cluster. Pig Latin vs SQL Pig essentially creates set of map and reduce jobs under the hoods. Due to same users does not have to now write, compile and build solution for Big Data. The pig is very similar to SQL in many ways. The Ping Latin language provide an abstraction layer over the data. It focuses on the data and not the structure under the hood. Pig Latin is a very powerful language and it can do various operations like loading and storing data, streaming data, filtering data as well various data operations related to strings. The major difference between SQL and Pig Latin is that PIG is procedural and SQL is declarative. In simpler words, Pig Latin is very similar to SQ Lexecution plan and that makes it much easier for programmers to build various processes. Whereas SQL handles trees naturally, Pig Latin follows directed acyclic graph (DAG). DAGs is used to model several different kinds of structures in mathematics and computer science. DAG Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about very important components of the Big Data Ecosystem – Zookeeper. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • Not Dead, Just Busy

    - by MOSSLover
    So I didn’t die in a freak smelting accident yet, but I have been dealing with a lot of different things.  I had to take a bit of a break to deal with the cat death issue.  I am not fully recovered, because well it just happened a few months ago.  It kind of sucked.  Plus the apartment feels a lot bigger. Then you have the whole New York Comic Con thing where I had to plan some cosplay costumes.  I have been trying to find time to hang out with friends and have a social life.  That plus I built an entire presentation for iOS development for New York Code Camp.  I am also planning a couple MS Community dinners (namely one a week from Tuesday) plus a give camp.  I am also planning a vacation around SPS UK plus I will be at SPC.  Life is just incredibly hectic and when you factor in dating to the mix it’s gotten insane to the point where some day I just have to go dark.  Hence the lack of blogging.  I am just trying to keep up with everything and everyone without losing myself. If you guys will be at SPC or SPS UK I will be at both places this year.  Stop by the Planet Technologies booth and see me or I’ll be around somewhere.  I am really sorry if I don’t remember you from an event or if you are someone following me on twitter.  I am trying to get better at the mnemonic memory devices, but I think things broke down around the 47th event I attended or spoke at or something to that nature.  If anyone wants to talk to Cathy, Lori, or I about Women in SharePoint definitely find us at the event.  Anyway good night and good luck guys.  I promise to check back at least once before the year ends.  In the meantime twitter stalking is always possible.  Sometimes I even respond back. Technorati Tags: SPC,SPS UK,NYCC,NYC Code Camp,MOSSLover

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  • You do not need a separate SQL Server license for a Standby or Passive server - this Microsoft White Paper explains all

    - by tonyrogerson
    If you were in any doubt at all that you need to license Standby / Passive Failover servers then the White Paper “Do Not Pay Too Much for Your Database Licensing” will settle those doubts. I’ve had debate before people thinking you can only have a single instance as a standby machine, that’s just wrong; it would mean you could have a scenario where you had a 2 node active/passive cluster with database mirroring and log shipping (a total of 4 SQL Server instances) – in that set up you only need to buy one physical license so long as the standby nodes have the same or less physical processors (cores are irrelevant). So next time your supplier suggests you need a license for your standby box tell them you don’t and educate them by pointing them to the white paper. For clarity I’ve copied the extract below from the White Paper. Extract from “Do Not Pay Too Much for Your Database Licensing” Standby Server Customers often implement standby server to make sure the application continues to function in case primary server fails. Standby server continuously receives updates from the primary server and will take over the role of primary server in case of failure in the primary server. Following are comparisons of how each vendor supports standby server licensing. SQL Server Customers does not need to license standby (or passive) server provided that the number of processors in the standby server is equal or less than those in the active server. Oracle DB Oracle requires customer to fully license both active and standby servers even though the standby server is essentially idle most of the time. IBM DB2 IBM licensing on standby server is quite complicated and is different for every editions of DB2. For Enterprise Edition, a minimum of 100 PVUs or 25 Authorized User is needed to license standby server.   The following graph compares prices based on a database application with two processors (dual-core) and 25 users with one standby server. [chart snipped]  Note   All prices are based on newest Intel Xeon Nehalem processor database pricing for purchases within the United States and are in United States dollars. Pricing is based on information available on vendor Web sites for Enterprise Edition. Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition 25 users (CALs) x $164 / CAL + $8,592 / Server = $12,692 (no need to license standby server) Oracle Enterprise Edition (base license without options) Named User Plus minimum (25 Named Users Plus per Core) = 25 x 2 = 50 Named Users Plus x $950 / Named Users Plus x 2 servers = $95,000 IBM DB2 Enterprise Edition (base license without feature pack) Need to purchase 125 Authorized User (400 PVUs/100 PVUs = 4 X 25 = 100 Authorized User + 25 Authorized Users for standby server) = 125 Authorized Users x $1,040 / Authorized Users = $130,000  

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  • CodeStock 2012 Review: Michael Eaton( @mjeaton ) - 3 Simple Things for Increased Productivity

    3 Simple Things for Increased ProductivitySpeaker: Michael EatonTwitter: @mjeatonBlog: http://mjeaton.net/blog This was the first time I had seen Michael Eaton speak but have hear a lot of really good things about his speaking abilities. Needless to say I was really looking forward to his session. He basically addressed the topic of distractions and how they can decrease or increase your productivity as a developer. He makes the case that in order to become more productive you must block/limit all distractions. For example, he covered his top distractions as a developer. Top Distractions Social Media(Twitter, Reddit, Facebook) Wiki sites Phone Email Video Games Coworkers, Friends, Family Michael stated that he uses various types of music to help him block out these distractions in order for him to get into his coding zone. While he states that music works for him, he also notes that he knows of others that cannot really work with music. I have to say I am in the latter group because I require a quiet environment in order to work. A few session attendees also recommended listening to really loud white noise or music in another language other than your own. This allows for less focus to be placed on words being sung compared to the rhythmic beats being played. I have to say that I have not tried these suggestions yet but will in the near future. However, distractions can be very beneficial to productivity in that they give your mind a chance to relax and not think about the issues at hand. He spoke highly of taking vacations, and setting boundaries at work so that develops prevent the problem of burnout. One way he suggested that developer’s combat distractions is to use the Pomodoro technique. In his example he selects one task to do for 20 minutes and he can only do that task during that time. He ignores all other distractions until this task or time limit is complete. After it is completed he allows himself to relax and distract himself for another 5- 10 minutes before his next Pomodoro. This allows him to stay completely focused on a task and when the time is up he can then focus on other things.

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  • ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0 Review

