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• Geek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95

  - by Matthew Guay

  Last week we enjoyed looking at Windows 3.1 running in VMware Player on Windows 7.  Today, let’s upgrade our 3.1 to 95, and get a look at how most of us remember Windows from the 90’s. In this demo, we’re running the first release of Windows 95 (version 4.00.950) in VMware Player 3.0 running on Windows 7 x64.  For fun, we ran the 95 upgrade on the 3.1 virtual machine we built last week. Windows 95 So let’s get started.  Here’s the first setup screen.  For the record, Windows 95 installed in about 15 minutes or less in VMware in our test. Strangely, Windows 95 offered several installation choices.  They actually let you choose what extra parts of Windows to install if you wished.  Oh, and who wants to run Windows 95 on your “Portable Computer”?  Most smartphones today are more powerful than the “portable computers” of 95. Your productivity may vastly increase if you run Windows 95.  Anyone want to switch? No, I don’t want to restart … I want to use my computer! Welcome to Windows 95!  Hey, did you know you can launch programs from the Start button? Our quick spin around Windows 95 reminded us why Windows got such a bad reputation in the ‘90’s for being unstable.  We didn’t even get our test copy fully booted after installation before we saw our first error screen.  Windows in space … was that the most popular screensaver in Windows 95, or was it just me? Hello Windows 3.1!  The UI was still outdated in some spots.   Ah, yes, Media Player before it got 101 features to compete with iTunes. But, you couldn’t even play CDs in Media Player.  Actually, CD player was one program I used almost daily in Windows 95 back in the day. Want some new programs?  This help file about new programs designed for Windows 95 lists a lot of outdated names in tech.    And, you really may want some programs.  The first edition of Windows 95 didn’t even ship with Internet Explorer.   We’ve still got Minesweeper, though! My Computer had really limited functionality, and by default opened everything in a new window.  Double click on C:, and it opens in a new window.  Ugh. But Explorer is a bit more like more modern versions. Hey, look, Start menu search!  If only it found the files you were looking for… Now I’m feeling old … this shutdown screen brought back so many memories … of shutdowns that wouldn’t shut down! But, you still have to turn off your computer.  I wonder how many old monitors had these words burned into them? So there’s yet another trip down Windows memory lane.  Most of us can remember using Windows 95, so let us know your favorite (or worst) memory of it!  At least we can all be thankful for our modern computers and operating systems today, right?  Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Fun: Remember the Old-School SkiFree Game?Geek Fun: Virtualized old school Windows 3.11Stupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7Stupid Geek Tricks: Select Multiple Windows on the TaskbarHow to Delete a System File in Windows 7 or Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Ask How-To Geek: Learning the Office Ribbon, Booting to USB with an Old BIOS, and Snapping Windows

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  You’ve got questions and we’ve got answers. Today we highlight how to master the new Office interface, USB boot a computer with outdated BIOS, and snap windows to preset locations. Learning the New Office Ribbon Dear How-To Geek, I feel silly asking this (in light of how long the new Office interface has been out) but my company finally got around to upgrading from Windows XP and Office 2000 so the new interface it totally new to me. Can you recommend any resources for quickly learning the Office ribbon and the new changes? I feel completely lost after two decades of the old Office interface. Help! Sincerely, Where the Hell is Everything? Dear Where the Hell, We think most people were with you at some point in the last few years. “Where the hell is…” could possibly be the slogan for the new ribbon interface. You could browse through some of the dry tutorials online or even get a weighty book on the topic but the best way to learn something new is to get hands on. Ribbon Hero turns learning the new Office features and ribbon layout into a game. It’s no vigorous round of Team Fortress mind you, but it’s significantly more fun than reading a training document. Check out how to install and configure Ribbon Hero here. You’ll be teaching your coworkers new tricks in no time. Boot via USB with an Old BIOS Dear How-To Geek, I’m trying to repurpose some old computers by updating them with lightweight Linux distros but the BIOS on most of the machines is ancient and creaky. How ancient? It doesn’t even support booting from a USB device! I have a large flash drive that I’ve turned into a master installation tool for jobs like this but I can’t use it. The computers in question have USB ports; they just aren’t recognized during the boot process. What can I do? USB Bootin’ in Boise Dear USB Bootin’, It’s great you’re working to breathe life into old hardware! You’ve run into one of the limitations of older BIOSes, USB was around but nobody was thinking about booting off of it. Fortunately if you have a computer old enough to have that kind of BIOS it’s likely to also has a floppy drive or a CDROM drive. While you could make a bootable CDROM for your application we understand that you want to keep using the master USB installer you’ve made. In light of that we recommend PLoP Boot Manager. Think of it like a boot manager for your boot manager. Using it you can create a bootable floppy or CDROM that will enable USB booting of your master USB drive. Make a CD and a floppy version and you’ll have everything in your toolkit you need for future computer refurbishing projects. Read up on creating bootable media with PLoP Boot Manager here. Snapping Windows to Preset Coordinates Dear How-To Geek, Once upon a time I had a company laptop that came with a little utility that snapped windows to preset areas of the screen. This was long before the snap-to-side features in Windows 7. You could essentially configure your screen into a grid pattern of your choosing and then windows would neatly snap into those grids. I have no idea what it was called or if was anymore than a gimmick from the computer manufacturer, but I’d really like to have it on my new computer! Bend and Snap in San Francisco, Dear Bend and Snap, If we had to guess, we’d guess your company must have had a set of laptops from Acer as the program you’re describing sounds exactly like Acer GridVista. Fortunately for you the application was extremely popular and Acer released it independently of their hardware. If, by chance, you’ve since upgraded to a multiple monitor setup the app even supports multiple monitors—many of the configurations are handy for arranging IM windows and other auxiliary communication tools. Check out our guide to installing and configuring Acer GridVista here for more information. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Download the New Year in Japan Windows 7 Theme from Microsoft Once More Unto the Breach – Facebook Apps Can Now Access Your Address and Phone Number Dial Zero Speeds You Through Annoying Customer Service Menus Complete Dropquest 2011 and Receive Free Dropbox Storage Desktop Computer versus Laptop Wallpaper The Kids Have No Idea What Old Tech Is [Video]

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 14, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 14, 2010New ProjectsBeerMath.net: BeerMath.net lets brewers calculate expected values for their recipes. Written entirely in C#, it can be used in any .Net language.Bible Study: Данный проект предусматривает создание программного обеспечения, предоставляющего пользователю гибкие и мощные инструменты для чтения и изучения Пи...E-Messenger: Description détaillé du sujet : Développement d'une application (client lourd) de messagerie instantané et de partage de fichier interne à ESPRIT....Facebook Azure Toolkit: The Facebook Azure Toolit provides a flexible and scalable hosting platform for the smallest and largest of Facebook applications. This toolkit hel...Gherkin editor: A simple text editor to write specifications using Gherkin. The editor supports code completion, syntax highlighting, spell checker and more.Mydra Center: Mydra Center is a Media center with the particularity to be very flexible, allowing developers to extend it and add new features. The philosophy be...MyTwits - A rich Twitter client for Windows powered by WPF: MyTwits is a free Twitter client for Windows XP/Vista/7 powered by WPF which gives you freedom to twit right from your desktop. You can do almost a...na laborke: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaasssssssssssssssddddddddddddddddddddfffffffffffffNMTools: The "Network Management Tools" (NMTools) complete OpenSLIM CMDB capa­bil­i­ties with Network Discovery, Automa­tion and Con­fig­u­ra­tion Man­age­m...orionSRO: This project aims to make a fully functional server.Project Naduvar: Project Naduvar, is a centralized Locking Service in distribute systems. You can use this service in any of your existing distributed application. ...Silverlight Input Keyboard: Silverlight Input Keyboard and Behaviorsuh: uh.py is a command line tool that helps developers porting native projects from a case-insensitive filesystem to a case-sensitive filesystem by sea...New ReleasesAmiBroker Plug-ins with C#. A non official AmiBroker Plug-in SDK: AmiBroker Plug-in SDK v0.0.3: Small changesAmiBroker Plug-ins with C#. A non official AmiBroker Plug-in SDK: AmiBroker Plug-in SDK v0.0.4: Small updatesAStyle AddIn for SharpDevelop (Alex): 2.0 Production: #D 3.* add in with updated GUI elements.Coding Cockerel code samples: Validation with ASP .NET MVC and jQuery: Code sample related to the following blog post, http://codingcockerel.co.uk/consistent-validation-with-asp-net-mvc-and-jquery/.CoreSystem Library: Release - 1.0.3725.10575: This release contains a new class Crypto which makes encryption and descryption of string easy, it uses TripleDESCrystal Mapper: Release - 2.0.3725.11614: This is preview if release 2.0* that I promised, it contains following new features Tracking dirty entities and provide Save function to save all ...Digital Media Processing Project 1: Image Processor: Image Processor Alpha: First Release Features Include: Curve Adjustment Tool Region Growing Segmetation Threshold Segmentation Guassian/Butterworth High/Low pass filter...Exepack.NET: Exepack.NET version 0.03 beta: Exepack.NET is executable file compressor for .NET Framework. It allows to package your .NET application consisting of an executable file and sever...Export code as Code Snippet - Addin for Visual Studio 2008/2010 RC: VS 2010 Release Candidate: This release targets Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. It includes full Visual Basic 2010 source code. Fixes already available in previous ve...Facebook Azure Toolkit: 0.9 Beta: This is the initial beta releaseFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.0.5.0: Version 1.0.5.0 Change the way Census & Individual reports columns are sized so that user can resize later. Add filter to exclude individuals over...Home Access Plus+: v3.1.2.1: Version 3.1.2.1 Release Change Log: Added SSL SMTP Added SSL Authentication File Changes: ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdb ~/we...Home Access Plus+: v3.1.3.1: Version 3.1.3.1 Release Change Log: Fixed Help Desk File Changes: ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdb ~/helpdesk/*.htmIceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 Full Install: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 - Full Installer, installs IceChat 2009, and the Emoticons, and will also download .Net Framework 2.0 if needed.IceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 Simple Binaries: This simply the IceChat2009.exe and the IPluginIceChat.dll needed to run IceChat 2009. Is not an installer, does not include emoticons.IceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 Source Code: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 Source CodeLunar Phase Silverlight Gadget: Lunar Phase RC: Stable release. 6 languages Auto refresh. Name / Light problem fixedMiracle OS: Miracle OS Alpha 0.001: Our first release is the Alpha 0.001. Miracle OS doens't work at all, but we work on it. You to? Please help us.MyTwits - A rich Twitter client for Windows powered by WPF: MyTwits BETA 1: I'm happy to release first BETA version of MyTwits. Just download the zip file attached and run setup.exe and you are done! If you've any problem...MyTwits - A rich Twitter client for Windows powered by WPF: MyTwits Source BETA 1: I'm providing you just a project file, I'll upload complete source code once I fine tuned the code.NMock3: NMock3 - Beta 5, .NET 3.5: Hilights of this releaseTutorials have been updated and are in a much better place now. (they compile) Public API is getting locked down. Void me...Project Naduvar: com.declum.naduvar.locking: First ReleaseQueryToGrid Module for DotNetNuke®: QueryToGrid Module version 01.00.01: This module is a proof of concept for both using AJAX in a DotNetNuke® module, and for using SQL in a module. »»» IMPORTANT NOTE ««« Using this mo...SCSI Interface for Multimedia and Block Devices: Release 10 - Almost like a commercial burner!!: I made many changes in the ISOBurn program in this version, making it much more user-friendly than before. You can now add, rename, and delete file...Silverlight Input Keyboard: Initial Release: For more information see http://www.orktane.com/Blog/post/2009/11/09/Virtual-Input-Keyboard-Behaviours-for-Silverlight.aspxThe Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: RC: The release candidate is now in place. Unfortunately, because there are aspects of it that I'm not yet ready to discuss, the code for the RC will...twNowplaying: twNowplaying 1.0.0.3: Press the Twitter icon to get started, don't forget to submit bugs to the issue tracker. What's new This release has some minor UI fixes.uh: 1.0: This is the first stable release. It isn't super full featured but it does the basics.UriTree: UriTree 2.0.0: This release is the WPF version of this application.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30313.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVr30 OS: Blackra1n: The software was made by blackra1n for jailbreak iphone and ipod touch. Is not the Vr30 OS Team ProjectVr30 OS: Vr30 Operating System Live Cd 1.0: The Operating system linux made by team. For more information go to http://vr30os.tuxfamily.orgWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.01.00: Whats New Decide between Tags generated from the Search words, or create your own Tag List Custom Tag list changes Small BugfixesZeta Resource Editor: Source code release 2010-03-13: New sources, some small fixes.ZipStorer - A Pure C# Class to Store Files in Zip: ZipStorer 2.35: Improved UTF-8 Support Correct writting of modification time for extracted filesMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NET Ajax LibraryASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrN2 CMSBlogEngine.NETpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibrarySharePoint Team-MailerFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APICaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesCalcium: A modular application toolset leveraging PrismFarseer Physics Engine

