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• ImgBurn fails to burn data CD-R disk due to "Layouts do not match" error

  - by 0xAether

  I have a reoccurring problem with the program ImgBurn. Whenever I try and burn anything to a CD-R using ImgBurn it burns just fine, except for when I go and verify the disk. It tells me that the "Layouts do not match". Windows 7 shows the disk as completely blank. Although, I see on the bottom of the disk it has been written to. I can burn ISO files to DVD-R's just fine. This only seems to happen with CD-R's. The CD-R's I'm using are Memorex Cool Colors 52x CD-R's. I have looked on Google, and it seems like I'm not the only one this happens to. Unfortunately, no one is able to provide an explanation. I have included the log file from the last CD I just burnt. If you need anything else to better diagnose this problem, I will gladly provide it. ; //****************************************\\ ; ImgBurn Version 2.5.7.0 - Log ; Monday, 19 November 2012, 16:11:57 ; \\****************************************// ; ; I 16:04:55 ImgBurn Version 2.5.7.0 started! I 16:04:55 Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition (6.1, Build 7601 : Service Pack 1) I 16:04:55 Total Physical Memory: 4,156,380 KB - Available: 3,317,144 KB I 16:04:55 Initialising SPTI... I 16:04:55 Searching for SCSI / ATAPI devices... I 16:04:56 -> Drive 1 - Info: Optiarc DVD RW AD-7560S SH03 (D:) (SATA) I 16:04:56 Found 1 DVD±RW/RAM! I 16:05:37 Operation Started! I 16:05:37 Source File: C:\Users\Aaron\Desktop\VMware Workstation 9.iso I 16:05:37 Source File Sectors: 223,057 (MODE1/2048) I 16:05:37 Source File Size: 456,820,736 bytes I 16:05:37 Source File Volume Identifier: VMwareWorksta9 I 16:05:37 Source File Volume Set Identifier: 20121119_2102 I 16:05:37 Source File File System(s): ISO9660, Joliet I 16:05:37 Destination Device: [1:0:0] Optiarc DVD RW AD-7560S SH03 (D:) (SATA) I 16:05:37 Destination Media Type: CD-R (Disc ID: 97m17s06f, Moser Baer India) I 16:05:37 Destination Media Supported Write Speeds: 10x, 16x, 20x, 24x I 16:05:37 Destination Media Sectors: 359,847 I 16:05:37 Write Mode: CD I 16:05:37 Write Type: SAO I 16:05:37 Write Speed: 6x I 16:05:37 Lock Volume: Yes I 16:05:37 Test Mode: No I 16:05:37 OPC: No I 16:05:37 BURN-Proof: Enabled W 16:05:37 Write Speed Miscompare! - MODE SENSE: 1,764 KB/s (10x), GET PERFORMANCE: 11,080 KB/s (63x) W 16:05:37 Write Speed Miscompare! - MODE SENSE: 1,764 KB/s (10x), GET PERFORMANCE: 11,080 KB/s (63x) W 16:05:37 Write Speed Miscompare! - MODE SENSE: 1,764 KB/s (10x), GET PERFORMANCE: 11,080 KB/s (63x) W 16:05:37 Write Speed Miscompare! - MODE SENSE: 1,764 KB/s (10x), GET PERFORMANCE: 11,080 KB/s (63x) W 16:05:37 Write Speed Miscompare! - MODE SENSE: 1,764 KB/s (10x), GET PERFORMANCE: 11,080 KB/s (63x) W 16:05:37 Write Speed Miscompare! - Wanted: 1,058 KB/s (6x), Got: 1,764 KB/s (10x) / 11,080 KB/s (63x) W 16:05:37 The drive only supports writing these discs at 10x, 16x, 20x, 24x. I 16:05:38 Filling Buffer... (80 MB) I 16:05:40 Writing LeadIn... I 16:06:07 Writing Session 1 of 1... (1 Track, LBA: 0 - 223056) I 16:06:07 Writing Track 1 of 1... (MODE1/2048, LBA: 0 - 223056) I 16:11:00 Synchronising Cache... I 16:11:18 Exporting Graph Data... I 16:11:18 Graph Data File: C:\Users\Aaron\AppData\Roaming\ImgBurn\Graph Data Files\Optiarc_DVD_RW_AD-7560S_SH03_MONDAY-NOVEMBER-19-2012_4-05_PM_97m17s06f_6x.ibg I 16:11:18 Export Successfully Completed! I 16:11:18 Operation Successfully Completed! - Duration: 00:05:41 I 16:11:18 Average Write Rate: 1,522 KB/s (10.1x) - Maximum Write Rate: 1,544 KB/s (10.3x) I 16:11:18 Cycling Tray before Verify... W 16:11:23 Waiting for device to become ready... I 16:11:47 Device Ready! E 16:11:47 CompareImageFileLayouts Failed! - Session Count Not Equal (1/0) E 16:11:47 Verify Failed! - Reason: Layouts do not match. I 16:11:57 Close Request Acknowledged I 16:11:57 Closing Down... I 16:11:57 Shutting down SPTI... I 16:11:57 ImgBurn closed!

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• nginx: How can I set proxy_* directives only for matching URIs?

  - by Artem Russakovskii

  I've been at this for hours and I can't figure out a clean solution. Basically, I have an nginx proxy setup, which works really well, but I'd like to handle a few urls more manually. Specifically, there are 2-3 locations for which I'd like to set proxy_ignore_headers to Set-Cookie to force nginx to cache them (nginx doesn't cache responses with Set-Cookie as per http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpProxyModule#proxy_ignore_headers). So for these locations, all I'd like to do is set proxy_ignore_headers Set-Cookie; I've tried everything I could think of outside of setting up and duplicating every config value, but nothing works. I tried: Nesting location directives, hoping the inner location which matches on my files would just set this value and inherit the rest, but that wasn't the case - it seemed to ignore anything set in the outer location, most notably proxy_pass and I end up with a 404). Specifying the proxy_cache_valid directive in an if block that matches on $request_uri, but nginx complains that it's not allowed ("proxy_cache_valid" directive is not allowed here). Specifying a variable equal to "Set-Cookie" in an if block, and then trying to set proxy_cache_valid to that variable later, but nginx isn't allowing variables for this case and throws up. It should be so simple - modifying/appending a single directive for some requests, and yet I haven't been able to make nginx do that. What am I missing here? Is there at least a way to wrap common directives in a reusable block and have multiple location blocks refer to it, after adding their own unique bits? Thank you. Just for reference, the main location / block is included below, together with my failed proxy_ignore_headers directive for a specific URI. location / { # Setup var defaults set $no_cache ""; # If non GET/HEAD, don't cache & mark user as uncacheable for 1 second via cookie if ($request_method !~ ^(GET|HEAD)$) { set $no_cache "1"; } if ($http_user_agent ~* '(iphone|ipod|ipad|aspen|incognito|webmate|android|dream|cupcake|froyo|blackberry|webos|s8000|bada)') { set $mobile_request '1'; set $no_cache "1"; } # feed crawlers, don't want these to get stuck with a cached version, especially if it caches a 302 back to themselves (infinite loop) if ($http_user_agent ~* '(FeedBurner|FeedValidator|MediafedMetrics)') { set $no_cache "1"; } # Drop no cache cookie if need be # (for some reason, add_header fails if included in prior if-block) if ($no_cache = "1") { add_header Set-Cookie "_mcnc=1; Max-Age=17; Path=/"; add_header X-Microcachable "0"; } # Bypass cache if no-cache cookie is set, these are absolutely critical for Wordpress installations that don't use JS comments if ($http_cookie ~* "(_mcnc|comment_author_|wordpress_(?!test_cookie)|wp-postpass_)") { set $no_cache "1"; } if ($request_uri ~* wpsf-(img|js)\.php) { proxy_ignore_headers Set-Cookie; } # Bypass cache if flag is set proxy_no_cache $no_cache; proxy_cache_bypass $no_cache; # under no circumstances should there ever be a retry of a POST request, or any other request for that matter proxy_next_upstream off; proxy_read_timeout 86400s; # Point nginx to the real app/web server proxy_pass http://localhost; # Set cache zone proxy_cache microcache; # Set cache key to include identifying components proxy_cache_key $scheme$host$request_method$request_uri$mobile_request; # Only cache valid HTTP 200 responses for this long proxy_cache_valid 200 15s; #proxy_cache_min_uses 3; # Serve from cache if currently refreshing proxy_cache_use_stale updating timeout; # Send appropriate headers through proxy_set_header Host $host; # no need for this proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; # no need for this proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; # Set files larger than 1M to stream rather than cache proxy_max_temp_file_size 1M; access_log /var/log/nginx/androidpolice-microcache.log custom; }

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• Why do two patterns (/.*) and (.*) match different strings? @per-directory (.htaccess) mod_rewrite RewriteRule

  - by Leftium

  Shouldn't the two patterns (/.*) and (.*) match the same string? My real question is actually: where did the "abc" go? Something funky seems to be happening inside the mod_rewrite engine... Given this .htaccess file in www/dir/: Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (/.*) print_url_args.php?result=$1 A request for http://localhost/dir/abc/123/ results in: result ($1) = "/123/" $_REQUEST_URI = "/dir/abc/123/" If the / is removed from the pattern like RewriteRule (.*) print_url_args.php?result=$1 The same request for http://localhost/dir/abc/123/ results in: result ($1) = "print_url_args.php" $_REQUEST_URI = "/dir/abc/123/" update: posted rewrite log. 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23cd4a8/initial] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] add path info postfix: C:/db/www/dir/abc - C:/db/www/dir/abc/123/ 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23cd4a8/initial] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] strip per-dir prefix: C:/db/www/dir/abc/123/ - abc/123/ 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23cd4a8/initial] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] applying pattern '(/.*)$' to uri 'abc/123/' 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23cd4a8/initial] (2) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] rewrite 'abc/123/' - 'print_url_args.php?result=/123/' 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23cd4a8/initial] (3) split uri=print_url_args.php?result=/123/ - uri=print_url_args.php, args=result=/123/ 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23cd4a8/initial] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] add per-dir prefix: print_url_args.php - C:/db/www/dir/print_url_args.php 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23cd4a8/initial] (2) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] strip document_root prefix: C:/db/www/dir/print_url_args.php - /dir/print_url_args.php 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23cd4a8/initial] (1) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] internal redirect with /dir/print_url_args.php [INTERNAL REDIRECT] 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#43833c8/initial/redir#1] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] strip per-dir prefix: C:/db/www/dir/print_url_args.php - print_url_args.php 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#43833c8/initial/redir#1] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] applying pattern '(/.*)$' to uri 'print_url_args.php' 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:21:51 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#43833c8/initial/redir#1] (1) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] pass through C:/db/www/dir/print_url_args.php 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23bf470/initial] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] add path info postfix: C:/db/www/dir/abc - C:/db/www/dir/abc/123/ 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23bf470/initial] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] strip per-dir prefix: C:/db/www/dir/abc/123/ - abc/123/ 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23bf470/initial] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] applying pattern '(.*)$' to uri 'abc/123/' 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23bf470/initial] (2) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] rewrite 'abc/123/' - 'print_url_args.php?result=abc/123/' 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23bf470/initial] (3) split uri=print_url_args.php?result=abc/123/ - uri=print_url_args.php, args=result=abc/123/ 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23bf470/initial] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] add per-dir prefix: print_url_args.php - C:/db/www/dir/print_url_args.php 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23bf470/initial] (2) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] strip document_root prefix: C:/db/www/dir/print_url_args.php - /dir/print_url_args.php 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23bf470/initial] (1) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] internal redirect with /dir/print_url_args.php [INTERNAL REDIRECT] 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23fda10/initial/redir#1] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] strip per-dir prefix: C:/db/www/dir/print_url_args.php - print_url_args.php 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23fda10/initial/redir#1] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] applying pattern '(.*)$' to uri 'print_url_args.php' 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23fda10/initial/redir#1] (2) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] rewrite 'print_url_args.php' - 'print_url_args.php?result=print_url_args.php' 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23fda10/initial/redir#1] (3) split uri=print_url_args.php?result=print_url_args.php - uri=print_url_args.php, args=result=print_url_args.php 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23fda10/initial/redir#1] (3) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] add per-dir prefix: print_url_args.php - C:/db/www/dir/print_url_args.php 127.0.0.1 - - [15/Feb/2011:14:24:54 +0900] [localhost/sid#1333140][rid#23fda10/initial/redir#1] (1) [perdir C:/db/www/dir/] initial URL equal rewritten URL: C:/db/www/dir/print_url_args.php [IGNORING REWRITE]

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• KVM guest io is much slower than host io: is that normal?

