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• Interview with Lenz Grimmer about MySQL Connect

  - by Keith Larson

  Keith Larson: Thank you for allowing me to do this interview with you.  I have been talking with a few different Oracle ACEs   about the MySQL Connect Conference. I figured the MySQL community might be missing you as well. You have been very busy with Oracle Linux but I know you still have an eye on the MySQL Community. How have things been?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks for including me in this series of interviews, I feel honored! I've read the other interviews, and really liked them. I still try to follow what's going on over in the MySQL community and it's good to see that many of the familiar faces are still around. Over the course of the 9 years that I was involved with MySQL, many colleagues and contacts turned into good friends and we still maintain close relationships.It's been almost 1.5 years ago that I moved into my new role here in the Linux team at Oracle, and I really enjoy working on a Linux distribution again (I worked for SUSE before I joined MySQL AB in 2002). I'm still learning a lot - Linux in the data center has greatly evolved in so many ways and there are a lot of new and exciting technologies to explore. Keith Larson: What were your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to deliver the MySQL Connect conference to the MySQL Community?Lenz Grimmer: I think it's testament to the fact that Oracle deeply cares about MySQL, despite what many skeptics may say. What started as "MySQL Sunday" two years ago has now evolved into a full-blown sub-conference, with 80 sessions at one of the largest corporate IT events in the world. I find this quite telling, not many products at Oracle enjoy this level of exposure! So it certainly makes me feel proud to see how far MySQL has come. Keith Larson: Have you had a chance to look over the sessions? What are your thoughts on them?Lenz Grimmer: I did indeed look at the final schedule.The content committee did a great job with selecting these sessions. I'm glad to see that the content selection was influenced by involving well-known and respected members of the MySQL community. The sessions cover a broad range of topics and technologies, both covering established topics as well as recent developments. Keith Larson: When you get a chance, what sessions do you plan on attending?Lenz Grimmer: I will actually be manning the Oracle booth in the exhibition area on one of these days, so I'm not sure if I'll have a lot of time attending sessions. But if I do, I'd love to see the keynotes and catch some of the sessions that talk about recent developments and new features in MySQL, High Availability and Clustering . Quite a lot has happened and it's hard to keep up with this constant flow of new MySQL releases.In particular, the following sessions caught my attention: MySQL Connect Keynote: The State of the Dolphin Evaluating MySQL High-Availability Alternatives CERN’s MySQL “as a Service” Deployment with Oracle VM: Empowering Users MySQL 5.6 Replication: Taking Scalability and High Availability to the Next Level What’s New in MySQL Server 5.6? MySQL Security: Past and Present MySQL at Twitter: Development and Deployment MySQL Community BOF MySQL Connect Keynote: MySQL Perspectives Keith Larson: So I will ask you just like I have asked the others I have interviewed, any tips that you would give to people for handling the long hours at conferences?Lenz Grimmer: Wear comfortable shoes and make sure to drink a lot! Also prepare a plan of the sessions you would like to attend beforehand and familiarize yourself with the venue, so you can get to the next talk in time without scrambling to find the location. The good thing about piggybacking on such a large conference like Oracle OpenWorld is that you benefit from the whole infrastructure. For example, there is a nice schedule builder that helps you to keep track of your sessions of interest. Other than that, bring enough business cards and talk to people, build up your network among your peers and other MySQL professionals! Keith Larson: What features of the MySQL 5.6 release do you look forward to the most ?Lenz Grimmer: There has been solid progress in so many areas like the InnoDB Storage Engine, the Optimizer, Replication or Performance Schema, it's hard for me to really highlight anything in particular. All in all, MySQL 5.6 sounds like a very promising release. I'm confident it will follow the tradition that Oracle already established with MySQL 5.5, which received a lot of praise even from very critical members of the MySQL community. If I had to name a single feature, I'm particularly and personally happy that the precise GIS functions have finally made it into a GA release - that was long overdue. Keith Larson:  In your opinion what is the best reason for someone to attend this event?Lenz Grimmer: This conference is an excellent opportunity to get in touch with the key people in the MySQL community and ecosystem and to get facts and information from the domain experts and developers that work on MySQL. The broad range of topics should attract people from a variety of roles and relations to MySQL, beginning with Developers and DBAs, to CIOs considering MySQL as a viable solution for their requirements. Keith Larson: You will be attending MySQL Connect and have some Oracle Linux Demos, do you see a growing demand for MySQL on Oracle Linux ?Lenz Grimmer: Yes! Oracle Linux is our recommended Linux distribution and we have a good relationship to the MySQL engineering group. They use Oracle Linux as a base Linux platform for development and QA, so we make sure that MySQL and Oracle Linux are well tested together. Setting up a MySQL server on Oracle Linux can be done very quickly, and many customers recognize the benefits of using them both in combination.Because Oracle Linux is available for free (including free bug fixes and errata), it's an ideal choice for running MySQL in your data center. You can run the same Linux distribution on both your development/staging systems as well as on the production machines, you decide which of these should be covered by a support subscription and at which level of support. This gives you flexibility and provides some really attractive cost-saving opportunities. Keith Larson: Since I am a Linux user and fan, what is on the horizon for  Oracle Linux?Lenz Grimmer: We're working hard on broadening the ecosystem around Oracle Linux, building up partnerships with ISVs and IHVs to certify Oracle Linux as a fully supported platform for their products. We also continue to collaborate closely with the Linux kernel community on various projects, to make sure that Linux scales and performs well on large systems and meets the demands of today's data centers. These improvements and enhancements will then rolled into the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, which is the key ingredient that sets Oracle Linux apart from other distributions. We also have a number of ongoing projects which are making good progress, and I'm sure you'll hear more about this at the upcoming OpenWorld conference :) Keith Larson: What is something that more people should be aware of when it comes to Oracle Linux and MySQL ?Lenz Grimmer: Many people assume that Oracle Linux is just tuned for Oracle products, such as the Oracle Database or our Engineered Systems. While it's of course true that we do a lot of testing and optimization for these workloads, Oracle Linux is and will remain a general-purpose Linux distribution that is a very good foundation for setting up a LAMP-Stack, for example. We also provide MySQL RPM packages for Oracle Linux, so you can easily stay up to date if you need something newer than what's included in the stock distribution.One more thing that is really unique to Oracle Linux is Ksplice, which allows you to apply security patches to the running Linux kernel, without having to reboot. This ensures that your MySQL database server keeps up and running and is not affected by any downtime. Keith Larson: What else would you like to add ?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks again for getting in touch with me, I appreciated the opportunity. I'm looking forward to MySQL Connect and Oracle OpenWorld and to meet you and many other people from the MySQL community that I haven't seen for quite some time! Keith Larson:  Thank you Lenz!

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• Code Camp 2011 – Summary

  - by hajan

  Waiting whole twelve months to come this year’s Code Camp 2011 event was something which all Microsoft technologies (and even non-Microsoft techs.) developers were doing in the past year. Last year’s success was enough big to be heard and to influence everything around our developer community and beyond. Code Camp 2011 was nothing else but a invincible success which will remain in our memory for a long time from now. Darko Milevski (president of MKDOT.NET UG and SharePoint MVP) said something interesting at the event keynote that up to now we were looking at the past by saying what we did… now we will focus on the future and how to develop our community more and more in the future days, weeks, months and I hope so for many years… Even though it was held only two days ago (26th of November 2011), I already feel the nostalgia for everything that happened there and for the excellent time we have spent all together. ORGANIZED BY ENTHUSIASTS AND EXPERTS Code Camp 2011 was organized by number of community enthusiasts and experts who have unselfishly contributed with all their free time to make the best of this event. The event was organized by a known community group called MKDOT.NET User Group, name of a user group which is known not only in Macedonia, but also in many countries abroad. Organization mainly consists of software developers, technical leaders, team leaders in several known companies in Macedonia, as well as Microsoft MVPs. SPEAKERS There were 24 speakers at five parallel tracks. At Code Camp 2011 we had two groups of speakers: Professional Experts in various technologies and Student Speakers. The new interesting thing here is the Student Speakers, which draw attention a lot, especially to other students who were interested to see what their colleagues are going to speak about and how do they use Microsoft technologies in different coding scenarios and practices, in different topics. From the rest of the professional speakers, there were 7 Microsoft MVPs: Two ASP.NET/IIS MVPs, Two C# MVPs, and One MVP in SharePoint, SQL Server and Exchange Server. I must say that besides the MVP Speakers, who definitely did a great job as always… there were other excellent speakers as well, which were speaking on various technologies, such as: Web Development, Windows Phone Development, XNA, Windows 8, Games Development, Entity Framework, Event-driven programming, SOLID, SQLCLR, T-SQL, e.t.c. SESSIONS There were 25 sessions mainly all related to Microsoft technologies, but ranging from Windows 8, WP7, ASP.NET till Games Development, XNA and Event-driven programming. Sessions were going in five parallel tracks named as Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Student track. Five presentations in each track, each with level 300 or 400. More info MY SESSION (ASP.NET MVC Best Practices) I must say that from the big number of speaking engagements I have had, this was one of my best performances and definitely I have set new records of attendees at my sessions and probably overall. I spoke on topic ASP.NET MVC Best Practices, where I have shown tips, tricks, guidelines and best practices on what to use and what to avoid by developing with one of the best web development frameworks nowadays, ASP.NET MVC. I had approximately 350+ attendees, the hall was full so that there was no room for staying at feet. Besides .NET developers, there were a lot of other technology oriented developers, who has also received the presentation very well and I really hope I gave them reason to think about ASP.NET as one of the best options for web development nowadays (if you ask me, it’s the best one ;-)). I have included 10 tips in using ASP.NET MVC each of them followed by a demo. Besides these 10 tips, I have briefly introduced the concept of ASP.NET MVC for those that haven’t been working with the framework and at the end some bonus tips. I must say there was lot of laugh for some funny sentences I have stated, like “If you code ASP.NET MVC, girls will love you more” – same goes for girls, only replace girls with boys :). [LINK TO SESSION WILL GO HERE, ONCE SESSIONS ARE AVAILABLE ON MK CODECAMP WEBSITE] VOLUNTEERS Without strong organization, such events wouldn’t be able to gather hundreds of attendees at one place and still stay perfectly organized to the smallest details, without dedicated organization and volunteers. I would like to dedicate this space in my blog to them and to say one big THANK YOU for supporting us before the event and during the whole day in the event. With such young and dedicated volunteers, we couldn’t achieve anything but great results. THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION! NETWORKING One of the main reasons why we do such events is to gather all professionals in one place. Networking is what everyone wants because through this way of networking, we can meet incredible people in one place. It is amazing feeling to share your knowledge with others and exchange thoughts on various topics. Meet and talk to interesting people. I have had very special moments with many attendees especially after my presentation. Special Thank You to all of them who come to meet me in person, whether to ask a question, say congrats for my session or simply meet me and just smile :)… everything counts! Thank You! TWITTER During the event, twitter was one of the most useful event-wide communication tool where everyone could tweet with hash tag #mkcodecamp or #mkdotnet and say what he/she wants to say about the current state and happenings at that moment… In my next blog post I will list the top craziest tweets that were posted at this event… FUTURE OF MKDOT.NET Having such strong community around MKDOT.NET, the future seems very bright. The initial plans are to have sub-groups in several technologies, however all these sub-groups will belong to the MKDOT.NET UG which will be, somehow, the HEAD of these sub-groups. We are doing this to provide better divisions by technologies and organize ourselves better since our community is very big, around 500 members in MKDOT.NET.We will have five sub-groups:- Web User Group (Lead:Hajan Selmani - me)- Mobile User Group (Lead: Filip Kerazovski)- Visual C# User Group (Lead: Vekoslav Stefanovski)- SharePoint User Group (Lead: Darko Milevski)- Dynamics User Group (Lead: Vladimir Senih) SUMMARY Online registered attendees: ~1.200 Event attendees: ~800 Number of members in organization: 40+ Organized by: MKDOT.NET User Group Number of tracks: 5 Number of speakers: 24 Number of sessions: 25 Event official website: http://codecamp.mkdot.net Total number of sponsors: 20 Platinum Sponsors: Microsoft, INETA, Telerik Place held: FON University City and Country: Skopje, Macedonia THANK YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE BEST EVENT IN MACEDONIA, CODE CAMP 2011. Regards, Hajan

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• Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