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• The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like)

  - by The Geek

  Welcome to the very first How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide, where we’ve put together a list of our absolute favorites to help you weed through all of the junk out there to pick the perfect gift for anybody. Though really, it’s just a list of the geeky stuff we want. We’ve got a whole range of items on the list, from cheaper gifts that most anybody can afford, to the really expensive stuff that we’re pretty sure nobody is giving us. Stocking Stuffers Here’s a couple of ideas for items that won’t break the bank. LED Keychain Micro-Light   Magcraft 1/8-Inch Rare Earth Cube Magnets Best little LED keychain light around. If they don’t need the penknife of the above item this is the perfect gift. I give them out by the handfuls and nobody ever says anything but good things about them. I’ve got ones that are years old and still running on the same battery.  Price: $8   Geeks cannot resist magnets. Jason bought this pack for his fridge because he was sick of big clunky magnets… these things are amazing. One tiny magnet, smaller than an Altoid mint, can practically hold a clipboard right to the fridge. Amazing. I spend more time playing with them on the counter than I do actually hanging stuff.  Price: $10 Lots of Geeky Mugs   Astronomy Powerful Green Laser Pointer There’s loads of fun, geeky mugs you can find on Amazon or anywhere else—and they are great choices for the geek who loves their coffee. You can get the Caffeine mug pictured here, or go with an Atari one, Canon Lens, or the Aperture mug based on Portal. Your choice. Price: $7   No, it’s not a light saber, but it’s nearly bright enough to be one—you can illuminate low flying clouds at night or just blind some aliens on your day off. All that for an extremely low price. Loads of fun. Price: $15       Geeky TV Shows and Books Sometimes you just want to relax and enjoy a some TV or a good book. Here’s a few choices. The IT Crowd Fourth Season   Doctor Who, Complete Fifth Series Ridiculous, funny show about nerds in the IT department, loved by almost all the geeks here at HTG. Justin even makes this required watching for new hires in his office so they’ll get his jokes. You can pre-order the fourth season, or pick up seasons one, two, or three for even cheaper. Price: $13   It doesn’t get any more nerdy than Eric’s pick, the fifth all-new series of Doctor Who, where the Daleks are hatching a new master plan from the heart of war-torn London. There’s also alien vampires, humanoid reptiles, and a lot more. Price: $52 Battlestar Galactica Complete Series   MAKE: Electronics: Learning Through Discovery Watch the epic fight to save the human race by finding the fabled planet Earth while being hunted by the robotic Cylons. You can grab the entire series on DVD or Blu-ray, or get the seasons individually. This isn’t your average sci-fi TV show. Price: $150 for Blu-ray.   Want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun, hands-on way? The Make:Electronics book helps you build the circuits and learn how it all works—as if you had any more time between all that registry hacking and loading software on your new PC. Price: $21       Geeky Gadgets for the Gadget-Loving Geek Here’s a few of the items on our gadget list, though lets be honest: geeks are going to love almost any gadget, especially shiny new ones. Klipsch Image S4i Premium Noise-Isolating Headset with 3-Button Apple Control   GP2X Caanoo MAME/Console Emulator If you’re a real music geek looking for some serious quality in the headset for your iPhone or iPod, this is the pair that Alex recommends. They aren’t terribly cheap, but you can get the less expensive S3 earphones instead if you prefer. Price: $50-100   Eric says: “As an owner of an older version, I can say the GP2X is one of my favorite gadgets ever. Touted a “Retro Emulation Juggernaut,” GP2X runs Linux and may be the only open source software console available. Sounds too good to be true, but isn’t.” Price: $150 Roku XDS Streaming Player 1080p   Western Digital WD TV Live Plus HD Media Player If you do a lot of streaming over Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon’s Video on Demand, Pandora, and others, the Roku box is a great choice to get your content on your TV without paying a lot of money.  It’s also got Wireless-N built in, and it supports full 1080P HD. Price: $99   If you’ve got a home media collection sitting on a hard drive or a network server, the Western Digital box is probably the cheapest way to get that content on your TV, and it even supports Netflix streaming too. It’ll play loads of formats in full HD quality. Price: $99 Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 Color Mobile Scanner   Doxie, the amazing scanner for documents Trevor said: “This wonderful little scanner has become absolutely essential to me. My desk used to just be a gigantic pile of papers that I didn’t need at the moment, but couldn’t throw away ‘just in case.’ Now, every few weeks, I’ll run that paper pile through this and then happily shred the originals!” Price: $300   If you don’t scan quite as often and are looking for a budget scanner you can throw into your bag, or toss into a drawer in your desk, the Doxie scanner is a great alternative that I’ve been using for a while. It’s half the price, and while it’s not as full-featured as the Fujitsu, it might be a better choice for the very casual user. Price: $150       (Expensive) Gadgets Almost Anybody Will Love If you’re not sure that one of the more geeky presents is gonna work, here’s some gadgets that just about anybody is going to love, especially if they don’t have one already. Of course, some of these are a bit on the expensive side—but it’s a wish list, right? Amazon Kindle       The Kindle weighs less than a paperback book, the screen is amazing and easy on the eyes, and get ready for the kicker: the battery lasts at least a month. We aren’t kidding, either—it really lasts that long. If you don’t feel like spending money for books, you can use it to read PDFs, and if you want to get really geeky, you can hack it for custom screensavers. Price: $139 iPod Touch or iPad       You can’t go wrong with either of these presents—the iPod Touch can do almost everything the iPhone can do, including games, apps, and music, and it has the same Retina display as the iPhone, HD video recording, and a front-facing camera so you can use FaceTime. Price: $229+, depending on model. The iPad is a great tablet for playing games, browsing the web, or just using on your coffee table for guests. It’s well worth buying one—but if you’re buying for yourself, keep in mind that the iPad 2 is probably coming out in 3 months. Price: $500+ MacBook Air  The MacBook Air comes in 11” or 13” versions, and it’s an amazing little machine. It’s lightweight, the battery lasts nearly forever, and it resumes from sleep almost instantly. Since it uses an SSD drive instead of a hard drive, you’re barely going to notice any speed problems for general use. So if you’ve got a lot of money to blow, this is a killer gift. Price: $999 and up. Stuck with No Idea for a Present? Gift Cards! Yeah, you’re not going to win any “thoughtful present” awards with these, but you might just give somebody what they really want—the new Angry Birds HD for their iPad, Cut the Rope, or anything else they want. ITunes Gift Card   Amazon.com Gift Card Somebody in your circle getting a new iPod, iPhone, or iPad? You can get them an iTunes gift card, which they can use to buy music, games or apps. Yep, this way you can gift them a copy of Angry Birds if they don’t already have it. Or even Cut the Rope.   No clue what to get somebody on your list? Amazon gift cards let them buy pretty much anything they want, from organic weirdberries to big screen TVs. Yeah, it’s not as thoughtful as getting them a nice present, but look at the bright side: maybe they’ll get you an Amazon gift card and it’ll balance out. That’s the highlights from our lists—got anything else to add? Share your geeky gift ideas in the comments. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 7: Design and Typography Happy Snow Bears Theme for Chrome and Iron [Holiday] Download Full Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun Game for Free Scorched Cometary Planet Wallpaper Quick Fix: Add the RSS Button Back to the Firefox Awesome Bar Dropbox Desktop Client 1.0.0 RC for Windows, Linux, and Mac Released Hang in There Scrat! – Ice Age Wallpaper

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• Ten - oh, wait, eleven - Eleven things you should know about the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update