  - by Evolver

  I have a Qemu-KVM host system setup on CentOS 6.3. Four 1TB SATA HDDs working in Software RAID10. Guest CentOS 6.3 is installed on separate LVM. People say that they see guest performance almost equal to host performance, but I don't see that. My i/o tests are showing 30-70% slower performance on guest than on host system. I tried to change scheduler (set elevator=deadline on host and elevator=noop on guest), set blkio.weight to 1000 in cgroup, change io to virtio... But none of these changes gave me any significant results. This is a guest .xml config part: <disk type='file' device='disk'> <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/> <source file='/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2'/> <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/> </disk> There are my tests: Host system: iozone test # iozone -a -i0 -i1 -i2 -s8G -r64k random random KB reclen write rewrite read reread read write 8388608 64 189930 197436 266786 267254 28644 66642 dd read test: one process and then four simultaneous processes # dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.23044 s, 254 MB/s # dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=1024 & dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=2048 & dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=3072 & dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=4096 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.4528 s, 74.3 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.562 s, 73.7 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.6341 s, 73.4 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.7006 s, 73.0 MB/s dd write test: one process and then four simultaneous processes # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 6.2039 s, 173 MB/s # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test2 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test3 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test4 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 32.7173 s, 32.8 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 32.8868 s, 32.6 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 32.9097 s, 32.6 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 32.9688 s, 32.6 MB/s Guest system: iozone test # iozone -a -i0 -i1 -i2 -s512M -r64k random random KB reclen write rewrite read reread read write 524288 64 93374 154596 141193 149865 21394 46264 dd read test: one process and then four simultaneous processes # dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=1024 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 5.04356 s, 213 MB/s # dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=1024 & dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=2048 & dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=3072 & dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=4096 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24.7348 s, 43.4 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24.7378 s, 43.4 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24.7408 s, 43.4 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24.744 s, 43.4 MB/s dd write test: one process and then four simultaneous processes # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 10.415 s, 103 MB/s # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test2 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test3 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test4 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 49.8874 s, 21.5 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 49.8608 s, 21.5 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 49.8693 s, 21.5 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 49.9427 s, 21.5 MB/s I wonder is that normal situation or did I missed something?

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• How to automate org-refile for multiple todo

  - by lawlist

  I'm looking to automate org-refile so that it will find all of the matches and re-file them to a specific location (but not archive). I found a fully automated method of archiving multiple todo, and I am hopeful to find or create (with some help) something similar to this awesome function (but for a different heading / location other than archiving): https://github.com/tonyday567/jwiegley-dot-emacs/blob/master/dot-org.el (defun org-archive-done-tasks () (interactive) (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (while (re-search-forward "\* \\(None\\|Someday\\) " nil t) (if (save-restriction (save-excursion (org-narrow-to-subtree) (search-forward ":LOGBOOK:" nil t))) (forward-line) (org-archive-subtree) (goto-char (line-beginning-position)))))) I also found this (written by aculich), which is a step in the right direction, but still requires repeating the function manually: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7509463/how-to-move-a-subtree-to-another-subtree-in-org-mode-emacs ;; I also wanted a way for org-refile to refile easily to a subtree, so I wrote some code and generalized it so that it will set an arbitrary immediate target anywhere (not just in the same file). ;; Basic usage is to move somewhere in Tree B and type C-c C-x C-m to mark the target for refiling, then move to the entry in Tree A that you want to refile and type C-c C-w which will immediately refile into the target location you set in Tree B without prompting you, unless you called org-refile-immediate-target with a prefix arg C-u C-c C-x C-m. ;; Note that if you press C-c C-w in rapid succession to refile multiple entries it will preserve the order of your entries even if org-reverse-note-order is set to t, but you can turn it off to respect the setting of org-reverse-note-order with a double prefix arg C-u C-u C-c C-x C-m. (defvar org-refile-immediate nil "Refile immediately using `org-refile-immediate-target' instead of prompting.") (make-local-variable 'org-refile-immediate) (defvar org-refile-immediate-preserve-order t "If last command was also `org-refile' then preserve ordering.") (make-local-variable 'org-refile-immediate-preserve-order) (defvar org-refile-immediate-target nil) "Value uses the same format as an item in `org-refile-targets'." (make-local-variable 'org-refile-immediate-target) (defadvice org-refile (around org-immediate activate) (if (not org-refile-immediate) ad-do-it ;; if last command was `org-refile' then preserve ordering (let ((org-reverse-note-order (if (and org-refile-immediate-preserve-order (eq last-command 'org-refile)) nil org-reverse-note-order))) (ad-set-arg 2 (assoc org-refile-immediate-target (org-refile-get-targets))) (prog1 ad-do-it (setq this-command 'org-refile))))) (defadvice org-refile-cache-clear (after org-refile-history-clear activate) (setq org-refile-targets (default-value 'org-refile-targets)) (setq org-refile-immediate nil) (setq org-refile-immediate-target nil) (setq org-refile-history nil)) ;;;###autoload (defun org-refile-immediate-target (&optional arg) "Set current entry as `org-refile' target. Non-nil turns off `org-refile-immediate', otherwise `org-refile' will immediately refile without prompting for target using most recent entry in `org-refile-targets' that matches `org-refile-immediate-target' as the default." (interactive "P") (if (equal arg '(16)) (progn (setq org-refile-immediate-preserve-order (not org-refile-immediate-preserve-order)) (message "Order preserving is turned: %s" (if org-refile-immediate-preserve-order "on" "off"))) (setq org-refile-immediate (unless arg t)) (make-local-variable 'org-refile-targets) (let* ((components (org-heading-components)) (level (first components)) (heading (nth 4 components)) (string (substring-no-properties heading))) (add-to-list 'org-refile-targets (append (list (buffer-file-name)) (cons :regexp (format "^%s %s$" (make-string level ?*) string)))) (setq org-refile-immediate-target heading)))) (define-key org-mode-map "\C-c\C-x\C-m" 'org-refile-immediate-target) It sure would be helpful if aculich, or some other maven, could please create a variable similar to (setq org-archive-location "~/0.todo.org::* Archived Tasks") so users can specify the file and heading, which is already a part of the org-archive-subtree functionality. I'm doing a search and mark because I don't have the wherewithal to create something like org-archive-location for this setup. EDIT: One step closer -- almost home free . . . (defun lawlist-auto-refile () (interactive) (beginning-of-buffer) (re-search-forward "\* UNDATED") (org-refile-immediate-target) ;; cursor must be on a heading to work. (save-excursion (re-search-backward "\* UNDATED") ;; must be written in such a way so that sub-entries of * UNDATED are not searched; or else infinity loop. (while (re-search-backward "\* \\(None\\|Someday\\) " nil t) (org-refile) ) ) )

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• Router 2wire, Slackware desktop in DMZ mode, iptables policy aginst ping, but still pingable

  - by user135501

  I'm in DMZ mode, so I'm firewalling myself, stealthy all ok, but I get faulty test results from Shields Up that there are pings. Yesterday I couldn't make a connection to game servers work, because ping block was enabled (on the router). I disabled it, but this persists even due to my firewall. What is the connection between me and my router in DMZ mode (for my machine, there is bunch of others too behind router firewall)? When it allows router affecting if I'm pingable or not and if router has setting not blocking ping, rules in my iptables for this scenario do not work. Please ignore commented rules, I do uncomment them as I want. These two should do the job right? iptables -A INPUT -p icmp --icmp-type echo-request -j DROP echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all Here are my iptables: #!/bin/sh # Begin /bin/firewall-start # Insert connection-tracking modules (not needed if built into the kernel). #modprobe ip_tables #modprobe iptable_filter #modprobe ip_conntrack #modprobe ip_conntrack_ftp #modprobe ipt_state #modprobe ipt_LOG # allow local-only connections iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT # free output on any interface to any ip for any service # (equal to -P ACCEPT) iptables -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT # permit answers on already established connections # and permit new connections related to established ones (eg active-ftp) iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT #Gamespy&NWN #iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp -m multiport --ports 5120:5129 -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 6667 --tcp-flags SYN,RST,ACK SYN -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 28910 --tcp-flags SYN,RST,ACK SYN -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 29900 --tcp-flags SYN,RST,ACK SYN -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 29901 --tcp-flags SYN,RST,ACK SYN -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 29920 --tcp-flags SYN,RST,ACK SYN -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp -m multiport --ports 5120:5129 -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 6500 -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 27900 -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 27901 -j ACCEPT #iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 29910 -j ACCEPT # Log everything else: What's Windows' latest exploitable vulnerability? iptables -A INPUT -j LOG --log-prefix "FIREWALL:INPUT" # set a sane policy: everything not accepted > /dev/null iptables -P INPUT DROP iptables -P FORWARD DROP iptables -P OUTPUT DROP iptables -A INPUT -p icmp --icmp-type echo-request -j DROP # be verbose on dynamic ip-addresses (not needed in case of static IP) echo 2 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_dynaddr # disable ExplicitCongestionNotification - too many routers are still # ignorant echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn #ping death echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all # If you are frequently accessing ftp-servers or enjoy chatting you might # notice certain delays because some implementations of these daemons have # the feature of querying an identd on your box for your username for # logging. Although there's really no harm in this, having an identd # running is not recommended because some implementations are known to be # vulnerable. # To avoid these delays you could reject the requests with a 'tcp-reset': #iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 113 -j REJECT --reject-with tcp-reset #iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 113 -m state --state RELATED -j ACCEPT # To log and drop invalid packets, mostly harmless packets that came in # after netfilter's timeout, sometimes scans: #iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp -m state --state INVALID -j LOG --log-prefix \ "FIREWALL:INVALID" #iptables -I INPUT 2 -p tcp -m state --state INVALID -j DROP # End /bin/firewall-start

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• MySQL reserves too much RAM

  - by Buddy

  I have a cheap VPS with 128Mb RAM and 256Mb burst. MySQL starts and reserves about 110Mb, but uses not more than 20Mb of them. My VPS Control Panel shows, that I use 127Mb (I also running nginx and sphinx), I know, that it shows reserved RAM, but when I reach over 128Mb, my VPS reboots automatically every 4 hours. So I want to force MySQL to reserve less RAM. How can i do that? I did some tweaks with my.conf but it helped not so much. top output: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1 root 15 0 2156 668 572 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.03 init 11311 root 15 0 11212 356 228 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 vzctl 11312 root 18 0 3712 1484 1248 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.01 bash 11347 root 18 0 2284 916 732 R 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 top 13978 root 17 -4 2248 552 344 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 udevd 14262 root 15 0 1812 564 472 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.03 syslogd 14293 sphinx 15 0 11816 1172 672 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.07 searchd 14305 root 25 0 7192 1036 636 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 sshd 14321 root 25 0 2832 836 668 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 xinetd 15389 root 18 0 3708 1300 1132 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.00 mysqld_safe 15441 mysql 15 0 113m 16m 4440 S 0.0 6.4 0:00.15 mysqld 15489 root 21 0 13056 1456 340 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.00 nginx 15490 nginx 18 0 13328 2388 992 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.06 nginx 15507 nginx 25 0 19520 5888 4244 S 0.0 2.2 0:00.00 php-cgi 15508 nginx 18 0 19636 4876 2748 S 0.0 1.9 0:00.12 php-cgi 15509 nginx 15 0 19668 4872 2716 S 0.0 1.9 0:00.11 php-cgi 15518 root 18 0 4492 1116 568 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.01 crond MySQL tuner: >> MySQLTuner 1.0.1 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering Please enter your MySQL administrative login: root Please enter your MySQL administrative password: -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.0.77 [OK] Operating on 32-bit architecture with less than 2GB RAM -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 1M (Tables: 1) [OK] Total fragmented tables: 0 -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 38m 43s (37 q [0.016 qps], 20 conn, TX: 4M, RX: 3K) [--] Reads / Writes: 100% / 0% [--] Total buffers: 28.1M global + 832.0K per thread (100 max threads) [OK] Maximum possible memory usage: 109.4M (42% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (0/37) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 1% (1/100) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 128.0K/64.0K [OK] Query cache efficiency: 42.1% (8 cached / 19 selects) [OK] Query cache prunes per day: 0 [!!] Temporary tables created on disk: 27% (3 on disk / 11 total) [!!] Thread cache is disabled [OK] Table cache hit rate: 57% (8 open / 14 opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 1% (12/1K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (22 immediate / 22 locks) [!!] Connections aborted: 10% [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 1.5M/8.0M -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries When making adjustments, make tmp_table_size/max_heap_table_size equal Reduce your SELECT DISTINCT queries without LIMIT clauses Set thread_cache_size to 4 as a starting value Your applications are not closing MySQL connections properly Variables to adjust: tmp_table_size (> 32M) max_heap_table_size (> 16M) thread_cache_size (start at 4) I think if I do what MySQLtuner says, MySQL will use more RAM.