  Back in February at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series (EKS) I spoke to various people at Emtel about their data centre here on the island. I was trying to see whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting over there for a selected group of our community members. Well, let's say it like this... My first approach wasn't that promising and far from successful but during the following months there were more and more occasions to get in touch with the "right" contact persons at Emtel to make it happen... Setting up an appointment and pre-requisites The major improvement came during a Boot Camp for Windows Phone 8.1 App development organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands in cooperation with Emtel at the Emtel World, Ebene. Apart from learning bits and pieces regarding Universal Apps I took the opportunity to get in touch with Arvin Lockee, Sales Executive - Data, during our lunch break. And this really kicked off the whole procedure. Prior to get access to the Emtel data centre it is requested that you provide full name and National ID of anyone going to visit. Also, it should be noted that there was only a limited amount of seats available. Anyways, packed with this information I posted through the usual social media channels. Responses came in very quickly and based on First-come, first-serve (FCFS) principle I noted down the details and forwarded them to Emtel in order to fix a date and time for the visit. In preparation on our side, all attendees exchanged contact details and we organised transport options to go to the data centre in Arsenal. The day before and on the day of our meeting, Arvin send me a reminder to check whether everything is still confirmed and ready to go... Of course, it was! Arriving at the Emtel Data Centre As I'm coming from Flic En Flac towards the North, we agreed that I'm going to pick up a couple of young fellows near the old post office in Port Louis. All went well, except that Sean eventually might be living in another time zone compared to the rest of us. Anyway, after some extended stop we were complete and arrived just in time in Arsenal to meet and greet with Ish and Veer. Again, Emtel is taking access procedures to their data centre very serious and the gate stayed close until all our IDs had been noted and compared to the list of registered attendees. Despite having a good laugh at the mixture of old and new ID cards it was a straight-forward processing. The ward was very helpful and guided us to the waiting area at the entrance section of the building. Shortly after we were welcomed by Kamlesh Bokhoree, the Data Centre Officer. He gave us brief introduction into the rules and regulations during our visit, like no photography allowed, not touching the buttons, and following his instructions through the whole visit. Of course! Inside the data centre Next, he explained us the multi-factor authentication system using a combination of bio-metric data, like finger print reader, and "classic" pin panel. The Emtel data centre provides multiple services and next to co-location for your own hardware they also offer storage options for your backup and archive data in their massive, fire-resistant vault. Very impressive to get to know about the considerations that have been done in choosing the right location and how to set up the whole premises. It should also be noted that there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance inside and outside the buildings. Strengths of the Emtel TIER 3 Data Centre, Mauritius Finally, we were guided into the first server room. And wow, the whole setup is cleverly planned and outlined in the architecture. From the false floor and ceilings in order to provide optimum air flow, over to the separation of cold and hot aisles between the full-size server racks, and of course the monitored air conditions in order to analyse and watch changes in temperature, smoke detection and other parameters. And not surprisingly everything has been implemented in two independent circuits. There is a standardised classification for the construction and operation of data centres world-wide, and the Emtel's one has been designed to be a TIER 4 building but due to the lack of an alternative power supplier on the island it is officially registered as a TIER 3 compliant data centre. Maybe in the long run there might be a second supplier of energy next to CEB... time will tell. Luckily, the data centre is integrated into the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and Emtel already connects internationally through diverse undersea cable routes like SAFE & LION/LION2 out of Mauritius and through several other providers for onwards connectivity. The data centre is part of the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and has redundant internet connectivity onwards. Meanwhile, Arvin managed to join our little group of geeks and he supported Kamlesh in answering our technical questions regarding the capacities and general operation of the data centre. Visiting the NOC and its dedicated team of IT professionals was surely one of the visual highlights. Seeing their wall of screens to monitor any kind of activities on the data lines, the managed servers and the activity in and around the building was great. Even though I'm using a multi-head setup since years I cannot keep it up with that setup... ;-) But I got a couple of ideas on how to improve my work spaces here at the office. Clear advantages of hosting your e-commerce and mobile backends locally After the completely isolated NOC area we continued our Q&A session with Kamlesh and Arvin in the second server room which is dedictated to shared environments. On first thought it should be well-noted that there is lots of space for full-sized racks and therefore co-location of your own hardware. Actually, given the feedback that there will be upcoming changes in prices the facilities at the Emtel data centre are getting more and more competitive and interesting for local companies, especially small and medium enterprises. After seeing this world-class infrastructure available on the island, I'm already considering of moving one of my root servers abroad to be co-located here on the island. This would provide an improved user experience in terms of site performance and latency. This would be a good improvement, especially for upcoming e-commerce solutions for two of my local clients. Later on, we actually started the conversation of additional services that could be a catalyst for the local market in order to attract more small and medium companies to take the data centre into their evaluations regarding online activities. Until today Emtel does not provide virtualised server environments but there might be ongoing plans in the future to cover this field as well. Emtel is a mobile operator and internet connectivity provider in the first place, entering a market of managed and virtualised server infrastructures including capacities in terms of cloud storage and computing are rather new and there is a continuous learning curve at Emtel, too. You cannot just jump into a new market and see how it works out... And I appreciate Emtel's approach towards a solid fundament and then building new services on top of that. Emtel as a future one-stop-shop service provider for all your internet and telecommunications needs. Emtel's promotional video about their TIER 3 data centre in Arsenal, Mauritius More details are thoroughly described in Emtel's brochure of their data centre. Check out their PDF document here. Thanks for this opportunity Visiting and walking through the Emtel data centre for more than 2 hours was a great experience. As representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) I would like to thank anyone at Emtel involved in the process of making it happen, and especially to Arvin Lockee and Kamlesh Bokhoree for their time and patience in explaining the infrastructure and answering all the endless questions from our members. Thank You!

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• Underwriting in a New Frontier: Spurring Innovation

  - by [email protected]

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Susan Keuer, product strategy manager for Oracle Insurance, shares her experiences and insight from the 2010 Association of Home Office Underwriters (AHOU) Annual Conference, April 11-14, in San Antonio, Texas    How can I be more innovative in underwriting?  It's a common question I hear from insurance carriers, producers and others, so it was no surprise that it was the key theme at the recent 2010 AHOU Annual Conference.  This year's event drew more than 900 insurance professionals involved in the underwriting process across life and annuities, property and casualty and reinsurance from around the globe, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Bahamas, and more, to San Antonio - a Texas city where innovation transformed a series of downtown drainage canals into its premiere River Walk tourist destination.   CNN's Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta kicked off the conference with a phenomenal opening session that drove home the theme of the conference, "Underwriting in a New Frontier:  Spurring Innovation."   Drawing from his own experience as a neurosurgeon treating critically injured medical patients in the field in Iraq, Gupta inspired audience members to think outside the box during the underwriting process. He shared a compelling story of operating on a soldier who had suffered a head-related trauma in a field hospital.  With minimal supplies available Gupta used a Black and Decker saw to operate on the soldier's head and reduce pressure on his swelling brain. Drawing from this example, Gupta encouraged underwriters to think creatively, be innovative, and consider new tools and sources of information, such as social networking sites, during the underwriting process. So as you are looking at risk take into consideration all resources you have available.    Gupta also stressed the concept of IKIGAI - noting that individuals who believe that their life is worth living are less likely to die than are their counterparts without this belief.  How does one quantify this approach to life or thought process when evaluating risk?  Could this be something to consider as a "category" in the near future? How can this same belief in your own work spur innovation?   The role of technology was a hot topic of discussion throughout the conference.  Sessions delved into the latest in underwriting software to the rise of social media and how it is being increasingly integrated into underwriting process and solutions.  In one session a trio of panelists representing the carrier, producer and vendor communities stressed the importance to underwriters of leveraging new technology and the plethora of online information sources, which all could be used to accurately, honestly and consistently evaluate the risk throughout the underwriting process.   Another focused on the explosion of social media noting:  1.    Social media is growing exponentially - About eight percent of Americans used social media five years ago. Today about 46 percent of Americans do so, with 85 percent of financial services professionals using social media in their work.  2.    It will impact your business - Underwriters reconfirmed over and over that they are increasingly using "free" tools that are available in cyberspace in lieu of more costly solutions, such as inspection reports conducted by individuals in the field.  3.    Information is instantly available on the Web, anytime, anywhere - LinkedIn was mentioned as a way to connect to peers in the underwriting community and producers alike.  Many carriers and agents also are using Facebook to promote their company to customers - and as a point-of-entry to allow them to perform some functionality - such as accessing product marketing information versus directing users to go to the carrier's own proprietary website.  Other carriers have released their tight brand marketing to allow their producers to drive more business to their personal Facebook site where they offer innovative tools such as Application Capture or asking medical information in a more relaxed fashion.     Other key topics at the conference included the economy, ongoing industry consolidation, real-estate valuations as an asset and input into the underwriting process, and producer trends.  All stressed a "back to basics" approach for low cost, term products.   Finally, Connie Merritt, RN, PHN, entertained the large group of atttendees with audience-engaging insight on how to "Tame the Lions in Your Life - Dealing with Complainers, Bullies, Grump and Curmudgeon." Merritt noted "we are too busy for our own good." She shared how her overachieving personality had impacted her life.  Audience members then were asked to pick red, yellow, blue, or green shapes, without knowing that each one represented a specific personality trait.  For example, those who picked blue were the peacemakers. Those who choose yellow were social - the hint was to "Be Quiet Longer."  She then offered these "lion taming" steps:   1.    Admit It 2.    Accept It 3.    Let Go 4.    Be Present (which paralleled Gupta's IKIGAI concept)   When thinking about underwriting I encourage you to be present in the moment and think creatively, but don't be afraid to look ahead to the future and be an innovator.  I hope to see you at next year's AHOU Annual Conference, May 1-4, 2011 at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Nev.     Susan Keuer is the product strategy manager for new business underwriting.  She brings more than 20 years of insurance industry experience working with leading insurance carriers and technology companies to her role on the product strategy team for life/annuities solutions within the Oracle Insurance Global Business Unit  

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• Emit Knowledge - social network for knowledge sharing

  - by hajan

  Emit Knowledge, as the words refer - it's a social network for emitting / sharing knowledge from users by users. Those who can benefit the most out of this network is perhaps all of YOU who have something to share with others and contribute to the knowledge world. I've been closely communicating with the core team of this very, very interesting, brand new social network (with specific purpose!) about the concept, idea and the vision they have for their product and I can say with a lot of confidence that this network has real potential to become something from which we will all benefit. I won't speak much about that and would prefer to give you link and try it yourself - http://www.emitknowledge.com Mainly, through the past few months I've been testing this network and it is getting improved all the time. The user experience is great, you can easily find out what you need and it follows some known patterns that are common for all social networks. They have some real good ideas and plans that are already under development for the next updates of their product. You can do micro blogging or you can do regular normal blogging… it’s up to you, and the way it works, it is seamless. Here is a short Question and Answers (QA) interview I made with the lead of the team, Marijan Nikolovski: 1. Can you please explain us briefly, what is Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge is a brand new knowledge based social network, delivering quality content from users to users. We believe that people’s knowledge, experience and professional thoughts compose quality content, worth sharing among millions around the world. Therefore, we created the platform that matches people’s need to share and gain knowledge in the most suitable and comfortable way. Easy to work with, Emit Knowledge lets you to smoothly craft and emit knowledge around the globe. 2. How 'old' is Emit Knowledge? In hamster’s years we are almost five years old start-up :). Just kidding. We’ve released our public beta about three months ago. Our official release date is 27 of June 2012. 3. How did you come up with this idea? Everything started from a simple idea to solve a complex problem. We’ve seen that the social web has become polluted with data and is on the right track to lose its base principles – socialization and common cause. That was our start point. We’ve gathered the team, drew some sketches and started to mind map the idea. After several idea refactoring’s Emit Knowledge was born. 4. Is there any competition out there in the market? Currently we don't have any competitors that share the same cause. What makes our platform different is the ideology that our product promotes and the functionalities that our platform offers for easy socialization based on interests and knowledge sharing. 5. What are the main technologies used to build Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge was built on a heterogeneous pallet of technologies. Currently, we have four of separation: UI – Built on ASP.NET MVC3 and Knockout.js; Messaging infrastructure – Build on top of RabbitMQ; Background services – Our in-house solution for job distribution, orchestration and processing; Data storage – Build on top of MongoDB; What are the main reasons you've chosen ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 6. What are the main reasons for choosing ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 7. Did you use some of the latest Microsoft technologies? If yes, which ones? Yes, we like to rock the cutting edge tech house. Currently we are using Microsoft’s latest technologies like ASP.NET MVC, Web API (work in progress) and the best for the last; we are utilizing Windows Azure IaaS to the bone. 8. Can you please tell us shortly, what would be the benefit of regular bloggers in other blogging platforms to join Emit Knowledge? Well, unless you are some of the smoking ace gurus whose blogs are followed by a large number of users, our platform offers knowledge based segregated community equipped with tools that will enable both current and future users to expand their relations and to self-promote in the community based on their activity and knowledge sharing. 10. I see you are working very intensively and there is already integration with some third-party services to make the process of sharing and emitting knowledge easier, which services did you integrate until now and what do you plan do to next? We have “reemit” functionality for internal sharing and we also support external services like: Twitter; LinkedIn; Facebook; For the regular bloggers we have an extra cream, Windows Live Writer support for easy blog posts emitting. 11. What should we expect next? Currently, we are working on a new fancy community feature. This means that we are going to support user groups to be formed. So for all existing communities and user groups out there, wait us a little bit, we are coming for rescue :). One of the top next features they are developing is the Community Feature. It means, if you have your own User Group, Community Group or any other Group on which you and your users are mostly blogging or sharing (emitting) knowledge in various ways, Emit Knowledge as a platform will help you have everything you need to promote your group, make new followers and host all the necessary stuff that you have had need of. I would invite you to try the network and start sharing knowledge in a way that will help you gather new followers and spread your knowledge faster, easier and in a more efficient way! Let’s Emit Knowledge!