  - by Jon Galloway

  Today, just a little over two months after the big ASP.NET 4.5 / ASP.NET MVC 4 / ASP.NET Web API / Visual Studio 2012 / Web Matrix 2 release, the first preview of the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update is out. Here's what you need to know: There are no new framework bits in this release - there's no change or update to ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC or Web Forms features. This means that you can start using it without any updates to your server, upgrade concerns, etc. This update is really an update to the project templates and Visual Studio tooling, conceptually similar to the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update. It's a relatively lightweight install. It's a 41MB download. I've installed it many times and usually takes 5-7 minutes; it's never required a reboot. It adds some new project templates to ASP.NET MVC: Facebook Application and Single Page Application templates. It adds a lot of cool enhancements to ASP.NET Web API. It adds some tooling that makes it easy to take advantage of features like SignalR, Friendly URLs, and Windows Azure Authentication. Most of the new features are installed via NuGet packages. Since ASP.NET is open source, nightly NuGet packages are available, and the roadmap is published, most of this has really been publicly available for a while. The official name of this drop is the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update BUILD Prerelease. Please do not attempt to say that ten times fast. While the EULA doesn't prohibit it, it WILL legally change your first name to Scott. As with all new releases, you can find out everything you need to know about the Fall Update at http://asp.net/vnext (especially the release notes!) I'm going to be showing all of this off, assisted by special guest code monkey Scott Hanselman, this Friday at BUILD: Bleeding edge ASP.NET: See what is next for MVC, Web API, SignalR and more… (and I've heard it will be livestreamed). Let's look at some of those things in more detail. No new bits ASP.NET 4.5, MVC 4 and Web API have a lot of great core features. I see the goal of this update release as making it easier to put those features to use to solve some useful scenarios by taking advantage of NuGet packages and template code. If you create a new ASP.NET MVC application using one of the new templates, you'll see that it's using the ASP.NET MVC 4 RTM NuGet package (4.0.20710.0): This means you can install and use the Fall Update without any impact on your existing projects and no worries about upgrading or compatibility. New Facebook Application Template ASP.NET MVC 4 (and ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms) included the ability to authenticate your users via OAuth and OpenID, so you could let users log in to your site using a Facebook account. One of the new changes in the Fall Update is a new template that makes it really easy to create full Facebook applications. You could create Facebook application in ASP.NET already, you'd just need to go through a few steps: Search around to find a good Facebook NuGet package, like the Facebook C# SDK (written by my friend Nathan Totten and some other Facebook SDK brainiacs). Read the Facebook developer documentation to figure out how to authenticate and integrate with them. Write some code, debug it and repeat until you got something working. Get started with the application you'd originally wanted to write. What this template does for you: eliminate steps 1-3. Erik Porter, Nathan and some other experts built out the Facebook Application template so it automatically pulls in and configures the Facebook NuGet package and makes it really easy to take advantage of it in an ASP.NET MVC application. One great example is the the way you access a Facebook user's information. Take a look at the following code in a File / New / MVC / Facebook Application site. First, the Home Controller Index action: [FacebookAuthorize(Permissions = "email")] public ActionResult Index(MyAppUser user, FacebookObjectList<MyAppUserFriend> userFriends) { ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your Facebook application using ASP.NET MVC."; ViewBag.User = user; ViewBag.Friends = userFriends.Take(5); return View(); } First, notice that there's a FacebookAuthorize attribute which requires the user is authenticated via Facebook and requires permissions to access their e-mail address. It binds to two things: a custom MyAppUser object and a list of friends. Let's look at the MyAppUser code: using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Facebook.Attributes; using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Facebook.Models; // Add any fields you want to be saved for each user and specify the field name in the JSON coming back from Facebook // https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/ namespace MvcApplication3.Models { public class MyAppUser : FacebookUser { public string Name { get; set; } [FacebookField(FieldName = "picture", JsonField = "picture.data.url")] public string PictureUrl { get; set; } public string Email { get; set; } } } You can add in other custom fields if you want, but you can also just bind to a FacebookUser and it will automatically pull in the available fields. You can even just bind directly to a FacebookUser and check for what's available in debug mode, which makes it really easy to explore. For more information and some walkthroughs on creating Facebook applications, see: Deploying your first Facebook App on Azure using ASP.NET MVC Facebook Template (Yao Huang Lin) Facebook Application Template Tutorial (Erik Porter) Single Page Application template Early releases of ASP.NET MVC 4 included a Single Page Application template, but it was removed for the official release. There was a lot of interest in it, but it was kind of complex, as it handled features for things like data management. The new Single Page Application template that ships with the Fall Update is more lightweight. It uses Knockout.js on the client and ASP.NET Web API on the server, and it includes a sample application that shows how they all work together. I think the real benefit of this application is that it shows a good pattern for using ASP.NET Web API and Knockout.js. For instance, it's easy to end up with a mess of JavaScript when you're building out a client-side application. This template uses three separate JavaScript files (delivered via a Bundle, of course): todoList.js - this is where the main client-side logic lives todoList.dataAccess.js - this defines how the client-side application interacts with the back-end services todoList.bindings.js - this is where you set up events and overrides for the Knockout bindings - for instance, hooking up jQuery validation and defining some client-side events This is a fun one to play with, because you can just create a new Single Page Application and hit F5. Quick, easy install (with one gotcha) One of the cool engineering changes for this release is a big update to the installer to make it more lightweight and efficient. I've been running nightly builds of this for a few weeks to prep for my BUILD demos, and the install has been really quick and easy to use. The install takes about 5 minutes, has never required a reboot for me, and the uninstall is just as simple. There's one gotcha, though. In this preview release, you may hit an issue that will require you to uninstall and re-install the NuGet VSIX package. The problem comes up when you create a new MVC application and see this dialog: The solution, as explained in the release notes, is to uninstall and re-install the NuGet VSIX package: Start Visual Studio 2012 as an Administrator Go to Tools->Extensions and Updates and uninstall NuGet. Close Visual Studio Navigate to the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update installation folder: For Visual Studio 2012: Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Stack\Visual Studio 2012 For Visual Studio 2012 Express for Web: Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Stack\Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web Double click on the NuGet.Tools.vsix to reinstall NuGet This took me under a minute to do, and I was up and running. ASP.NET Web API Update Extravaganza! Uh, the Web API team is out of hand. They added a ton of new stuff: OData support, Tracing, and API Help Page generation. OData support Some people like OData. Some people start twitching when you mention it. If you're in the first group, this is for you. You can add a [Queryable] attribute to an API that returns an IQueryable<Whatever> and you get OData query support from your clients. Then, without any extra changes to your client or server code, your clients can send filters like this: /Suppliers?$filter=Name eq ‘Microsoft’ For more information about OData support in ASP.NET Web API, see Alex James' mega-post about it: OData support in ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET Web API Tracing Tracing makes it really easy to leverage the .NET Tracing system from within your ASP.NET Web API's. If you look at the \App_Start\WebApiConfig.cs file in new ASP.NET Web API project, you'll see a call to TraceConfig.Register(config). That calls into some code in the new \App_Start\TraceConfig.cs file: public static void Register(HttpConfiguration configuration) { if (configuration == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("configuration"); } SystemDiagnosticsTraceWriter traceWriter = new SystemDiagnosticsTraceWriter() { MinimumLevel = TraceLevel.Info, IsVerbose = false }; configuration.Services.Replace(typeof(ITraceWriter), traceWriter); } As you can see, this is using the standard trace system, so you can extend it to any other trace listeners you'd like. To see how it works with the built in diagnostics trace writer, just run the application call some API's, and look at the Visual Studio Output window: iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Request, Method=GET, Url=http://localhost:11147/api/Values, Message='http://localhost:11147/api/Values' iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Values', Operation=DefaultHttpControllerSelector.SelectController iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='WebAPI.Controllers.ValuesController', Operation=DefaultHttpControllerActivator.Create iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='WebAPI.Controllers.ValuesController', Operation=HttpControllerDescriptor.CreateController iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Selected action 'Get()'', Operation=ApiControllerActionSelector.SelectAction iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=HttpActionBinding.ExecuteBindingAsync iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=QueryableAttribute.ActionExecuting iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Action returned 'System.String[]'', Operation=ReflectedHttpActionDescriptor.ExecuteAsync iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Will use same 'JsonMediaTypeFormatter' formatter', Operation=JsonMediaTypeFormatter.GetPerRequestFormatterInstance iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Message='Selected formatter='JsonMediaTypeFormatter', content-type='application/json; charset=utf-8'', Operation=DefaultContentNegotiator.Negotiate iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=ApiControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionAsync, Status=200 (OK) iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=QueryableAttribute.ActionExecuted, Status=200 (OK) iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=ValuesController.ExecuteAsync, Status=200 (OK) iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Response, Status=200 (OK), Method=GET, Url=http://localhost:11147/api/Values, Message='Content-type='application/json; charset=utf-8', content-length=unknown' iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=JsonMediaTypeFormatter.WriteToStreamAsync iisexpress.exe Information: 0 : Operation=ValuesController.Dispose API Help Page When you create a new ASP.NET Web API project, you'll see an API link in the header: Clicking the API link shows generated help documentation for your ASP.NET Web API controllers: And clicking on any of those APIs shows specific information: What's great is that this information is dynamically generated, so if you add your own new APIs it will automatically show useful and up to date help. This system is also completely extensible, so you can generate documentation in other formats or customize the HTML help as much as you'd like. The Help generation code is all included in an ASP.NET MVC Area: SignalR SignalR is a really slick open source project that was started by some ASP.NET team members in their spare time to add real-time communications capabilities to ASP.NET - and .NET applications in general. It allows you to handle long running communications channels between your server and multiple connected clients using the best communications channel they can both support - websockets if available, falling back all the way to old technologies like long polling if necessary for old browsers. SignalR remains an open source project, but now it's being included in ASP.NET (also open source, hooray!). That means there's real, official ASP.NET engineering work being put into SignalR, and it's even easier to use in an ASP.NET application. Now in any ASP.NET project type, you can right-click / Add / New Item... SignalR Hub or Persistent Connection. And much more... There's quite a bit more. You can find more info at http://asp.net/vnext, and we'll be adding more content as fast as we can. Watch my BUILD talk to see as I demonstrate these and other features in the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update, as well as some other even futurey-er stuff!

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• SanjayP&rsquo;s venture after Microsoft involves no Microsoft

  - by eddraper

  When I was at Microsoft, I always found Sanjay Parthasarathy to be a bright and passionate leader.  While he was a bit disconnected at times with what was really going on out in the trenches, I always thought he was true believer in what we in Developer Platform and Evangelism (DPE) were doing.  He got it.  He had started DPE and kicked a lot of doors down up in Redmond to make it happen.  Back in the early 2000s, battles over platform choices at large customers was trench warfare… bayonets and hand grenades at the P-Code level.  This model was not at all suited to Microsoft’s org structure at the time.  While there were plenty of people fully able to have competitive conversations around Windows Server, or AD, or Exchange, or the desktop, there weren’t many that could have deep technical conversations around Java vs .NET and the platform “stack” as a cohesive, unified unit of value.  This task fell to DPE. Sanjay ended up leaving Microsoft a number of months before me in 2009 and I remember thinking these exact words: “holy shit, SanjayP left Microsoft.”  When SanjayP left DPE years before that,  Sheila Gulati had stepped into his shoes and I thought we where starting to miss a beat.  Sheila had built an amazing business at Microsoft India, but I don’t recall being inspired by her as a leader.  SanjayP’s talks felt like the opening scene of “Patton” with George C. Scott pacing in front of the American flag.  Sheila was a voice on a con-call.  When she moved on in 2007, Walid Abu-Hadba was given the reigns.  Personally, I don’t ever recall even seeing his face.  I think I might recall hearing his voice on some con-calls, but for all intents and purposes he was invisible to me.  Perhaps this was the beginning of my carelessness around seeking “visibility.” Fast forward to Build 2011.  First off, we have no PDC – we have Build.  Microsoft had made an 11 year investment by this time in building an organization to make its technology relevant to developers.  One would think such an org would be in the driver’s seat of such an event, but we see Windows product group people on the podiums.  Watching, I could see the messaging unfold… but no story.  It was like the old days.  Demos and PowerPoints by team members building the tech, and in many cases VPs.  The ensuing confusion is almost legendary now.  Windows 8 was, and is, a pretty big deal… but who is telling the story – not just features and benefits, but the story around how it all fits together. Having been out of Microsoft for two years now, and looking in, I can only conclude that the “DPE of old” has at best been emasculated, and at worst been completely marginalized by internal politics, or perhaps the eternal march of the corporate entropy generator that resides at all large companies.  I don’t think this is a good thing for anyone. And now, back to Sanjay who is the father of Microsoft DPE… I noticed that he has moved back to India and is doing start-up work.  His current company Indix looks to be doing some interesting things with “big data” and here’s their stack: Nary a trace of anything Microsoft.  What could account for this?  I wonder….  Better availability of labor and expertise in India for this stack?  Donno, but even in India, leet R and Hadoop skills have to be hard to find. Technical superiority?  This, I sincerely doubt. This stack, with SanjayP’s name as CEO leaves me with an unsettling feeling.  If he did believe, he no longer does.  One doesn’t place bets with real money on things they don’t believe in.  Perhaps he never did believe, and was a corporate creature seeking to find a niche for himself after which he manipulated me and others.  Or perhaps… anger… be it passive aggression or an outright “in your face F*** you” to his former masters. I guess in the end, only he knows the true reason… But I have my theory...

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• Information Indepth Newsletter - Linux Edition

  - by Paulo Folgado

  INFORMATION INDEPTH NEWSLETTERLinux Edition February 2011 Stay Connected:  NEWS Now Available: Oracle Linux 6 Get the latest release of Oracle Linux 6, which includes Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.Download Oracle Linux 6 Read More Customers Succeed by Using Oracle Exadata with Oracle Linux Watch IT executives from Bank of America, Linkshare, and Johns Hopkins as they talk about the business challenges they faced and why they chose to use Oracle Linux along with Oracle Exadata as the solution. Watch Now Video Interview: Oracle Senior Vice President Wim Coekaerts Watch Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, as he talks about use cases for Oracle VM Templates as well as the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Linux.Watch Now Hot Off the Press: Migrate Your IBM AIX Environment to Oracle Linux This new white paper provides recommendations for planning and implementing the migration of applications from an IBM Power System running AIX to Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 Server with Intel Xeon 7560 Processor running Oracle Linux 5.5.Read More  Back to Top BLOGOSPHERE Just Launched: The Oracle Linux Blog Follow our new Oracle Linux blog  to hear the latest updates, product news, upcoming events, and all the latest happenings, directly from the Linux team at Oracle. Back to Top TECH DIVE NEW: Linux/Oracle Solaris CommandComparo Site from Oracle Technology NetworkThis site gives equivalent command syntax in Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 for common administrative tasks--focusing particularly on tasks that have tricky syntax or that you frequently need to double check. It acts as a quick reference for administrators who operate in these two OS environments. Free Download: Oracle Linux Release 5.6Did you know that by using Oracle Linux 5.5 or 5.6 along with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, you can get all the benefits of Linux mainline kernel 2.6.32 and more, right now, without the need to reinstall or migrate to a new operating system such as RHEL6?Read Release NotesDownload Oracle Linux 5.6 LSB 4.0 Certification Completed for Oracle Linux 5.5Oracle Linux 5.5 with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel successfully completed the LSB 4.0 certification.  Back to Top WEBCASTS Boost Your Linux Performance with Oracle's Enhancements in Infiniband and RDSRegister to hear Director of Kernel Engineering Chris Mason cover scalability and performance improvements in Linux environment. Get the Facts Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise KernelSVP Wim Coekaerts and Senior Director Monica Kumar cover the facts about and benefits of using Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.  View Other Webcasts on Demand   Back to Top EVENTS Collaborate 2011April 10-14 Orlando, Florida Cloud Summit Events, WorldwideVarious dates (check the city for date/time of event) Datacenter Efficiency Events WorldwideThese events include Linux and Oracle VM sessions.Various dates (check the city for date/time of event) Virtualization Events in North America Find an Oracle Event  Back to Top EDUCATION Get Oracle Linux Certified from Oracle University Oracle University offers courses in both Oracle Linux and the administration of Oracle Database on Linux.  Back to Top CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT Pella Corporation Improves IT Performance and Efficiency with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM To improve IT performance and efficiency and lower operational costs, Pella Corporation, has standardized on Oracle VM and Oracle Linux. Read More Disney Store Deploys POS in 330 Stores and 7 Countries on Oracle Linux Disney Store is running 1,500 registers worldwide on a broad Oracle technology software stack including Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Linux. Read More Back to Top PARTNER SPOTLIGHT Emulex and Oracle Announce Data Integrity Features The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel provides data integrity checking between Oracle Database applications and Emulex 8Gb/s LightPulse Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters. Read More Dell Inc. Dell Inc. tested and validated configurations support Oracle Linux. Back to Top STAY IN TOUCH Follow @ORCL_Linux on Twitter for the latest penguin tweets Bookmark Oracle.com/Linux Read the Oracle Linux blog Back to Top  Oracle Information InDepth newsletters bring targeted news, articles, customer stories, and special offers to business people who want to find out how to streamline enterprise information management, measure results, improve business processes, and communicate a single truth to their constituents. Please send questions or comments to [email protected]. For answers to questions about subscribing, unsubscribing, and managing your Oracle e-mail communications preferences, please see the Oracle E-Mail Communications page. Copyright © 2011, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor is it subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. 