    - by Michael B. McLaughlin
    (This is my first review as a part of the GeeksWithBlogs.net Influencers program. It’s a program in which I (and the others who have been selected for it) get the opportunity to check out new products and services and write reviews about them. We don’t get paid for this, but we do generally get to keep a copy of the software or retain an account for some period of time on the service that we review. In this case I received a copy of Red Gate Software’s ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0, which was released in January. I don’t have any upgrade rights nor is my review guided, restrained, influenced, or otherwise controlled by Red Gate or anyone else. But I do get to keep the software license. I will always be clear about what I received whenever I do a review – I leave it up to you to decide whether you believe I can be objective. I believe I can be. If I used something and really didn’t like it, keeping a copy of it wouldn’t be worth anything to me. In that case though, I would simply uninstall/deactivate/whatever the software or service and tell the company what I didn’t like about it so they could (hopefully) make it better in the future. I don’t think it’d be polite to write up a terrible review, nor do I think it would be a particularly good use of my time. There are people who get paid for a living to review things, so I leave it to them to tell you what they think is bad and why. I’ll only spend my time telling you about things I think are good.) Overview of Common .NET Memory Problems When coming to land of managed memory from the wilds of unmanaged code, it’s easy to say to one’s self, “Wow! Now I never have to worry about memory problems again!” But this simply isn’t true. Managed code environments, such as .NET, make many, many things easier. You will never have to worry about memory corruption due to a bad pointer, for example (unless you’re working with unsafe code, of course). But managed code has its own set of memory concerns. For example, failing to unsubscribe from events when you are done with them leaves the publisher of an event with a reference to the subscriber. If you eliminate all your own references to the subscriber, then that memory is effectively lost since the GC won’t delete it because of the publishing object’s reference. When the publishing object itself becomes subject to garbage collection then you’ll get that memory back finally, but that could take a very long time depending of the life of the publisher. Another common source of resource leaks is failing to properly release unmanaged resources. When writing a class that contains members that hold unmanaged resources (e.g. any of the Stream-derived classes, IsolatedStorageFile, most classes ending in “Reader” or “Writer”), you should always implement IDisposable, making sure to use a properly written Dispose method. And when you are using an instance of a class that implements IDisposable, you should always make sure to use a 'using' statement in order to ensure that the object’s unmanaged resources are disposed of properly. (A ‘using’ statement is a nicer, cleaner looking, and easier to use version of a try-finally block. The compiler actually translates it as though it were a try-finally block. Note that Code Analysis warning 2202 (CA2202) will often be triggered by nested using blocks. A properly written dispose method ensures that it only runs once such that calling dispose multiple times should not be a problem. Nonetheless, CA2202 exists and if you want to avoid triggering it then you should write your code such that only the innermost IDisposable object uses a ‘using’ statement, with any outer code making use of appropriate try-finally blocks instead). Then, of course, there are situations where you are operating in a memory-constrained environment or else you want to limit or even eliminate allocations within a certain part of your program (e.g. within the main game loop of an XNA game) in order to avoid having the GC run. On the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7, for example, for every 1 MB of heap allocations you make, the GC runs; the added time of a GC collection can cause a game to drop frames or run slowly thereby making it look bad. Eliminating allocations (or else minimizing them and calling an explicit Collect at an appropriate time) is a common way of avoiding this (the other way is to simplify your heap so that the GC’s latency is low enough not to cause performance issues). ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0 When the opportunity to review Red Gate’s recently released ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0 arose, I jumped at it. In order to review it, I was given a free copy (which does not include upgrade rights for future versions) which I am allowed to keep. For those of you who are familiar with ANTS Memory Profiler, you can find a list of new features and enhancements here. If you are an experienced .NET developer who is familiar with .NET memory management issues, ANTS Memory Profiler is great. More importantly still, if you are new to .NET development or you have no experience or limited experience with memory profiling, ANTS Memory Profiler is awesome. From the very beginning, it guides you through the process of memory profiling. If you’re experienced and just want dive in however, it doesn’t get in your way. The help items GAHSFLASHDAJLDJA are well designed and located right next to the UI controls so that they are easy to find without being intrusive. When you first launch it, it presents you with a “Getting Started” screen that contains links to “Memory profiling video tutorials”, “Strategies for memory profiling”, and the “ANTS Memory Profiler forum”. I’m normally the kind of person who looks at a screen like that only to find the “Don’t show this again” checkbox. Since I was doing a review, though, I decided I should examine them. I was pleasantly surprised. The overview video clocks in at three minutes and fifty seconds. It begins by showing you how to get started profiling an application. It explains that profiling is done by taking memory snapshots periodically while your program is running and then comparing them. ANTS Memory Profiler (I’m just going to call it “ANTS MP” from here) analyzes these snapshots in the background while your application is running. It briefly mentions a new feature in Version 7, a new API that give you the ability to trigger snapshots from within your application’s source code (more about this below). You can also, and this is the more common way you would do it, take a memory snapshot at any time from within the ANTS MP window by clicking the “Take Memory Snapshot” button in the upper right corner. The overview video goes on to demonstrate a basic profiling session on an application that pulls information from a database and displays it. It shows how to switch which snapshots you are comparing, explains the different sections of the Summary view and what they are showing, and proceeds to show you how to investigate memory problems using the “Instance Categorizer” to track the path from an object (or set of objects) to the GC’s root in order to find what things along the path are holding a reference to it/them. For a set of objects, you can then click on it and get the “Instance List” view. This displays all of the individual objects (including their individual sizes, values, etc.) of that type which share the same path to the GC root. You can then click on one of the objects to generate an “Instance Retention Graph” view. This lets you track directly up to see the reference chain for that individual object. In the overview video, it turned out that there was an event handler which was holding on to a reference, thereby keeping a large number of strings that should have been freed in memory. Lastly the video shows the “Class List” view, which lets you dig in deeply to find problems that might not have been clear when following the previous workflow. Once you have at least one memory snapshot you can begin analyzing. The main interface is in the “Analysis” tab. You can also switch to the “Session Overview” tab, which gives you several bar charts highlighting basic memory data about the snapshots you’ve taken. If you hover over the individual bars (and the individual colors in bars that have more than one), you will see a detailed text description of what the bar is representing visually. The Session Overview is good for a quick summary of memory usage and information about the different heaps. You are going to spend most of your time in the Analysis tab, but it’s good to remember that the Session Overview is there to give you some quick feedback on basic memory usage stats. As described above in the summary of the overview video, there is a certain natural workflow to the Analysis tab. You’ll spin up your application and take some snapshots at various times such as before and after clicking a button to open a window or before and after closing a window. Taking these snapshots lets you examine what is happening with memory. You would normally expect that a lot of memory would be freed up when closing a window or exiting a document. By taking snapshots before and after performing an action like that you can see whether or not the memory is really being freed. If you already know an area that’s giving you trouble, you can run your application just like normal until just before getting to that part and then you can take a few strategic snapshots that should help you pin down the problem. Something the overview didn’t go into is how to use the “Filters” section at the bottom of ANTS MP together with the Class List view in order to narrow things down. The video tutorials page has a nice 3 minute intro video called “How to use the filters”. It’s a nice introduction and covers some of the basics. I’m going to cover a bit more because I think they’re a really neat, really helpful feature. Large programs can bring up thousands of classes. Even simple programs can instantiate far more classes than you might realize. In a basic .NET 4 WPF application for example (and when I say basic, I mean just MainWindow.xaml with a button added to it), the unfiltered Class List view will have in excess of 1000 classes (my simple test app had anywhere from 1066 to 1148 classes depending on which snapshot I was using as the “Current” snapshot). This is amazing in some ways as it shows you how in stark detail just how immensely powerful the WPF framework is. But hunting through 1100 classes isn’t productive, no matter how cool it is that there are that many classes instantiated and doing all sorts of awesome things. Let’s say you wanted to examine just the classes your application contains source code for (in my simple example, that would be the MainWindow and App). Under “Basic Filters”, click on “Classes with source” under “Show only…”. Voilà. Down from 1070 classes in the snapshot I was using as “Current” to 2 classes. If you then click on a class’s name, it will show you (to the right of the class name) two little icon buttons. Hover over them and you will see that you can click one to view the Instance Categorizer for the class and another to view the Instance List for the class. You can also show classes based on which heap they live on. If you chose both a Baseline snapshot and a Current snapshot then you can use the “Comparing snapshots” filters to show only: “New objects”; “Surviving objects”; “Survivors in growing classes”; or “Zombie objects” (if you aren’t sure what one of these means, you can click the helpful “?” in a green circle icon to bring up a popup that explains them and provides context). Remember that your selection(s) under the “Show only…” heading will still apply, so you should update those selections to make sure you are seeing the view you want. There are also links under the “What is my memory problem?” heading that can help you diagnose the problems you are seeing including one for “I don’t know which kind I have” for situations where you know generally that your application has some problems but aren’t sure what the behavior you have been seeing (OutOfMemoryExceptions, continually growing memory usage, larger memory use than expected at certain points in the program). The Basic Filters are not the only filters there are. “Filter by Object Type” gives you the ability to filter by: “Objects that are disposable”; “Objects that are/are not disposed”; “Objects that are/are not GC roots” (GC roots are things like static variables); and “Objects that implement _______”. “Objects that implement” is particularly neat. Once you check the box, you can then add one or more classes and interfaces that an object must implement in order to survive the filtering. Lastly there is “Filter by Reference”, which gives you the option to pare down the list based on whether an object is “Kept in memory exclusively by” a particular item, a class/interface, or a namespace; whether an object is “Referenced by” one or more of those choices; and whether an object is “Never referenced by” one or more of those choices. Remember that filtering is cumulative, so anything you had set in one of the filter sections still remains in effect unless and until you go back and change it. There’s quite a bit more to ANTS MP – it’s a very full featured product – but I think I touched on all of the most significant pieces. You can use it to debug: a .NET executable; an ASP.NET web application (running on IIS); an ASP.NET web application (running on Visual Studio’s built-in web development server); a Silverlight 4 browser application; a Windows service; a COM+ server; and even something called an XBAP (local XAML browser application). You can also attach to a .NET 4 process to profile an application that’s already running. The startup screen also has a large number of “Charting Options” that let you adjust which statistics ANTS MP should collect. The default selection is a good, minimal set. It’s worth your time to browse through the charting options to examine other statistics that may also help you diagnose a particular problem. The more statistics ANTS MP collects, the longer it will take to collect statistics. So just turning everything on is probably a bad idea. But the option to selectively add in additional performance counters from the extensive list could be a very helpful thing for your memory profiling as it lets you see additional data that might provide clues about a particular problem that has been bothering you. ANTS MP integrates very nicely with all versions of Visual Studio that support plugins (i.e. all of the non-Express versions). Just note that if you choose “Profile Memory” from the “ANTS” menu that it will launch profiling for whichever project you have set as the Startup project. One quick tip from my experience so far using ANTS MP: if you want to properly understand your memory usage in an application you’ve written, first create an “empty” version of the type of project you are going to profile (a WPF application, an XNA game, etc.) and do a quick profiling session on that so that you know the baseline memory usage of the framework itself. By “empty” I mean just create a new project of that type in Visual Studio then compile it and run it with profiling – don’t do anything special or add in anything (except perhaps for any external libraries you’re planning to use). The first thing I tried ANTS MP out on was a demo XNA project of an editor that I’ve been working on for quite some time that involves a custom extension to XNA’s content pipeline. The first time I ran it and saw the unmanaged memory usage I was convinced I had some horrible bug that was creating extra copies of texture data (the demo project didn’t have a lot of texture data so when I saw a lot of unmanaged memory I instantly figured I was doing something wrong). Then I thought to run an empty project through and when I saw that the amount of unmanaged memory was virtually identical, it dawned on me that the CLR itself sits in unmanaged memory and that (thankfully) there was nothing wrong with my code! Quite a relief. Earlier, when discussing the overview video, I mentioned the API that lets you take snapshots from within your application. I gave it a quick trial and it’s very easy to integrate and make use of and is a really nice addition (especially for projects where you want to know what, if any, allocations there are in a specific, complicated section of code). The only concern I had was that if I hadn’t watched the overview video I might never have known it existed. Even then it took me five minutes of hunting around Red Gate’s website before I found the “Taking snapshots from your code" article that explains what DLL you need to add as a reference and what method of what class you should call in order to take an automatic snapshot (including the helpful warning to wrap it in a try-catch block since, under certain circumstances, it can raise an exception, such as trying to call it more than 5 times in 30 seconds. The difficulty in discovering and then finding information about the automatic snapshots API was one thing I thought could use improvement. Another thing I think would make it even better would be local copies of the webpages it links to. Although I’m generally always connected to the internet, I imagine there are more than a few developers who aren’t or who are behind very restrictive firewalls. For them (and for me, too, if my internet connection happens to be down), it would be nice to have those documents installed locally or to have the option to download an additional “documentation” package that would add local copies. Another thing that I wish could be easier to manage is the Filters area. Finding and setting individual filters is very easy as is understanding what those filter do. And breaking it up into three sections (basic, by object, and by reference) makes sense. But I could easily see myself running a long profiling session and forgetting that I had set some filter a long while earlier in a different filter section and then spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out why some problem that was clearly visible in the data wasn’t showing up in, e.g. the instance list before remembering to check all the filters for that one setting that was only culling a few things from view. Some sort of indicator icon next to the filter section names that appears you have at least one filter set in that area would be a nice visual clue to remind me that “oh yeah, I told it to only show objects on the Gen 2 heap! That’s why I’m not seeing those instances of the SuperMagic class!” Something that would be nice (but that Red Gate cannot really do anything about) would be if this could be used in Windows Phone 7 development. If Microsoft and Red Gate could work together to make this happen (even if just on the WP7 emulator), that would be amazing. Especially given the memory constraints that apps and games running on mobile devices need to work within, a good memory profiler would be a phenomenally helpful tool. If anyone at Microsoft reads this, it’d be really great if you could make something like that happen. Perhaps even a (subsidized) custom version just for WP7 development. (For XNA games, of course, you can create a Windows version of the game and use ANTS MP on the Windows version in order to get a better picture of your memory situation. For Silverlight on WP7, though, there’s quite a bit of educated guess work and WeakReference creation followed by forced collections in order to find the source of a memory problem.) The only other thing I found myself wanting was a “Back” button. Between my Windows Phone 7, Zune, and other things, I’ve grown very used to having a “back stack” that lets me just navigate back to where I came from. The ANTS MP interface is surprisingly easy to use given how much it lets you do, and once you start using it for any amount of time, you learn all of the different areas such that you know where to go. And it does remember the state of the areas you were previously in, of course. So if you go to, e.g., the Instance Retention Graph from the Class List and then return back to the Class List, it will remember which class you had selected and all that other state information. Still, a “Back” button would be a welcome addition to a future release. Bottom Line ANTS Memory Profiler is not an inexpensive tool. But my time is valuable. I can easily see ANTS MP saving me enough time tracking down memory problems to justify it on a cost basis. More importantly to me, knowing what is happening memory-wise in my programs and having the confidence that my code doesn’t have any hidden time bombs in it that will cause it to OOM if I leave it running for longer than I do when I spin it up real quickly for debugging or just to see how a new feature looks and feels is a good feeling. It’s a feeling that I like having and want to continue to have. I got the current version for free in order to review it. Having done so, I’ve now added it to my must-have tools and will gladly lay out the money for the next version when it comes out. It has a 14 day free trial, so if you aren’t sure if it’s right for you or if you think it seems interesting but aren’t really sure if it’s worth shelling out the money for it, give it a try.