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• Print directly to CUPS server from non-local clients (Ubuntu 14.04)

  - by OEP

  I set up a CUPS server with a few queues and printing from local clients (the CUPS test page and Samba) seems to work just fine. It seems like the CUPS server is denying non-local clients though: 130.127.48.70 - - [03/Jun/2014:14:29:19 -0400] "POST /printers/m137 HTTP/1.1" 200 390 Validate-Job successful-ok 130.127.48.70 - - [03/Jun/2014:14:29:19 -0400] "POST /printers/m137 HTTP/1.1" 200 339 Create-Job client-error-not-authorized localhost - - [03/Jun/2014:14:40:50 -0400] "POST /printers/m137 HTTP/1.1" 200 410869 Print-Job successful-ok This makes me think I have some sort of host-based restriction in my configuration file, but I can't find it. I've even set my default policy to Allow all only to get the same log message. I'm working from a configuration file which had previously worked on an older version of CUPS, which looks quite similar to the example cupsd.conf. I could be wrong but it looks like that final <Limit All> block ought to allow the actions the logs complain about. MaxLogSize 2000000000 # Log general information in error_log - change "info" to "debug" for # troubleshooting... LogLevel info #AccessLog syslog #ErrorLog syslog #PageLog syslog # Administrator user group... SystemGroup sys root lp # Only listen for connections from the local machine. Listen 0.0.0.0:631 Listen :::631 Listen /var/run/cups/cups.sock ServerName <snipped> # Show shared printers on the local network. Browsing Off BrowseOrder allow,deny # (Change '@LOCAL' to 'ALL' if using directed broadcasts from another subnet.) BrowseAllow @LOCAL # Default authentication type, when authentication is required... DefaultAuthType Basic # Restrict access to the server... <Location /> Order allow,deny Allow all </Location> # Restrict access to the admin pages... <Location /admin> AuthType Default Require user @SYSTEM Encryption Required Order allow,deny Allow all </Location> # Restrict access to configuration files... <Location /admin/conf> AuthType Default Require user @SYSTEM Encryption Required Order allow,deny Allow all </Location> # Set the default printer/job policies... <Policy default> # Job-related operations must be done by the owner or an administrator... <Limit Send-Document Send-URI Hold-Job Release-Job Restart-Job Purge-Jobs Set-Job-Attributes Create-Job-Subscription Renew-Subscription Cancel-Subscription Get-Notifications Reprocess-Job Cancel-Current-Job Suspend-Current-Job Resume-Job CUPS-Move-Job> Require user @OWNER @SYSTEM Order deny,allow </Limit> # All administration operations require an administrator to authenticate... <Limit CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer CUPS-Delete-Printer CUPS-Add-Modify-Class CUPS-Delete-Class CUPS-Set-Default> AuthType Default Require user @SYSTEM Order deny,allow </Limit> # All printer operations require a printer operator to authenticate... <Limit Pause-Printer Resume-Printer Enable-Printer Disable-Printer Pause-Printer-After-Current-Job Hold-New-Jobs Release-Held-New-Jobs Deactivate-Printer Activate-Printer Restart-Printer Shutdown-Printer Startup-Printer Promote-Job Schedule-Job-After CUPS-Accept-Jobs CUPS-Reject-Jobs> AuthType Default Require user @SYSTEM Order deny,allow </Limit> # Only the owner or an administrator can cancel or authenticate a job... <Limit Cancel-Job CUPS-Authenticate-Job> Require user @OWNER @SYSTEM Order deny,allow </Limit> <Limit All> Order allow,deny </Limit> </Policy>

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• From Binary to Data Structures

  - by Cédric Menzi

  Table of Contents Introduction PE file format and COFF header COFF file header BaseCoffReader Byte4ByteCoffReader UnsafeCoffReader ManagedCoffReader Conclusion History This article is also available on CodeProject Introduction Sometimes, you want to parse well-formed binary data and bring it into your objects to do some dirty stuff with it. In the Windows world most data structures are stored in special binary format. Either we call a WinApi function or we want to read from special files like images, spool files, executables or may be the previously announced Outlook Personal Folders File. Most specifications for these files can be found on the MSDN Libarary: Open Specification In my example, we are going to get the COFF (Common Object File Format) file header from a PE (Portable Executable). The exact specification can be found here: PECOFF PE file format and COFF header Before we start we need to know how this file is formatted. The following figure shows an overview of the Microsoft PE executable format. Source: Microsoft Our goal is to get the PE header. As we can see, the image starts with a MS-DOS 2.0 header with is not important for us. From the documentation we can read "...After the MS DOS stub, at the file offset specified at offset 0x3c, is a 4-byte...". With this information we know our reader has to jump to location 0x3c and read the offset to the signature. The signature is always 4 bytes that ensures that the image is a PE file. The signature is: PE\0\0. To prove this we first seek to the offset 0x3c, read if the file consist the signature. So we need to declare some constants, because we do not want magic numbers.   private const int PeSignatureOffsetLocation = 0x3c; private const int PeSignatureSize = 4; private const string PeSignatureContent = "PE";   Then a method for moving the reader to the correct location to read the offset of signature. With this method we always move the underlining Stream of the BinaryReader to the start location of the PE signature.   private void SeekToPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // seek to the offset for the PE signagure br.BaseStream.Seek(PeSignatureOffsetLocation, SeekOrigin.Begin); // read the offset int offsetToPeSig = br.ReadInt32(); // seek to the start of the PE signature br.BaseStream.Seek(offsetToPeSig, SeekOrigin.Begin); }   Now, we can check if it is a valid PE image by reading of the next 4 byte contains the content PE.   private bool IsValidPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // read 4 bytes to get the PE signature byte[] peSigBytes = br.ReadBytes(PeSignatureSize); // convert it to a string and trim \0 at the end of the content string peContent = Encoding.Default.GetString(peSigBytes).TrimEnd('\0'); // check if PE is in the content return peContent.Equals(PeSignatureContent); }   With this basic functionality we have a good base reader class to try the different methods of parsing the COFF file header. COFF file header The COFF header has the following structure: Offset Size Field 0 2 Machine 2 2 NumberOfSections 4 4 TimeDateStamp 8 4 PointerToSymbolTable 12 4 NumberOfSymbols 16 2 SizeOfOptionalHeader 18 2 Characteristics If we translate this table to code, we get something like this:   [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public MachineType Machine; public ushort NumberOfSections; public uint TimeDateStamp; public uint PointerToSymbolTable; public uint NumberOfSymbols; public ushort SizeOfOptionalHeader; public Characteristic Characteristics; } BaseCoffReader All readers do the same thing, so we go to the patterns library in our head and see that Strategy pattern or Template method pattern is sticked out in the bookshelf. I have decided to take the template method pattern in this case, because the Parse() should handle the IO for all implementations and the concrete parsing should done in its derived classes.   public CoffHeader Parse() { using (var br = new BinaryReader(File.Open(_fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))) { SeekToPeSignature(br); if (!IsValidPeSignature(br)) { throw new BadImageFormatException(); } return ParseInternal(br); } } protected abstract CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br);   First we open the BinaryReader, seek to the PE signature then we check if it contains a valid PE signature and rest is done by the derived implementations. Byte4ByteCoffReader The first solution is using the BinaryReader. It is the general way to get the data. We only need to know which order, which data-type and its size. If we read byte for byte we could comment out the first line in the CoffHeader structure, because we have control about the order of the member assignment.   protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { CoffHeader coff = new CoffHeader(); coff.Machine = (MachineType)br.ReadInt16(); coff.NumberOfSections = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.TimeDateStamp = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.PointerToSymbolTable = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.NumberOfSymbols = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.SizeOfOptionalHeader = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.Characteristics = (Characteristic)br.ReadInt16(); return coff; }   If the structure is as short as the COFF header here and the specification will never changed, there is probably no reason to change the strategy. But if a data-type will be changed, a new member will be added or ordering of member will be changed the maintenance costs of this method are very high. UnsafeCoffReader Another way to bring the data into this structure is using a "magically" unsafe trick. As above, we know the layout and order of the data structure. Now, we need the StructLayout attribute, because we have to ensure that the .NET Runtime allocates the structure in the same order as it is specified in the source code. We also need to enable "Allow unsafe code (/unsafe)" in the project's build properties. Then we need to add the following constructor to the CoffHeader structure.   [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { unsafe { fixed (byte* packet = &data[0]) { this = *(CoffHeader*)packet; } } } }   The "magic" trick is in the statement: this = *(CoffHeader*)packet;. What happens here? We have a fixed size of data somewhere in the memory and because a struct in C# is a value-type, the assignment operator = copies the whole data of the structure and not only the reference. To fill the structure with data, we need to pass the data as bytes into the CoffHeader structure. This can be achieved by reading the exact size of the structure from the PE file.   protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { return new CoffHeader(br.ReadBytes(Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)))); }   This solution is the fastest way to parse the data and bring it into the structure, but it is unsafe and it could introduce some security and stability risks. ManagedCoffReader In this solution we are using the same approach of the structure assignment as above. But we need to replace the unsafe part in the constructor with the following managed part:   [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { IntPtr coffPtr = IntPtr.Zero; try { int size = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)); coffPtr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(size); Marshal.Copy(data, 0, coffPtr, size); this = (CoffHeader)Marshal.PtrToStructure(coffPtr, typeof(CoffHeader)); } finally { Marshal.FreeHGlobal(coffPtr); } } }     Conclusion We saw that we can parse well-formed binary data to our data structures using different approaches. The first is probably the clearest way, because we know each member and its size and ordering and we have control about the reading the data for each member. But if add member or the structure is going change by some reason, we need to change the reader. The two other solutions use the approach of the structure assignment. In the unsafe implementation we need to compile the project with the /unsafe option. We increase the performance, but we get some security risks.

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• BNF – how to read syntax?

  - by Piotr Rodak

  A few days ago I read post of Jen McCown (blog) about her idea of blogging about random articles from Books Online. I think this is a great idea, even if Jen says that it’s not exciting or sexy. I noticed that many of the questions that appear on forums and other media arise from pure fact that people asking questions didn’t bother to read and understand the manual – Books Online. Jen came up with a brilliant, concise acronym that describes very well the category of posts about Books Online – RTFM365. I take liberty of tagging this post with the same acronym. I often come across questions of type – ‘Hey, i am trying to create a table, but I am getting an error’. The error often says that the syntax is invalid. 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT DEFAULT Guid_Default NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); 5 The answer is usually(1), ‘Ok, let me check it out.. Ah yes – you have to put name of the DEFAULT constraint before the type of constraint: 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT Guid_Default DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); Why many people stumble on syntax errors? Is the syntax poorly documented? No, the issue is, that correct syntax of the CREATE TABLE statement is documented very well in Books Online and is.. intimidating. Many people can be taken aback by the rather complex block of code that describes all intricacies of the statement. However, I don’t know better way of defining syntax of the statement or command. The notation that is used to describe syntax in Books Online is a form of Backus-Naur notatiion, called BNF for short sometimes. This is a notation that was invented around 50 years ago, and some say that even earlier, around 400 BC – would you believe? Originally it was used to define syntax of, rather ancient now, ALGOL programming language (in 1950’s, not in ancient India). If you look closer at the definition of the BNF, it turns out that the principles of this syntax are pretty simple. Here are a few bullet points: italic_text is a placeholder for your identifier <italic_text_in_angle_brackets> is a definition which is described further. [everything in square brackets] is optional {everything in curly brackets} is obligatory everything | separated | by | operator is an alternative ::= “assigns” definition to an identifier Yes, it looks like these six simple points give you the key to understand even the most complicated syntax definitions in Books Online. Books Online contain an article about syntax conventions – have you ever read it? Let’s have a look at fragment of the CREATE TABLE statement: 1 CREATE TABLE 2 [ database_name . [ schema_name ] . | schema_name . ] table_name 3 ( { <column_definition> | <computed_column_definition> 4 | <column_set_definition> } 5 [ <table_constraint> ] [ ,...n ] ) 6 [ ON { partition_scheme_name ( partition_column_name ) | filegroup 7 | "default" } ] 8 [ { TEXTIMAGE_ON { filegroup | "default" } ] 9 [ FILESTREAM_ON { partition_scheme_name | filegroup 10 | "default" } ] 11 [ WITH ( <table_option> [ ,...n ] ) ] 12 [ ; ] Let’s look at line 2 of the above snippet: This line uses rules 3 and 5 from the list. So you know that you can create table which has specified one of the following. just name – table will be created in default user schema schema name and table name – table will be created in specified schema database name, schema name and table name – table will be created in specified database, in specified schema database name, .., table name – table will be created in specified database, in default schema of the user. Note that this single line of the notation describes each of the naming schemes in deterministic way. The ‘optionality’ of the schema_name element is nested within database_name.. section. You can use either database_name and optional schema name, or just schema name – this is specified by the pipe character ‘|’. The error that user gets with execution of the first script fragment in this post is as follows: Msg 156, Level 15, State 1, Line 2 Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'DEFAULT'. Ok, let’s have a look how to find out the correct syntax. Line number 3 of the BNF fragment above contains reference to <column_definition>. Since column_definition is in angle brackets, we know that this is a reference to notion described further in the code. And indeed, the very next fragment of BNF contains syntax of the column definition. 1 <column_definition> ::= 2 column_name <data_type> 3 [ FILESTREAM ] 4 [ COLLATE collation_name ] 5 [ NULL | NOT NULL ] 6 [ 7 [ CONSTRAINT constraint_name ] DEFAULT constant_expression ] 8 | [ IDENTITY [ ( seed ,increment ) ] [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] 9 ] 10 [ ROWGUIDCOL ] [ <column_constraint> [ ...n ] ] 11 [ SPARSE ] Look at line 7 in the above fragment. It says, that the column can have a DEFAULT constraint which, if you want to name it, has to be prepended with [CONSTRAINT constraint_name] sequence. The name of the constraint is optional, but I strongly recommend you to make the effort of coming up with some meaningful name yourself. So the correct syntax of the CREATE TABLE statement from the beginning of the article is like this: 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT Guid_Default DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); That is practically everything you should know about BNF. I encourage you to study the syntax definitions for various statements and commands in Books Online, you can find really interesting things hidden there. Technorati Tags: SQL Server,t-sql,BNF,syntax   (1) No, my answer usually is a question – ‘What error message? What does it say?’. You’d be surprised to know how many people think I can go through time and space and look at their screen at the moment they received the error.