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• The Winds of Change are a Blowin&rsquo;

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now.  Not the fan part, but the paying customer part.  I’m still a huge fan.  I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often).  I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books.  I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do.  But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team.  I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools.  Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more.  (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it.  Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools.  They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum).  I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video).  I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime.  Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited.  I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up.  So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool.  This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with.  When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to.  The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route.  Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford:  Team Foundation Server.  And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now.  So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools.  I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny).  Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction.  As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching.  So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant.  It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry).  As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company.  This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with.  We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now.  This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time.  We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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• FAT Volume and CE

  - by Kate Moss' Open Space

  Whenever we format a disk volume, it is a good idea to name the label so it will be easier to categorize. To label a volume, we can use LABEL command or UI depends on your preference. Windows CE does provide FAT driver and support various format (FAT12, FAT16,FAT32, ExFAT and TFAT - transaction-safe FAT) and many feature to let you scan and even defrag the volume but not labeling. At any time you format a volume in CE and then mount it on PC, the label is always empty! Of course, you can always label the volume on PC, even it is formatted in CE. So looks like CE does not care about the volume label at all, neither report the label to OS nor changing the label on FAT.So how can we set the volume label in CE? To Answer this question, we need to know how does FAT stores the volume label. Here are some on-line resources are handy for parsing FAT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/ide/fat32.html http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/fatgen.mspx You can refer to PUBLIC\COMMON\OAK\DRIVERS\FSD\FATUTIL\MAIN\bootsec.h and dosbpb.h or the above links for the fields we discuss here. The first sector of a FAT Volume (it is not necessary to be the first sector of a disk.) is a FAT boot sector and BPB (BIOS Parameter Block). And at offset 43, bgbsVolumeLabel (or bsVolumeLabel on FAT16) is for storing the volume lable, but note in the spec also indicates "FAT file system drivers should make sure that they update this field when the volume label file in the root directory has its name changed or created.". So we can't just simply update the bgbsVolumeLabel but also need to create a volume lable file in root directory. The volume lable file is not a real file but just a file entry in root directory with zero file lenth and a very special file attribute, ATTR_VOLUME_ID. (defined in public\common\oak\drivers\fsd\fatutil\MAIN\fatutilp.h) Locating and accessing bootsector is quite straight forward, as long as we know the starting sector of a FAT volume, that's it. But where is the root directory? The layout of a typical FAT is like this Boot sector (Volume ID in the figure) followed by Reserved Sectors (1 on FAT12/16 and 32 on FAT32), then FAT chain table(s) (can be 1 or 2), after that is the root directory (FAT12/16 and not shows in the figure) then begining of the File and Directories. In FAT12/16, the root directory is placed right after FAT so it is not hard to caculate the offset in the volume. But in FAT32, this rule is no longer true: the first cluster of the root directory is determined by BGBPB_RootDirStrtClus (or offset 44 in boot sector). Although this field is usually 0x00000002 (it is how CE initial the root directory after formating a volume. Note we should never assume it is always true) which means the first cluster contains data but not like the root directory is contiguous in FAT12/16, it is just like a regular file can be fragmented. So we need to access the root directory (of FAT32) hopping one cluster to another by traversing FAT table. Let's trace the code now. Although the source of FAT driver is not available in CE Shared Source program, but the formatter, Fatutil.dll, is available in public\common\oak\drivers\fsd\fatutil\MAIN\formatdisk.cpp. Be aware the public code only provides formatter for FAT12/16/32 for ExFAT it is still not available. FormatVolumeInternal is the main worker function. With the knowledge here, you should be able the trace the code easily. But I would like to discuss the following code pieces     dwReservedSectors = (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) ? 32 : 1;     dwRootEntries = (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) ? 0 : fo.dwRootEntries; Note the dwReservedSectors is 32 in FAT32 and 1 in FAT12/16. Root Entries is another different mentioned in previous paragraph, 0 for FAT32 (dynamic allocated) and fixed size (usually 512, defined in DEFAULT_ROOT_ENTRIES in public\common\sdk\inc\fatutil.h) And then here   memset(pBootSec->bsVolumeLabel, 0x20, sizeof(pBootSec->bsVolumeLabel)); It sets the Volume Label as empty string. Now let's carry on to the next section - write the root directory.     if (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) {         if (!(fo.dwFlags & FATUTIL_FORMAT_TFAT)) {             dwRootSectors = dwSectorsPerCluster;         }         else {             DIRENTRY    dirEntry;             DWORD       offset;             int               iVolumeNo;             memset(pbBlock, 0, pdi->di_bytes_per_sect);             memset(&dirEntry, 0, sizeof(DIRENTRY));                         dirEntry.de_attr = ATTR_VOLUME_ID;             // the first one is volume label             memcpy(dirEntry.de_name, "TFAT       ", sizeof (dirEntry.de_name));             memcpy(pbBlock, &dirEntry, sizeof(dirEntry));              ...             // Skip the next step of zeroing out clusters             dwCurrentSec += dwSectorsPerCluster;             dwRootSectors = 0;         }     }     // Each new root directory sector needs to be zeroed.     memset(pbBlock, 0, cbSizeBlk);     iRootSec=0;     while ( iRootSec < dwRootSectors) { Basically, the code zero out the each entry in root directory depends on dwRootSectors. In FAT12/16, the dwRootSectors is calculated as the sectors we need for the root entries (512 for most of the case) and in FAT32 it just zero out the one cluster. Please note that, if it is a TFAT volume, it initialize the root directory with special volume label entries for some special purpose. Despite to its unusual initialization process for TFAT, it does provide a example for how to create a volume entry. With some minor modification, we can assign the volume label in FAT formatter and also remember to sync the volume label with bsVolumeLabel or bgbsVolumeLabel in boot sector.

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• Some New .NET Toys (Repost)

  - by Kevin Grossnicklaus

  Last week I was fortunate enough to spend time in Redmond on Microsoft’s campus for the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit. It was great to hang out with a number of old friends and get the opportunity to talk tech with the various product teams up at Microsoft. The weather wasn’t exactly sunny but Microsoft always does a great job with the Summit and everyone had a blast (heck, I even got to run the bases at SafeCo field) While much of what we saw is covered under NDA, there a ton of great things in the pipeline from Microsoft and many things that are already available (or just became so) that I wasn’t necessarily aware of. The purpose of this post is to share some of the info I learned on resources and tools available to .NET developers today. Please let me know if you have any questions (or if you know of something else cool which might benefit others). Enjoy! Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Microsoft has issued the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1. You can download the full SP1 on MSDN as of today (March 10th to the general public) and take advantage of such things as: Silverlight 4 is included in the box (as opposed to a separate install) Silverlight 4 Profiling WCF RIA Services SP1 Intellitrace for 64-bit and SharePoint ASP.NET now easily supports IIS Express and SQL CE Want a description of all that’s new beyond the above biased list (which arguably only contains items I think are important)? Check out this KB article. Portable Library Tools CTP Without much fanfare Microsoft has released a CTP of a new add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which simplifies code sharing between projects targeting different runtimes (i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Win7 Phone, XBox). With this Add-In installed you can add a new project of type “Portable Library” and specify which platforms you wish to target. Once that is done, any code added to this library will be limited to use only features which are common to all selected frameworks. Other projects can now reference this portable library and be provided assemblies custom built to their environment. This greatly simplifies the current process of sharing linked files between platforms like WPF and Silverlight. You can find out more about this CTP and how it works on this great blog post. Visual Studio Async CTP Microsoft has also released a CTP of a set of language and framework enhancements to provide a much more powerful asynchronous programming model. Due to the focus on async programming in all types of platforms (and it being the ONLY option in Silverlight and Win7 phone) a move towards a simpler and more understandable model is always a good thing. This CTP (called Visual Studio Async CTP) can be downloaded here. You can read more about this CTP on this blog post. MSDN Code Samples Gallery Microsoft has also launched new code samples gallery on their MSDN site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/. This site allows you to easily search for small samples of code related to a particular technology or platform. If a sample of code you are looking for is not found, you can request one via the site and other developers can see your request and provide a sample to the site to suit your needs. You can also peruse requested samples and, if you find a scenario where you can provide value, upload your own sample for the benefit of others. Samples are packaged into the VS .vsix format and include any necessary references/dependencies. By using .vsix as the deployment mechanism, as samples are installed from the site they are kept in your Visual Studio 2010 Samples Gallery and kept for your future reference. If you get a chance, check out the site and see how it is done. Although a somewhat simple concept, I was very impressed with their implementation and the way they went about trying to suit a need. I’ll definitely be looking there in the future as need something or want to share something. MSDN Search Capabilities Another item I learned recently and was not aware of (that might seem trivial to some) is the power of the MSDN site’s search capabilities. Between the Code Samples Gallery described above and the search enhancements on MSDN, Microsoft is definitely investing in their platform to help provide developers of all skill levels the tools and resources they need to be successful. What do I mean by the MSDN search capability and why should you care? If you go to the MSDN home page (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and use the “Search MSDN with Big” box at the very top of the page you will see some very interesting results. First, the search actually doesn’t just search the MSDN library it searches: MSDN Library All Microsoft Blogs CodePlex StackOverflow Downloads MSDN Magazine Support Knowledgebase (I’m not sure it even ends there but the above are all I know of) Beyond just searching all the above locations, the results are formatted very nicely to give some contextual information based on where the result came from. For example, if a keyword search returned results from CodePlex, each row in the search results screen would include a large amount of information specific to CodePlex such as: Looking at the above results immediately tells you everything from the page views to the CodePlex ratings. All in all, knowing that this much information is indexed and available from a single search location will lead me to utilize this as one of my initial searches for development information.

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• 10 Great Free Icon Packs To Theme Your Android Phone

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Android allows you to customize your home screen, adding widgets, arranging shortcuts and folders, choosing a background, and even replacing the included launcher entirely. You can install icon packs to theme your app icons, too. Third-party launchers use standard app icons by default, but they don’t have to. You can install icon packs that third-party launchers will use in place of standard app icons. How to Use Icon Packs To use icon packs, you’ll need to use a third-party launcher that supports them, such as Nova, Apex, ADW, Go Launcher, Holo Launcher, or Action Launcher Pro. Once you’re using a third-party launcher, you can install an icon pack and go into your launcher’s settings. You’ll find an option that allows you to choose between the icon packs you’ve installed. Many of these icon packs also include wallpapers, which you can set in the normal way. MIUI 5 Icons This icon pack offers over 1900 free icons that are similar to the icons used by the MIUi ROM developed by China’s Xiaomi Tech. The large list of icons is a big plus — this pack will give the majority of your app icons a very slick, consistent look. DCikonZ Theme DCikonZ is a free icon theme that includes a whopping 4000+ icons with a consistent look. This icon theme stands out not just because it’s huge, but also for offering for going in its own direction and avoiding the super-simple, flat look many icon packs use. Holo Icons Holo Icons replaces many app icons with simple, consistent-looking that match Google’s Holo style. If you’re a fan of Android’s Holo look, give it a try. It even tweaks many of the icons from Google’s own apps to make them look more consistent. Square Icon Pack Square Icon Pack turns your icons into simple squares. Even Google Chrome becomes an orb instead of a square. This makes every icon a consistent size and offers a unique look. The icons here almost look a bit like the small-size tiles available on Windows Phone and Windows 8.1. The free version doesn’t offer as many icons as the paid version, but it does offer icons for many popular apps. Rounded Want rounded icons instead? Try the Rounded icon theme, which offers simple rounded icons. The developer says they’re inspired by the consistently round icons used on Mozilla’s Firefox OS. Crumbled Icon Pack Crumbled Icon Pack applies an effect that makes icons look as if they’r crumbling. Rather than theming individual icons, Crumbled Icon Pack adds an effect to every app icon on your device. This means that all your app icons will be themed and consistent. Dainty Icon Pack Is your Android home screen too colorful? Dainty Icon Pack offers simple, gray-on-white icons for over 1200 apps. It’d be ideal over a simple background. The contrast may be a bit low here with the gray-on-white, but it’s otherwise very slick. Simplex Icons Simplex Icons offers more contrast, with black-on-gray icons. This icon pack could simplify busy home screens, allowing photographic wallpapers to come through. Min Icon Set Min attempts to go as minimal as possible, offering simple white icons for over 570 apps. It would be ideal over a simple wallpaper with app names hidden in your launcher, offering a calming, minimal home screen. For apps it doesn’t recognize, it will enclose part of the app’s icon in a white circle. Elegance Elegance goes in another direction entirely, offering icons that incorporate more details and gradients rather than going for minimalism. Its over 1200 icons offer another good option for people who aren’t into the minimal, flat look. Icon pack designers generally have to create and include their own icons to replace icons associated with specific apps, so you’ll probably find a few of your app icons aren’t replaced with most of these themes. Of course, a standard Android phone without an icon pack doesn’t have consistent icons, either. Even if all the icons in your app drawer aren’t themed, the few app icons you have on your home screen will be if you use widely used apps.     