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  • Computer Visionaries 2014 Kinect Hackathon

    - by T
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tburger/archive/2014/08/08/computer-visionaries-2014-kinect-hackathon.aspxA big thank you to Computer Vision Dallas and Microsoft for putting together the Computer Visionaries 2014 Kinect Hackathon that took place July 18th and 19th 2014.  Our team had a great time and learned a lot from the Kinect MVP's and Microsoft team.  The Dallas Entrepreneur Center was a fantastic venue. In total, 114 people showed up to form 15 teams. Burger ITS & Friends team members with Ben Lower:  Shawn Weisfeld, Teresa Burger, Robert Burger, Harold Pulcher, Taylor Woolley, Cori Drew (not pictured), and Katlyn Drew (not pictured) We arrived Friday after a long day of work/driving.  Originally, our idea was to make a learning game for kids.  It was intended to be multi-simultaneous players dragging and dropping tiles into a canvas area for kids around 5 years old. We quickly learned that we were limited to two simultaneous players. After working on the game for the rest of the evening and into the next morning we decided that a fast multi-player game with hand gestures was not going to happen without going beyond what was provided with the API. If we were going to have something to show, it was time to switch gears. The next idea on the table was the Photo Anywhere Kiosk. The user can use voice and hand gestures to pick a place they would like to be.  After the user says a place (or anything they want) and then the word "search", the app uses Bing to display a bunch of images for him/her to choose from. With the use of hand gesture (grab and slide to move back and forth and push/pull to select an image) the user can get the perfect image to pose with. I couldn't get a snippet with the hand but when a the app is in use, a hand shows up to cue the user to use their hand to control it's movement. Once they chose an image, we use the Kinect background removal feature to super impose the user on that image. When they are in the perfect position, they say "save" to save the image. Currently, the image is saved in the images folder on the users account but there are many possibilities such as emailing it, posting to social media, etc.. The competition was great and we were honored to be recognized for third place. Other related posts: http://jasongfox.com/computer-visionaries-2014-incredible-success/ A couple of us are continuing to work on the kid's game and are going to make it a Windows 8 multi-player game without Kinect functionality. Stay tuned for more updates.