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• ODI 12c - Parallel Table Load

  - by David Allan

  In this post we will look at the ODI 12c capability of parallel table load from the aspect of the mapping developer and the knowledge module developer - two quite different viewpoints. This is about parallel table loading which isn't to be confused with loading multiple targets per se. It supports the ability for ODI mappings to be executed concurrently especially if there is an overlap of the datastores that they access, so any temporary resources created may be uniquely constructed by ODI. Temporary objects can be anything basically - common examples are staging tables, indexes, views, directories - anything in the ETL to help the data integration flow do its job. In ODI 11g users found a few workarounds (such as changing the technology prefixes - see here) to build unique temporary names but it was more of a challenge in error cases. ODI 12c mappings by default operate exactly as they did in ODI 11g with respect to these temporary names (this is also true for upgraded interfaces and scenarios) but can be configured to support the uniqueness capabilities. We will look at this feature from two aspects; that of a mapping developer and that of a developer (of procedures or KMs). 1. Firstly as a Mapping Developer..... 1.1 Control when uniqueness is enabled A new property is available to set unique name generation on/off. When unique names have been enabled for a mapping, all temporary names used by the collection and integration objects will be generated using unique names. This property is presented as a check-box in the Property Inspector for a deployment specification. 1.2 Handle cleanup after successful execution Provided that all temporary objects that are created have a corresponding drop statement then all of the temporary objects should be removed during a successful execution. This should be the case with the KMs developed by Oracle. 1.3 Handle cleanup after unsuccessful execution If an execution failed in ODI 11g then temporary tables would have been left around and cleaned up in the subsequent run. In ODI 12c, KM tasks can now have a cleanup-type task which is executed even after a failure in the main tasks. These cleanup tasks will be executed even on failure if the property 'Remove Temporary Objects on Error' is set. If the agent was to crash and not be able to execute this task, then there is an ODI tool (OdiRemoveTemporaryObjects here) you can invoke to cleanup the tables - it supports date ranges and the like. That's all there is to it from the aspect of the mapping developer it's much, much simpler and straightforward. You can now execute the same mapping concurrently or execute many mappings using the same resource concurrently without worrying about conflict.  2. Secondly as a Procedure or KM Developer..... In the ODI Operator the executed code shows the actual name that is generated - you can also see the runtime code prior to execution (introduced in 11.1.1.7), for example below in the code type I selected 'Pre-executed Code' this lets you see the code about to be processed and you can also see the executed code (which is the default view). References to the collection (C$) and integration (I$) names will be automatically made unique by using the odiRef APIs - these objects will have unique names whenever concurrency has been enabled for a particular mapping deployment specification. It's also possible to use name uniqueness functions in procedures and your own KMs. 2.1 New uniqueness tags  You can also make your own temporary objects have unique names by explicitly including either %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG in the name passed to calls to the odiRef APIs. Such names would always include the unique tag regardless of the concurrency setting. To illustrate, let's look at the getObjectName() method. At <% expansion time, this API will append %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG to the object name for collection and integration tables. The name parameter passed to this API may contain  %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. This API always generates to the <? version of getObjectName() At execution time this API will replace the unique tag macros with a string that is unique to the current execution scope. The returned name will conform to the name-length restriction for the target technology, and its pattern for the unique tag. Any necessary truncation will be performed against the initial name for the object and any other fixed text that may have been specified. Examples are:- <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "%COL_PRFEMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG", "D")?> SCOTT.C$_EABH7QI1BR1EQI3M76PG9SIMBQQ <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "EMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "D")?> SCOTT.EMPAO96Q2JEKO0FTHQP77TMSAIOSR_ Methods which have this kind of support include getFrom, getTableName, getTable, getObjectShortName and getTemporaryIndex. There are APIs for retrieving this tag info also, the getInfo API has been extended with the following properties (the UNIQUE* properties can also be used in ODI procedures); UNIQUE_STEP_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current step scope, e.g. 5rvmd8hOIy7OU2o1FhsF61 Note that this will be a different value for each loop-iteration when the step is in a loop. UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current session scope, e.g. 6N38vXLrgjwUwT5MseHHY9 IS_CONCURRENT - Returns info about the current mapping, will return 0 or 1 (only in % phase) GUID_SRC_SET - Returns the UUID for the current source set/execution unit (only in % phase) The getPop API has been extended with the IS_CONCURRENT property which returns info about an mapping, will return 0 or 1.  2.2 Additional APIs Some new APIs are provided including getFormattedName which will allow KM developers to construct a name from fixed-text or ODI symbols that can be optionally truncate to a max length and use a specific encoding for the unique tag. It has syntax getFormattedName(String pName[, String pTechnologyCode]) This API is available at both the % and the ? phase.  The format string can contain the ODI prefixes that are available for getObjectName(), e.g. %INT_PRF, %COL_PRF, %ERR_PRF, %IDX_PRF alongwith %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. The latter tags will be expanded into a unique string according to the specified technology. Calls to this API within the same execution context are guaranteed to return the same unique name provided that the same parameters are passed to the call. e.g. <%=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")%> <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")?> C$_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB_AE <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG.log", "FILE")?> C2_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB.log 2.3 Name length generation  As part of name generation, the length of the generated name will be compared with the maximum length for the target technology and truncation may need to be applied. When a unique tag is included in the generated string it is important that uniqueness is not compromised by truncation of the unique tag. When a unique tag is NOT part of the generated name, the name will be truncated by removing characters from the end - this is the existing 11g algorithm. When a unique tag is included, the algorithm will first truncate the <postfix> and if necessary  the <prefix>. It is recommended that users will ensure there is sufficient uniqueness in the <prefix> section to ensure uniqueness of the final resultant name. SUMMARY To summarize, ODI 12c make it much simpler to utilize mappings in concurrent cases and provides APIs for helping developing any procedures or custom knowledge modules in such a way they can be used in highly concurrent, parallel scenarios. 

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• Building Great-Looking, Usable Apps: A two-day workshop applying Oracle’s best UX practices in ADF

  - by mvaughan

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User ExperienceI have been with Oracle for more than 12 years. It is a company that has granted me extraordinary creative freedom to help deliver compelling experiences for customers.I am beyond proud to talk about one of the experiences we just took for a test drive. Recently, we delivered a first-of-its-kind, three-team collaboration, train-the-trainer event in Reading, U.K., on building great-looking, usable apps based on Oracle Fusion Applications -- using the ADF tool kit. A new kind of workshopKevin Li, Platform Product Director, asked the Oracle Applications User Experience VP, Jeremy Ashley, if the team had anything to help partners and customers build applications that looked like Fusion. He was receiving this request from European partners and customers.Some quick conversations ensued, and the idea for the workshop was born: We would conduct an experiment.  We would work with feedback from the key Platform Technology Solutions (PTS) trainers under Andre Pavanello, Director, Platform Technology Solutions, in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We would partner with the ADF team lead by Grant Ronald, Director of Product Management, title> and leverage the Applications UX expertise in Ashley’s team.The goal: Create a pilot workshop that in two days would explain to an ADF developer how to leverage the next-generation user experience best-practices developed for Fusion Apps. Why? Customers who need integrations with Oracle Fusion Applications, who are looking for custom applications that need to co-exist with Fusion, or who quite simply want a next-generation design for a custom app, need their solutions to reflect the next-generation research and design.Building an event for an ADF developerThe biggest hurdle was figuring out where to start.  How far into user experience country do you take an ADF developer? How far into ADF do you need to go if you are a UX professional?After some time in the UX kitchen, the workshop recipe looked like this: Mix equal parts: Fusion user experience design principles and functional design patterns The art and science behind UX How to wireframe designs that you can build in Fusion How to translate those designs into an ADF application Ultan O’Broin, Director of Global User Experience, explaining the trouble ticket wireframe design exerciseLynn Munsinger, Senior Group Product Manager, explaining the follow-on trouble ticket ADF coding exercise For spice, add:•    Debra Lilley, Fujitsu and ACE director, showcasing some of the latest ADF design work in the new face of Fusion Applications •    Partner show-and-tell of example apps they have built with FMW and ADF that are dynamic, beautiful, and interactive.Debra Lilley, Oracle ACE Director and Fujitsu Fusion Champion on the new face of Fusion built with ADF and Fusion extensibility with composers as a window into “the possible”?The taste testThis first go-round of the workshop was aimed squarely at ADF developers and partners.  We were privileged to have participation and feedback from:•    Sten Vesterli, Scott/Tiger S. A., Denmark•    John Sim, Fishbowl Solutions, UK•    Josef Huber, Primus Delphi Group, Munich•    Thaddaus Weindl, Primus Delphi, Group , Munich•    Praveen Pillalamarri, EiS Technologies, Bangalore•    Balaji Kamepalli, EiS Technologies, Bangalore•    Plinio Arbizu, Services & Processes Solutions S. A., Mexico•    Yannick Ongena, infoMENTUM, UK•    Jakub Ciszek, infoMENTUM, UK•    Mauro Flores, infoMENTUM, UK•    Matteo Formica, infoMENTUM, UKRichard Bingham, Oracle, Mauro Flores and Matteo Formica, infoMENTUMWhy is this so exciting?  Oracle has invested heavily in the research and development of the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience. This investment has been and continues to be applied across the product lines. Now, we finally get to teach customers and partners how to take advantage of this investment for custom solutions.This event was a pilot to test-drive the content, as well as a train-the-trainer event that our EMEA colleagues will be using with partners who want to build with Fusion Apps design patterns.What did attendees think?"I liked most the science stuff, like eye-tracking, design patterns and best-practice (color, contrast),” Josef Huber said. “It was a very good introduction to UI design, and most developers and project managers are very bad in that.  So this course would be good for all developers and even project managers." Team Anonymous: John Sim, Fishbowl Solutions, Flavius Sana, Oracle, Josef Huber, infoMENTUM, Mireille Duroussaud, Oracle. Winners of the wireframing design exercise.  Sten Vesterli, of Scott/Tiger, said he attended to learn techniques he could use in his own projects. He wants to ensure that his applications better meet the needs of his users, and he said sessions during the workshop on user interface design and wireframing were most useful to him.  “Go to this event to learn the art and science of good user interfaces from people who really know how to do it,” he said.Sten Vesterli, Scott/Tiger, Angelo Santagata, Oracle Plinio Arbizu said the workshop fulfilled his goals, thanks to the recommendations given in how to design user interfaces to facilitate the adoption of applications among the final users. “The workshop combined these recommendations with an exercise that improved the technical comprehension, permitting the usage of JDeveloper to set forth our solutions,” he said. He added: “The first session that I really enjoyed was the five Fusion design principles. It was incredible to discover how these simple principles were included in an inherit manner in Fusion Applications, and I had been using many of them applying only ADF components.  Another topic that I enjoyed a lot was the eight recommendations about the visual design of UIs. The issues that were raised in that lesson are unknown to the developers and of great value to achieve an attractive presentation layer to the end users.  Participate in this workshop, and include these usability features in your projects and in this manner not only to facilitate and improve the user productivity, but also to distinguish you as a professional who takes advantage fully of the functionalities offered by Oracle technology. Praveen Pillalamarri came to the workshop to learn about the difficulties faced in UI and UX development, and how this can be resolved with the help of ADF.  He also appreciated the opportunity to talk with other individuals who came to the workshop. Pillalmarri said, “The way we looked at things in terms of work and projects were sharpened.  UI and UX design knowledge shared by you was quite interesting, especially the minute things which we ignored in the UI or UX design.” Plinio Arbizu, Services & Processes Solutions S. A., Richard Bingham, Oracle, Balaji Kamepalli, & Praveen Pillalamarri, EiS TechnologiesReady to spread the wordIn EMEA, Oracle customers and partners have access to three world-class trainers via Platform Technology Solutions: Mireille Duroussaud, Flavius Sana, and Angelo Santagata. Contact Andre Pavanello if you like to experience this workshop firsthand, or you have customers or partners who would benefit from the training.We are looking to bring the event to the U.S. in spring 2013. If you have interest in this kind of a workshop, leave a comment below. For those who want to follow the action, join the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group run by Oracle’s Chris Muir. Ask questions and continue with the conversation in this forum, or check blogs.oracle.com/usableapps for topics emerging from the workshop.