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• J2EE Applications, SPARC T4, Solaris Containers, and Resource Pools

  - by user12620111

  I've obtained a substantial performance improvement on a SPARC T4-2 Server running a J2EE Application Server Cluster by deploying the cluster members into Oracle Solaris Containers and binding those containers to cores of the SPARC T4 Processor. This is not a surprising result, in fact, it is consistent with other results that are available on the Internet. See the "references", below, for some examples. Nonetheless, here is a summary of my configuration and results. (1.0) Before deploying a J2EE Application Server Cluster into a virtualized environment, many decisions need to be made. I'm not claiming that all of the decisions that I have a made will work well for every environment. In fact, I'm not even claiming that all of the decisions are the best possible for my environment. I'm only claiming that of the small sample of configurations that I've tested, this is the one that is working best for me. Here are some of the decisions that needed to be made: (1.1) Which virtualization option? There are several virtualization options and isolation levels that are available. Options include: Hard partitions:  Dynamic Domains on Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series Servers Hypervisor based virtualization such as Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDOMs) on SPARC T-Series Servers OS Virtualization using Oracle Solaris Containers Resource management tools in the Oracle Solaris OS to control the amount of resources an application receives, such as CPU cycles, physical memory, and network bandwidth. Oracle Solaris Containers provide the right level of isolation and flexibility for my environment. To borrow some words from my friends in marketing, "The SPARC T4 processor leverages the unique, no-cost virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris Zones"  (1.2) How to associate Oracle Solaris Containers with resources? There are several options available to associate containers with resources, including (a) resource pool association (b) dedicated-cpu resources and (c) capped-cpu resources. I chose to create resource pools and associate them with the containers because I wanted explicit control over the cores and virtual processors.  (1.3) Cluster Topology? Is it best to deploy (a) multiple application servers on one node, (b) one application server on multiple nodes, or (c) multiple application servers on multiple nodes? After a few quick tests, it appears that one application server per Oracle Solaris Container is a good solution. (1.4) Number of cluster members to deploy? I chose to deploy four big 64-bit application servers. I would like go back a test many 32-bit application servers, but that is left for another day. (2.0) Configuration tested. (2.1) I was using a SPARC T4-2 Server which has 2 CPU and 128 virtual processors. To understand the physical layout of the hardware on Solaris 10, I used the OpenSolaris psrinfo perl script available at http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/download/Community+Group+performance/files/psrinfo.pl: test# ./psrinfo.pl -pv The physical processor has 8 cores and 64 virtual processors (0-63) The core has 8 virtual processors (0-7)   The core has 8 virtual processors (8-15)   The core has 8 virtual processors (16-23)   The core has 8 virtual processors (24-31)   The core has 8 virtual processors (32-39)   The core has 8 virtual processors (40-47)   The core has 8 virtual processors (48-55)   The core has 8 virtual processors (56-63)     SPARC-T4 (chipid 0, clock 2848 MHz) The physical processor has 8 cores and 64 virtual processors (64-127)   The core has 8 virtual processors (64-71)   The core has 8 virtual processors (72-79)   The core has 8 virtual processors (80-87)   The core has 8 virtual processors (88-95)   The core has 8 virtual processors (96-103)   The core has 8 virtual processors (104-111)   The core has 8 virtual processors (112-119)   The core has 8 virtual processors (120-127)     SPARC-T4 (chipid 1, clock 2848 MHz) (2.2) The "before" test: without processor binding. I started with a 4-member cluster deployed into 4 Oracle Solaris Containers. Each container used a unique gigabit Ethernet port for HTTP traffic. The containers shared a 10 gigabit Ethernet port for JDBC traffic. (2.3) The "after" test: with processor binding. I ran one application server in the Global Zone and another application server in each of the three non-global zones (NGZ):  (3.0) Configuration steps. The following steps need to be repeated for all three Oracle Solaris Containers. (3.1) Stop AppServers from the BUI. (3.2) Stop the NGZ. test# ssh test-z2 init 5 (3.3) Enable resource pools: test# svcadm enable pools (3.4) Create the resource pool: test# poolcfg -dc 'create pool pool-test-z2' (3.5) Create the processor set: test# poolcfg -dc 'create pset pset-test-z2' (3.6) Specify the maximum number of CPU's that may be addd to the processor set: test# poolcfg -dc 'modify pset pset-test-z2 (uint pset.max=32)' (3.7) bash syntax to add Virtual CPUs to the processor set: test# (( i = 64 )); while (( i < 96 )); do poolcfg -dc "transfer to pset pset-test-z2 (cpu $i)"; (( i = i + 1 )) ; done (3.8) Associate the resource pool with the processor set: test# poolcfg -dc 'associate pool pool-test-z2 (pset pset-test-z2)' (3.9) Tell the zone to use the resource pool that has been created: test# zonecfg -z test-z1 set pool=pool-test-z2 (3.10) Boot the Oracle Solaris Container test# zoneadm -z test-z2 boot (3.11) Save the configuration to /etc/pooladm.conf test# pooladm -s (4.0) Results. Using the resource pools improves both throughput and response time: (5.0) References: System Administration Guide: Oracle Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Oracle Solaris Zones Capitalizing on large numbers of processors with WebSphere Portal on Solaris WebSphere Application Server and T5440 (Dileep Kumar's Weblog)  http://www.brendangregg.com/zones.html Reuters Market Data System, RMDS 6 Multiple Instances (Consolidated), Performance Test Results in Solaris, Containers/Zones Environment on Sun Blade X6270 by Amjad Khan, 2009.

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• PowerShell Script to Enumerate SharePoint 2010 or 2013 Permissions and Active Directory Group Membership

  - by Brian T. Jackett

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/bjackett/archive/2013/07/01/powershell-script-to-enumerate-sharepoint-2010-or-2013-permissions-and.aspx   In this post I will present a script to enumerate SharePoint 2010 or 2013 permissions across the entire farm down to the site (SPWeb) level.  As a bonus this script also recursively expands the membership of any Active Directory (AD) group including nested groups which you wouldn’t be able to find through the SharePoint UI.   History     Back in 2009 (over 4 years ago now) I published one my most read blog posts about enumerating SharePoint 2007 permissions.  I finally got around to updating that script to remove deprecated APIs, supporting the SharePoint 2010 commandlets, and fixing a few bugs.  There are 2 things that script did that I had to remove due to major architectural or procedural changes in the script. Indenting the XML output Ability to search for a specific user    I plan to add back the ability to search for a specific user but wanted to get this version published first.  As for indenting the XML that could be added but would take some effort.  If there is user demand for it (let me know in the comments or email me using the contact button at top of blog) I’ll move it up in priorities.    As a side note you may also notice that I’m not using the Active Directory commandlets.  This was a conscious decision since not all environments have them available.  Instead I’m relying on the older [ADSI] type accelerator and APIs.  It does add a significant amount of code to the script but it is necessary for compatibility.  Hopefully in a few years if I need to update again I can remove that legacy code.   Solution    Below is the script to enumerate SharePoint 2010 and 2013 permissions down to site level.  You can also download it from my SkyDrive account or my posting on the TechNet Script Center Repository. SkyDrive TechNet Script Center Repository http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Enumerate-SharePoint-2010-35976bdb   001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042 043 044 045 046 047 048 049 050 051 052 053 054 055 056 057 058 059 060 061 062 063 064 065 066 067 068 069 070 071 072 073 074 075 076 077 078 079 080 081 082 083 084 085 086 087 088 089 090 091 092 093 094 095 096 097 098 099 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 ########################################################### #DisplaySPWebApp8.ps1 # #Author: Brian T. Jackett #Last Modified Date: 2013-07-01 # #Traverse the entire web app site by site to display # hierarchy and users with permissions to site. ########################################################### function Expand-ADGroupMembership {     Param     (         [Parameter(Mandatory=$true,                    Position=0)]         [string]         $ADGroupName,         [Parameter(Position=1)]         [string]         $RoleBinding     )     Process     {         $roleBindingText = ""         if(-not [string]::IsNullOrEmpty($RoleBinding))         {             $roleBindingText = " RoleBindings=`"$roleBindings`""         }         Write-Output "<ADGroup Name=`"$($ADGroupName)`"$roleBindingText>"         $domain = $ADGroupName.substring(0, $ADGroupName.IndexOf("\") + 1)         $groupName = $ADGroupName.Remove(0, $ADGroupName.IndexOf("\") + 1)                                     #BEGIN - CODE ADAPTED FROM SCRIPT CENTER SAMPLE CODE REPOSITORY         #http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/powershell/search/users/srch106.mspx         #GET AD GROUP FROM DIRECTORY SERVICES SEARCH         $strFilter = "(&(objectCategory=Group)(name="+($groupName)+"))"         $objDomain = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry         $objSearcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher         $objSearcher.SearchRoot = $objDomain         $objSearcher.Filter = $strFilter         # specify properties to be returned         $colProplist = ("name","member","objectclass")         foreach ($i in $colPropList)         {             $catcher = $objSearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add($i)         }         $colResults = $objSearcher.FindAll()         #END - CODE ADAPTED FROM SCRIPT CENTER SAMPLE CODE REPOSITORY         foreach ($objResult in $colResults)         {             if($objResult.Properties["Member"] -ne $null)             {                 foreach ($member in $objResult.Properties["Member"])                 {                     $indMember = [adsi] "LDAP://$member"                     $fullMemberName = $domain + ($indMember.Name)                                         #if($indMember["objectclass"]                         # if child AD group continue down chain                         if(($indMember | Select-Object -ExpandProperty objectclass) -contains "group")                         {                             Expand-ADGroupMembership -ADGroupName $fullMemberName                         }                         elseif(($indMember | Select-Object -ExpandProperty objectclass) -contains "user")                         {                             Write-Output "<ADUser>$fullMemberName</ADUser>"                         }                 }             }         }                 Write-Output "</ADGroup>"     } } #end Expand-ADGroupMembership # main portion of script if((Get-PSSnapin -Name microsoft.sharepoint.powershell) -eq $null) {     Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell } $farm = Get-SPFarm Write-Output "<Farm Guid=`"$($farm.Id)`">" $webApps = Get-SPWebApplication foreach($webApp in $webApps) {     Write-Output "<WebApplication URL=`"$($webApp.URL)`" Name=`"$($webApp.Name)`">"     foreach($site in $webApp.Sites)     {         Write-Output "<SiteCollection URL=`"$($site.URL)`">"                 foreach($web in $site.AllWebs)         {             Write-Output "<Site URL=`"$($web.URL)`">"             # if site inherits permissions from parent then stop processing             if($web.HasUniqueRoleAssignments -eq $false)             {                 Write-Output "<!-- Inherits role assignments from parent -->"             }             # else site has unique permissions             else             {                 foreach($assignment in $web.RoleAssignments)                 {                     if(-not [string]::IsNullOrEmpty($assignment.Member.Xml))                     {                         $roleBindings = ($assignment.RoleDefinitionBindings | Select-Object -ExpandProperty name) -join ","                         # check if assignment is SharePoint Group                         if($assignment.Member.XML.StartsWith('<Group') -eq "True")                         {                             Write-Output "<SPGroup Name=`"$($assignment.Member.Name)`" RoleBindings=`"$roleBindings`">"                             foreach($SPGroupMember in $assignment.Member.Users)                             {                                 # if SharePoint group member is an AD Group                                 if($SPGroupMember.IsDomainGroup)                                 {                                     Expand-ADGroupMembership -ADGroupName $SPGroupMember.Name                                 }                                 # else SharePoint group member is an AD User                                 else                                 {                                     # remove claim portion of user login                                     #Write-Output "<ADUser>$($SPGroupMember.UserLogin.Remove(0,$SPGroupMember.UserLogin.IndexOf("|") + 1))</ADUser>"                                     Write-Output "<ADUser>$($SPGroupMember.UserLogin)</ADUser>"                                 }                             }                             Write-Output "</SPGroup>"                         }                         # else an indivdually listed AD group or user                         else                         {                             if($assignment.Member.IsDomainGroup)                             {                                 Expand-ADGroupMembership -ADGroupName $assignment.Member.Name -RoleBinding $roleBindings                             }                             else                             {                                 # remove claim portion of user login                                 #Write-Output "<ADUser>$($assignment.Member.UserLogin.Remove(0,$assignment.Member.UserLogin.IndexOf("|") + 1))</ADUser>"                                                                 Write-Output "<ADUser RoleBindings=`"$roleBindings`">$($assignment.Member.UserLogin)</ADUser>"                             }                         }                     }                 }             }             Write-Output "</Site>"             $web.Dispose()         }         Write-Output "</SiteCollection>"         $site.Dispose()     }     Write-Output "</WebApplication>" } Write-Output "</Farm>"      The output from the script can be sent to an XML which you can then explore using the [XML] type accelerator.  This lets you explore the XML structure however you see fit.  See the screenshot below for an example.      If you do view the XML output through a text editor (Notepad++ for me) notice the format.  Below we see a SharePoint site that has a SharePoint group Demo Members with Edit permissions assigned.  Demo Members has an AD group corp\developers as a member.  corp\developers has a child AD group called corp\DevelopersSub with 1 AD user in that sub group.  As you can see the script recursively expands the AD hierarchy.   Conclusion    It took me 4 years to finally update this script but I‘m happy to get this published.  I was able to fix a number of errors and smooth out some rough edges.  I plan to develop this into a more full fledged tool over the next year with more features and flexibility (copy permissions, search for individual user or group, optional enumerate lists / items, etc.).  If you have any feedback, feature requests, or issues running it please let me know.  Enjoy the script!         -Frog Out