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• SQL Saturday #44 Huntington Beach Recap

  What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach.  It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location.  I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis).  It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+.  Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless.  We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well.  That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you. So lets talk about the event Overall We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later). Location- Golden West College We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC! Some lessons learned Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors. I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community. Sponsors We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love. Platinum Sponsors Quest Software http://www.quest.com My Space http://www.myspace.com/ Gold Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com Silver Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com Bronze WestClinTech http://westclintech.com Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org Attunity http://www.attunity.com Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com Some additional Thanks Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community! Einstein Bros. Bagels They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee. Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com) Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch. Moving Forward Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events. In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS. San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm ) Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ ) L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ ) SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ ) So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• .NET vs Windows 8

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, day 1 of DevWeek. Lots and lots of Windows 8 and WinRT, as you would expect. The keynote had some actual content in it, fleshed out some of the details of how your apps linked into the Metro infrastructure, and confirmed that there would indeed be an enterprise version of the app store available for Metro apps.) However, that's, not what I want to focus this post on. What I do want to focus on is this: Windows 8 does not make .NET developers obsolete. Phew! .NET in the New Ecosystem In all the hype around Windows 8 the past few months, a lot of developers have got the impression that .NET has been sidelined in Windows 8; C++ and COM is back in vogue, and HTML5 + JavaScript is the New Way of writing applications. You know .NET? It's yesterday's tech. Enter the 21st Century and write <div>! However, after speaking to people at the conference, and after a couple of talks by Dave Wheeler on the innards of WinRT and how .NET interacts with it, my views on the coming operating system have changed somewhat. To summarize what I've picked up, in no particular order (none of this is official, just my sense of what's been said by various people): Metro apps do not replace desktop apps. That is, Windows 8 fully supports .NET desktop applications written for every other previous version of Windows, and will continue to do so in the forseeable future. There are some apps that simply do not fit into Metro. They do not fit into the touch-based paradigm, and never will. Traditional desktop support is not going away anytime soon. The reason Silverlight has been hidden in all the Metro hype is that Metro is essentially based on Silverlight design principles. Silverlight developers will have a much easier time writing Metro apps than desktop developers, as they would already be used to all the principles of sandboxing and separation introduced with Silverlight. It's desktop developers who are going to have to adapt how they work. .NET + XAML is equal to HTML5 + JS in importance. Although the underlying WinRT system is built on C++ & COM, most application development will be done either using .NET or HTML5. Both systems have their own wrapper around the underlying WinRT infrastructure, hiding the implementation details. The CLR is unchanged; it's still the .NET 4 CLR, running IL in .NET assemblies. The thing that changes between desktop and Metro is the class libraries, which have more in common with the Silverlight libraries than the desktop libraries. In Metro, although all the types look and behave the same to callers, some of the core BCL types are now wrappers around their WinRT equivalents. These wrappers are then enhanced using standard .NET types and code to produce the Metro .NET class libraries. You can't simply port a desktop app into Metro. The underlying file IO, network, timing and database access is either completely different or simply missing. Similarly, although the UI is programmed using XAML, the behaviour of the Metro XAML is different to WPF or Silverlight XAML. Furthermore, the new design principles and touch-based interface for Metro applications demand a completely new UI. You will be able to re-use sections of your app encapsulating pure program logic, but everything else will need to be written from scratch. Microsoft has taken the opportunity to remove a whole raft of types and methods from the Metro framework that are obsolete (non-generic collections) or break the sandbox (synchronous APIs); if you use these, you will have to rewrite to use the alternatives, if they exist at all, to move your apps to Metro. If you want to write public WinRT components in .NET, there are some quite strict rules you have to adhere to. But the compilers know about these rules; you can write them in C# or VB, and the compilers will tell you when you do something that isn't allowed and deal with the translation to WinRT metadata rather than .NET assemblies. It is possible to write a class library that can be used in Metro and desktop applications. However, you need to be very careful not to use types that are available in one but not the other. One can imagine developers writing their own abstraction around file IO and UIs (MVVM anyone?) that can be implemented differently in Metro and desktop, but look the same within your shared library. So, if you're a .NET developer, you have a lot less to worry about. .NET is a viable platform on Metro, and traditional desktop apps are not going away. You don't have to learn HTML5 and JavaScript if you don't want to. Hurray!

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• Upcoming EMEA, APAC & US Events with MySQL in 2014

  - by Lenka Kasparova

  As an update to the previous announcement from Mar 25, 2014 please find below the updated list of events where MySQL Community team is attending and/or supporting. This time you can find not only EMEA & APAC ones but also conferences & events we are covering in the US & Canada. You are invited to meet our engineers at the events below.   EMEA  NEW!! BGOUG, Sandanski, Bulgaria, June 13, 2014  Georgi Kodinov will attend and speak at this local Oracle User Group event. Feel free to come. PHP Tour Lyon, Lyon, France, June 23-24, 2014 MySQL team is going to be part of this show as well, we are not going to have a booth here but very active networking by our french MySQL team around the event. Come to meet us and talk to us! NEW!! Converge Conference, Glasgow, Scotland, August 15-16, 2014  MySQL Community Manager, David Stokes attends with MySQL talk. NEW!! CakeFest, Madrid, Spain, August 21-24, 2014  A talk on "Scaling Your MySQL instances AND keeping your Sanity" will be given by the MySQL Community Manager, David Stokes. Froscon 2014, St.Augustin, Germany, August 23-24, 2014 Please visit our booth as well as watch the Froscon website for the schedule updates. NEW!! SymfonyLive, UK, London, September 25-26, 2014 MySQL Community Magers, David Stokes & Morgan Tocker submitted MySQL talks for this show. Schedule will be announced later on. DrupalCon Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 29-Oct 3, 2014 Meet us at our booth at DrupalCon Amsterdam. For the schedule please watch the DrupalCon website. All Your Base, Oxford UK, October 17, 2014  Come to visit our MySQL booth and talk to our MySQL experts. NEW!! WebTechCon / IPC, Munich Germany, October 26-29, 2014 NEW!! DOAG, Nuremberg, Germany, November 18-20, 2014 There will be a full day of MySQL talks and one full day of MySQL workshop & sessions with live demo. This event is simply hard to miss! NEW!! Forum PHP Paris, France, November 21-22, 2014 More details: TBD NEW!! UK OUG, Liverpool, UK, December 8-10, 2014 MySQL will be part of the Oracle booth and we hope to get more space for MySQL talks.  USA NEW!! Texas Linux Fest, Austin, Texas, US, June 13-14, 2014 NEW!! SouthEast Linux Fest, Charlotte, US, June 20-22, 2014 NEW!! Debian Conference 2014, Portland, OR, US, August 23-31, 2014 NEW!! FossetCon, Orlando, US, September 11-13, 2014 NEW!! Oracle Open World, San Francisco, US, September 29-October 3, 2014 NEW!! MySQL Central @ Open/World, San Francisco, US, September 29-October 3, 2014 NEW!! PyTexas 2014, Dallas, TX, US, October 3-5, 2014 NEW!! All Things Open (replacing POSSCON), Raleigh, NC, October 23-24, 2014 NEW!! Ohio LinuxFest 2014, Columbus, Ohio, US, October 24-25, 2014 NEW!! ZendCon PHP, Santa Clara, US, October 27-30, 2014 NEW!! Kuali Days 2014, Indianapolis, US, November 10-13, 2014 NEW!! Live 360, Orlando, FL, US, November 17-20, 2014 APAC OpenSourceConference Japan, Hokkaido, June 13-14, 2014 MySQL is represented by Ryusuke Kajiyama with the talk on "MySQL Technology Updates". NEW!! db tech showcase, Osaka Japan, June 18-20, 2014 Three MySQL talks are scheduled for this show, "MySQL for Oracle DBA" & "MySQL Technology Updates" by Ryusuke Kajiyama. The last talk will be on MySQL Fabric by Yoshiaki Yamasaki. NEW!! PyCon Singapore, Singapore, June 18-20, 2014 Ryusuke Kajiyama will be talking about "Sharding and scale-out using Python-based MySQL Fabric". NEW!! COSCUP, Taipei, Taiwan, July 19-20, 2014 We are going to run a technical session on MySQL Workbench & one talk on how to make MySQL better MySQL. NEW!! PyCon New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, September 13-14, 2014 MySQL talks were submitted as well as one talk by Solaris Modernization team on Python & Solaris, watch the website for schedule updates. NEW!! PyCon Japan, Tokyo Japan, September 13-15, 2014 MySQL will be a MySQL session speaker, no schedule is announced yet. Ruby Kaigi, Tokyo, Japan, September 18-20, 2014 Another event MySQL supports and attends in APAC region. Ruby Kaigi is the international Ruby Conference in Japan, Tokyo. Ruby started in Japan, so Ruby Kaigi has excellent speakers and developers! MySQL team is going to be present at this conference with MySQL talks and active networking around the venue. NEW!! PyCon India, Bangalore, India, September 26-28, 2014 A MySQL talk on "MySQL Utilities scaling MySQL with Python" has been submitted, please watch the PyCon website for the schedule updates. NEW!! OpenSourceConference Japan, Tokyo, October 18-19, 2014 NEW!! OpenSource India, Bengaluru, India, November 7-8, 2014 NEW!! OpenSourceConference Japan, Fukuoka, November 14-15, 2014 You can check the MySQL wikis for updates on the conferences we are attending. Next time I hope to have more details for each event above (especially for the US ones).