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  • Simple tips to design a Customer Journey Map

    - by Isabel F. Peñuelas
    “A model can abstract to a level that is comprehensible to humans, without getting lost in details.” -The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Inception using Post-it, StoryBoards, Lego or Mindmaping Techniques The first step in a Customer Experience project is to describe customer interactions creating a customer journey map. Modeling is never easy, so to succeed on this effort, it is very convenient that your CX´s team have some “abstract thinking” skills. Besides is very helpful to consult a Business Service Design offered by an Interactive Agency to lead your inception process. Initially, you may start by a free discussion using post-it cards; storyboards; even lego or any other brainstorming technique you like. This will help you to get your mind into the path followed by the customer to purchase your product or to consume any business service you actually offer to your customers, or plan to offer in the near future. (from www.servicedesigntools.org) Colorful Mind Maps are very useful to document and share meeting ideas. Some Mind Maps software providers as ThinkBuzzan provide trial versions, and you will find more mindmapping options on this post by Mashable. Finally to produce a quick one, I do recommend Wise, an entirely online mindmaping service. On my view the best results in terms of communication will always come for an artistic hand-made drawing. Customer Experience Mind Map Example Making your first Customer Journey Map To add some more formalization to your thoughts, there is a wide offering for designing Customer Journey Maps. A Customer Map can be represented as an oriented graph in which another follows each step. The one below is the most simple Customer Journey you can draw. Nothing more than a couple of pictures, numbers and lines to design the customer steps sequence in the purchase process. Very simple Customer Journey for Social Mobile Shopping There are a lot of Customer Journey templates much more sophisticated available  in the Web using a variety of styles, as per example this one with a focus on underlining emotional experience, or this other worksheet template. Representing different interaction devices on the vertical axis, and touchpoints / requirements and existing gaps horizontally  is today´s most common format for Customer Journeys. From Customer Journey Maps to CX Technology Adoption Plans Once you have your map ready, you can start to identify the IT infrastructure requirements for your CXProject. By analyzing customer problems and improvement opportunities with maps, you will then identify the technology gaps and the new investment requirements in your IT infrastructure. Deeping step by step from the more abstract to the more concrete is the best guarantee to take the right IT investment decisions.  ¡Remember to keep your initial customer journey safe on your pocket in every one of your CX´s project meetings- that´s you map to success!

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  • on coding style

    - by user12607414
    I vastly prefer coding to discussing coding style, just as I would prefer to write poetry instead of talking about how it should be written. Sometimes the topic cannot be put off, either because some individual coder is messing up a shared code base and needs to be corrected, or (worse) because some officious soul has decided, "what we really need around here are some strongly enforced style rules!" Neither is the case at the moment, and yet I will venture a post on the subject. The following are not rules, but suggested etiquette. The idea is to allow a coherent style of coding to flourish safely and sanely, as a humane, inductive, social process. Maxim M1: Observe, respect, and imitate the largest-scale precedents available. (Preserve styles of whitespace, capitalization, punctuation, abbreviation, name choice, code block size, factorization, type of comments, class organization, file naming, etc., etc., etc.) Maxim M2: Don't add weight to small-scale variations. (Realize that Maxim M1 has been broken many times, but don't take that as license to create further irregularities.) Maxim M3: Listen to and rely on your reviewers to help you perceive your own coding quirks. (When you review, help the coder do this.) Maxim M4: When you touch some code, try to leave it more readable than you found it. (When you review such changes, thank the coder for the cleanup. When you plan changes, plan for cleanups.) On the Hotspot project, which is almost 1.5 decades old, we have often practiced and benefited from such etiquette. The process is, and should be, inductive, not prescriptive. An ounce of neighborliness is better than a pound of police-work. Reality check: If you actually look at (or live in) the Hotspot code base, you will find we have accumulated many annoying irregularities in our source base. I suppose this is the normal condition of a lived-in space. Unless you want to spend all your time polishing and tidying, you can't live without some smudge and clutter, can you? Final digression: Grammars and dictionaries and other prescriptive rule books are sometimes useful, but we humans learn and maintain our language by example not grammar. The same applies to style rules. Actually, I think the process of maintaining a clean and pleasant working code base is an instance of a community maintaining its common linguistic identity. BTW, I've been reading and listening to John McWhorter lately with great pleasure. (If you end with a digression, is it a tail-digression?)

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  • Live CD / Live USB much faster than full install

    - by user29347
    I've observed it on both laptops I own! HP Compaq nx6125 and Ubuntu 11.04 x64 - somewhat solved Lenovo Thinkpad T500 and Ubuntu 11.10 x64 - help needed! I'm still struggling with the Thinkpad to get performance level similar to that of 10 y.o. laptops... All in all a really serious issue with multiple versions of Ubuntu that renders computers with perfectly compatible hardware unusable, as far as out of the box experience is concerned. Troubleshooting resultant issues seems to be a hard case even for users with some experience with installing graphics drivers. EDIT: I can't really post additional details. Two different ubuntu versions, two laptops, two different set of graph. drivers (OS vs ATI prop.) - all with the same symptoms. Also I can't stress enough how massive the performance degradation is compared to a healthy system. For that reason I ask for input from people who may know roughly what are we dealing with here. I can post more details if we were to focus on my current Thinkpad T500. In that case my current system details: Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Ubuntu 11.10 x64 ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 (also see the "What I have already tried" section about Intel graphics tested) ATI Catalyst 11.10 drivers OCZ Agility 3 SSD but! same with the default driver for ATI the card same with the prop. driver for the ATI card from Jockey (Additional drivers applet) What I have already tried: 0. Switching to Intel integrated card (Intel GMA 4500M HD) with the default driver - same effects = may indicate not driver related problem but a problem with something of global influence like e.g. nomodeset or other I don't even know about. (What you can read above) ATI Catalyst 11.10 and radeon.modeset=0 boot parameter + disabled Wait for VBlank. Unity 2D Ubuntu 10.04 LTS tested (ubuntu-10.04.3-desktop-i386.iso): Both live USB and installed version blazing fast! (on the default drivers - without even installing the proprietary fglrx drivers). re2 a) seems to give me the only significant results (still poor) - perfect Unity elements performance with the same crawling stuttering/lagging when dragging windows around. re2 b) this happens often http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b68/Bucic/ubuntuforumsorg/Screenshotat2011-10-28083140.png re2 c) Sometimes I am able to witness a normal performance when dragging a window around but only for a second or two. When I try to shake it longer it starts to lag and it will keep lagging like that with an increased probability of what you see in the sshot in point re2 b). re2 d) I can't establish the radeon.modeset=0 influence though. Once it seems to work be smooth with it, the other time - without it. Really can't tell.