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• Getting your bearings and defining the project objective

  - by johndoucette

  I wrote this two years ago and thought it was worth posting… Some may think this is a daunting task and some may even say “what a waste of time” and want to open MS Project and start typing out tasks because someone asked for an estimate and a task list. Hell, maybe you even use Excel and pump out a spreadsheet with some real scientific formula for guessing how long it will take to code a bunch of classes. However, this short exercise will provide the basis for the entire project, whether small or large and be a great friend when communicating to anyone on your team or even your client. I call this the Project Brief. If you find yourself going beyond a single page, then you must decompose the sections and summarize your findings so there is a complete and clear picture of the project you are working on in a relatively short statement. Here is a great quote from the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) relative to what a project is;   A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. With this in mind, the project brief should encompass the entirety (objective) of the endeavor in its explanation and what it will take (goals) to create the product, service or result (deliverables). Normally the process of identifying the project objective is done during the first stage of a project called the Project Kickoff, but you can perform this very important step anytime to help you get a bearing. There are many more parts to helping a project stay on course, but this is usually the foundation where it can be grounded on. Through a series of 3 exercises, you should be able to come up with the objective, goals and deliverables on your project. Follow these steps, and in no time (about &frac12; hour), you will have the foundation of your project plan. (See examples below) Exercise 1 – Objectives Begin with the end in mind. Think about your project in business terms with a couple things to help you understand the objective; Reference the business benefit in terms of cost, speed and / or quality, Provide a higher level of what the outcome will look like (future sense) It should be non-measurable, that’s what the goals are all about The output should be a single paragraph with three sentences and take 10 minutes to write. *Typically, agreement must be reached on the objectives of the project before you would proceed to the next steps of the project. Exercise 2 – Goals A project goal is a statement that answers questions about who, what, why, where and when. A good project goal statement; Answers the five “W” questions for the project Is measurable in each of its parts Is published and agreed on by all the owners This helps the Project Manager receive confirmation on defining the project target. Using the established project objective done in the first exercise, think about the things it will take to get the job done. Think about tangible activities which are the top level tasks in a typical Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The overall goal statement plus all the deliverables (next exercise) can be seen as the project team’s contract with the project owners. Write 3 - 5 goals in about 10 minutes. You should not write the words “Who, what, why, where and when, but merely be able to answer the questions when you read a goal. Exercise 3 – Deliverables Every project creates some type of output and these outputs are called deliverables. There are two classes of deliverables; Internal – produced for project team members to meet their goals External – produced for project owners to meet their expectations The list you enter here provides a checklist for the team’s delivery and/or is a statement of all the expectations of the project owners. Here are some typical project deliverables; Product and product documentation End product/system Requirements/feature documents Installation guides Demo/prototype System design documents User guides/help files Plans Project plan Training plan Conversion/installation/delivery plan Test plans Documentation plan Communication plan Reports and general documentation Progress reports System acceptance tests Outstanding bug list Procedures Risk and issue logs Project history Deliverables should go with each of the goals. Have 3-5 deliverables for each goal. When you are done, you will have established a great foundation for the clarity of your project. This exercise can take some time, but with practice, you should be able to whip this one out in 10 minutes as well, especially if you are intimate with an ongoing project. Samples  Objective [Client] is implementing a series of MOSS sites to support external public (Internet), internal employee (Intranet) and an external secure (password protected Internet) applications. This project will focus on the public-facing web site and will provide [Client] with architectural recommendations based on the current design being done by their design partner [Partner] and the internal Content Team. In addition, it will provide [Client] with a development plan and confidence they need to deploy a world class public Internet website. Goals 1.  [Consultant] will provide technical guidance and set project team expectations for the implementation of the MOSS Internet site based on provided features/functions within three weeks. 2.  [Consultant] will understand phase 2 secure password-protected Internet site design and provide recommendations.   Deliverables 1.1  Public Internet (unsecure) Architectural Recommendation Plan 1.2  Physical Site construction Work Breakdown Structure and plan (Time, cost and resources needed) 2.1  Two Factor authentication recommendation document   Objective [Client] is currently using an application developed by [Consultant] many years ago called "XXX". This application, although functional, does not meet their new updated business requirements and contains a few defects which [Client] has developed work-around processes. [Client] would like to have a "new and improved" system to support their membership management needs by expanding membership and subscription capabilities, provide accounting integration with internal (GL) and external (VeriSign) systems, and implement hooks to the current CRM solution. This effort will take place through a series of phases, beginning with envisioning. Goals 1. Through discussions with users, [Consultant] will discover current issues/bugs which need to be resolved which must meet the current functionality requirements within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will gather requirements from the users about what is "needed" vs. "what they have" for enhancements and provide a high level document supporting their needs. 3. [Consultant] will meet with the team members through a series of meetings and help define the overall project plan to deliver a new and improved solution. Deliverables 1.1 Prioritized list of Current application issues/bugs that need to be resolved 1.2 Provide a resolution plan on the issues/bugs identified in the current application 1.3 Risk Assessment Document 2.1 Deliver a Requirements Document showing high-level [Client] needs for the new XXX application. · New feature functionality not in the application today · Existing functionality that will remain in the new functionality 2.2 Reporting Requirements Document 3.1 A Project Plan showing the deliverables and cost for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.2 A Statement of Work for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.3 An Estimate of any work that would need to follow the second phase.

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• Oracle Tutor: Top 10 to Implement Sustainable Policies and Procedures

  - by emily.chorba(at)oracle.com

  Overview Your organization (executives, managers, and employees) understands the value of having written business process documents (process maps, procedures, instructions, reference documents, and form abstracts). Policies and procedures should be documented because they help to reduce the range of individual decisions and encourage management by exception: the manager only needs to give special attention to unusual problems, not covered by a specific policy or procedure. As more and more procedures are written to cover recurring situations, managers will begin to make decisions which will be consistent from one functional area to the next.Companies should take a project management approach when implementing an environment for a sustainable documentation program and do the following:1. Identify an Executive Champion2. Put together a winning team3. Assign ownership4. Centralize publishing5. Establish the Document Maintenance Process Up Front6. Document critical activities only7. Document actual practice8. Minimize documentation9. Support continuous improvement10. Keep it simple 1. Identify an Executive ChampionAppoint a top down driver. Select one key individual to be a mentor for the procedure planning team. The individual should be a senior manager, such as your company president, CIO, CFO, the vice-president of quality, manufacturing, or engineering. Written policies and procedures can be important supportive aids when known to express the thinking for the chief executive officer and / or the president and to have his or her full support. 2. Put Together a Winning TeamChoose a strong Project Management Leader and staff the procedure planning team with management members from cross functional groups. Make sure team members have the responsibility - and the authority - to make things happen.The winning team should consist of the Documentation Project Manager, Document Owners (one for each functional area), a Document Controller, and Document Specialists (as needed). The Tutor Implementation Guide has complete job descriptions for these roles. 3. Assign Ownership It is virtually impossible to keep process documentation simple and meaningful if employees who are far removed from the activity itself create it. It is impossible to keep documentation up-to-date when responsibility for the document is not clearly understood.Key to the Tutor methodology, therefore, is the concept of ownership. Each document has a single owner, who is responsible for ensuring that the document is necessary and that it reflects actual practice. The owner must be a person who is knowledgeable about the activity and who has the authority to build consensus among the persons who participate in the activity as well as the authority to define or change the way an activity is performed. The owner must be an advocate of the performers and negotiate, not dictate practices.In the Tutor environment, a document's owner is the only person with the authority to approve an update to that document. 4. Centralize Publishing Although it is tempting (especially in a networked environment and with document management software solutions) to decentralize the control of all documents -- with each owner updating and distributing his own -- Tutor promotes centralized publishing by assigning the Document Administrator (gate keeper) to manage the updates and distribution of the procedures library. 5. Establish a Document Maintenance Process Up Front (and stick to it) Everyone in your organization should know they are invited to suggest changes to procedures and should understand exactly what steps to take to do so. Tutor provides a set of procedures to help your company set up a healthy document control system. There are many document management products available to automate some of the document change and maintenance steps. Depending on the size of your organization, a simple document management system can reduce the effort it takes to track and distribute document changes and updates. Whether your company decides to store the written policies and procedures on a file server or in a database, the essential tasks for maintaining documents are the same, though some tasks are automated. 6. Document Critical Activities Only The best way to keep your documentation simple is to reduce the number of process documents to a bare minimum and to include in those documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary. The first step to reducing process documentation is to document only those activities that are deemed critical. Not all activities require documentation. In fact, some critical activities cannot and should not be standardized. Others may be sufficiently documented with an instruction or a checklist and may not require a procedure. A document should only be created when it enhances the performance of the employee performing the activity. If it does not help the employee, then there is no reason to maintain the document. Activities that represent little risk (such as project status), activities that cannot be defined in terms of specific tasks (such as product research), and activities that can be performed in a variety of ways (such as advertising) often do not require documentation. Sometimes, an activity will evolve to the point where documentation is necessary. For example, an activity performed by single employee may be straightforward and uncomplicated -- that is, until the activity is performed by multiple employees. Sometimes, it is the interaction between co-workers that necessitates documentation; sometimes, it is the complexity or the diversity of the activity.7. Document Actual Practices The only reason to maintain process documentation is to enhance the performance of the employee performing the activity. And documentation can only enhance performance if it reflects reality -- that is, current best practice. Documentation that reflects an unattainable ideal or outdated practices will end up on the shelf, unused and forgotten.Documenting actual practice means (1) auditing the activity to understand how the work is really performed, (2) identifying best practices with employees who are involved in the activity, (3) building consensus so that everyone agrees on a common method, and (4) recording that consensus.8. Minimize Documentation One way to keep it simple is to document at the highest level possible. That is, include in your documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary.When writing a document, you should ask yourself, What is the purpose of this document? That is, what problem will it solve?By focusing on this question, you can target the critical information.• What questions are the end users likely to have?• What level of detail is required?• Is any of this information extraneous to the document's purpose? Short, concise documents are user friendly and they are easier to keep up to date. 9. Support Continuous Improvement Employees who perform an activity are often in the best position to identify improvements to the process. In other words, continuous improvement is a natural byproduct of the work itself -- but only if the improvements are communicated to all employees who are involved in the process, and only if there is consensus among those employees.Traditionally, process documentation has been used to dictate performance, to limit employees' actions. In the Tutor environment, process documents are used to communicate improvements identified by employees. How does this work? The Tutor methodology requires a process document to reflect actual practice, so the owner of a document must routinely audit its content -- does the document match what the employees are doing? If it doesn't, the owner has the responsibility to evaluate the process, to build consensus among the employees, to identify "best practices," and to communicate these improvements via a document update. Continuous improvement can also be an outgrowth of corrective action -- but only if the solutions to problems are communicated effectively. The goal should be to solve a problem once and only once, which means not only identifying the solution, but ensuring that the solution becomes part of the process. The Tutor system provides the method through which improvements and solutions are documented and communicated to all affected employees in a cost-effective, timely manner; it ensures that improvements are not lost or confined to a single employee. 10. Keep it Simple Process documents don't have to be complex and unfriendly. In fact, the simpler the format and organization, the more likely the documents will be used. And the simpler the method of maintenance, the more likely the documents will be kept up-to-date. Keep it simply by:• Minimizing skills and training required• Following the established Tutor document format and layout• Avoiding technology just for technology's sake No other rule has as major an impact on the success of your internal documentation as -- keep it simple. Learn More For more information about Tutor, visit Oracle.Com or the Tutor Blog. Post your questions at the Tutor Forum.   Emily Chorba Principle Product Manager Oracle Tutor & BPM 