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• top Tweets SOA Partner Community – May 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity SOA Community BPMN2.0 Oracle notations poster from eaiesb http://wp.me/p10C8u-pu Torsten WinterbergLook out for new Oracle #BPM edition coming up soon: The Oracle BPM Standard edtion! Great news for easy entry, small licence fees. Yes! Danilo Schmiedel Had a great chat with customer yesterday about #OracleBPM. Next step will be a 5day event combining modeling and implementation @soacommunity Frank Nimphius Still reading "Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g Handbook". Excellent resource for a non-SOA but ADF guy like me ;-) Oracle New webcast: Maximize #Oracle #WebLogic Server ROI with Oracle #Enterprise #Manager 12c on May 2 at 10 am PT. Register http://bit.ly/JFUrR9 OTNArchBeat@OTNArchBeat BPM in Financial Services Industry | Sanjeev Sharma http://bit.ly/HCCxui JDeveloper & ADF BPEL 11.1.1.6 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12.1.3 SOA Integrations http://dlvr.it/1V9SxR Oracle UPK & Tutor Collaborate Attendees: Visit the UPK demo pod, SIGS, and sessions: If you are attending Collaborate 2012 - Sun. http://bit.ly/J39z65 Heidi Buelow see #fmw track RT @demed: Are you going to #KSCOPE12 in San Antonio, June 24-28? http://kscope12.com/component/ seminar/seminarslist?topicsid=6 Use promo code Fusion for discount! Sabine Leitner #SIG #Middleware 15.05. Frankfurt #Oracle #DOAG Planung & Aufbau WebLogic Server #WLS http://bit.ly/HKsCWV @OracleWebLogic @soacommunity SOA Community MDS explorer by Red Samurai http://wp.me/p10C8u-pp Biemond &reg; Retrieve or set a HTTP header from Oracle BPEL: With Oracle SOA Suite 11g patch 12928372 you can finally retrie http://bit.ly/JejTHC Lucas Jellema Call for papers for UKOUG 2012 has opened: http://techandebs.ukoug.org /default.asp?p=9306 (deadline 1st of June) OTNArchBeat BPM API usage: List all BPM Processes for a user | Kavitha Srinivasan http://bit.ly/IJKVfj demed SOA, Cloud + Service Tech symposium (London, Sep 24-25) call for paper is open http://www.servicetechsymposium. com /call2012.php @techsymp #oraclesoa OracleBlogs Lessons learned configuring OER 11g Workflows http://ow.ly/1iMsKh OTNArchBeat Scripting WebLogic Admin Server Startup | Antony Reynolds http://bit.ly/IH5ciU orclateamsoa A-Team Blog #ateam: BPM API usage: List all BPM Processes for a user http://ow.ly/1iJADp Lucas Jellema Just blogged about our Live FMW Application Development show during OBUG 2012, next Tuesday 24th April in Maastricht: OracleBlogs OEG integration with OSB/OWSM - 11g http://ow.ly/1iKx7G SOA Community SOA Community Newsletter April 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pl Frank DorstRT @whitehorsesnl: Whiteblog: BPM Process Spaces in Oracle Webcenter (Patch Set 5(http://bit.ly/Hxzh29) #soacommunity #bpm #oracle) David Shaffer The Advanced SOA suite training class next week in Redwood City is full! Learned a lot about accepting credit card payments. OTNArchBeat Running Built-In Test Simulator with SOA Suite Healthcare 11g in PS4 and PS5 | Shub Lahiri http://bit.ly/IgI8GN SOA Community Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards 2012, Call for Nominations #ofmaward #soa #bpm #soacommunity OTNArchBeat Updated SOA Documents now available in ITSO Reference Library http://bit.ly/I3Y6Sg Oracle Middleware Data Integrator & SOA - why 2 products better than one for integration? Webcast: Apr 24 10 AM PT http://bit.ly/IzmtKR Andrejus Baranovskis Red Samurai MDS Cleaner V2.0 http://fb.me/FxLVz82w SOA Community “@rluttikhuizen: Chapter 4 of SOA Made Simple book "Classification of Services" ready for collegial review” can #soacommunity get a preview? Xavier Verhaeghe #Gartner figures are out: #Oracle top in App Server market share (43.1%) and Relational #Database, too (48.8%) in 2011 Sabine Leitner WLS12c, Exa*, IDM, EM12c, DB @ Private, Public, Hybrid #Cloud Event 26.04. FFM #Oracle http://bit.ly/zcRuxi @OracleCloudZone @soacommunity Michel Schildmeijer@wlscommunity @MiddlewareMagic @OTNArchBeat @Oracle_Fusion Oracle WebLogic / SOA Suite 11g HACMP Cluster take-over http://lnkd.in/G78qMd Oracle Middleware Hear how ODI and SOA's unified approach are key to untangling your business. April 24 10AM PT http://bit.ly/IdcsUz #Oracle OTNArchBeat Using SAP Adapter with OSB 11g (PS3) | Shub Lahiri http://bit.ly/IswR9K SOA Community Integrating with Oracle Fusion Applications: Discovering Integration Artifacts https://blogs.oracle.com/governance /entry/integrating_with_oracle_fusion_ applications #soacommunity #oer #governance OracleBlogs Tuning B2B Server Engine Threads in SOA Suite 11g http://ow.ly/1iH5bx OracleBlogs Top Tweets SOA Partner Community April 2012 http://ow.ly/1iVHfA SOA Community Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management http://wp.me/p10C8u-pi Sabine Leitner WLS12c,Exa*,IDM,EM12c, DB @ Private, Public, Hybrid #Cloud Event 24.04. München #Oracle http://bit.ly/zcRuxi @OracleCloudZone @soacommunity SOA Community Testing Business Rules by Mark Nelson http://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/ 04/18/testing-business-rules/ #soacommunity #soa #rules #oracle SOA CommunityTop Tweets SOA Partner Community - April 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pn OTNArchBeat Webcast: Untangle Your Business with Oracle Unified SOA and Data Integration - April 24 http://bit.ly/IQexqT OTNArchBeat"Do more with SOA Integration: Best of Packt" contributors include @gschmutz, @llaszews, many others http://amzn.to/HVWwYt ServiceTechSymposium Symposium agenda page coming together - page launched today with keynotes, sessions to be added shortly. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com /agenda2012.php SOA Community Shipping Specialization plaques - congratulation #Fujitsu - request yours https://soacommunity.wordpress. com/2011/02/23/who-are-the-soa-experts-specialization-recognized-by-customers/ #soacommunity #OPN http://pic.twitter.com/YMRm2ion ServiceTechSymposium call for Presentations Submission Deadline Moved Up to May 21, 2012. Send your presentations submissions ASAP! ServiceTechSymposium Symposium Keynote by Vicente Navarro, European Space Agency, added to agenda: "SOA & Service-Orientation at the European Space Agency" SOA Community Running a large #soa project? Make sure you read - Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management #soacommunity #opn SOA Community List all BPM Processes for a user by Yogesh l #bpm #oracle #soacommunity  For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: soacommunity, twitter,Oracle,SOA Community,Jürgen Kress,OPN,SOA,BPM

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• Geocaching - World wide treasure hunt

  I'm not quite sure how I came across this topic but actually I find it absolutely interesting, challenging and most of all a great fun for the family and friends. The interesting part is for sure that you can follow other peoples treasures and their preferred locations where a cache might be hidden. Of course, it wont be easy to find a cache after all. Sometimes there are even 'mystery caches' which have either riddles, further instructions or little brain games for you in order to find the actual cache - that's the challenge. And last but not least, those caches are hidden outdoor. A great experience to explore nature either on your own, or your family especially with children, or as a treasure hunting pack with a couple of friends. What is geocaching? It's a high-tech outdoor treasure hunting game that's a great way to explore the world with friends, family or on your own. Participants use GPS-enabled devices to locate hidden containers called geocaches. There are over one million geocaches hidden around the world today, waiting for you to find them. Visit Geocaching.com to search for geocaches near you.(Source: Referral Email of geocaching.com) Checkout the Geocaching 101 for further details and information. They also provide a video channel on YouTube. Which equipment do I need? Any GPS-enabled device is sufficient to go onto the hunt. I'm going to start our geocaching experience equipped with my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Additionally, I installed a geocaching.com client called c:geo that hopefully assists me soon. Combined with a map app like Google Maps and a nice Compass app you should be fully equipped and ready to go. I guess, that even a car navigation system is perfect for that task. Later on, with more experience and demand for technology (or precision) it might be interesting to opt-in for a pure GPS device, like a Garmin or any other brand on the market. {loadposition content_adsense} What is a geocache and what does it contain? In its simplest form, a cache always contains a logbook or logsheet for you to log your find. Larger caches may contain a logbook and any number of items. These items turn the adventure into a true treasure hunt. You never know what the cache owner or visitors to the cache may have left for you to enjoy. Remember, if you take something, leave something of equal or greater value in return. It is recommended that items in a cache be individually packaged in a clear, zipped plastic bag to protect them from the elements. Finding your first geocache Well, first you have to have interest to pick up the challenge. Then you have to check out the Geocache directory on geocaching.com. They have recommendations for beginner's caches but you are free to choose any. Actually, we have a Mystery Cache very close to our base, and I guess that we are going for that one on our first trip. Anyway, there is a very informative guide on the website which should answer all your questions about starting your new outdoor adventure. For sure, it's going to be rewarding. Team up with friends and family Especially as a beginner there might be misunderstandings in handling the GPS coordinates, the compass, or the map, and even finding the container at the documented position isn't easy in the first place. Luckily, there are logbook reports online from other hunters, and most of the time there are even 'spoiler' images available. But also bear in mind, that a geocache might have been removed or is lost due to unconscious people or whatever other reasons. Don't be disappointed in case that you can't find anything... There be nothing anymore. A general recommendation in this case would be to replace the missing container with a new one, and give feedback to the original owner about the state of that particular location. After all, it's about fun and active participation in a world-wide community. Geocaches in Mauritius? Yes, there are currently about 45 geocaches spread all over the island, and even a single in Rodriguez - that's gonna be a tough one. Hopefully, we will get increasing numbers as Geocaching.com allows, no better, even encourages you to hide new containers at your locations of choice. I think this is going to be real fun for us during the upcoming weeks and months. Especially, when we are travelling to other countries and transfer so-called trackable items between geocaches. On my first impression, Geocaching.com seems to be very mature, open and community-oriented. There are literally hundreds of thousands geocache 'hunters' all over the world. And usually finding a container remote from your home is very rewarding. I'll keep you updated in these matters during the next months to come...

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• Red Gate does Byte Night 2012

  - by red(at)work

  On the 5th of October 2012, a team of nine plucky Red Gaters braved the howling wind and the driving rain to sleep outside. No tents or mattresses were allowed – all we took for protection were sleeping bags, groundsheets, plastic sacks and Colin’s enormous fishing umbrella (a godsend in umbrella-y disguise). Why would we do such a thing? For Byte Night, an annual tech sector sleepout in support of Action for Children, who tackle the causes as well as the consequences of youth homelessness. Byte Night encourages technology professionals to do for one night a year what thousands of young people have to do every night – sleep rough.  We signed up for Byte Night in the warm, heady midst of the British summer, thinking it couldn’t possibly be all that bad. Even on the night itself – before the rain began to fall, sat in the comfort and warmth of a company canteen, drinking wine and eating chill and preparing to win the pub quiz – we were excited and optimistic about the night that lay ahead of us. All of that changed as soon as we stepped out into one of the worst rainstorms of the year. Brian, the team’s birthday boy, describes it best: Picture the scene: it’s 3 am on a Friday. I’m lying outside, fully clothed in a sleeping bag, wearing a raincoat, trussed up inside a large plastic pocket, on a ground sheet beneath a giant umbrella, wedged so tightly between two of my colleagues that I can’t move my arms. I’m wide awake, staring up at the grey sky beyond the edge of the umbrella; a limp, flickering white glow hints at a moon somewhere behind the drifting clouds. I haven’t slept since we first moved outside at 11 pm. Outside. Did I mention we were outside? I’m hung over. I need the loo. But there is no way on earth that I’m getting out of this sleeping bag. It’s cold. It’s raining. Not just raining, but chucking it down. It’s been doing this non-stop since 10pm. The rain sounds like a hyperactive drummer on the fishing umbrella, and the noise is loud and relentless. Puddles of water are forming all over the groundsheet, and, despite being ensconced inside the plastic pouch, I am wet. The fishing umbrella is protecting me from the worst of the driving rain, but not all of me is under it, and five hours of rain is no match for it. Everything is wet. My left side has become horribly damp. My trainers, which I placed next to my sleeping bag, are now completely soaked through. Mmm. That’ll be fun in the morning. My head is next to Colin’s head on one side, and a multi-pack of McCoy’s cheddar and onion crisps on the other. Don’t ask about the tub of hummus. That’s somewhere down by my ankles, abandoned to the night. Jess, who is lying next to me, rolls over onto her side. A mini waterfall cascades from her rain-pouch onto my face. Bah. I continue to stare into the heavens, willing the dawn to hurry up. Something lands on my face. It’s a mosquito. Great. Midnight, when this still seemed like fun – when we opened some champagne and my colleagues presented me with a caterpillar birthday cake, when everyone was drunk and jolly and full of stoic resolve – feels like a long time ago. Did I mention that today is my birthday? The remains of the caterpillar cake endure the same fate as the hummus, left out in the rain like a metaphor for sadness. It’s getting colder. I can see my breath. Silence has descended on the group, apart from the rustle of plastic. And the rain, obviously. Someone snores, and I envy whoever it is the sweet escape of sleep. I try to wriggle a bit further down inside my sleeping bag, but it doesn’t want to be wriggled into. Only 3 hours till dawn. 180 minutes. I begin to count them off, one at a time.  All nine of us got to go home in the morning, but thousands of children across the UK don’t have that luxury. If you’d like to sponsor the Red Gate Byte Night team, our JustGiving page can be found here.   Chris, before the outside bit actually happened. More photos from Byte Night Cambridge 2012 can be found here.

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• WebLogic 12.1.2 launch webcast on-demand & WebLogic Community feedback