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  • Create Image Maps with GIMP

    - by SGWellens
    Having a clickable image in a web page is not a big deal. Having an image in a web page with clickable hotspots is a big deal. The powerful GIMP editor has a tool to make creating clickable hotspots much easier. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Its home page and download links are here: http://www.gimp.org/ (it is completely free). Beware: GIMP is an extraordinarily advanced and powerful image editor. If you wish to use it for general image editing tasks, you have a steep learning curve to climb. FYI: I used it to create the shadows you see on the images below. Fortunately, the tool to make Image Maps is separate from the main program. To start, open an image with GIMP or, drag and drop an image onto the GIMP main window. I'm using the image of a bar graph. Next, we have to find the Image Map tool and launch it (Filters->Web->Image Map…): Why is the Image Map tool under Filters and not Tools? I don't know. It's mystery—much like the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, or why my socks keep disappearing when I do laundry. I swear I've got twenty single unmatched socks. But I digress… Here is what the Image Map tool looks like: If we click the blue 'I' button, we can add information to the Image Map: Now we'll use the rectangle tool to create some clickable hotspots. Select the Blue Rectangle tool, drag a rectangle, click when done and you'll get something like this: You can also make circle/oval and polygon areas. You can edit all the parameters of an image map area after drawing it. Rectangle settings (for fine tweaking): JavaScript functions (it's up to you to write them): Here is a setup with two rectangles and one polygon area: When you hit save a map file is generated that looks something like this: Paste the contents into a web page and you are almost there. I made some tweaks before it became usable: Replaced &apos; with apostrophes in the javascript functions. Changed the image path so it would find the image in my images directory Tweaked the href urls. Added Title="Some Text" to get tool tips. Cleaned out the comments. Result: The final markup (with JavaScript function): function ImageMapMouseHover(Msg) { $("#Label1").html(Msg); } It may seem like a lot of bother but, the tool does the heavy lifting: i.e. the coordinates. Getting the regions positioned and sized is easy using a visual tool…much better than doing it by hand. This, of course, isn't a full treatise on the tool but it should give you enough information to decide if it's helpful. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens

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  • Best Platform/Engine for turn based Client/Server Android game

    - by Paradine
    I'm currently designing a turn based game for tablets. Initially for Android with porting to iOS later considered in design. I'm having trouble narrowing down the available technologies to even know where to spend my research time. I am hoping that if I explain what I am trying to achieve someone may be able to suggest a platform and/or engine. I've looked into some of the open source Engines ( http://www.cuteandroid.com/ten-open-source-android-2d-or-3d-game-engine-for-android-developers ) and some appear to handle much of what I might require - although with a higher focus on graphics than i need. Mages looks interesting although development appears to have ceased. If I could somehow leverage GoogleApps that would be excellent. Here is what I am trying to achieve: PvP turn based strategy game over internet - minimal animation and bandwidth required Players match up online using MetaGame system MatchID created on Resolution Server and Game starts Clients have 30 second countdown to select MoveString Clients sends small secure timestamped and MatchIDed MoveString to Resolution server Resolution server looks up Move String for each player, Resolves and Updates Players status in MatchID on Server Resolution server updates Client Views Repeat until victory conditions met - MatchID Closed, Rewards earned in MetaGame There will also need to be a full social and account system and metagame backend - but this could be running on separate system(s) Tablet in Offline mode would be catalog browsing and perhaps single player AI - bum I'm focusing on the Resolution Server at this point I'm not even certain if I would be looking at an Android App or a WebApp at this stage! I want a custom GUI so I guess an app - but maybe as I have little animation a WebApp might also work. Probably some combination of both. There will be very small overhead in data between client server - essentially a small text string every 30 seconds sent to the Resolution server which looks up the Effect and applies it to the Opponents string and determines some results to apply to the match. The client view is updated minimally with the results (only 5 in game Integers tracked) - perhaps triggering small animations/popups on the client to show the end result. e.g Explosion. If you have suggestions for a good technology or platform to best achieving the Resolution Server I'd love to hear. Also if you have experience with open source Engines - and could narrow down which (if any ) might be most suitable that would be a big help. Thanks in advance

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  • Refreshing imported MySQL data with MySQL for Excel

    - by Javier Rivera
    Welcome to another blog post from the MySQL for Excel Team. Today we're going to talk about a new feature included since MySQL for Excel 1.3.0, you can install the latest GA or maintenance version using the MySQL Installer or optionally you can download directly any GA or non-GA version from the MySQL Developer Zone.As some users suggested in our forums we should be maintaining the link between tables and Excel not only when editing data through the Edit MySQL Data option, but also when importing data via Import MySQL Data. Before 1.3.0 this process only provided you with an offline copy of the Table's data into Excel and you had no way to refresh that information from the DB later on. Now, with this new feature we'll show you how easy is to work with the latest available information at all times. This feature is transparent to you (it doesn't require additional steps to work as long as the users had the Create an Excel Table for the imported MySQL table data option enabled. To ensure you have this option checked, click over Advanced Options... after the Import Data dialog is displayed). The current blog post assumes you already know how to import data into excel, you could always take a look at our previous post How To - Guide to Importing Data from a MySQL Database to Excel using MySQL for Excel if you need further reference on that topic. After importing Data from a MySQL Table into Excel, you can refresh the data in 3 ways.1. Simply right click over the range of the imported data, to show the pop-up menu: Click over the Refresh button to obtain the latest copy of the data in the table. 2. Click the Refresh button on the Data ribbon: 3. Click the Refresh All button in the Data ribbon (beware this will refresh all Excel tables in the Workbook): Please take a note of a couple of details here, the first one is about the size of the table. If by the time you refresh the table new columns had been added to it, and you originally have imported all columns, the table will grow to the right. The same applies to rows, if the table has new rows and you did not limit the results , the table will grow to to the bottom of the sheet in Excel. The second detail you should take into account is this operation will overwrite any changes done to the cells after the table was originally imported or previously refreshed: Now with this new feature, imported data remains linked to the data source and is available to be updated at all times. It empowers the user to always be able to work with the latest version of the imported MySQL data. We hope you like this this new feature and give it a try! Remember that your feedback is very important for us, so drop us a message with your comments, suggestions for this or other features and follow us at our social media channels: MySQL on Windows (this) Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/MySqlOnWindows/ MySQL for Excel forum: http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?172 Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mysql YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MySQLChannel Thanks!

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  • Auto Mocking using JustMock

    - by mehfuzh
    Auto mocking containers are designed to reduce the friction of keeping unit test beds in sync with the code being tested as systems are updated and evolve over time. This is one sentence how you define auto mocking. Of course this is a more or less formal. In a more informal way auto mocking containers are nothing but a tool to keep your tests synced so that you don’t have to go back and change tests every time you add a new dependency to your SUT or System Under Test. In Q3 2012 JustMock is shipped with built in auto mocking container. This will help developers to have all the existing fun they are having with JustMock plus they can now mock object with dependencies in a more elegant way and without needing to do the homework of managing the graph. If you are not familiar with auto mocking then I won't go ahead and educate you rather ask you to do so from contents that is already made available out there from community as this is way beyond the scope of this post. Moving forward, getting started with Justmock auto mocking is pretty simple. First, I have to reference Telerik.JustMock.Container.DLL from the installation folder along with Telerik.JustMock.DLL (of course) that it uses internally and next I will write my tests with mocking container. It's that simple! In this post first I will mock the target with dependencies using current method and going forward do the same with auto mocking container. In short the sample is all about a report builder that will go through all the existing reports, send email and log any exception in that process. This is somewhat my  report builder class looks like: Reporter class depends on the following interfaces: IReporBuilder: used to  create and get the available reports IReportSender: used to send the reports ILogger: used to log any exception. Now, if I just write the test without using an auto mocking container it might end up something like this: Now, it looks fine. However, the only issue is that I am creating the mock of each dependency that is sort of a grunt work and if you have ever changing list of dependencies then it becomes really hard to keep the tests in sync. The typical example is your ASP.NET MVC controller where the number of service dependencies grows along with the project. The same test if written with auto mocking container would look like: Here few things to observe: I didn't created mock for each dependencies There is no extra step creating the Reporter class and sending in the dependencies Since ILogger is not required for the purpose of this test therefore I can be completely ignorant of it. How cool is that ? Auto mocking in JustMock is just released and we also want to extend it even further using profiler that will let me resolve not just interfaces but concrete classes as well. But that of course starts the debate of code smell vs. working with legacy code. Feel free to send in your expert opinion in that regard using one of telerik’s official channels. Hope that helps

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  • Too Few Women in IT!