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• Flashing your Windows Phone Dummies

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  The rate at which vendors release new updates for the HD2 is ridiculously slow. You have to wait for Microsoft to release the new OS, then you wait for HTC to build it into a ROM, and then you have to wait up to 6 months for your operator to badly customise it for their network. Once Windows Phone 7 is released this problem should go away as Microsoft is likely to be able to update the phone over the air, but what do we do until then? I want Windows Mobile 6.5.5 now!   I’m an early adopter. If there is a new version of something then that’s the version I want. As long as you accept that you are using something on a “let the early adopter beware” and accept that there may be bugs, sometimes serious crippling bugs the go for it. Note that I won't be responsible if you end up bricking your phone, unlocking or flashing your radio or ROM can be risky. If you follow the instructions then you should be fine, I've flashed my phones (SPV, M300, M1000, M2000, M3100, TyTN, TyTN 2, HD2) hundreds of times without any problems! I have been using Windows Mobile 6.5.5 before it was called 6.5.5 and for long enough that I don’t even remember when I first started using it. I was using it on my HTC TyTN 2 before I got an HD2 a couple of months before Christmas, and the first custom ROM’s for the HD2 were a couple of months after that. I always update to the latest ROM that I like, and occasionally I go back to the stock ROM’s to have a look see, but I am always disappointed. Terms: Soft Reset: Same as pulling out the battery, but is like a reboot for your phone Hard Reset: Reinstalls the Operating system from the Image that is stored on it ROM: This is Image that is loaded onto your phone and it is used to reinstall your phone whenever you do a “hard reset”. Stock ROM: A ROM from the original vendor… So HTC Cook a ROM: Referring to Cooking a ROM is the process a ROM developer goes through to take all of the parts (OS, Drivers and Applications) that make up a running phone and compiling them into a ROM. ROM Kitchen: A place where you get an SDK and all the component parts of the phone: OD, Drivers and Application. There are usually lots of Tools for making it easier to compile and build the image. Flashing: The process of updating one of the layers of your phone with a new layer Bricked: This is what happens when flashing goes wrong. Your phone is now good for only one thing… stopping paper blowing away in a windy place. You can “cook” you own ROM using one of the many good “ROM Kitchens” or you can use a ROM built and tested by someone else. I have cooked my own ROM before, and while the tutorials are good, it is a lot of hassle. You can only Flash new ROM’s that are specifically for your phone only so find a ROM for your phone and XDA Developers is the best place to look. It has a forum based structure and you can find your phone quite easily. XDA Developer Forum Installing a new ROM does have its risks. In the past there have been stories about phones being “bricked” but I have not heard of a bricked phone for quite some years. if you follow the instructions carefully you should not have any problems. note: Most of the tools are written by people for whom English is not their first language to you will need concentrate hard to understand some of the instructions. Have you ever read a manual that was just literally translated from another language? Enough said… There are a number of layers on your phone that you will need to know about: SPL: This is the lowest level, like a BIOS on a PC and is the Operating Systems gateway to the hardware Radio: I think of this as the hardware drivers, and you will need a different Radio for CDMA than GSM networks ROM: This is like your Windows CD, but it is stored internally to the Phone. Flashing your phone consists of replacing one Image with another and then wiping your phone and automatically reinstall from the Image. Sometimes when you download an Image wither it is for a Radio or for ROM you only get a file called *.nbh. What do you do with this? Well you need an RUU application to push that Image to your phone. The RUU’s are different per phone, but there is a CustomRUU for the HD2 that will update your phone with any *.nbh placed in the same directory. Download and Instructions for CustomRUU #1 Flash HardSPL An SPL is kind of like a BIOS, and the default one has checks to make sure that you are only installing a signed ROM. This would prevent you from installing one that comes from any other source but the vendor. NOTE: Installing a HARD SPL invalidates your warranty so remember to Flash your phone with a “stock” vendor ROM before trying to send your phone in for repairs. Is the warranty reinstated when you go back to a stock ROM? I don’t know… Updating your SPL to a HardSPL effectively unlocks your phone so you can install anything you like. I would recommend the HardSPL2. Download and Instructions for HardSPL2 #2 Task29 One of the problems that has been seen on the HD2 when flashing new ROM’s is that things are left over from the old ROM. For a while the recommendation was to Flash a stock ROM first, but some clever cookies have come up with “Task29” which formats your phone first. After running this your phone will be blank and will only boot to the white HTC logo and no further. You should follow the instructions and reboot (remove battery) and hold down the “volume down” button while turning you HD2 on to enter the bootloader. From here you can run CustomRUU once the USB message appears. Download and Instructions for Task29 #2 Flash Radio You may need to play around with this one, there is no good and bad version and the latest is not always the best. You know that annoying thing when you hit “end call” on your phone and nothing happens? Well that's down to the Radio. Get this version right for you and you may even be able to make calls. From a Windows Mobile as well Download There are no instructions here, but they are the same as th ROM, but you use this *.nbh file. #3 Flash ROM If you have gotten this far then you are probably a pro by now Just download the latest ROM below and Flash to your phone. I have been really impressed by the Artemis line of ROM’s but it is no way the only choice. I like this one as the developer builds them as close to the stock ROM as possible while updating to the latest of everything. Download and Instructions for  Artemis HD2 vXX Conclusion While updating your ROM is not for the faint hearted it provides more options than the Stock ROM’s and quicker feature updates than waiting… Technorati Tags: WM6

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• Integrating Flickr with ASP.Net application

  - by sreejukg

  Flickr is the popular photo management and sharing application offered by yahoo. The services from flicker allow you to store and share photos and videos online. Flicker offers strong API support for almost all services they provide. Using this API, developers can integrate photos to their public website. Since 2005, developers have collaborated on top of Flickr's APIs to build fun, creative, and gorgeous experiences around photos that extend beyond Flickr. In this article I am going to demonstrate how easily you can bring the photos stored on flicker to your website. Let me explain the scenario this article is trying to address. I have a flicker account where I upload photos and share in many ways offered by Flickr. Now I have a public website, instead of re-upload the photos again to public website, I want to show this from Flickr. Also I need complete control over what photo to display. So I went and referred the Flickr documentation and there is API support ready to address my scenario (and more… ). FlickerAPI for ASP.Net To Integrate Flicker with ASP.Net applications, there is a library available in CodePlex. You can find it here http://flickrnet.codeplex.com/ Visit the URL and download the latest version. The download includes a Zip file, when you unzip you will get a number of dlls. Since I am going to use ASP.Net application, I need FlickrNet.dll. See the screenshot of all the dlls, and there is a help file available in the download (.chm) for your reference. Once you have the dll, you need to use Flickr API from your website. I assume you have a flicker account and you are familiar with Flicker services. Arrange your photos using Sets in Flickr In flicker, you can define sets and add your uploaded photos to sets. You can compare set to photo album. A set is a logical collection of photos, which is an excellent option for you to categorize your photos. Typically you will have a number of sets each set having few photos. You can write application that brings photos from sets to your website. For the purpose of this article I already created a set Flickr and added some photos to it. Once you logged in to Flickr, you can see the Sets under the Menu. In the Sets page, you will see all the sets you have created. As you notice, you can see certain sample images I have uploaded just to test the functionality. Though I wish I couldn’t create good photos so please bear with me. I have created 2 photo sets named Blue Album and Red Album. Click on the image for the set, will take you to the corresponding set page. In the set “Red Album” there are 4 photos and the set has a unique ID (highlighted in the URL). You can simply retrieve the photos with the set id from your application. In this article I am going to retrieve the images from Red album in my ASP.Net page. For that First I need to setup FlickrAPI for my usage. Configure Flickr API Key As I mentioned, we are going to use Flickr API to retrieve the photos stored in Flickr. In order to get access to Flickr API, you need an API key. To create an API key, navigate to the URL http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/ Click on Request an API key link, now you need to tell Flickr whether your application in commercial or non-commercial. I have selected a non-commercial key. Now you need to enter certain information about your application. Once you enter the details, Click on the submit button. Now Flickr will create the API key for your application. Generating non-commercial API key is very easy, in couple of steps the key will be generated and you can use the key in your application immediately. ASP.Net application for retrieving photos Now we need write an ASP.Net application that display pictures from Flickr. Create an empty web application (I named this as FlickerIntegration) and add a reference to FlickerNet.dll. Add a web form page to the application where you will retrieve and display photos(I have named this as Gallery.aspx). After doing all these, the solution explorer will look similar to following. I have used the below code in the Gallery.aspx page. The output for the above code is as follows. I am going to explain the code line by line here. First it is adding a reference to the FlickrNet namespace. using FlickrNet; Then create a Flickr object by using your API key. Flickr f = new Flickr("<yourAPIKey>"); Now when you retrieve photos, you can decide what all fields you need to retrieve from Flickr. Every photo in Flickr contains lots of information. Retrieving all will affect the performance. For the demonstration purpose, I have retrieved all the available fields as follows. PhotoSearchExtras.All But if you want to specify the fields you can use logical OR operator(|). For e.g. the following statement will retrieve owner name and date taken. PhotoSearchExtras extraInfo = PhotoSearchExtras.OwnerName | PhotoSearchExtras.DateTaken; Then retrieve all the photos from a photo set using PhotoSetsGetPhotos method. I have passed the PhotoSearchExtras object created earlier. PhotosetPhotoCollection photos = f.PhotosetsGetPhotos("72157629872940852", extraInfo); The PhotoSetsGetPhotos method will return a collection of Photo objects. You can just navigate through the collection using a foreach statement. foreach (Photo p in photos) {     //access each photo properties } Photo class have lot of properties that map with the properties from Flickr. The chm documentation comes along with the CodePlex download is a great asset for you to understand the fields. In the above code I just used the following p.LargeUrl – retrieves the large image url for the photo. p.ThumbnailUrl – retrieves the thumbnail url for the photo p.Title – retrieves the Title of the photo p.DateUploaded – retrieves the date of upload Visual Studio intellisense will give you all properties, so it is easy, you can just try with Visual Studio intellisense to find the right properties you are looking for. Most of hem are self-explanatory. So you can try retrieving the required properties. In the above code, I just pushed the photos to the page. In real time you can use the retrieved photos along with JQuery libraries to create animated photo galleries, slideshows etc. Configuration and Troubleshooting If you get access denied error while executing the code, you need to disable the caching in Flickr API. FlickrNet cache the photos to your local disk when retrieved. You can specify a cache folder where the application need write permission. You can specify the Cache folder in the code as follows. Flickr.CacheLocation = Server.MapPath("./FlickerCache/"); If the application doesn’t have have write permission to the cache folder, the application will throw access denied error. If you cannot give write permission to the cache folder, then you must disable the caching. You can do this from code as follows. Flickr.CacheDisabled = true; Disabling cache will have an impact on the performance. Take care! Also you can define the Flickr settings in web.config file.You can find the documentation here. http://flickrnet.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=ExampleConfigFile&ProjectName=flickrnet Flickr is a great place for storing and sharing photos. The API access allows developers to do seamless integration with the photos uploaded on Flickr.