  - by JuergenKress

  You missed the WebLogic & Coherence & JDeveloper 12.1.2 launch Webcast? Watch it on-demand: View On-Demand Version Read the Q&A from this Webcast Special thanks for Frank Munz and Simon Haslams our WebLogic Community experts on the phone!Thanks for the community for the great twitter feedback send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity WebLogic Community Join the #WebLogic Partner Community for the latest WebLogic 12.1.2 details and upcoming trainings http://www.WeblogicCommunity.com #OracleCAF Oracle WebLogic ?Unified update, patch, install process is a key component in reducing Ops cost in #WebLogic 12c #OracleCAF WebLogic Community Demo time #WebLogic cluster creation in seconds #OracleCAF by @mike_lehmann & Will Lyons #WebLogicCommunity pic.twitter.com/gyb8YqnKco Oracle WebLogic ?Dynamic server clusters to scale apps - coming up in #WebLogic 12c launch. #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/lBmE Oracle WebLogic ?Key feature of #WebLogic 12.1.2 release: @Oracle Database 12c integration. #OracleCAF #OracleDB OTNArchBeat ?Many tech posts on #weblogic available on #oracleace Rene van Wijk's blog. #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/O9Cn Frank Munz ?Correct me if I am wrong, but this could be the first WebLogic 12.1.2 training ever: http://www.ausoug.org.au/insync13/insync13-frank-munz.html … Cloud Foundation ?.#WebLogic 12.1.2 deep dive starts NOW during #OracleCAF launch. #Coherence up next in a few minutes. http://pub.vitrue.com/HPHM Maciej Gruszka ?Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiCoO_QGBsU&feature=c4-overview&list=UUrEIV9YO17leE9aJWamKEPw … at #WebLogic channel with @dave_cabelus about Elastic JMS Oracle WebLogic ?Pick up the new book by @frankmunz on WLS 12c http://amzn.to/1ceppgZ #WebLogic #OracleCAF OTNArchBeat ?@OTNArchBeat 31 Jul @frankmunz 's #WebLogic YouTube channel >> watch and learn #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/B4IM WebLogic Community ?@frankmunz WebLogic expert build elastic clouds with #WebLogic http://www.munzandmore.com/blog #OracleCAF #WebLogicCommunity pic.twitter.com/UK5UKjXUVl OTNArchBeat @frankmunz 's blog, covering #weblog #cloud and more #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/N8ST OTNArchBeat ?oracladmin: @simon_haslam 's Oracle Fusion Middleware blog #OracleCAF #oracleace http://pub.vitrue.com/cwGx Yuri Grinshteyn ?Coherence uses WLS tooling, including deployment, and can be part of the WLS cluster. Well done there. #OracleCAF Maciej Gruszka ?#Coherence 12.1.2 auto updates data grid on changes inside DB thru #GoldenGate HotCache - another cool feature of #OracleCAF Oracle WebLogic ?From #OracleCAF launch: Tight integration tween WLS, #Coherence and #OracleDB. Dynamic clusters, OSS support & more http://pub.vitrue.com/3NL9 OTNArchBeat ?25 recent no-fluff technical articles on Oracle WebLogic #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/FEG5 Maciej Gruszka ?@dave_cabelus Elastic JMS is my favourite capability of #WebLogic 12.1.2 WebLogic Community ?Dynamic WebLogic Clustering COOL - what is Wour favorite 12.1.2 feature? #OracleCAF #WebLogicCommunity pic.twitter.com/T8lvDMJ1U0 WebLogic Community ?What is the coolest #WebLogic 12.1.2 feature? Let us know @wlscommunity http://weblogiccommunity.com/2013/07/30/launch-webcast-weblogic-coherence-jdeveloper-adf-12-1-2-00-july-31st-2013/ … #WebLogicCommunity Simon Haslam ?I'm speaking(!) on the panel session with @frankmunz & Matt Rosen on the CAF/WebLogic 12.1.2 launch: 6pm UK today https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=651242&partnerref=CAF_Launch_OCOM_07312013&sourcepage=register … Markus Eisele ?#WebLogic 12.1.2 - an Important New Release for Middleware Admins http://bit.ly/1cmtqhX by @simon_haslam OracleEnterpriseMgr ?The JVM diagnostics features of #EM12c are now shown in a demo by @hawkinsg1 at the #OracleCAF launch http://bit.ly/caflaunch Shaun Smith ?Curious about the new #Coherence 12.1.2 GoldenGate HotCache feature? I explain all on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0TIG3hgbg0&feature=share&list=PLxqhEJ4CA3JtQwuPS8Qmd88lGX-gsIbHV … #OracleCAF Maciej Gruszka ?Try for Yourself -- Download the products Oracle WebLogic 12.1.2: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/fusion-middleware/downloads/index.html … Oracle Coherence 12c: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/coherence/downloads/index.htm … WebLogic Community ?What is Your favorite feature in #WebLogic 12.1.2 ? cool stuff! #OracleCAF #WebLogicCommunity http://WeblogicCommunity.com pic.twitter.com/xjR05tiaQj We encourage you to learn more about all the products by reviewing the following resources: Try for Yourself -- Download the products Oracle WebLogic 12.1.2 Oracle Coherence 12c Enterprise Manager Developer Tools WebLogic Community blog Learn more Read the Oracle WebLogic Business Whitepaper Read the Oracle Coherence Business Whitepaper Read the Oracle WebLogic and Oracle Database Integration Whitepaper Get Training from Oracle University Check out the Oracle WebLogic YouTube Channel Check out the Oracle Coherence YouTube Channel WebLogic Partner Community Registration The Webcast is available on-demand Watch Webcast Now WebLogic Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Weblogic 12.1.2,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• SPARC M7 Chip - 32 cores - Mind Blowing performance

  - by Angelo-Oracle

  The M7 Chip Oracle just announced its Next Generation Processor at the HotChips HC26 conference. As the Tech Lead in our Systems Division's Partner group, I had a front row seat to the extraordinary price performance advantage of Oracle current T5 and M6 based systems. Partner after partner tested  these systems and were impressed with it performance. Just read some of the quotes to see what our partner has been saying about our hardware. We just announced our next generation processor, the M7. This has 32 cores (up from 16-cores in T5 and 12-cores in M6). With 20 nm technology  this is our most advanced processor. The processor has more cores than anything else in the industry today. After the Sun acquisition Oracle has released 5 processors in 4 years and this is the 6th.  The S4 core  The M7 is built using the foundation of the S4 core. This is the next generation core technology. Like its predecessor, the S4 has 8 dynamic threads. It increases the frequency while maintaining the Pipeline depth. Each core has its own fine grain power estimator that keeps the core within its power envelop in 250 nano-sec granularity. Each core also includes Software in Silicon features for Application Acceleration Support. Each core includes features to improve Application Data Integrity, with almost no performance loss. The core also allows using part of the Virtual Address to store meta-data.  User-Level Synchronization Instructions are also part of the S4 core. Each core has 16 KB Instruction and 16 KB Data L1 cache. The Core Clusters  The cores on the M7 chip are organized in sets of 4-core clusters. The core clusters share  L2 cache.  All four cores in the complex share 256 KB of 4 way set associative L2 Instruction Cache, with over 1/2 TB/s of throughput. Two cores share 256 KB of 8 way set associative L2 Data Cache, with over 1/2 TB/s of throughput. With this innovative Core Cluster architecture, the M7 doubles core execution bandwidth. to maximize per-thread performance.  The Chip  Each  M7 chip has 8 sets of these core-clusters. The chip has 64 MB on-chip L3 cache. This L3 caches is shared among all the cores and is partitioned into 8 x 8 MB chunks. Each chunk is  8-way set associative cache. The aggregate bandwidth for the L3 cache on the chip is over 1.6TB/s. Each chip has 4 DDR4 memory controllers and can support upto 16 DDR4 DIMMs, allowing for 2 TB of RAM/chip. The chip also includes 4 internal links of PCIe Gen3 I/O controllers.  Each chip has 7 coherence links, allowing for 8 of these chips to be connected together gluelessly. Also 32 of these chips can be connected in an SMP configuration. A potential system with 32 chips will have 1024 cores and 8192 threads and 64 TB of RAM.  Software in Silicon The M7 chip has many built in Application Accelerators in Silicon. These features will be exposed to our Software partners using the SPARC Accelerator Program.  The M7  has built-in logic to decompress data at the speed of memory access. This means that applications can directly work on compressed data in memory increasing the data access rates. The VA Masking feature allows the use of part of the virtual address to store meta-data.  Realtime Application Data Integrity The Realtime Application Data Integrity feature helps applications safeguard against invalid, stale memory reference and buffer overflows. The first 4-bits if the Pointer can be used to store a version number and this version number is also maintained in the memory & cache lines. When a pointer accesses memory the hardware checks to make sure the two versions match. A SEGV signal is raised when there is a mismatch. This feature can be used by the Database, applications and the OS.  M7 Database In-Memory Query Accelerator The M7 chip also includes a In-Silicon Query Engines.  These accelerate tasks that work on In-Memory Columnar Vectors. Oracle In-Memory options stores data in Column Format. The M7 Query Engine can speed up In-Memory Format Conversion, Value and Range Comparisons and Set Membership lookups. This engine can work on Compressed data - this means not only are we accelerating the query performance but also increasing the memory bandwidth for queries.  SPARC Accelerated Program  At the Hotchips conference we also introduced the SPARC Accelerated Program to provide our partners and third part developers access to all the goodness of the M7's SPARC Application Acceleration features. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in knowing more about this program. 

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• Supporting users if they're not on your site

  - by Roger Hart

  Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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• Check Your Spelling, Grammar, and Style in Firefox and Chrome

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you tired of making simple writing mistakes that get past your browser’s spell-check?  Here’s how you can get advanced grammar check and more in Firefox and Chrome with After the Deadline. Microsoft Word has spoiled us with grammar, syntax, and spell checking, but the default spell check in Firefox and Chrome still only does basic checks.  Even webapps like Google Docs don’t check more than basic spelling errors.  However, WordPress.com is an exception; it offers advanced spelling, grammar, and syntax checking with its After the Deadline proofing system.  This helps you keep from making embarrassing mistakes on your blog posts, and now, thanks to a couple free browser plugins, it can help you keep from making these mistakes in any website or webapp. After the Deadline in Google Chrome Add the After the Deadline extension (link below) to Chrome as usual. As soon as it’s installed, you’re ready to start improving your online writing.  To check spelling, grammar, and more, click the ABC button that you’ll now see at the bottom of most text boxes online. After a quick scan, grammar mistakes are highlighted in green, complex expressions and other syntax problems are highlighted in blue, and spelling mistakes are highlighted in red as would be expected.  Click on an underlined word to choose one of its recommended changes or ignore the suggestion. Or, if you want more explanation about what was wrong with that word or phrase, click Explain for more info. And, if you forget to run an After the Deadline scan before submitting a text entry, it will automatically check to make sure you still want to submit it.  Click Cancel to go back and check your writing first.   To change the After the Deadline settings, click its icon in the toolbar and select View Options.  Additionally, if you want to disable it on the site you’re on, you can click Disable on this site directly from the popup. From the settings page, you can choose extra things to check for such as double negatives and redundant phrases, as well as add sites and words to ignore. After the Deadline in Firefox Add the After the Deadline add-on to Firefox (link below) as normal. After the Deadline basically the same in Firefox as it does in Chrome.  Select the ABC icon in the lower right corner of textboxes to check them for problems, and After the Deadline will underline the problems as it did in Chrome.  To view a suggested change in Firefox, right-click on the underlined word and select the recommended change or ignore the suggestion. And, if you forget to check, you’ll see a friendly reminder asking if you’re sure you want to submit your text like it is. You can access the After the Deadline settings in Firefox from the menu bar.  Click Tools, then select AtD Preferences.  In Firefox, the settings are in a options dialog with three tabs, but it includes the same options as the Chrome settings page.  Here you can make After the Deadline as correction-happy as you like.   Conclusion The web has increasingly become an interactive place, and seldom does a day go by that we aren’t entering text in forms and comments that may stay online forever.  Even our insignificant tweets are being archived in the Library of Congress.  After the Deadline can help you make sure that your permanent internet record is as grammatically correct as possible.  Even though it doesn’t catch every problem, and even misses some spelling mistakes, it’s still a great help. Links Download the After the Deadline extension for Google Chrome Download the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Disable Favicons in FirefoxStupid Geek Tricks: Duplicate a Tab with a Shortcut Key in Chrome or FirefoxHow to Disable the New Geolocation Feature in Google ChromeStupid Geek Tricks: Compare Your Browser’s Memory Usage with Google ChromeStop YouTube Videos from Automatically Playing in Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Easily Search Food Recipes With Recipe Chimp Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools

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• DBCC CHECKDB (BatmanDb, REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS) &ndash; Are you Feeling Lucky?