    - by Yolande
    Last year, only 1% of attendees at Devoxx were women . This year, Devoxx addressed the issue in a panel entitled "Why We Should Target Women." On the panel were Kim Ross, Régina ten Bruggencate, Trisha Gee, Antonio Goncalves and Claude Falguiére. The moderator was Martijn Verburg. The discussion focused on how to attract women to programming and how to get current women programmers to be more active in the community. The panelists agreed that the IT field should not just attract more women but also men of different ethnic backgrounds. The lack of women in programming is in part a cultural issue that differs from region to region. In developed countries, very few women work as programmers whereas in Brazil and India a lot of women pursue careers in IT.  Women in developed countries perceive the field as isolating and very few young women graduate in computer science.  This perception of isolation was based in reality decades ago, but that is no longer the case today. Main ideas discussed by the panel: - Parents should encourage their daughters to play with Lego and learn programming - More organizations should target girls in high schools and young women in university to expose them to programming.  Duchess organization is planning on being more involved with young girl events and mentoring. - Women tend to be more self-critical about their skills and are intimidated by high skill requirements in job advertisements. Companies should change job advertisements to get more women to interviews. - Panelists don't recommend affirmative action because women feel favored and lose credibility. They want to be judged for their skills. - Panelists recommend acting the same way when dealing with either female or male co-workers and managers - Women need mentors (men or women) to learn to become speakers at conferences and to promote themselves better - Men should be sensitive to the fact that women are alone at work to respond to men teasing. The balance of power at work is different from a social setting. - Men also experience discrimination on the job. It is more difficult for men to take time off when their children are sick, for example. Equal valuing of parental obligations could result in equal pay for women. See also: Trisha Gee Blog - http://mechanitis.blogspot.com/ Duchess Organization - http://www.jduchess.org/

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  • Blank Cacti Graphs

    - by tortib
    I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and I'm having an issue with Cacti 0.8.8b not displaying any data in graphs. The graphs are being created and I see files in /var/lib/cacti/rra. My crontab entry for root is the following: */1 * * * * sudo -u www-data php -q /usr/share/cacti/site/poller.php > /dev/null The output of ls -la /var/lib/cacti/rra is the following: # ls -la /var/lib/cacti/rra/ total 1008 drwxrwx--- 2 www-data www-data 4096 Aug 20 19:27 . drwxr-xr-x 3 www-data www-data 4096 Aug 17 01:41 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:23 tortib_com_cpu_nice_34.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:24 tortib_com_cpu_system_35.rrd -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:25 tortib_com_cpu_user_36.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:27 tortib_com_hdd_used_43.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:23 tortib_com_hdd_used_44.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:27 tortib_com_load_15min_38.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:26 tortib_com_load_1min_37.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:23 tortib_com_load_5min_39.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:24 tortib_com_mem_buffers_40.rrd -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:25 tortib_com_mem_cache_41.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:26 tortib_com_mem_free_42.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:24 tortib_com_traffic_in_45.rrd -rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:25 tortib_com_traffic_in_46.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 94816 Aug 20 19:26 tortib_com_traffic_in_47.rrd -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47992 Aug 20 19:27 tortib_com_users_48.rrd I tried to run the poller as root from the command line but it doesn't output anything useful nor does it graph any data. The device in cacti shows that that it's able to query snmp and ping is alive. The graphs are still empty though. snmpwalk 127.0.0.1 -v2c -c public works as it should. It walks all MIBs. I'm quite perplexed as to why this isn't working any longer. It was graphing data but then it just stopped. And when it was graphing data it was graphing it intermittently. Thank you for reading this problem and helping.

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  • top tweets SOA Partner Community – June 2013

    - by JuergenKress
    Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity Oracle SOA Learn how Business Rules are used in Oracle SOA Suite. New free self-study course - Oracle Univ. #soa #oraclesoa http://pub.vitrue.com/ll9B OPITZ CONSULTING ?Wie #BPM und #SOA zusammengehören? Watch 100-Seconds-Video-Lesson by @Rolfbaer - http://ow.ly/luSjK @soacommunity Andrejus Baranovskis ?Customized BPM 11g PS6 Workspace Application http://fb.me/2ukaSBXKs Mark Nelson ?Case Management Samples Released http://wp.me/pgVeO-Lv Mark Nelson Instance Patching Demo for BPM 11.1.1.7 http://wp.me/pgVeO-Lx Simone Geib Antony Reynolds: Target Verification #oraclesoa https://blogs.oracle.com/reynolds/ OPITZ CONSULTING ?"It's all about Integration - Developing with Oracle #Cloud Services" @t_winterberg files: http://ow.ly/ljtEY #cloudworld @soacommunity Arun Pareek ?Functional Testing Business Processes In Oracle BPM Suite 11g http://wp.me/pkPu1-pc via @arrunpareek SOA Proactive Want to get started with Human Workflow? Check out the introductory video on OTN, http://pub.vitrue.com/enIL C2B2 Consulting Free tech workshop,London 6th of Jun Diagnosing Performance & Scalability Problems in Oracle SOASuite http://www.c2b2.co.uk/oracle_fusion_middleware_performance_seminar … @soacommunity Oracle BPM Must have technologies for delivering effective #CX : #BPM #Social #Mobile > #OracleBPM Whitepaper http://pub.vitrue.com/6pF6 OracleBlogs ?Introduction to Web Forms -Basic Tutorial http://ow.ly/2wQLTE OTNArchBeat ?Complete State of SOA podcast now available w/ @soacommunity @hajonormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/PZFw Ronald Luttikhuizen VENNSTER Blog | Article published - Fault Handling and Prevention - Part 2 | http://blog.vennster.nl/2013/05/article-published-fault-handling-and.html … Mark Nelson ?Getting to know Maven http://wp.me/pgVeO-Lk gschmutz ?Cool! Our 2nd article has just been published: "Fault Handling and Prevention for Services in Oracle Service Bus" http://pub.vitrue.com/jMOy David Shaffer Interesting SOA Development and Delivery post on A-Team Redstack site - http://bit.ly/18oqrAI . Would be great to get others to contribute! Mark Nelson BPM PS6 video showing process lifecycle in more detail (30min) http://wp.me/pgVeO-Ko SOA Proactive ?Webcast: 'Introduction and Troubleshooting of the SOA 11g Database Adapter', May 9th. Register now at http://pub.vitrue.com/8In7 Mark Nelson ?SOA Development and Delivery http://wp.me/pgVeO-Kd Oracle BPM Manoj Das, VP Product Mangement talks about new #OracleBPM release #BPM #processmanagement http://pub.vitrue.com/FV3R OTNArchBeat Podcast: The State of SOA w/ @soacommunity @hajonormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/OK2M gschmutz New article series on Industrial SOA started on OTN and Service Technology Magazine: http://guidoschmutz.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/first-two-chapters-of-industrial-soa-articles-series-have-been-published-both-on-otn-and-service-technology-magazine/ … #industrialSOA Danilo Schmiedel ?Article series #industrialSOA published on OTN and Service Technology Magazine http://inside-bpm-and-soa.blogspot.de/2013/04/industrial-soa_22.html … @soacommunity @OC_WIRE SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Oracle Unveils Oracle Fusion Tap for the iPad