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• AdvancedFormatProvider: Making string.format do more

  - by plblum

  When I have an integer that I want to format within the String.Format() and ToString(format) methods, I’m always forgetting the format symbol to use with it. That’s probably because its not very intuitive. Use {0:N0} if you want it with group (thousands) separators. text = String.Format("{0:N0}", 1000); // returns "1,000"   int value1 = 1000; text = value1.ToString("N0"); Use {0:D} or {0:G} if you want it without group separators. text = String.Format("{0:D}", 1000); // returns "1000"   int value2 = 1000; text2 = value2.ToString("D"); The {0:D} is especially confusing because Microsoft gives the token the name “Decimal”. I thought it reasonable to have a new format symbol for String.Format, "I" for integer, and the ability to tell it whether it shows the group separators. Along the same lines, why not expand the format symbols for currency ({0:C}) and percent ({0:P}) to let you omit the currency or percent symbol, omit the group separator, and even to drop the decimal part when the value is equal to the whole number? My solution is an open source project called AdvancedFormatProvider, a group of classes that provide the new format symbols, continue to support the rest of the native symbols and makes it easy to plug in additional format symbols. Please visit https://github.com/plblum/AdvancedFormatProvider to learn about it in detail and explore how its implemented. The rest of this post will explore some of the concepts it takes to expand String.Format() and ToString(format). AdvancedFormatProvider benefits: Supports {0:I} token for integers. It offers the {0:I-,} option to omit the group separator. Supports {0:C} token with several options. {0:C-$} omits the currency symbol. {0:C-,} omits group separators, and {0:C-0} hides the decimal part when the value would show “.00”. For example, 1000.0 becomes “$1000” while 1000.12 becomes “$1000.12”. Supports {0:P} token with several options. {0:P-%} omits the percent symbol. {0:P-,} omits group separators, and {0:P-0} hides the decimal part when the value would show “.00”. For example, 1 becomes “100 %” while 1.1223 becomes “112.23 %”. Provides a plug in framework that lets you create new formatters to handle specific format symbols. You register them globally so you can just pass the AdvancedFormatProvider object into String.Format and ToString(format) without having to figure out which plug ins to add. text = String.Format(AdvancedFormatProvider.Current, "{0:I}", 1000); // returns "1,000" text2 = String.Format(AdvancedFormatProvider.Current, "{0:I-,}", 1000); // returns "1000" text3 = String.Format(AdvancedFormatProvider.Current, "{0:C-$-,}", 1000.0); // returns "1000.00" The IFormatProvider parameter Microsoft has made String.Format() and ToString(format) format expandable. They each take an additional parameter that takes an object that implements System.IFormatProvider. This interface has a single member, the GetFormat() method, which returns an object that knows how to convert the format symbol and value into the desired string. There are already a number of web-based resources to teach you about IFormatProvider and the companion interface ICustomFormatter. I’ll defer to them if you want to dig more into the topic. The only thing I want to point out is what I think are implementation considerations. Why GetFormat() always tests for ICustomFormatter When you see examples of implementing IFormatProviders, the GetFormat() method always tests the parameter against the ICustomFormatter type. Why is that? public object GetFormat(Type formatType) { if (formatType == typeof(ICustomFormatter)) return this; else return null; } The value of formatType is already predetermined by the .net framework. String.Format() uses the StringBuilder.AppendFormat() method to parse the string, extracting the tokens and calling GetFormat() with the ICustomFormatter type. (The .net framework also calls GetFormat() with the types of System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo and System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo but these are exclusive to how the System.Globalization.CultureInfo class handles its implementation of IFormatProvider.) Your code replaces instead of expands I would have expected the caller to pass in the format string to GetFormat() to allow your code to determine if it handles the request. My vision would be to return null when the format string is not supported. The caller would iterate through IFormatProviders until it finds one that handles the format string. Unfortunatley that is not the case. The reason you write GetFormat() as above is because the caller is expecting an object that handles all formatting cases. You are effectively supposed to write enough code in your formatter to handle your new cases and call .net functions (like String.Format() and ToString(format)) to handle the original cases. Its not hard to support the native functions from within your ICustomFormatter.Format function. Just test the format string to see if it applies to you. If not, call String.Format() with a token using the format passed in. public string Format(string format, object arg, IFormatProvider formatProvider) { if (format.StartsWith("I")) { // handle "I" formatter } else return String.Format(formatProvider, "{0:" + format + "}", arg); } Formatters are only used by explicit request Each time you write a custom formatter (implementer of ICustomFormatter), it is not used unless you explicitly passed an IFormatProvider object that supports your formatter into String.Format() or ToString(). This has several disadvantages: Suppose you have several ICustomFormatters. In order to have all available to String.Format() and ToString(format), you have to merge their code and create an IFormatProvider to return an instance of your new class. You have to remember to utilize the IFormatProvider parameter. Its easy to overlook, especially when you have existing code that calls String.Format() without using it. Some APIs may call String.Format() themselves. If those APIs do not offer an IFormatProvider parameter, your ICustomFormatter will not be available to them. The AdvancedFormatProvider solves the first two of these problems by providing a plug-in architecture.

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• SQL Server Master class winner

  - by Testas

   The winner of the SQL Server MasterClass competition courtesy of the UK SQL Server User Group and SQL Server Magazine!    Steve Hindmarsh     There is still time to register for the seminar yourself at:  www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql     More information about the seminar     Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, London  When: Thursday 17th June 2010  This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance. The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will: Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour    Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data    Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Please Note: Agenda may be subject to change  Sessions Abstracts  KEYNOTE: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Production    Applications are commonly developed with little regard for how design choices will affect performance in production. This is often because developers don't realize the implications of their design on how SQL Server will be able to handle a high workload (e.g. blocking, fragmentation) and/or because there's no full-time trained DBA that can recognize production problems and help educate developers. The keynote sets the stage for the rest of the day. Discussing some of the issues that can arise, explaining how some can be avoided and highlighting some of the features in SQL 2008 that can help developers and DBAs make better use of SQL Server, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.   SESSION ONE: SQL Server Mythbusters  It's amazing how many myths and misconceptions have sprung up and persisted over the years about SQL Server - after many years helping people out on forums, newsgroups, and customer engagements, Paul and Kimberly have heard it all. Are there really non-logged operations? Can interrupting shrinks or rebuilds cause corruption? Can you override the server's MAXDOP setting? Will the server always do a table-scan to get a row count? Many myths lead to poor design choices and inappropriate maintenance practices so these are just a few of many, many myths that Paul and Kimberly will debunk in this fast-paced session on how SQL Server operates and should be managed and maintained.   SESSION TWO: Database Recovery Techniques Demo-Fest  Even if a company has a disaster recovery strategy in place, they need to practice to make sure that the plan will work when a disaster does strike. In this fast-paced demo session Paul and Kimberly will repeatedly do nasty things to databases and then show how they are recovered - demonstrating many techniques that can be used in production for disaster recovery. Not for the faint-hearted!   SESSION THREE: GUIDs: Use, Abuse, and How To Move Forward   Since the addition of the GUID (Microsoft’s implementation of the UUID), my life as a consultant and "tuner" has been busy. I’ve seen databases designed with GUID keys run fairly well with small workloads but completely fall over and fail because they just cannot scale. And, I know why GUIDs are chosen - it simplifies the handling of parent/child rows in your batches so you can reduce round-trips or avoid dealing with identity values. And, yes, sometimes it's even for distributed databases and/or security that GUIDs are chosen. I'm not entirely against ever using a GUID but overusing and abusing GUIDs just has to be stopped! Please, please, please let me give you better solutions and explanations on how to deal with your parent/child rows, round-trips and clustering keys!   SESSION 4: Essential Database Maintenance  In this session, Paul and Kimberly will run you through their top-ten database maintenance recommendations, with a lot of tips and tricks along the way. These are distilled from almost 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server customers and are geared towards making your databases more performant, more available, and more easily managed (to save you time!). Everything in this session will be practical and applicable to a wide variety of databases. Topics covered include: backups, shrinks, fragmentation, statistics, and much more! Focus will be on 2005 but we'll explain some of the key differences for 2000 and 2008 as well. Speaker Biographies     Kimberley L. Tripp Paul and Kimberly are a husband-and-wife team who own and run SQLskills.com, a world-renowned SQL Server consulting and training company. They are both SQL Server MVPs and Microsoft Regional Directors, with over 30 years of combined experience on SQL Server. Paul worked on the SQL Server team for nine years in development and management roles, writing many of the DBCC commands, and ultimately with responsibility for core Storage Engine for SQL Server 2008. Paul writes extensively on his blog (SQLskills.com/blogs/Paul) and for TechNet Magazine, for which he is also a Contributing Editor. Kimberly worked on the SQL Server team in the early 1990s as a tester and writer before leaving to found SQLskills and embrace her passion for teaching and consulting. Kimberly has been a staple at worldwide conferences since she first presented at TechEd in 1996, and she blogs at SQLskills.com/blogs/Kimberly. They have written Microsoft whitepapers and books for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, and are regular, top-rated presenters worldwide on database maintenance, high availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and SQL Server internals. Together they teach the SQL MCM certification and throughout Microsoft.In their spare time, they like to find frogfish in remote corners of the world.   Speaker Testimonials  "To call them good trainers is an epic understatement. They know how to deliver technical material in ways that illustrate it well. I had to stop Paul at one point and ask him how long it took to build a particular slide because the animations were so good at conveying a hard-to-describe process." "These are not beginner presenters, and they put an extreme amount of preparation and attention to detail into everything that they do. Completely, utterly professional." "When it comes to the instructors themselves, Kimberly and Paul simply have no equal. Not only are they both ultimate authorities, but they have endless enthusiasm about the material, and spot on delivery. If either ever got tired they never showed it, even after going all day and all week. We witnessed countless demos over the course of the week, some extremely involved, multi-step processes, and I can’t recall one that didn’t go the way it was supposed to." "You might think that with this extreme level of skill comes extreme levels of egotism and lack of patience. Nothing could be further from the truth. ... They simply know how to teach, and are approachable, humble, and patient." "The experience Paul and Kimberly have had with real live customers yields a lot more information and things to watch out for than you'd ever get from documentation alone." “Kimberly, I just wanted to send you an email to let you know how awesome you are! I have applied some of your indexing strategies to our website’s homegrown CMS and we are experiencing a significant performance increase. WOW....amazing tips delivered in an exciting way!  Thanks again” 

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• Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

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

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• Coming to OpenWorld? A must attend session…

  - by Ruma Sanyal

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE NTT Docomo, Inc. is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. The name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, "do communications over the mobile network", and is also from a compound word dokomo, meaning "everywhere" in Japanese.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-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-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} One of the most important of NTT Docomo’s systems is ALADIN, which is a nationwide operating system shared with its eight regional subsidiaries. ALADIN has five primary functions: customer management, phone number management, information processing and storage, sales information management, and credit investigation. To enhance cost efficiency and help ensure stable operation of ALADIN, NTT Docomo has employed Oracle WebLogic Server as a new application platform. Further information on this can be found here. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-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-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Last year at OpenWorld, NTT Docomo was honored as an Innovation Award Winner for: · Implementing real time sales and contract management system enabling all services requested by customers for immediate activations before customer leaves the Docomo store · A robust disaster recovery strategy, room to grow the business, and ability to move custom Java development to a platform with built in standards - WebLogic · Better performance, better reliability, better stability, and smooth migration v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-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-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet This Year's Most Impressive Innovators! This year we continue to honor customers for their most innovative and cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Join us in celebrating award recipients’ great achievements and commitment to innovation.   Oracle Fusion Middleware: Meet This Year's Most Impressive Innovators Session ID: CON7029 Tuesday September 30, 2014 @ 5-5:45 pm (PST) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts  YBCA Theater (next to Moscone North) 700 Howard St., San Francisco, CA, 94103 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-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-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Networking in VirtualBox