  - by David Totzke

  I’m currently working for a client on a PowerBuilder to WPF migration.  It’s one of those “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you” kind of clients and the quick-lime pits are currently occupied by the EMC tech…but I’ve said too much already. At approximately 3 or 4 pm that day users of the Batman[1] application here in Gotham[1] started to experience problems accessing the application.  Batman[2] is a document management system here that also integrates with the ERP system.  Very little goes on here that doesn’t involve Batman in some way.  The errors being received seemed to point to network issues (TCP protocol error, connection forcibly closed by the remote host etc…) but the real issue was much more insidious. Connecting to the database via SSMS and performing selects on certain tables underlying the application areas that were having problems started to reveal the issue.  You couldn’t do a SELECT * FROM MyTable without it bombing and giving the same error noted above.  A run of DBCC CHECKDB revealed 14 tables with corruption.  One of the tables with issues was the Document table.  Pretty central to a “document management” system.  Information was obtained from IT that a single drive in the SAN went bad in the night.  A new drive was in place and was working fine.  The partition that held the Batman database is configured for RAID Level 5 so a single drive failure shouldn’t have caused any trouble and yet, the database is corrupted.  They do hourly incremental backups here so the first thing done was to try a restore.  A restore of the most recent backup failed so they worked backwards until they hit a good point.  This successful restore was for a backup at 3AM – a full day behind.  This time also roughly corresponds with the time the SAN started to report the drive failure.  The plot thickens… I got my hands on the output from DBCC CHECKDB and noticed a pattern.  What’s sad is that nobody that should have noticed the pattern in the DBCC output did notice.  There was a rush to do things to try and recover the data before anybody really understood what was wrong with it in the first place.  Cooler heads must prevail in these circumstances and some investigation should be done and a plan of action laid out or you could end up making things worse[3].  DBCC CHECKDB also told us that: repair_allow_data_loss is the minimum repair level for the errors found by DBCC CHECKDB Yikes.  That means that the database is so messed up that you’re definitely going to lose some stuff when you repair it to get it back to a consistent state.  All the more reason to do a little more investigation into the problem.  Rescuing this database is preferable to having to export all of the data possible from this database into a new one.  This is a fifteen year old application with about seven hundred tables.  There are TRIGGERS everywhere not to mention the referential integrity constraints to deal with.  Only fourteen of the tables have an issue.  We have a good backup that is missing the last 24 hours of business which means we could have a “do-over” of yesterday but that’s not a very palatable option either. All of the affected tables had TEXT columns and all of the errors were about LOB data types and orphaned off-row data which basically means TEXT, IMAGE or NTEXT columns.  If we did a SELECT on an affected table and excluded those columns, we got all of the rows.  We exported that data into a separate database.  Things are looking up.  Working on a copy of the production database we then ran DBCC CHECKDB with REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS and that “fixed” everything up.   The allow data loss option will delete the bad rows.  This isn’t too horrible as we have all of those rows minus the text fields from out earlier export.  Now I could LEFT JOIN to the exported data to find the missing rows and INSERT them minus the TEXT column data. We had the restored data from the good 3AM backup that we could now JOIN to and, with fingers crossed, recover the missing TEXT column information.  We got lucky in that all of the affected rows were old and in the end we didn’t lose anything.  :O  All of the row counts along the way worked out and it looks like we dodged a major bullet here. We’ve heard back from EMC and it turns out the SAN firmware that they were running here is apparently buggy.  This thing is only a couple of months old.  Grrr…. They dispatched a technician that night to come and update it .  That explains why RAID didn’t save us. All-in-all this could have been a lot worse.  Given the root cause here, they basically won the lottery in not losing anything. Here are a few links to some helpful posts on the SQL Server Engine blog.  I love the title of the first one: Which part of 'REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS' isn't clear? CHECKDB (Part 8): Can repair fix everything? (in fact, read the whole series) Ta da! Emergency mode repair (we didn’t have to resort to this one thank goodness)   Dave Just because I can…   [1] Names have been changed to protect the guilty. [2] I'm Batman. [3] And if I'm the coolest head in the room, you've got even bigger problems...

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• How to Answer a Stupid Interview Question the Right Way

  - by AjarnMark

  Have you ever been asked a stupid question during an interview; one that seemed to have no relation to the job responsibilities at all?  Tech people are often caught off-guard by these apparently irrelevant questions, but there is a way you can turn these to your favor.  Here is one idea. While chatting with a couple of folks between sessions at SQLSaturday 43 last weekend, one of them expressed frustration over a seemingly ridiculous and trivial question that she was asked during an interview, and she believes it cost her the job opportunity.  The question, as I remember it being described was, “What is the largest byte measurement?”.  The candidate made up a guess (“zetabyte”) during the interview, which is actually closer than she may have realized.  According to Wikipedia, there is a measurement known as zettabyte which is 10^21, and the largest one listed there is yottabyte at 10^24. My first reaction to this question was, “That’s just a hiring manager that doesn’t really know what they’re looking for in a candidate.  Furthermore, this tells me that this manager really does not understand how to build a team.”  In most companies, team interaction is more important than uber-knowledge.  I didn’t ask, but this could also be another geek on the team trying to establish their Alpha-Geek stature.  I suppose that there are a few, very few, companies that can build their businesses on hiring only the extreme alpha-geeks, but that certainly does not represent the majority of businesses in America. My friend who was there suggested that the appropriate response to this silly question would be, “And how does this apply to the work I will be doing?” Of course this is an understandable response when you’re frustrated because you know you can handle the technical aspects of the job, and it seems like the interviewer is just being silly.  But it is also a direct challenge, which may not be the best approach in interviewing.  I do have to admit, though, that there are those folks who just won’t respect you until you do challenge them, but again, I don’t think that is the majority. So after some thought, here is my suggestion: “Well, I know that there are petabytes and exabytes and things even larger than that, but I haven’t been keeping up on my list of Greek prefixes that have not yet been used, so I would have to look up the exact answer if you need it.  However, I have worked with databases as large as 30 Terabytes.  How big are the largest databases here at X Corporation?”  Perhaps with a follow-up of, “Typically, what I have seen in companies that have databases of your size, is that the three biggest challenges they face are: A, B, and C.  What would you say are the top 3 concerns that you would like the person you hire to be able to address?…Here is how I have dealt with those concerns in the past (or ‘Here is how I would tackle those issues for you…’).” Wait! What just happened?!  We took a seemingly irrelevant and frustrating question and turned it around into an opportunity to highlight our relevant skills and guide the conversation back in a direction more to our liking and benefit.  In more generic terms, here is what we did: Admit that you don’t know the specific answer off the top of your head, but can get it if it’s truly important to the company. Maybe for some reason it really is important to them. Mention something similar or related that you do know, reassuring them that you do have some knowledge in that subject area. Draw a parallel to your past work experience. Ask follow-up questions about the company’s specific needs and discuss how you can fulfill those. This type of thing requires practice and some forethought.  I didn’t come up with this answer until a day later, which is too late when you’re interviewing.  I still think it is silly for an interviewer to ask something like that, but at least this is one way to spin it to your advantage while you consider whether you really want to work for someone who would ask a thing like that.  Remember, interviewing is a two-way process.  You’re deciding whether you want to work there just as much as they are deciding whether they want you. There is always the possibility that this was a calculated maneuver on the part of the hiring manager just to see how quickly you think on your feet and how you handle stupid questions.  Maybe he knows something about the work environment and he’s trying to gauge whether you’ll actually fit in okay.  And if that’s the case, then the above response still works quite well.

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• SQLAuthority News – #TechEDIn – TechEd India 2012 – Things to Do and Explore for SQL Enthusiast

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India 2012 is just 48 hours away and I have been receiving lots of requests regarding how SQL enthusiasts can maximize their time they’ll be spending at TechEd India 2012. Trust me – TechEd is the biggest Tech Event in India and it is much larger in magnitude than we can imagine. There are plenty of tracks there and lots of things to do. Honestly, we need clone ourselves multiple times to completely cover the event. However, I am going to talk about SQL enthusiasts only right now. In this post, I’ll share a few things they can do in this big event. But before I start talking about specific things, there is one thing which is a must – Keynote. There are amazing Keynotes planned every single day at TechEd India 2012. One should not miss them at all. Social Media I am a big believer of the social media. I am everywhere - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and GPlus. I suggest you follow the tag #TechEdIn as well as contribute at the healthy conversation going on right now. You may want to follow a few of the SQL Server enthusiasts who are also attending events like TechEd India. This way, you will know where they are and you can contribute along with them. For a good start, you can follow all the speakers who are presenting at the event. I have linked all the speakers’ names with their respective Twitter accounts. Networking Do not stop meeting new people. Introduce yourself. Catch the speakers after their sessions. Meet other SQL experts and discuss SQL as well as life aside SQL. The best way to start the communication is to talk about something new. Here are a few lines I usually use when I have to break the ice: SQL Server 2012 is just released and I have installed it. How many SQL Server sessions are you going to attend? I am going to attend _________ I am a big fan of SQL Server. Sessions Agenda Day 1 T-SQL Rediscovered with SQL Server 2012 - Jacob Sebastian Catapult your data with SQL Server 2012 integration services - Praveen Srivatsa Processing Big Data with SQL Server 2012 and Hadoop  - Stephan Forte SQL Server Misconceptions and Resolution – A Practical Perspective – Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar Securing with ContainedDB in SQL Server 2012  - Pranab Majumdar Agenda Day 2 Hand-on-Lab – Exploring Power View with SQL Server 2012 – Ravi S. Maniam Hand-on-Lab - SQL Server 2012 – AlwaysOn Availability Groups  - Amit Ganguli Agenda Day 3 Peeling SQL Server like an Onion: Internals Debunked  - Vinod Kumar Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance  - Pinal Dave Keeping Your Database Available – ‘AlwaysOn’  - Balmukund Lakhani Lesser Known Facts of SQL Server Backup and Restore  - Amit Banerjee Top five reasons why you want SQL Server 2012 BI - Praveen Srivatsa Product Booth and Event Partners There will be a dedicated SQL Server booth at the event. I suggest you stop by there and do communication with SQL Server Experts. Additionally there will be booths of various event partners. Stop by their booth and see if they have a product which can help your career. I know that Pluralsight has recently released my course on their online learning site and if that interests you, you can talk about the subject with them. Bring Your Camera Make a list of the people you want to meet. Follow them on Twitter or send them an email and know their location. Introduce yourself, meet them and have your conversation. Do not forget to take a photo with them and later on, share the photo on social media. It would be nice to send an email to everyone with attached high resolution images if you have their email address. After-hours parties After-hours parties are not always about eating and meeting friends but sometimes, they are very informative. Last time I ended up meeting an SQL expert, and we end up talking for long hours on various aspects of SQL Server. After 4 hours, we figured out that he stays in the same apartment complex as mine and since we have had an excellent friendship, he has then become our family friend. So, my advice is that you start to seek out who is meeting where in the evening and see if you can get invited to the parties. Make new friends but never lose mutual respect by doing something silly. Meet Me I will be at the event for three days straight. I will be around the SQL tracks. Please stop by and introduce yourself. I would like to meet you and talk to you. Meeting folks from the Community is very important as we all speak the same language at the end of the day – SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Einladung zur Oracle SE University am 13./14. Dezember 2011

  - by A&C Redaktion

  Sehr geehrte Oracle Partner, die erste Oracle SE University wird von Azlan und Oracle gemeinsam ins Leben gerufen, dazu laden wir Sie herzlich ein. Zielgruppe sind die technischen Ansprechpartner aller Oracle Partner. Wir bieten Ihnen in Fulda einen umfassenden Überblick über aktuelle Technologien, Produkte und Dienstleistungen mit den Schwerpunkten Oracle on Oracle, Positionierung und Architektur. Dabei werden sowohl bewährte Software-Produktbereiche wie Datenbank und Fusion Middleware beleuchtet, als auch klassische Hardware-Themen wie Systems, Storage und Virtualisierung. Die Agenda finden Sie hier. Top-Referenten garantieren Ihnen qualitativ hochwertige und technisch anspruchsvolle Vorträge.  Projektberichte aus der Praxis bringen Ihnen Kernthemen näher, um mit diesem Wissen zusätzlichen Umsatz zu generieren. Nutzen Sie darüber hinaus die Möglichkeiten zum Networking, die im täglichen Geschäft Gold wert sind.Logistische Informationen: Termin: 13. - 14. Dezember 2011 Ort: Fulda - bietet als die Barockstadt Deutschlands einen reizvollen Kontrast zu unseren technischen Themen. Aber vor allem liegt Fulda fast genau in der geographischen Mitte Deutschlands und ist via einem modernen ICE-Bahnhof bestens von ganz Deutschland aus zu erreichen. Hotel Esperanto Kongress- und Kulturzentrum Fulda: Vom Bahnhof aus gehen Sie gemütliche zwei Minuten um die Ecke und kommen direkt ins Hotel. Für PKW Fahrer sind ausreichend Parkplätze direkt am Hotel vorhanden. Zielgruppe: SEs, technischer Vertrieb, technische Consultants Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} Konzept der Oracle SE University: Plenum Sessions und Keynote mit strategischen Übersichtsthemen Break Out Sessions (4 Sessions parallel) mit technischem Tiefgang Technologie, Projekterfahrungen, Architekturen, Lösungsszenarien u.v.m. Networking: bei einem gemeinsamen Abendessen am 13.12., ab 19.00 Uhr. Im hauseigenen Grill-Restaurant "El Toro Nero" gibt es die brasilianische Spezialität "Rodizio". Die Teilnahme zur Oracle SE University inklusive dem gemeinsamen Abendessen ist für Sie kostenfrei, die Übernachtungskosten werden von Ihnen selbst getragen. Melden Sie sich bitte bis spätestens 30.11. zur Oracle SE University hier an. Wir haben ein Zimmer-Kontingent reserviert, die Buchung bitten wir Sie online selbst vorzunehmen. Bitte geben Sie bei der Buchung das Stichwort „Oracle SE Uni“ an, damit erhalten Sie den Sonderpreis von 102,- Euro inklusive Frühstück. Wir freuen uns, Sie in Fulda zu begrüßen! Joachim Hissmann Birgit Nehring Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Manager Key Partner HW Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Direktor Software & Solution Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Oracle Deutschland Tech Data/Azlan ================================================================= Kontakte Azlan:Peter MosbauerTel.: 089 [email protected] Robert BacciTel.: 089 4700-3018 [email protected] Oracle:Regina SteyerTel.: 0211 [email protected]

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