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    Oracle Fusion Tap: Productivity Amplified Anywhere, Anytime Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Fusion Tap, a native iPad application that redefines the level of productivity users can achieve while on-the-go.   Oracle Fusion Tap runs off cloud-based enterprise applications and across Oracle Application Cloud Services, requiring only one simple Apple App Store installation.   Automatically personalized to each user, Oracle Fusion Tap gives users exactly what they need at their fingertips and provides the long-sought, key functionalities to remain productive and to keep business moving, even when away from the desk.   Designed specifically for the iPad and the mobile workforce, Oracle Fusion Tap provides access with or without an Internet connection.   By grouping functional capabilities into three core areas of "connect," "analyze," and "work," users can easily and directly connect with what they need in the app, complete activities, and move on.   As organizations strive for a lean and agile workforce, Oracle Fusion Tap helps users find and make connections with the right people at the right time, obtaining answers to questions quickly and removing roadblocks faster.   Oracle Fusion Tap also provides users with secure access to actionable performance indicators and day-to-day management of their workforce and sales force automation. Supporting Quotes "Both the enterprise and technology providers must recognize the need to innovate and adapt for the increasing mobility of the workforce—not just for sales teams, but across the organization," said Carter Lusher, Research Fellow and Chief Analyst of Enterprise Applications Ecosystem, Ovum. "A mobile application that quickly and powerfully allows employees to make connections, analyze data, and complete activities at any time and wherever they may be located drives new levels of business value and enhances efficiency. Frankly, mobile access is no longer a 'nice to have' but a 'must have.'"   "The mobile workforce is a business reality, and Oracle Fusion Tap is an example of how Oracle delivers mobile and cloud innovations that fundamentally improve productivity and how we work," said Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Application Development, Oracle. "With Oracle Fusion Tap users will have an all-in-one, easily extensible app that puts mission-critical data and colleague connection at their fingertips." Supporting Resources Oracle Fusion Tap Oracle Fusion Tap on App Store Oracle Fusion Tap YouTube Video Oracle CRM on Social Media @OracleCRM OracleCRM on Facebook OracleCRM on YouTube

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  • Partner Webcast – Oracle Coherence Applications on WebLogic 12c Grid - 21st Nov 2013

    - by Thanos Terentes Printzios
    Oracle Coherence is the industry leading in-memory data grid solution that enables organizations to predictably scale mission-critical applications by providing fast access to frequently used data. As data volumes and customer expectations increase, driven by the “internet of things”, social, mobile, cloud and always-connected devices, so does the need to handle more data in real-time, offload over-burdened shared data services and provide availability guarantees. The latest release of Oracle Coherence 12c comes with great improvements in ease of use, integration and RASP (Reliability, Availability, Scalability, and Performance) areas. In addition it features an innovating approach to build and deploy Coherence Application as an integral part of typical JEE Enterprise Application. Coherence GAR archives and Coherence Managed Servers are now first-class citizens of all JEE applications and Oracle WebLogic domains respectively. That enables even easier development, deployment and management of complex multi-tier enterprise applications powered by data grid rich features. Oracle Coherence 12c makes your solution ready for the future of big data and always-on-line world. This webcast is focused on demonstrating How to create a Coherence Application using Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 12.1.2.1.1 (Kepler release). How to package the application in form of GAR archive inside the EAR deployable application. How to deploy the application to multi-tier WebLogic clusters. How to define and configure the WebLogic domain for the tiered clusters hosting both data grid and client JEE applications.  Finally we will expose the data in grid to external systems using REST services and create a simple web interface to the underlying data using Oracle ADF Faces components. Join us on this technology webcast, to find out more about how Oracle Cloud Application Frameworks brings together the key industry leading technologies of Oracle Coherence and Weblogic 12c, delivering next-generation applications. Agenda: Introduction to Oracle Coherence What's new in 12c release POF annotations Live Events Elastic Data (Flash storage support) Managed Coherence Servers for Oracle WebLogic Coherence Applications (Grid Archive) Live Demonstration Creating and configuring Coherence Servers forming the data tier cluster Creating a simple Coherence Grid Application in Eclipse Adding REST support and creating simple ADF Faces client application Deploying the grid and client applications to separate tiers in WebLogic topology HA capabilities of the data tier Summary - Q&A Delivery Format This FREE online LIVE eSeminar will be delivered over the Web. Registrations received less than 24hours prior to start time may not receive confirmation to attend. Duration: 1 hour REGISTER NOW For any questions please contact us at partner.imc-AT-beehiveonline.oracle-DOT-com Stay Connected Oracle Newsletters

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  • Go Big or Go Special

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    Watching Shark Tank tonight and the first presentation was by Mango Mango Preserves and it highlighted an interesting contrast in business trends today and how to capitalize on opportunities.  <Spoiler Alert> Even though every one of the sharks was raving about the product samples they tried, with two of them going for second and third servings, none of them made a deal to invest in the company.</Spoiler>  In fact, one of the sharks, Kevin O’Leary, kept ripping into the owners with statements to the effect that he thinks they are headed over a financial cliff because he felt their costs were way out of line and would be their downfall if they didn’t take action to radically cut costs. He said that he had previously owned a jams and jellies business and knew the cost ratios that you had to have to make it work.  I don’t doubt he knows exactly what he’s talking about and is 100% accurate…for doing business his way, which I’ll call “Go Big”.  But there’s a whole other way to do business today that would be ideal for these ladies to pursue. As I understand it, based on his level of success in various businesses and the fact that he is even in a position to be investing in other companies, Kevin’s approach is to go mass market (Go Big) and make hundreds of millions of dollars in sales (or something along that scale) while squeezing out every ounce of cost that you can to produce an acceptable margin.  But there is a very different way of making a very successful business these days, which is all about building a passionate and loyal community of customers that are rooting for your success and even actively trying to help you succeed by promoting your product or company (Go Special).  This capitalizes on the power of social media, niche marketing, and The Long Tail.  One of the most prolific writers about capitalizing on this trend is Seth Godin, and I hope that the founders of Mango Mango pick up a couple of his books (probably Purple Cow and Tribes would be good starts) or at least read his blog.  I think the adoration expressed by all of the sharks for the product is the biggest hint that they have a remarkable product and that they are perfect for this type of business approach. Both are completely valid business models, and it may certainly be that the scale at which Kevin O’Leary wants to conduct business where he invests his money is well beyond the long tail, but that doesn’t mean that there is not still a lot of money to be made there.  I wish them the best of luck with their endeavors!

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  • Should I be looking for an alternative to Zen Cart as my business grows?

    - by MarkS
    I created a business website for a family business which is growing. It's my family, and I'm a software developer, but I don't want to rebuild the wheels or be a shopping cart programmer. For this business, I need the web store to "just work", but... it gets complicated... There are two parts of this business website. One of them is driven by Wordpress and I use the awesome Thesis theme. This is modern, flexible, and saves me a lot of time from doing custom coding and styling. I couldn't be more pleased with this arrangement. The other part of the site is a Zen Cart store. It's administration and it's flexibility is frustrating and archaic Web 1.0. For the past few years, I keep hearing that the developers are working on a 2.0 version of Zen Cart, but they haven't communicated anything significant in the past few years other than to say, "When it's ready, we'll let you know." What I'm looking for in a cart, I would need to install 6-10 additional mods, and would need to do a lot of custom coding. I'm now willing to pay for a top-notch e-commerce solution for a small business that we can grow up into a larger business over time. Requirements: Extremely flexible shipping that let's us set up rules per product/category, tables of rates, calculated rates, max package weighs, etc. (flexibility like that available with CEON Advance Shipping Module for Zen Cart Coupons and gift certificates Manual order entry for phone orders Multi-channel support (We also sell on Amazon, eBay, use Google Base and we want to maintain one set of inventory and have it kept current) Decent SEO features Reviews and star-ratings on products Easy social networking features for sharing, following, liking, etc) Easy integration with AdWords and analytics tracking Modern and very usable product and store administration (Like I was saying, I'm spoiled by Wordpress and Thesis) At the end of the day, I don't care if it's a hosted solution or if I have to host it myself. I just want something that is going to stay up-to-date, regularly be maintained and improved, and if I have to update it, things like the one-click update present in Wordpress is something it has to have. Professional Webmasters, if you had to run a store / website, but you had to spend your time focusing on your sales and marketing efforts rather than diffing php files and copying and tweaking them to change even the slightest details of your site, what would you choose?