  - by Fat Bloke

  Networking in VirtualBox is extremely powerful, but can also be a bit daunting, so here's a quick overview of the different ways you can setup networking in VirtualBox, with a few pointers as to which configurations should be used and when. VirtualBox allows you to configure up to 8 virtual NICs (Network Interface Controllers) for each guest vm (although only 4 are exposed in the GUI) and for each of these NICs you can configure: Which virtualized NIC-type is exposed to the Guest. Examples include: Intel PRO/1000 MT Server (82545EM),  AMD PCNet FAST III (Am79C973, the default) or  a Paravirtualized network adapter (virtio-net). How the NIC operates with respect to your Host's physical networking. The main modes are: Network Address Translation (NAT) Bridged networking Internal networking Host-only networking NAT with Port-forwarding The choice of NIC-type comes down to whether the guest has drivers for that NIC.  VirtualBox, suggests a NIC based on the guest OS-type that you specify during creation of the vm, and you rarely need to modify this. But the choice of networking mode depends on how you want to use your vm (client or server) and whether you want other machines on your network to see it. So let's look at each mode in a bit more detail... Network Address Translation (NAT) This is the default mode for new vm's and works great in most situations when the Guest is a "client" type of vm. (i.e. most network connections are outbound). Here's how it works: When the guest OS boots,  it typically uses DHCP to get an IP address. VirtualBox will field this DHCP request and tell the guest OS its assigned IP address and the gateway address for routing outbound connections. In this mode, every vm is assigned the same IP address (10.0.2.15) because each vm thinks they are on their own isolated network. And when they send their traffic via the gateway (10.0.2.2) VirtualBox rewrites the packets to make them appear as though they originated from the Host, rather than the Guest (running inside the Host). This means that the Guest will work even as the Host moves from network to network (e.g. laptop moving between locations), and from wireless to wired connections too. However, how does another computer initiate a connection into a Guest?  e.g. connecting to a web server running in the Guest. This is not (normally) possible using NAT mode as there is no route into the Guest OS. So for vm's running servers we need a different networking mode.... Bridged Networking Bridged Networking is used when you want your vm to be a full network citizen, i.e. to be an equal to your host machine on the network. In this mode, a virtual NIC is "bridged" to a physical NIC on your host, like this: The effect of this is that each VM has access to the physical network in the same way as your host. It can access any service on the network such as external DHCP services, name lookup services, and routing information just as the host does. Logically, the network looks like this: The downside of this mode is that if you run many vm's you can quickly run out of IP addresses or your network administrator gets fed up with you asking for statically assigned IP addresses. Secondly, if your host has multiple physical NICs (e.g. Wireless and Wired) you must reconfigure the bridge when your host jumps networks.  Hmm, so what if you want to run servers in vm's but don't want to involve your network administrator? Maybe one of the next 2 modes is for you... Internal Networking When you configure one or more vm's to sit on an Internal network, VirtualBox ensures that all traffic on that network stays within the host and is only visible to vm's on that virtual network. Configuration looks like this: The internal network ( in this example "intnet" ) is a totally isolated network and so is very "quiet". This is good for testing when you need a separate, clean network, and you can create sophisticated internal networks with vm's that provide their own services to the internal network. (e.g. Active Directory, DHCP, etc). Note that not even the Host is a member of the internal network, but this mode allows vm's to function even when the Host is not connected to a network (e.g. on a plane). Note that in this mode, VirtualBox provides no "convenience" services such as DHCP, so your machines must be statically configured or one of the vm's needs to provide a DHCP/Name service. Multiple internal networks are possible and you can configure vm's to have multiple NICs to sit across internal and other network modes and thereby provide routes if needed. But all this sounds tricky. What if you want an Internal Network that the host participates on with VirtualBox providing IP addresses to the Guests? Ah, then for this, you might want to consider Host-only Networking... Host-only Networking Host-only Networking is like Internal Networking in that you indicate which network the Guest sits on, in this case, "vboxnet0": All vm's sitting on this "vboxnet0" network will see each other, and additionally, the host can see these vm's too. However, other external machines cannot see Guests on this network, hence the name "Host-only". Logically, the network looks like this: This looks very similar to Internal Networking but the host is now on "vboxnet0" and can provide DHCP services. To configure how a Host-only network behaves, look in the VirtualBox Manager...Preferences...Network dialog: Port-Forwarding with NAT Networking Now you may think that we've provided enough modes here to handle every eventuality but here's just one more... What if you cart around a mobile-demo or dev environment on, say, a laptop and you have one or more vm's that you need other machines to connect into? And you are continually hopping onto different (customer?) networks. In this scenario: NAT - won't work because external machines need to connect in. Bridged - possibly an option, but does your customer want you eating IP addresses and can your software cope with changing networks? Internal - we need the vm(s) to be visible on the network, so this is no good. Host-only - same problem as above, we want external machines to connect in to the vm's. Enter Port-forwarding to save the day! Configure your vm's to use NAT networking; Add Port Forwarding rules; External machines connect to "host":"port number" and connections are forwarded by VirtualBox to the guest:port number specified. For example, if your vm runs a web server on port 80, you could set up rules like this:  ...which reads: "any connections on port 8080 on the Host will be forwarded onto this vm's port 80".  This provides a mobile demo system which won't need re-configuring every time you open your laptop lid. Summary VirtualBox has a very powerful set of options allowing you to set up almost any configuration your heart desires. For more information, check out the VirtualBox User Manual on Virtual Networking. -FB 

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• Using SQL Execution Plans to discover the Swedish alphabet

  - by Rob Farley

  SQL Server is quite remarkable in a bunch of ways. In this post, I’m using the way that the Query Optimizer handles LIKE to keep it SARGable, the Execution Plans that result, Collations, and PowerShell to come up with the Swedish alphabet. SARGability is the ability to seek for items in an index according to a particular set of criteria. If you don’t have SARGability in play, you need to scan the whole index (or table if you don’t have an index). For example, I can find myself in the phonebook easily, because it’s sorted by LastName and I can find Farley in there by moving to the Fs, and so on. I can’t find everyone in my suburb easily, because the phonebook isn’t sorted that way. I can’t even find people who have six letters in their last name, because also the book is sorted by LastName, it’s not sorted by LEN(LastName). This is all stuff I’ve looked at before, including in the talk I gave at SQLBits in October 2010. If I try to find everyone who’s names start with F, I can do that using a query a bit like: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F'; Unfortunately, the Query Optimizer doesn’t realise that all the entries that satisfy LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F' will be together, and it has to scan the whole table to find them. But if I write: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LastName LIKE 'F%'; then SQL is smart enough to understand this, and performs an Index Seek instead. To see why, I look further into the plan, in particular, the properties of the Index Seek operator. The ToolTip shows me what I’m after: You’ll see that it does a Seek to find any entries that are at least F, but not yet G. There’s an extra Predicate in there (a Residual Predicate if you like), which checks that each LastName is really LIKE F% – I suppose it doesn’t consider that the Seek Predicate is quite enough – but most of the benefit is seen by its working out the Seek Predicate, filtering to just the “at least F but not yet G” section of the data. This got me curious though, particularly about where the G comes from, and whether I could leverage it to create the Swedish alphabet. I know that in the Swedish language, there are three extra letters that appear at the end of the alphabet. One of them is ä that appears in the word Västerås. It turns out that Västerås is quite hard to find in an index when you’re looking it up in a Swedish map. I talked about this briefly in my five-minute talk on Collation from SQLPASS (the one which was slightly less than serious). So by looking at the plan, I can work out what the next letter is in the alphabet of the collation used by the column. In other words, if my alphabet were Swedish, I’d be able to tell what the next letter after F is – just in case it’s not G. It turns out it is… Yes, the Swedish letter after F is G. But I worked this out by using a copy of my PhoneBook table that used the Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI collation. I couldn’t find how the Query Optimizer calculates the G, and my friend Paul White (@SQL_Kiwi) tells me that it’s frustratingly internal to the QO. He’s particularly smart, even if he is from New Zealand. To investigate further, I decided to do some PowerShell, leveraging the Get-SqlPlan function that I blogged about recently (make sure you also have the SqlServerCmdletSnapin100 snap-in added). I started by indicating that I was going to use Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI as my collation of choice, and that I’d start whichever letter cam straight after the number 9. I figure that this is a cheat’s way of guessing the first letter of the alphabet (but it doesn’t actually work in Unicode – luckily I’m using varchar not nvarchar. Actually, there are a few aspects of this code that only work using ASCII, so apologies if you were wanting to apply it to Greek, Japanese, etc). I also initialised my $alphabet variable. $collation = 'Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI'; $firstletter = '9'; $alphabet = ''; Now I created the table for my test. A single field would do, and putting a Clustered Index on it would suffice for the Seeks. Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "create table dbo.collation_test (col varchar(10) collate $collation primary key);" Now I get into the looping. $c = $firstletter; $stillgoing = $true; while ($stillgoing) { I construct the query I want, seeking for entries which start with whatever $c has reached, and get the plan for it: $query = "select col from dbo.collation_test where col like '$($c)%';"; [xml] $pl = get-sqlplan $query "." "tempdb"; At this point, my $pl variable is a scary piece of XML, representing the execution plan. A bit of hunting through it showed me that the EndRange element contained what I was after, and that if it contained NULL, then I was done. $stillgoing = ($pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange -ne $null); Now I could grab the value out of it (which came with apostrophes that needed stripping), and append that to my $alphabet variable.   if ($stillgoing)   {  $c=$pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange.RangeExpressions.ScalarOperator.ScalarString.Replace("'","");     $alphabet += $c;   } Finally, finishing the loop, dropping the table, and showing my alphabet! } Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "drop table dbo.collation_test;"; $alphabet; When I run all this, I see that the Swedish alphabet is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZÅÄÖ, which matches what I see at Wikipedia. Interesting to see that the letters on the end are still there, even with Case Insensitivity. Turns out they’re not just “letters with accents”, they’re letters in their own right. I’m sure you gave up reading long ago, and really aren’t that fazed about the idea of doing this using PowerShell. I chose PowerShell because I’d already come up with an easy way of grabbing the estimated plan for a query, and PowerShell does allow for easy navigation of XML. I find the most interesting aspect of this as the fact that the Query Optimizer uses the next letter of the alphabet to maintain the SARGability of LIKE. I’m hoping they do something similar for a whole bunch of operations. Oh, and the fact that you know how to find stuff in the IKEA catalogue. Footnote: If you are interested in whether this works in other languages, you might want to consider the following screenshot, which shows that in principle, it should work with Japanese. It might be a bit harder to run this in PowerShell though, as I’m not sure how it translates. In Hiragana, the Japanese alphabet starts ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ...

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• European Interoperability Framework - a new beginning?

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  The most controversial document in the history of the European Commission's IT policy is out. EIF is here, wrapped in the Communication "Towards interoperability for European public services", and including the new feature European Interoperability Strategy (EIS), arguably a higher strategic take on the same topic. Leaving EIS aside for a moment, the EIF controversy has been around IPR, defining open standards and about the proper terminology around standardization deliverables. Today, as the document finally emerges, what is the verdict? First of all, to be fair to those among you who do not spend your lives in the intricate labyrinths of Commission IT policy documents on interoperability, let's define what we are talking about. According to the Communication: "An interoperability framework is an agreed approach to interoperability for organisations that want to collaborate to provide joint delivery of public services. Within its scope of applicability, it specifies common elements such as vocabulary, concepts, principles, policies, guidelines, recommendations, standards, specifications and practices." The Good - EIF reconfirms that "The Digital Agenda can only take off if interoperability based on standards and open platforms is ensured" and also confirms that "The positive effect of open specifications is also demonstrated by the Internet ecosystem." - EIF takes a productive and pragmatic stance on openness: "In the context of the EIF, openness is the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and stimulate debate within that community, the ultimate goal being to advance knowledge and the use of this knowledge to solve problems" (p.11). "If the openness principle is applied in full: - All stakeholders have the same possibility of contributing to the development of the specification and public review is part of the decision-making process; - The specification is available for everybody to study; - Intellectual property rights related to the specification are licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software" (p. 26). - EIF is a formal Commission document. The former EIF 1.0 was a semi-formal deliverable from the PEGSCO, a working group of Member State representatives. - EIF tackles interoperability head-on and takes a clear stance: "Recommendation 22. When establishing European public services, public administrations should prefer open specifications, taking due account of the coverage of functional needs, maturity and market support." - The Commission will continue to support the National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO), reconfirming the importance of coordinating such approaches across borders. - The Commission will align its internal interoperability strategy with the EIS through the eCommission initiative. - One cannot stress the importance of using open standards enough, whether in the context of open source or non-open source software. The EIF seems to have picked up on this fact: What does the EIF says about the relation between open specifications and open source software? The EIF introduces, as one of the characteristics of an open specification, the requirement that IPRs related to the specification have to be licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software. In this way, companies working under various business models can compete on an equal footing when providing solutions to public administrations while administrations that implement the standard in their own software (software that they own) can share such software with others under an open source licence if they so decide. - EIF is now among the center pieces of the Digital Agenda (even though this demands extensive inter-agency coordination in the Commission): "The EIS and the EIF will be maintained under the ISA Programme and kept in line with the results of other relevant Digital Agenda actions on interoperability and standards such as the ones on the reform of rules on implementation of ICT standards in Europe to allow use of certain ICT fora and consortia standards, on issuing guidelines on essential intellectual property rights and licensing conditions in standard-setting, including for ex-ante disclosure, and on providing guidance on the link between ICT standardisation and public procurement to help public authorities to use standards to promote efficiency and reduce lock-in.(Communication, p.7)" All in all, quite a few good things have happened to the document in the two years it has been on the shelf or was being re-written, depending on your perspective, in any case, awaiting the storms to calm. The Bad - While a certain pragmatism is required, and governments cannot migrate to full openness overnight, EIF gives a bit too much room for governments not to apply the openness principle in full. Plenty of reasons are given, which should maybe have been put as challenges to be overcome: "However, public administrations may decide to use less open specifications, if open specifications do not exist or do not meet functional interoperability needs. In all cases, specifications should be mature and sufficiently supported by the market, except if used in the context of creating innovative solutions". - EIF does not use the internationally established terminology: open standards. Rather, the EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification". How do "formalised specifications" relate to "standards"? According to the FAQ provided: The word "standard" has a specific meaning in Europe as defined by Directive 98/34/EC. Only technical specifications approved by a recognised standardisation body can be called a standard. Many ICT systems rely on the use of specifications developed by other organisations such as a forum or consortium. The EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification", which is either a standard pursuant to Directive 98/34/EC or a specification established by ICT fora and consortia. The term "open specification" used in the EIF, on the one hand, avoids terminological confusion with the Directive and, on the other, states the main features that comply with the basic principle of openness laid down in the EIF for European Public Services. Well, this may be somewhat true, but in reality, Europe is 30 year behind in terminology. Unless the European Standardization Reform gets completed in the next few months, most Member States will likely conclude that they will go on referencing and using standards beyond those created by the three European endorsed monopolists of standardization, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. Who can afford to begin following the strict Brussels rules for what they can call open standards when, in reality, standards stemming from global standardization organizations, so-called fora/consortia, dominate in the IT industry. What exactly is EIF saying? Does it encourage Member States to go on using non-ESO standards as long as they call it something else? I guess I am all for it, although it is a bit cumbersome, no? Why was there so much interest around the EIF? The FAQ attempts to explain: Some Member States have begun to adopt policies to achieve interoperability for their public services. These actions have had a significant impact on the ecosystem built around the provision of such services, e.g. providers of ICT goods and services, standardisation bodies, industry fora and consortia, etc... The Commission identified a clear need for action at European level to ensure that actions by individual Member States would not create new electronic barriers that would hinder the development of interoperable European public services. As a result, all stakeholders involved in the delivery of electronic public services in Europe have expressed their opinions on how to increase interoperability for public services provided by the different public administrations in Europe. Well, it does not take two years to read 50 consultation documents, and the EU Standardization Reform is not yet completed, so, more pragmatically, you finally had to release the document. Ok, let's leave some of that aside because the document is out and some people are happy (and others definitely not). The Verdict Considering the controversy, the delays, the lobbying, and the interests at stake both in the EU, in Member States and among vendors large and small, this document is pretty impressive. As with a good wine that has not yet come to full maturity, let's say that it seems to be coming in in the 85-88/100 range, but only a more fine-grained analysis, enjoyment in good company, and ultimately, implementation, will tell. The European Commission has today adopted a significant interoperability initiative to encourage public administrations across the EU to maximise the social and economic potential of information and communication technologies. Today, we should rally around this achievement. Tomorrow, let's sit down and figure out what it means for the future.