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 3 – Agile or agile?

  - by Chris George

  Another early start for my last Lean Coffee of the conference, and again it was not wasted. We had some really interesting discussions around how to determine what test automation is useful, if agile is not faster, why do it? and a rather existential discussion on whether unicorns exist! First keynote of the day was entitled “Fast Feedback Teams” by Ola Ellnestam. Again this relates nicely to the releasing faster talk on day 2, and something that we are looking at and some teams are actively trying. Introducing the notion of feedback, Ola describes a game he wrote for his eldest child. It was a simple game where every time he clicked a button, it displayed “You’ve Won!”. He then changed it to be a Win-Lose-Win-Lose pattern and watched the feedback from his son who then twigged the pattern and got his younger brother to play, alternating turns… genius! (must do that with my children). The idea behind this was that you need that feedback loop to learn and progress. If you are not getting the feedback you need to close that loop. An interesting point Ola made was to solve problems BEFORE writing software. It may be that you don’t have to write anything at all, perhaps it’s a communication/training issue? Perhaps the problem can be solved another way. Writing software, although it’s the business we are in, is expensive, and this should be taken into account. He again mentions frequent releases, and how they should be made as soon as stuff is ready to be released, don’t leave stuff on the shelf cause it’s not earning you anything, money or data. I totally agree with this and it’s something that we will be aiming for moving forwards. “Exceptions, Assumptions and Ambiguity: Finding the truth behind the story” by David Evans started off very promising by making references to ‘Grim up North’ referring to the north of England. Not sure it was appreciated by most of the audience, but it made me laugh! David explained how there are always risks associated with exceptions, giving the example of a one-way road near where he lives, with an exception sign giving rights to coaches to go the wrong way. Therefore you could merrily swing around the corner of the one way road straight into a coach! David showed the danger in making assumptions with lyrical quotes from Lola by The Kinks “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola” and with a picture of a toilet flush that needed instructions to operate the full and half flush. With this particular flush, you pulled the handle all the way down to half flush, and half way down to full flush! hmmm, a bit of a crappy user experience methinks! Then through a clever use of a passage from the Jabberwocky, David then went onto show how mis-translation/ambiguity is the can completely distort the original meaning of something, and this is a real enemy of software development. This was all helping to demonstrate that the term Story is often heavily overloaded in the Agile world, and should really be stripped back to what it is really for, stating a business problem, and offering a technical solution. Therefore a story could be worded as “In order to {make some improvement}, we will { do something}”. The first ‘in order to’ statement is stakeholder neutral, and states the problem through requesting an improvement to the software/process etc. The second part of the story is the verb, the doing bit. So to achieve the ‘improvement’ which is not currently true, we will do something to make this true in the future. My PM is very interested in this, and he’s observed some of the problems of overloading stories so I’m hoping between us we can use some of David’s suggestions to help clarify our stories better. The second keynote of the day (and our last) proved to be the most entertaining and exhausting of the conference for me. “The ongoing evolution of testing in agile development” by Scott Barber. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott before… OMG I would love to have even half of the energy he has! What struck me during this presentation was Scott’s explanation of how testing has become the role/job that it is (largely) today, and how this has led to the need for ‘methodologies’ to make dev and test work! The argument that we should be trying to converge the roles again is a very valid one, and one that a couple of the teams at work are actively doing with great results. Making developers as responsible for quality as testers is something that has been lost over the years, but something that we are now striving to achieve. The idea that we (testers) should be testing experts/specialists, not testing ‘union members’, supports this idea so the entire team works on all aspects of a feature/product, with the ‘specialists’ taking the lead and advising/coaching the others. This leads to better propagation of information around the team, a greater holistic understanding of the project and it allows the team to continue functioning if some of it’s members are off sick, for example. Feeling somewhat drained from Scott’s keynote (but at the same time excited that alot of the points he raised supported actions we are taking at work), I headed into my last presentation for Agile Testing Days 2012 before having to make my way to Tegel to catch the flight home. “Thinking and working agile in an unbending world” with Pete Walen was a talk I was not going to miss! Having spoken to Pete several times during the past few days, I was looking forward to hearing what he was going to say, and I was not disappointed. Pete started off by trying to separate the definitions of ‘Agile’ as in the methodology, and ‘agile’ as in the adjective by pronouncing them the ‘english’ and ‘american’ ways. So Agile pronounced (Ajyle) and agile pronounced (ajul). There was much confusion around what the hell he was talking about, although I thought it was quite clear. Agile – Software development methodology agile – Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character. Anyway, that aside (although it provided a few laughs during the presentation), the point was that many teams that claim to be ‘Agile’ but are not, in fact, ‘agile’ by nature. Implementing ‘Agile’ methodologies that are so prescriptive actually goes against the very nature of Agile development where a team should anticipate, adapt and explore. Pete made a valid point that very few companies intentionally put up roadblocks to impede work, so if work is being blocked/delayed, why? This is where being agile as a team pays off because the team can inspect what’s going on, explore options and adapt their processes. It is through experimentation (and that means trying and failing as well as trying and succeeding) that a team will improve and grow leading to focussing on what really needs to be done to achieve X. So, that was it, the last talk of our conference. I was gutted that we had to miss the closing keynote from Matt Heusser, as Matt was another person I had spoken too a few times during the conference, but the flight would not wait, and just as well we left when we did because the traffic was a nightmare! My Takeaway Triple from Day 3: Release often and release small – don’t leave stuff on the shelf Keep the meaning of the word ‘agile’ in mind when working in ‘Agile Look at testing as more of a skill than a role  

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• The Future of Project Management is Social

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Kazim Isfahani, Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Rapid Ascent. Breakneck Speed. Lightning Fast. Perhaps even overwhelming. No matter which set of adjectives we use to describe it, social media’s rise into the enterprise mainstream has been unprecedented. Indeed, the big 4 social media powerhouses (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter), have nearly 2 Billion users between them. You may be asking (as you should really) “That’s all well and good for the consumer, but for me at my company, what’s your point? Beyond the fact that I can check and post updates, that is.” Good question, kind sir. Impact of Social and Collaboration on Project Management I’ll dovetail this discussion to the project management realm, since that’s what I’m writing about. Speed is a big challenge for project-driven organizations. Anything that can help speed up project delivery - be it a new product introduction effort or a geographical expansion project - fast is a good thing. So where does this whole social thing fit particularly since there are already a host of tools to help with traditional project execution? The fact is companies have seen improvements in their productivity by deploying departmental collaboration and other social-oriented solutions. McKinsey’s survey on social tools shows we have reached critical scale: 72% of respondents report that their companies use at least one and over 40% say they are using social networks and blogs. We don’t hear as much about the impact of social media technologies at the project and project manager level, but that does not mean there is none. Consider the new hire. The type of individual entering the workforce and executing on projects is a generation of worker expecting visually appealing, easy to use and easy to understand technology meshing hand-in-hand with business processes. Consider the project manager. The social era has enhanced the role that the project manager must play. Today’s project manager must be a supreme communicator, an influencer, a sympathizer, a negotiator, and still manage to keep all stakeholders in the loop on project progress. Social tools play a significant role in this effort. Now consider the impact to the project team. The way that a project team functions has changed, with newer, social oriented technologies making the process of information dissemination and team communications much more fluid. It’s clear that a shift is occurring where “social” is intersecting with project management. The Rise of Social Project Management We refer to the melding of project management and social networking as Social Project Management. Social Project Management is based upon the philosophy that the project team is one part of an integrated whole, and that valuable and unique abilities exist within the larger organization. For this reason, Social Project Management systems should be integrated into the collaborative platform(s) of an organization, allowing communication to proceed outside the project boundaries. What makes social project management "social" is an implicit awareness where distributed teams build connected links in ways that were previously restricted to teams that were co-located. Just as critical, Social Project Management embraces the vision of seamless online collaboration within a project team, but also provides for, (and enhances) the use of rigorous project management techniques. Social Project Management acknowledges that projects (particularly large projects) are a social activity - people doing work with people, for other people, with commitments to yet other people. The more people (larger projects), the more interpersonal the interactions, and the more social affects the project. The Epitome of Social - Fusion Project Portfolio Management If I take this one level further to discuss Fusion Project Portfolio Management, the notion of Social Project Management is on full display. With Fusion Project Portfolio Management, project team members have a single place for interaction on projects and access to any other resources working within the Fusion ERP applications. This allows team members the opportunity to be informed with greater participation and provide better information. The application’s the visual appeal, and highly graphical nature makes it easy to navigate information. The project activity stream adds to the intuitive user experience. The goal of productivity is pervasive throughout Fusion Project Portfolio Management. Field research conducted with Oracle customers and partners showed that users needed a way to stay in the context of their core transactions and yet easily access social networking tools. This is manifested in the application so when a user executes a business process, they not only have the transactional application at their fingertips, but also have things like e-mail, SMS, text, instant messaging, chat – all providing a number of different ways to interact with people and/or groups of people, both internal and external to the project and enterprise. But in the end, connecting people is relatively easy. The larger issue is finding a way to serve up relevant, system-generated, actionable information, in real time, which will allow for more streamlined execution on key business processes. Fusion Project Portfolio Management’s design concept enables users to create project communities, establish discussion threads, manage event calendars as well as deliver project based work spaces to organize communications within the context of a project – all within a secure business environment. We’d love to hear from you and get your thoughts and ideas about how Social Project Management is impacting your organization. To learn more about Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management, please visit this link