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  • Character Stats and Power

    - by Stephen Furlani
    I'm making an RPG game system and I'm having a hard time deciding on doing detailed or abstract character statistics. These statistics define the character's natural - not learned - abilities. For example: Mass Effect: 0 (None that I can see) X20 (Xtreme Dungeon Mastery): 1 "STAT" Diablo: 4 "Strength, Magic, Dexterity, Vitality" Pendragon: 5 "SIZ, STR, DEX, CON, APP" Dungeons & Dragons (3.x, 4e): 6 "Str, Dex, Con, Wis, Int, Cha" Fallout 3: 7 "S.P.E.C.I.A.L." RIFTS: 8 "IQ, ME, MA, PS, PP, PE, PB, Spd" Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st ed?): 12-ish "WS, BS, S, T, Ag, Int, WP, Fel, A, Mag, IP, FP" HERO (5th ed): 14 "Str, Dex, Con, Body, Int, Ego, Pre, Com, PD, ED, Spd, Rec, END, STUN" The more stats, the more complex and detailed your character becomes. This comes with a trade-off however, because you usually only have limited resources to describe your character. D&D made this infamous with the whole min/max-ing thing where strong characters were typically not also smart. But also, a character with a high Str typically also has high Con, Defenses, Hit Points/Health. Without high numbers in all those other stats, they might as well not be strong since they wouldn't hold up well in hand-to-hand combat. So things like that force trade-offs within the category of strength. So my original (now rejected) idea was to force players into deciding between offensive and defensive stats: Might / Body Dexterity / Speed Wit / Wisdom Heart Soul But this left some stat's without "opposites" (or opposites that were easily defined). I'm leaning more towards the following: Body (Physical Prowess) Mind (Mental Prowess) Heart (Social Prowess) Soul (Spiritual Prowess) This will define a character with just 4 numbers. Everything else gets based off of these numbers, which means they're pretty important. There won't, however, be ways of describing characters who are fast, but not strong or smart, but absent minded. Instead of defining the character with these numbers, they'll be detailing their character by buying skills and powers like these: Quickness Add a +2 Bonus to Body Rolls when Dodging. for a character that wants to be faster, or the following for a big, tough character Body Building Add a +2 Bonus to Body Rolls when Lifting, Pushing, or Throwing objects. [EDIT - removed subjectiveness] So my actual questions is what are some pitfalls with a small stat list and a large amount of descriptive powers? Is this more difficult to port cross-platform (pen&paper, PC) for example? Are there examples of this being done well/poorly? Thanks,

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  • ACORD LOMA 2010: Building Insurance Companies in the Clouds

    - by [email protected]
    Chuck Johnston, vice president of global strategy and alliances for Oracle Insurance, participated in a featured speaking session at ACORD LOMA 2010. He provides an update on his discussions with insurers at the show and after his presentation. Every year I always make a point of walking the show floor at the ACORD LOMA technology conference to visit with colleagues and competitors, and try to get a feel for which way the industry will move over the next 12 months. Insurers are looking for substance in cloud (computing), trying to mix business with pleasure (monetizing social networks), and expect differentiation through commodity (Software as a Service). The disconnect at this show is that most vendors are still struggling with creating a clear path from Facebook to customer intimacy, SaaS to core cost savings and clouds to ubiquitous presence. Vendors need to find new ways to help insurers find the real value in these potentially disruptive technologies by understanding the changes coming to the insurance business and how these new technologies impact the new insurance business. Oracle's approach to understanding the evolving insurance industry comes from a discussion with our customers in our Insurance CIO Council, where one of our customers suggested we buy an insurance company to really understand our customers. We have decided to do the next best thing and build our own model of an insurance company, Alamere Insurance, that uses the latest technologies to transform its own business. Alamere will never issue an actual policy, but it does give us a framework to consider the impacts of changes in the insurance landscape and how Oracle technology meets the challenge or needs to evolve to help our customers be successful. In preparing for my talk at the conference using Alamere as my organizing theme, I found myself reading actuarial memoranda on CSO table changes and articles on underwriting theory that really made me think about my customer's problems first and foremost, and then how Oracle technology can provide answers. As much as I prefer techno-thrillers and sci-fi novels to actuarial papers for plane reading, I got very excited about the idea of putting myself back in the customer shoes I haven't worn in a decade, and really looking at how Oracle can power the Adaptive Insurance Enterprise. Talking to customers and industry people after the session, the idea of Alamere seemed to excite people and I got a lot of suggestions as to what lines of business we should model and where we should focus first on technology uptake. One customer said to a colleague that Oracle's attempt to "share their pain" was unique among vendors. More about Alamere, and the Adaptive Insurance Enterprise next time. Chuck Johnston is vice president of global strategy and alliances for Oracle Insurance.

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  • Am I experienced enough to learn and develop immediately using Ruby on Rails?

    - by acheong87
    General Question I understand that discussions revolving around questions of this form run the risk of becoming too specific to help others. So, perhaps a better, general question would be: What kind of experience, if any, translates easily to Ruby on Rails; and if none, then what's the learning curve like, in comparison to other popular languages? Background I have the opportunity to build a website using whatever technologies I wish to use. It's a fairly simple website, for listing products, taking payments, managing customer data, providing a back-end portal for employees to manage data, possibly hooking in flight information (the products are travel related), possibly integrating a blog and all the social-networking goodies. Specific Problem I have to let the client know by tonight whether I'm interested in taking up this project, before he talks to other potential developers, but I'm on the fence. I already work a full-time C++ development job, so the money doesn't do it for me. It's the opportunity to (be paid to) learn some new technologies and to have a real, running product in the end. I've heard and read great things about Ruby, and am really intrigued. I zipped through some introductory Ruby tutorials, no sweat. However I found the Rails tutorials a little overwhelming, especially not being able to try it out anywhere. And researching Rails hosts like Heroku and EngineYard makes me think that maybe I don't know what I'm getting myself into. The ship's leaving port! I wish I had more time to learn, better yet play with the language, but I have to decide soon! Should I venture or pass? Additional Details My experiences are in C/C++/Tcl/Perl/PHP/jQuery, and basic knowledge of Java/C#. I didn't study C.S. formally so I wasn't exposed to design principles, programming paradigms, etc., which is my greatest concern. Will my lack of understanding in this realm make RoR frustrating to learn? Will it be so incompatible with a C++ "way" of thinking that I'll wish I never started? Am I putting my client at risk by attempting this? If it helps, I'm quick to learn new things (self-taught so far) and care a great deal about correctness, using things for their intended purposes, and so on. I've read numerous recommendations of Agile Development with Rails and would love to read it (though perhaps, while developing in parallel, for shortness of time). Worse comes to worst, I'd give up and do the standard LAMP gig, of course, not charging the client for wasted time. But I'm hoping to avoid the project altogether if it's gonna come down to that! Thanks in advance for any tips, insights, votes of confidence, votes of discouragement (for the better), and such.

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