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• Projected Results

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Monica Mehta Yasser Mahmud has seen a revolution in project management over the past decade. During that time, the former Primavera product strategist (who joined Oracle when his company was acquired in 2008) has not only observed a transformation in the way IT systems support corporate projects but the role project portfolio management (PPM) plays in the enterprise. “15 years ago project management was the domain of project management office (PMO),” Mahmud recalls of earlier days. “But over the course of the past decade, we've seen it transform into a mission critical enterprise discipline, that has made Primavera indispensable in the board room. Now, as a senior manager, a board member, or a C-level executive you have direct and complete visibility into what’s kind of going on in the organization—at a level of detail that you're going to consume that information.” Now serving as Oracle’s vice president of product strategy and industry marketing, Mahmud shares his thoughts on how Oracle’s Primavera solutions have evolved and how best-in-class project portfolio management systems can help businesses stay competitive. Profit: What do you feel are the market dynamics that are changing project management today? Mahmud: First, the data explosion. We're generating data at twice the rate at which we can actually store it. The same concept applies for project-intensive organizations. A lot of data is gathered, but what are we really doing with it? Are we turning data into insight? Are we using that insight and turning it into foresight with analytics tools? This is a key driver that will separate the very good companies—the very competitive companies—from those that are not as competitive. Another trend is centered on the explosion of mobile computing. By the year 2013, an estimated 35 percent of the world’s workforce is going to be mobile. That’s one billion people. So the question is not if you're going to go mobile, it’s how fast you are going to go mobile. What kind of impact does that have on how the workforce participates in projects? What worked ten to fifteen years ago is not going to work today. It requires a real rethink around the interfaces and how data is actually presented. Profit: What is the role of project management in this new landscape? Mahmud: We recently conducted a PPM study with the Economist Intelligence Unit centered to determine how important project management is considered within organizations. Our target was primarily CFOs, CIOs, and senior managers and we discovered that while 95 percent of participants believed it critical to their business, only six percent were confident that projects were delivered on time and on budget. That’s a huge gap. Most organizations are looking for efficiency, especially in these volatile financial times. But senior management can’t keep track of every project in a large organization. As a result, executives are attempting to inventory the work being conducted under their watch. What is often needed is a very high-level assessment conducted at the board level to say, “Here are the 50 initiatives that we have underway. How do they line up with our strategic drivers?” This line of questioning can provide early warning that work and strategy are out of alignment; finding the gap between what the business needs to do and the actual performance scorecard. That’s low-hanging fruit for any executive looking to increase efficiency and save money. But it can only be obtained through proper assessment of existing projects—and you need a project system of record to get that done. Over the next decade or so, project management is going to transform into holistic work management. Business leaders will want make sure key projects align with corporate strategy, but also the ability to drill down into daily activity and smaller projects to make sure they line up as well. Keeping employees from working on tasks—even for a few hours—that don’t line up with corporate goals will, in many ways, become a competitive differentiator. Profit: How do all of these market challenges and shifting trends impact Oracle’s Primavera solutions and meeting customers’ needs? Mahmud: For Primavera, it’s a transformation from being a project management application to a PPM system in the enterprise. Also making that system a mission-critical application by connecting to other key applications within the ecosystem, such as the enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain, and CRM systems. Analytics have also become a huge component. Business analytics have made Oracle’s Primavera applications pertinent in the boardroom. Now, as a senior manager, a board member, a CXO, CIO, or CEO, you have direct visibility into what’s going on in the organization at a level that you're able to consume that information. In addition, all of this information pairs up really well with your financials and other data. Certainly, when you're an Oracle shop, you have that visibility that you didn’t have before from a project execution perspective. Profit: What new strategies and tools are being implemented to create a more efficient workplace for users? Mahmud: We believe very strongly that just because you call something an enterprise project portfolio management system doesn’t make it so—you have to get people to want to participate in the system. This can’t be mandated down from the top. It simply doesn’t work that way. A truly adoptable solution is one that makes it super easy for all types users to participate, by providing them interfaces where they live. Keeping that in mind, a major area of development has been alternative user interfaces. This is increasingly resulting in the creation of lighter weight, targeted interfaces such as iOS applications, and smartphones interfaces such as for iPhone and Android platform. Profit: How does this translate into the development of Oracle’s Primavera solutions? Mahmud: Let me give you a few examples. We recently announced the launch of our Primavera P6 Team Member application, which is a native iOS application for the iPhone. This interface makes it easier for team members to do their jobs quickly and effectively. Similarly, we introduced the Primavera analytics application, which can be consumed via mobile devices, and when married with Oracle Spatial capabilities, users can get a geographical view of what’s going on and which projects are occurring in various locations around the world. Lastly, we introduced advanced email integration that allows project team members to status work via E-mail. This functionality leverages the fact that users are in E-mail system throughout the day and allows them to status their work without the need to launch the Primavera application. It comes back to a mantra: provide as many alternative user interfaces as possible, so you can give people the ability to work, to participate, to raise issues, to create projects, in the places where they live. Do it in such a way that it’s non-intrusive, do it in such a way that it’s easy and intuitive and they can get it done in a short amount of time. If you do that, workers can get back to doing what they're actually getting paid for.

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• PASS: SQLRally Thoughts

  - by Bill Graziano

  The PASS Board recently decided that we wouldn’t put another US-based SQLRally on the calendar until we had a chance to review the program. I wanted to provide some of my thinking around this. Keep in mind that this is the opinion of one Board member. The Board committed to complete two SQLRally events to determine if an event modeled between SQL Saturday and the Summit was viable. We’ve completed the two events and now it’s time to step back and review the program. This is my seventh year on the PASS Board. Over that time people have asked me why PASS does certain things. Many, many times my answer has been “Because that’s the way we did it last year”. And I am tired of giving that answer. We need to take a step back and review the US-based SQLRally before we schedule another one. It would be irresponsible for me as a Board member to commit resources to this without validating that what we’re doing makes sense for the organization and our members. I have no doubt that this was a great event for the attendees. We just need to validate it’s the best use of our resources. Please keep in mind that we haven’t cancelled the event. We’ve just said we need to review it before scheduling another one. My opinion is that some fairly serious changes are needed to the model before we consider it again – IF we do it again. I’ve come to that conclusion after speaking with the Dallas organizers, our HQ team, our Marketing team, other Board members (including one of the Orlando organizers), attendees in Orlando and Dallas and visiting other similar events. I should point out that their views aren’t unanimous on nearly any part of this event -- which is one of the reasons I want to take some time and think about this before continuing. I think it’s helpful to look at the original goals of what we were trying to accomplish. Andy Warren wrote these up in August of 2010. My summary of these goals and some thoughts on each one is below. Many of these thoughts revolve around the growth of SQL Saturdays. In the two years since that document was written these events have grown significantly. The largest SQL Saturdays are now over 500 people which mean they are nearly the same size as our recent SQLRally. Our goals included: Geographic diversity. We wanted an event in an area of the country that was away from any given Summit location. I think that’s still a valid goal. But we also have SQL Saturdays all over the country. What does SQLRally bring to this that SQLSaturday doesn’t? Speaker growth. One of the stated goals was to build a “farm club” for speakers. This gives us a way for speakers to work up to speaking at Summit by speaking in front of larger crowds. What does SQLRally bring to this that the larger SQL Saturdays aren’t providing? Pre-Conference speakers is one obvious answer here. Lower price. On a per-day basis, SQLRally is roughly 1/4th the price of the Summit. We wanted a way for people to experience something Summit-like at a lower price point. The challenge is that we are very budget constrained at that lower price point. International Event Model.  (I need to write more about this but I’m out of time.  I’ll cover it in the next installment.) There are a number of things I really like about SQLRally. I love the smaller conferences. They give me a chance to meet more people than at something the size of Summit. I like the two day format. That gives you two evenings to be at social events with people. Seeing someone a second day is a great way to build a bond with that person. That’s more difficult to do at a SQL Saturday. We also need to talk about the financial aspects of the event. Last year generated a small $17,000 profit on revenues of $200,000. Percentage-wise that’s reasonable but on an absolute basis it’s not a huge amount in our budget. We think this year will lose between $30,000 and $50,000 and take roughly 1,000 hours of HQ time. We don’t have detailed financials back yet but that’s our best guess at this point. Part of that was driven by using a convention center instead of a hotel. Until we get detailed financials back we won’t have the full picture around the financial impact. This event also takes time and mindshare from our Marketing team. This may sound like a small thing but please don’t underestimate it. Our original vision for this was something that would take very little time from our Marketing team and just a few mentions in the Connector. It turned out to need more than that. And all those mentions and emails take up space we could use to talk about other events and other programs. Last I wanted to talk about some of the things I’m thinking about. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying if we just fix “X” it all gets better. Is this that much better of an event than SQL Saturdays? What if we gave a few SQL Saturdays some extra resources? When SQL Saturdays were around 250 people that wasn’t as viable. With some of those events over 500 we need to reconsider this. We need to get back to a hotel venue. That will help with cost and networking. Is this the best use of the 1,000 HQ hours that we invested in the event? Is our price-point correct? I’m leaning toward raising our price closer to Summit on a per-day basis. I think this will let us put on a higher quality event and alleviate much of the budget pressure. Should growing speakers be a focus? Having top-line pre-conference speakers helps market the event. It will also have an impact on pricing and overall profit. We should also ask if it actually does grow speakers. How many of these people will eventually register for Summit? Attend chapters? Is SQLRally a driver into PASS or is it something that chapters, etc. drive people to? Should we have one paid day and one free instead of two paid days? This is a very interesting model that is used by SQLBits in the UK. This gives you the two day aspect as well as offering options for paid and free attendees. I’m very intrigued by this. Should we focus on a topic? Buried in the minutes is a discussion of whether PASS should have a Business Analytics conference separate from Summit. This is an interesting question to consider. Would making SQLRally be focused on a particular topic make it more attractive? Would that even be a SQLRally? Can PASS effectively manage the two events? (FYI - Probably not.) Would it help differentiate it from Summit and SQL Saturday? These are all questions that I think should be asked and answered before we do this event again. And we can’t do that if we don’t take time to have the discussion. I wanted to get this published before I take off for a few days of vacation. When I get back I’d like to write more about why the international events are different and talk about where we go from here.

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• How do I send automated e-mails from Drupal using Messaging and Notifications?

  - by Adrian

  I am working on a Notifications plugin, and after starting to write my notes down about how to do this, decided to just post them here. Please feel free to come make modifications and changes. Eventually I hope to post this on the Drupal handbook as well. Thanks. --Adrian Sending automated e-mails from Drupal using Messaging and Notifications To implement a notifications plugin, you must implement the following functions: Use hook_messaging, hook_token_list and hook_token_values to create the messages that will be sent. Use hook_notifications to create the subscription types Add code to fire events (eg in hook_nodeapi) Add all UI elements to allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe Understanding Messaging The Messaging module is used to compose messages that can be delivered using various formats, such as simple mail, HTML mail, Twitter updates, etc. These formats are called "send methods." The backend details do not concern us here; what is important are the following concepts: TOKENS: tokens are provided by the "tokens" module. They allow you to write keywords in square brackets, [like-this], that can be replaced by any arbitrary value. Note: the token groups you create must match the keys you add to the $events-objects[$key] array. MESSAGE KEYS: A key is a part of a message, such as the greetings line. Keys can be different for each send method. For example, a plaintext mail's greeting might be "Hi, [user]," while an HTML greeing might be "Hi, [user]," and Twitter's might just be "[user-firstname]: ". Keys can have any arbitrary name. Keys are very simple and only have a machine-readable name and a user-readable description, the latter of which is only seen by admins. MESSAGE GROUPS: A group is a bunch of keys that often, but not always, might be used together to make up a complete message. For example, a generic group might include keys for a greeting, body, closing and footer. Groups can also be "subclassed" by selecting a "fallback" group that will supply any keys that are missing. Groups are also associated with modules; I'm not sure what these are used for. Understanding Notifications The Notifications module revolves around the following concepts: SUBSCRIPTIONS: Notifications plugins may define one or more types of subscriptions. For example, notifications_content defines subscriptions for: Threads (users are notified whenever a node or its comments change) Content types (users are notified whenever a node of a certain type is created or is changed) Users (users are notified whenever another user is changed) Subscriptions refer to both the user who's subscribed, how often they wish to be notified, the send method (for Messaging) and what's being subscribed to. This last part is defined in two steps. Firstly, a plugin defines several "subscription fields" (through a hook_notifications op of the same name), and secondly, "subscription types" (also an op) defines which fields apply to each type of subscription. For example, notifications_content defines the fields "nid," "author" and "type," and the subscriptions "thread" (nid), "nodetype" (type), "author" (author) and "typeauthor" (type and author), the latter referring to something like "any STORY by JOE." Fields are used to link events to subscriptions; an event must match all fields of a subscription (for all normal subscriptions) to be delivered to the recipient. The $subscriptions object is defined in subsequent sections. Notifications prefers that you don't create these objects yourself, preferring you to call the notifications_get_link() function to create a link that users may click on, but you can also use notifications_save_subscription and notifications_delete_subscription to do it yourself. EVENTS: An event is something that users may be notified about. Plugins create the $event object then call notifications_event($event). This either sends out notifications immediately, queues them to send out later, or both. Events include the type of thing that's changed (eg 'node', 'user'), the ID of the thing that's changed (eg $node-nid, $user-uid) and what's happened to it (eg 'create'). These are, respectively, $event-type, $event-oid (object ID) and $event-action. Warning: notifications_content_nodeapi also adds a $event-node field, referring to the node itself and not just $event-oid = $node-nid. This is not used anywhere in the core notifications module; however, when the $event is passed back to the 'query' op (see below), we assume the node is still present. Events do not refer to the user they will be referred to; instead, Notifications makes the connection between subscriptions and events, using the subscriptions' fields. MATCHING EVENTS TO SUBSCRIPTIONS: An event matches a subscription if it has the same type as the event (eg "node") and if the event matches all the correct fields. This second step is determined by the "query" hook op, which is called with the $event object as a parameter. The query op is responsible for giving Notifications a value for all the fields defined by the plugin. For example, notifications_content defines the 'nid', 'type' and 'author' fields, so its query op looks like this (ignore the case where $event_or_user = 'user' for now): $event_or_user = $arg0; $event_type = $arg1; $event_or_object = $arg2; if ($event_or_user == 'event' && $event_type == 'node' && ($node = $event_or_object->node) || $event_or_user == 'user' && $event_type == 'node' && ($node = $event_or_object)) { $query[]['fields'] = array( 'nid' => $node->nid, 'type' => $node->type, 'author' => $node->uid, ); return $query; After extracting the $node from the $event, we set $query[]['fields'] to a dictionary defining, for this event, all the fields defined by the module. As you can tell from the presence of the $query object, there's way more you can do with this op, but they are not covered here. DIGESTING AND DEDUPING: Understanding the relationship between Messaging and Notifications Usually, the name of a message group doesn't matter, but when being used with Notifications, the names must follow very strict patterns. Firstly, they must start with the name "notifications," and then are followed by either "event" or "digest," depending on whether the message group is being used to represent either a single event or a group of events. For 'events,' the third part of the name is the "type," which we get from Notification's $event-type (eg: notifications_content uses 'node'). The last part of the name is the operation being performed, which comes from Notification's $event-action. For example: notifications-event-node-comment might refer to the message group used when someone comments on a node notifications-event-user-update to a user who's updated their profile Hyphens cannot appear anywhere other than to separate the parts of these words. For 'digest' messages, the third and fourth part of the name come from hook_notification's "event types" callback, specifically this line: $types[] = array( 'type' => 'node', 'action' => 'insert', ... 'digest' => array('node', 'type'), ); $types[] = array( 'type' => 'node', 'action' => 'update', ... 'digest' => array('node', 'nid'), ); In this case, the first event type (node insertion) will be digested with the notifications-digest-node-type message template providing the header and footer, likely saying something like "the following [type] was created." The second event type (node update) will be digested with the notifications-digest-node-nid message template. Data Structure and Callback Reference $event The $event object has the following members: $event-type: The type of event. Must match the type in hook_notification::"event types". {notifications_event} $event-action: The action the event describes. Most events are sorted by [$event-type][$event-action]. {notifications_event}. $event-object[$object_type]: All objects relevant to the event. For example, $event-object['node'] might be the node that the event describes. $object_type can come from the 'event types' hook (see below). The main purpose appears to be to be passed to token_replace_multiple as the second parameter. $event-object[$event-type] is assumed to exist in the short digest processing functions, but this doesn't appear to be used anywhere. Not saved in the database; loaded by hook_notifications::"event load" $event-oid: apparently unused. The id of the primary object relevant to this event (eg the node's nid). $event-module: apparently unused $event-params[$key]: Mainly a place for plugins to save random data. The main module will serialize the contents of this array but does not use it in any way. However, notifications_ui appears to do something weird with it, possibly by using subscriptions' fields as keys into this array. I'm not sure why though. hook_notifications op 'subscription types': returns an array of subscription types provided by the plugin, in the form $key = array(...) with the following members: event_type: this subscription can only match events whose $event-type has this value. Stored in the database as notifications.event_type for every individual subscription. Apparently, this can be overiden in code but I wouldn't try it (see notifications_save_subscription). fields: an unkeyed array of fields that must be matched by an event (in addition to the event_type) for it to match this subscription. Each element of this array must be a key of the array returned by op 'subscription fields' which in turn must be used by op 'query' to actually perform the matching. title: user-readable title for their subscriptions page (eg the 'type' column in user/%uid/notifications/subscriptions) description: a user-readable description. page callback: used to add a supplementary page at user/%uid/notifications/blah. This and the following are used by notifications_ui as a part of hook_menu_alter. Appears to be partially deprecated. user page: user/%uid/notifications/blah. op 'event types': returns an array of event types, with each event type being an array with the following members: type: this will match $event-type action: this will match $event-action digest: an array with two ordered (non-keyed) elements, "type" and "field." 'type' is used as an index into $event-objects. 'field' is also used to group events like so: $event-objects[$type]-$field. For example, 'field' might be 'nid' - if the object is a node, the digest lines will be grouped by node ID. Finally, both are used to find the correct Messaging template; see discussion above. description: used on the admin "Notifications-Events" page name: unused, use Messaging instead line: deprecated, use Messaging instead Other Stuff This is an example of the main query that inserts an event into the queue: INSERT INTO {notifications_queue} (uid, destination, sid, module, eid, send_interval, send_method, cron, created, conditions) SELECT DISTINCT s.uid, s.destination, s.sid, s.module, %d, // event ID s.send_interval, s.send_method, s.cron, %d, // time of the event s.conditions FROM {notifications} s INNER JOIN {notifications_fields} f ON s.sid = f.sid WHERE (s.status = 1) AND (s.event_type = '%s') // subscription type AND (s.send_interval >= 0) AND (s.uid <> %d) AND ( (f.field = '%s' AND f.intval IN (%d)) // everything from 'query' op OR (f.field = '%s' AND f.intval = %d) OR (f.field = '%s' AND f.value = '%s') OR (f.field = '%s' AND f.intval = %d)) GROUP BY s.uid, s.destination, s.sid, s.module, s.send_interval, s.send_method, s.cron, s.conditions HAVING s.conditions = count(f.sid)

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• creating objects in list

  - by prince23

  List myList = new List { new Users{ Name="Kumar", Gender="M", Age=75, Parent="All"}, new Users{ Name="Suresh",Gender="M", Age=50, Parent="Kumar"}, new Users{ Name="Bennette", Gender="F",Age=45, Parent="Kumar"}, new Users{ Name="kian", Gender="M",Age=20, Parent="Suresh"}, new Users{ Name="Nathani", Gender="M",Age=15, Parent="Suresh"}, new Users{ Name="Peter", Gender="M",Age=90, Parent="All"}, new Users{ Name="Mica", Age=56, Gender="M",Parent="Peter"}, new Users{ Name="Linderman", Gender="M",Age=51, Parent="Peter"}, new Users{ Name="john", Age=25, Gender="M",Parent="Mica"}, new Users{ Name="tom", Gender="M",Age=21, Parent="Mica"}, new Users{ Name="Ando", Age=64, Gender="M",Parent="All"}, new Users{ Name="Maya", Age=24, Gender="M",Parent="Ando"}, new Users{ Name="Niki Sanders", Gender="F",Age=2, Parent="Maya"}, new Users{ Name="Angela Patrelli", Gender="F",Age=3, Parent="Maya"}, }; now i need to format the data like here i need to check the parent based on the parent i will be creating objects under the parent objects now { Name="Kumar", Gender="M", Age=75, Parent="All" } this is the top level as a property Parent ="all" now under parent object kumar here we again create a new object to store these information under object(kumar who is the parent) new Users{ Name="Suresh",Gender="M", Age=50, Parent="Kumar"}, new Users{ Name="Bennette", Gender="F",Age=45, Parent="Kumar"}, what i need to do here is i need to check the parent based on the parent create further objects under it ex: i need to achive like this. looking for the syntax how i can do it. public class SampleProjectData { public static ObservableCollection<Product> GetSampleData() { DateTime dtS = DateTime.Now; ObservableCollection<Product> teams = new ObservableCollection<Product>(); teams.Add(new Product() { PDName = "Product1", OverallStartTime = dtS, OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(3), }); Project emp = new Project() { PName = "Project1", OverallStartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(1), OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(6) }; emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS, EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(2), TaskName = "John's Task 3" }); emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(3), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(4), TaskName = "John's Task 2" }); teams[0].Projects.Add(emp); emp = new Project() { PName = "Project2", OverallStartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(1.5), OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(5.5) }; emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(1), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(4), TaskName = "Victor's Task" }); teams[0].Projects.Add(emp); emp = new Project() { PName = "Project3", OverallStartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(2), OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(5) }; emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(1), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(4), TaskName = "Jason's Task 1" }); emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(7), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(9), TaskName = "Jason's Task 2" }); teams[0].Projects.Add(emp); teams.Add(new Product() { PDName = "Product2", OverallStartTime = dtS, OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(3) }); emp = new Project() { PName = "Project4", OverallStartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(0.5), OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(3.5) }; emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(1.5), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(4), TaskName = "Vicky's Task" }); teams[1].Projects.Add(emp); emp = new Project() { PName = "Project5", OverallStartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(2), OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(6) }; emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(2.2), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(3.8), TaskName = "Oleg's Task 1" }); emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(5), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(6), TaskName = "Oleg's Task 2" }); emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(8), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(9.6), TaskName = "Oleg's Task 3" }); teams[1].Projects.Add(emp); emp = new Project() { PName = "Project6", OverallStartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(2.5), OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(4.5) }; emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(0.8), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(2), TaskName = "Kim's Task" }); teams[1].Projects.Add(emp); teams.Add(new Product() { PDName = "Product3", OverallStartTime = dtS, OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(3) }); emp = new Project() { PName = "Project7", OverallStartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(5), OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(7.5) }; emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(1.5), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(4), TaskName = "Balaji's Task 1" }); emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(5), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(8), TaskName = "Balaji's Task 2" }); teams[2].Projects.Add(emp); emp = new Project() { PName = "Project8", OverallStartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(3), OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(6.3) }; emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(1.75), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(2.25), TaskName = "Li's Task" }); teams[2].Projects.Add(emp); emp = new Project() { PName = "Project9", OverallStartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(2), OverallEndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(6) }; emp.Tasks.Add(new Task() { StartTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(2), EndTime = dtS + TimeSpan.FromDays(3), TaskName = "Stacy's Task" }); teams[2].Projects.Add(emp); return teams; } } above is an sample data where i am grouping them with static data in the same way i need **to for teh data which is cmg from DB and i need to store them list** all these three data are comig from different services. and i am storing them in a list now i have three tables data Product , Project, Task. all the data are coming from webservies. i have created three list where i am storing the data in list. List<Project>objpro= new List<Project>(); List<Product>objproduct= new List<Product>(); LIst<Task>objTask= new List<Task>(); **now what i need to do is i need to do the mapping between these tables. if you see above. i have object of Product under Product i have added object of Project and then under project object i have added task object.** now from the above data which is stored in the list i need to do the same mapping between class. and group the data. public class Product : INotifyPropertyChanged { public Product() { this.Projects = new ObservableCollection<Project>(); } public string PDName { get; set; } public ObservableCollection<Project> Projects { get; set; } private DateTime _st; public DateTime OverallStartTime { get { return _st; } set { if (this._st != value) { TimeSpan dur = this._et - this._st; this._st = value; this.OnPropertyChanged("OverallStartTime"); this.OverallEndTime = value + dur; } } } private DateTime _et; public DateTime OverallEndTime { get { return _et; } set { if (this._et != value) { this._et = value; this.OnPropertyChanged("OverallEndTime"); } } } #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members protected void OnPropertyChanged(string name) { if (this.PropertyChanged != null) this.PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name)); } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; #endregion } public class Project : INotifyPropertyChanged { public Project() { this.Tasks = new ObservableCollection<Task>(); } public string PName { get; set; } public ObservableCollection<Task> Tasks { get; set; } DateTime _st; public DateTime OverallStartTime { get { return _st; } set { if (this._st != value) { TimeSpan dur = this._et - this._st; this._st = value; this.OnPropertyChanged("OverallStartTime"); this.OverallEndTime = value + dur; } } } DateTime _et; public DateTime OverallEndTime { get { return _et; } set { if (this._et != value) { this._et = value; this.OnPropertyChanged("OverallEndTime"); } } } #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members protected void OnPropertyChanged(string name) { if (this.PropertyChanged != null) this.PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name)); } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; #endregion } public class Task : INotifyPropertyChanged { public string TaskName { get; set; } DateTime _st; public DateTime StartTime { get { return _st; } set { if (this._st != value) { TimeSpan dur = this._et - this._st; this._st = value; this.OnPropertyChanged("StartTime"); this.EndTime = value + dur; } } } private DateTime _et; public DateTime EndTime { get { return _et; } set { if (this._et != value) { this._et = value; this.OnPropertyChanged("EndTime"); } } } #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members protected void OnPropertyChanged(string name) { if (this.PropertyChanged != null) this.PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name)); } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; #endregion } hope my question is clear

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• Virtual Disk Degraded

  - by TheD

  There is a physical DC with a Raid 1 Mirror, 2 Physical Disks, 500GB each. Dell Server Administrator is installed on the DC, and is reporting both physical disks are fine, online, in a good state etc. On a PERC S300 Raid Controller: Physical Disk 0:0 Physical Disk 0:1 However at the same time it's reporting that a virtual disk is degraded, what exactly does this mean? The virtual disk indicates it's State is in a Raid 1 Layout. Device Name: Windows Disk 0 If my understanding is correct then the Virtual Disk, when you drill down into Dell OpenManage should have both physical disks as members, as it is a mirror? Is this correct? However, when I drill down into the Virtual Disk, it only displays Physical Disk 0:0 included in Virtual Disk 1. I'm very new to server side/raid management etc. just while our server techy is away! Thanks!

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• WCF security via message headers

  - by exalted

  I'm trying to implement "some sort of" server-client & zero-config security for some WCF service. The best (as well as easiest to me) solution that I found on www is the one described at http://www.dotnetjack.com/post/Automate-passing-valuable-information-in-WCF-headers.aspx (client-side) and http://www.dotnetjack.com/post/Processing-custom-WCF-header-values-at-server-side.aspx (corrisponding server-side). Below is my implementation for RequestAuth (descibed in the first link above): using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Configuration; using System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher; using System.ServiceModel.Description; using System.ServiceModel.Channels; namespace AuthLibrary { /// <summary> /// Ref: http://www.dotnetjack.com/post/Automate-passing-valuable-information-in-WCF-headers.aspx /// </summary> public class RequestAuth : BehaviorExtensionElement, IClientMessageInspector, IEndpointBehavior { [DebuggerBrowsable(DebuggerBrowsableState.Never)] private string headerName = "AuthKey"; [DebuggerBrowsable(DebuggerBrowsableState.Never)] private string headerNamespace = "http://some.url"; public override Type BehaviorType { get { return typeof(RequestAuth); } } protected override object CreateBehavior() { return new RequestAuth(); } #region IClientMessageInspector Members // Keeping in mind that I am SENDING something to the server, // I only need to implement the BeforeSendRequest method public void AfterReceiveReply(ref System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message reply, object correlationState) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } public object BeforeSendRequest(ref System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message request, System.ServiceModel.IClientChannel channel) { MessageHeader<string> header = new MessageHeader<string>(); header.Actor = "Anyone"; header.Content = "TopSecretKey"; //Creating an untyped header to add to the WCF context MessageHeader unTypedHeader = header.GetUntypedHeader(headerName, headerNamespace); //Add the header to the current request request.Headers.Add(unTypedHeader); return null; } #endregion #region IEndpointBehavior Members public void AddBindingParameters(ServiceEndpoint endpoint, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } public void ApplyClientBehavior(ServiceEndpoint endpoint, ClientRuntime clientRuntime) { clientRuntime.MessageInspectors.Add(this); } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(ServiceEndpoint endpoint, EndpointDispatcher endpointDispatcher) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } public void Validate(ServiceEndpoint endpoint) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } #endregion } } So first I put this code in my client WinForms application, but then I had problems signing it, because I had to sign also all third-party references eventhough http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/h4fa028b(v=VS.80).aspx at section "What Should Not Be Strong-Named" states: In general, you should avoid strong-naming application EXE assemblies. A strongly named application or component cannot reference a weak-named component, so strong-naming an EXE prevents the EXE from referencing weak-named DLLs that are deployed with the application. For this reason, the Visual Studio project system does not strong-name application EXEs. Instead, it strong-names the Application manifest, which internally points to the weak-named application EXE. I expected VS to avoid this problem, but I had no luck there, it complained about all the unsigned references, so I created a separate "WCF Service Library" project inside my solution containing only code above and signed that one. At this point entire solution compiled just okay. And here's my problem: When I fired up "WCF Service Configuration Editor" I was able to add new behavior element extension (say "AuthExtension"), but then when I tried to add that extension to my end point behavior it gives me: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. So I'm stuck here. Any ideas?

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• How to expose service contract interfaces with multiple inheritance in WCF service on single endpoin

  - by Vaibhav Gawali

  I have only simple data types in method signature of service (such as int, string). My service class implements single ServiceContract interface say IMathService, and this interface in turn inherits from some other base interface say IAdderService. I want to expose the MathService using interface contract IAdderService as a service on a single endpoint. However some of the clinet's which know about IMathService should be able to access the extra services provided by IMathService on that single endpoint i.e. by just typecasting IAdderService to IMathService. //Interfaces and classes at server side [ServiceContract] public interface IAdderService { [OperationContract] int Add(int num1, int num2); } [ServiceContract] public interface IMathService : IAdderService { [OperationContract] int Substract(int num1, int num2); } public class MathService : IMathService { #region IMathService Members public int Substract(int num1, int num2) { return num1 - num2; } #endregion #region IAdderService Members public int Add(int num1, int num2) { return num1 + num2; } #endregion } //Run WCF service as a singleton instace MathService mathService = new MathService(); ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(mathService); host.Open(); Server side Configuration: <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <services> <service name="IAdderService" behaviorConfiguration="AdderServiceServiceBehavior"> <endpoint address="net.pipe://localhost/AdderService" binding="netNamedPipeBinding" bindingConfiguration="Binding1" contract="TestApp.IAdderService" /> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexNamedPipeBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="net.pipe://localhost/AdderService"/> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> </services> <bindings> <netNamedPipeBinding> <binding name="Binding1" > <security mode = "None"> </security> </binding > </netNamedPipeBinding> </bindings> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="AdderServiceServiceBehavior"> <serviceMetadata /> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="True" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> Client Side imeplementation: IAdderService adderService = new ChannelFactory<IAdderService>("AdderService").CreateChannel(); int result = adderService.Add(10, 11); IMathService mathService = adderService as IMathService; result = mathService.Substract(100, 9); Client side configuration: <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <client> <endpoint name="AdderService" address="net.pipe://localhost/AdderService" binding="netNamedPipeBinding" bindingConfiguration="Binding1" contract="TestApp.IAdderService" /> </client> <bindings> <netNamedPipeBinding> <binding name="Binding1" maxBufferSize="65536" maxConnections="10"> <security mode = "None"> </security> </binding > </netNamedPipeBinding> </bindings> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> Using above code and configuration I am not able to typecast IAdderService instnace to IMathService, it fails and I get null instance of IMathService at client side. My observation is if server exposes IMathService to client then client can safely typecast to IAdderService and vice versa is also possible. However if server exposes IAdderService then the typecast fails. Is there any solution to this? or am I doing it in a wrong way.

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• Permissions issue Mac OS X Client -> Mac OS X Server

  - by Meltemi

  I can't get access to a folder on our server and can't understand why. Perhaps someone will see what I'm overlooking... Trouble accessing /Library/Subdirectory/NextDirectory/ User joe can ssh to the server just fine and cd to /Library/Subdirectory/ however trying to cd into the next folder, NextDirectory, gives this error: -bash: cd: NextDirectory/: Permission denied both username joe & bill are members of the group admin and both can get INTO Subdirectory without any trouble... hostname:Library joe$ ls -l | grep Subdirectory drwxrwxr-x 3 bill admin 102 Jun 1 14:51 Subdirectory and from w/in the Subversion folder hostname:Subdirectory joe$ ls -l drwxrwx--- 5 root admin 170 Jun 1 22:19 NextDirectory bill can cd into NextDirectory but joe cannot!?! What am I overlooking? What tools do we have to troubleshoot this? thanks!

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• Draw underlined / strikethrough text ( MULTILINE STRING ) ?

  - by Madhup

  Hi, I have to draw underlined-multiline text with all types of text alignment. I have searched on forums and got some results like: http://davidjhinson.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/underline-text-on-the-iphone/ http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=561572 But all draw text for single line only. while i have multi-line text. The situation even become worse when the text alignment is centered. I searched and found that in iphone-sdk-3.2 there are some core-text attributes for underlining a text but no idea how to use that. Besides if I use these my problem would not be solved fully. As I have to draw strikethrough text also. Anybody having idea about this please help.

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• Exchange Server 2007 Forwarding Circles

  - by LorenVS

  Hello, I asked a question quite a while ago about two members of an organization who wanted to receive all of each other's emails, and yet maintain seperate mailboxes. (so all emails to mike@company get sent to mike and dave and all emails to dave@company get sent to mike and dave). At the time, I actually only needed to implement one side of this (only mikes emails got sent to both receipients) and (with the help of ServerFault) I set up forwarding on dave's inbox so that all of his emails would also be sent to mike. I'm now in a situation where I have to implement the other side of this relation (such that mike's emails will also forward to dave). I still remember how to set up the forwarding rule, but I'm worried that I might be creating a circular forwarding rule such that mike@compnay forwards to dave@company which forwards to mike@company and so on. Can anyone clear up my confusion (just want to make sure I don't make a stupid mistake). Thanks a ton

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• A help system for a PHP web app

  - by Dave

  Hi, As our new web app gets more complicated, so the need for help docs increases. I am not talking about documenting code, I am literally talking about application help. So myapp/help, or for example, enabling context help from a particular point in the app with a link such as myapp/help/users/create/ etc. Are there apps out there for doing this? For example, Wufoo use wordpress for http://wufoo.com/docs/ which I like (and understand wp, so its a nice solution), and Xero have a lovely ASPX http://help.xero.com/ interface. But I'm thinking there might be more dedicated implementations for what I'm looking for. We're on a linux, apache, postgresql, php stack, but a mysql supported installation is not the end of the world. Does anyone have any suggestions for this? It's a bit of a minefield when googling php + help + system.

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• Annotating axis in ggplot2

  - by mpiktas

  I am looking for the way to annotate axis in ggplot2. The example of the problem can be found here: http://learnr.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/ggplot2-back-to-back-bar-charts. The y axis of the chart (example graph in the link) has an annotation: (million euro). Is there a way to create such types of annotations in ggplot2? Looking at the documentation there is no obvious way, since the ggplot does not explicitly let you put objects outside plotting area. But maybe there is some workaround? One of the possible workarounds I thought about is using scales: data=data.frame(x=1:10,y=1:10) qplot(x=x,y=y,data=data)+scale_y_continuous(breaks=10.1,label="Millions") But then how do I remove the tick? And it seems that since ggplot does not support multiple scales, I will need to grab the output of the scale_y_continuous, when it calculates the scales automaticaly and then add my custom break and label by hand. Maybe there is a better way?

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• What is the difference between DVCS systems?

  - by Stephen

  What is the difference between DVCS systems? Seriously, wikipedia doesn't cover it well, and I read an article on HN recently comparing git and bzr in some detail, but the author admitted knowing little about mercurial, and the other options didn't get mentioned. (I'm happily using fossil on small win/mac/Linux projects) Please restrict answers to the DVCS aspects of the tool, e.g. The basic unit of vc in hit is the repository- in bazaar it is the branch(http://unspecified.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/why-git-aint-better-than-x/). bugtrackers and wikis are nice, but I'm really interested in the tools themselves, rather than any extras. Unfortunately SO demands a single 'right answer', so I'm making the question community wiki in the hope that users will contribute their knowledge.

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• Resources for rails widget creation

  - by Kenji Crosland

  My rails app is about to go live and I'm trying to figure out how to create a widget based on data on the site. My Javascript is not too hot--limited to the O'reilly head first book on JS. I can read simple Javascript okay but when it comes to writing it I'm a little lost. That said, I hope to roll out a widget, maybe a wordpress plugin too soon after my app is launched. Does anyone know of any rails plugins, javascript templates, tutorials or books that can get me going? I did ask a similar question before here: But my limited knowledge of JS kept me from implementing the suggested answer properly.

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