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• Deferred rendering with VSM - Scaling light depth loses moments

  - by user1423893

  I'm calculating my shadow term using a VSM method. This works correctly when using forward rendered lights but fails with deferred lights. // Shadow term (1 = no shadow) float shadow = 1; // [Light Space -> Shadow Map Space] // Transform the surface into light space and project // NB: Could be done in the vertex shader, but doing it here keeps the // "light shader" abstraction and doesn't limit the number of shadowed lights float4x4 LightViewProjection = mul(LightView, LightProjection); float4 surf_tex = mul(position, LightViewProjection); // Re-homogenize // 'w' component is not used in later calculations so no need to homogenize (it will equal '1' if homogenized) surf_tex.xyz /= surf_tex.w; // Rescale viewport to be [0,1] (texture coordinate system) float2 shadow_tex; shadow_tex.x = surf_tex.x * 0.5f + 0.5f; shadow_tex.y = -surf_tex.y * 0.5f + 0.5f; // Half texel offset //shadow_tex += (0.5 / 512); // Scaled distance to light (instead of 'surf_tex.z') float rescaled_dist_to_light = dist_to_light / LightAttenuation.y; //float rescaled_dist_to_light = surf_tex.z; // [Variance Shadow Map Depth Calculation] // No filtering float2 moments = tex2D(ShadowSampler, shadow_tex).xy; // Flip the moments values to bring them back to their original values moments.x = 1.0 - moments.x; moments.y = 1.0 - moments.y; // Compute variance float E_x2 = moments.y; float Ex_2 = moments.x * moments.x; float variance = E_x2 - Ex_2; variance = max(variance, Bias.y); // Surface is fully lit if the current pixel is before the light occluder (lit_factor == 1) // One-tailed inequality valid if float lit_factor = (rescaled_dist_to_light <= moments.x - Bias.x); // Compute probabilistic upper bound (mean distance) float m_d = moments.x - rescaled_dist_to_light; // Chebychev's inequality float p = variance / (variance + m_d * m_d); p = ReduceLightBleeding(p, Bias.z); // Adjust the light color based on the shadow attenuation shadow *= max(lit_factor, p); This is what I know for certain so far: The lighting is correct if I do not try and calculate the shadow term. (No shadows) The shadow term is correct when calculated using forward rendered lighting. (VSM works with forward rendered lights) With the current rescaled light distance (lightAttenuation.y is the far plane value): float rescaled_dist_to_light = dist_to_light / LightAttenuation.y; The light is correct and the shadow appears to be zoomed in and misses the blurring: When I do not rescale the light and use the homogenized 'surf_tex': float rescaled_dist_to_light = surf_tex.z; the shadows are blurred correctly but the lighting is incorrect and the cube model is no longer lit Why is scaling by the far plane value (LightAttenuation.y) zooming in too far? The only other factor involved is my world pixel position, which is calculated as follows: // [Position] float4 position; // [Screen Position] position.xy = input.PositionClone.xy; // Use 'x' and 'y' components already homogenized for uv coordinates above position.z = tex2D(DepthSampler, texCoord).r; // No need to homogenize 'z' component position.z = 1.0 - position.z; position.w = 1.0; // 1.0 = position.w / position.w // [World Position] position = mul(position, CameraViewProjectionInverse); // Re-homogenize position (xyz AND w, otherwise shadows will bend when camera is close) position.xyz /= position.w; position.w = 1.0; Using the inverse matrix of the camera's view x projection matrix does work for lighting but maybe it is incorrect for shadow calculation? EDIT: Light calculations for shadow including 'dist_to_light' // Work out the light position and direction in world space float3 light_position = float3(LightViewInverse._41, LightViewInverse._42, LightViewInverse._43); // Direction might need to be negated float3 light_direction = float3(-LightViewInverse._31, -LightViewInverse._32, -LightViewInverse._33); // Unnormalized light vector float3 dir_to_light = light_position - position; // Direction from vertex float dist_to_light = length(dir_to_light); // Normalise 'toLight' vector for lighting calculations dir_to_light = normalize(dir_to_light); EDIT2: These are the calculations for the moments (depth) //============================================= //---[Vertex Shaders]-------------------------- //============================================= DepthVSOutput depth_VS( float4 Position : POSITION, uniform float4x4 shadow_view, uniform float4x4 shadow_view_projection) { DepthVSOutput output = (DepthVSOutput)0; // First transform position into world space float4 position_world = mul(Position, World); output.position_screen = mul(position_world, shadow_view_projection); output.light_vec = mul(position_world, shadow_view).xyz; return output; } //============================================= //---[Pixel Shaders]--------------------------- //============================================= DepthPSOutput depth_PS(DepthVSOutput input) { DepthPSOutput output = (DepthPSOutput)0; // Work out the depth of this fragment from the light, normalized to [0, 1] float2 depth; depth.x = length(input.light_vec) / FarPlane; depth.y = depth.x * depth.x; // Flip depth values to avoid floating point inaccuracies depth.x = 1.0f - depth.x; depth.y = 1.0f - depth.y; output.depth = depth.xyxy; return output; } EDIT 3: I have tried the folloiwng: float4 pp; pp.xy = input.PositionClone.xy; // Use 'x' and 'y' components already homogenized for uv coordinates above pp.z = tex2D(DepthSampler, texCoord).r; // No need to homogenize 'z' component pp.z = 1.0 - pp.z; pp.w = 1.0; // 1.0 = position.w / position.w // Determine the depth of the pixel with respect to the light float4x4 LightViewProjection = mul(LightView, LightProjection); float4x4 matViewToLightViewProj = mul(CameraViewProjectionInverse, LightViewProjection); float4 vPositionLightCS = mul(pp, matViewToLightViewProj); float fLightDepth = vPositionLightCS.z / vPositionLightCS.w; // Transform from light space to shadow map texture space. float2 vShadowTexCoord = 0.5 * vPositionLightCS.xy / vPositionLightCS.w + float2(0.5f, 0.5f); vShadowTexCoord.y = 1.0f - vShadowTexCoord.y; // Offset the coordinate by half a texel so we sample it correctly vShadowTexCoord += (0.5f / 512); //g_vShadowMapSize This suffers the same problem as the second picture. I have tried storing the depth based on the view x projection matrix: output.position_screen = mul(position_world, shadow_view_projection); //output.light_vec = mul(position_world, shadow_view); output.light_vec = output.position_screen; depth.x = input.light_vec.z / input.light_vec.w; This gives a shadow that has lots surface acne due to horrible floating point precision errors. Everything is lit correctly though. EDIT 4: Found an OpenGL based tutorial here I have followed it to the letter and it would seem that the uv coordinates for looking up the shadow map are incorrect. The source uses a scaled matrix to get the uv coordinates for the shadow map sampler /// <summary> /// The scale matrix is used to push the projected vertex into the 0.0 - 1.0 region. /// Similar in role to a * 0.5 + 0.5, where -1.0 < a < 1.0. /// <summary> const float4x4 ScaleMatrix = float4x4 ( 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, -0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0 ); I had to negate the 0.5 for the y scaling (M22) in order for it to work but the shadowing is still not correct. Is this really the correct way to scale? float2 shadow_tex; shadow_tex.x = surf_tex.x * 0.5f + 0.5f; shadow_tex.y = surf_tex.y * -0.5f + 0.5f; The depth calculations are exactly the same as the source code yet they still do not work, which makes me believe something about the uv calculation above is incorrect.

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• Combination of Operating Mode and Commit Strategy

  - by Kevin Yang

  If you want to populate a source into multiple targets, you may also want to ensure that every row from the source affects all targets uniformly (or separately). Let’s consider the Example Mapping below. If a row from SOURCE causes different changes in multiple targets (TARGET_1, TARGET_2 and TARGET_3), for example, it can be successfully inserted into TARGET_1 and TARGET_3, but failed to be inserted into TARGET_2, and the current Mapping Property TLO (target load order) is “TARGET_1 -> TARGET_2 -> TARGET_3”. What should Oracle Warehouse Builder do, in order to commit the appropriate data to all affected targets at the same time? If it doesn’t behave as you intended, the data could become inaccurate and possibly unusable.                                               Example Mapping In OWB, we can use Mapping Configuration Commit Strategies and Operating Modes together to achieve this kind of requirements. Below we will explore the combination of these two features and how they affect the results in the target tables Before going to the example, let’s review some of the terms we will be using (Details can be found in white paper Oracle® Warehouse Builder Data Modeling, ETL, and Data Quality Guide11g Release 2): Operating Modes: Set-Based Mode: Warehouse Builder generates a single SQL statement that processes all data and performs all operations. Row-Based Mode: Warehouse Builder generates statements that process data row by row. The select statement is in a SQL cursor. All subsequent statements are PL/SQL. Row-Based (Target Only) Mode: Warehouse Builder generates a cursor select statement and attempts to include as many operations as possible in the cursor. For each target, Warehouse Builder inserts each row into the target separately. Commit Strategies: Automatic: Warehouse Builder loads and then automatically commits data based on the mapping design. If the mapping has multiple targets, Warehouse Builder commits and rolls back each target separately and independently of other targets. Use the automatic commit when the consequences of multiple targets being loaded unequally are not great or are irrelevant. Automatic correlated: It is a specialized type of automatic commit that applies to PL/SQL mappings with multiple targets only. Warehouse Builder considers all targets collectively and commits or rolls back data uniformly across all targets. Use the correlated commit when it is important to ensure that every row in the source affects all affected targets uniformly. Manual: select manual commit control for PL/SQL mappings when you want to interject complex business logic, perform validations, or run other mappings before committing data. Combination of the commit strategy and operating mode To understand the effects of each combination of operating mode and commit strategy, I’ll illustrate using the following example Mapping. Firstly we insert 100 rows into the SOURCE table and make sure that the 99th row and 100th row have the same ID value. And then we create a unique key constraint on ID column for TARGET_2 table. So while running the example mapping, OWB tries to load all 100 rows to each of the targets. But the mapping should fail to load the 100th row to TARGET_2, because it will violate the unique key constraint of table TARGET_2. With different combinations of Commit Strategy and Operating Mode, here are the results ¦ Set-based/ Correlated Commit: Configuration of Example mapping:                                                     Result:                                                      What’s happening: A single error anywhere in the mapping triggers the rollback of all data. OWB encounters the error inserting into Target_2, it reports an error for the table and does not load the row. OWB rolls back all the rows inserted into Target_1 and does not attempt to load rows to Target_3. No rows are added to any of the target tables. ¦ Row-based/ Correlated Commit: Configuration of Example mapping:                                                   Result:                                                  What’s happening: OWB evaluates each row separately and loads it to all three targets. Loading continues in this way until OWB encounters an error loading row 100th to Target_2. OWB reports the error and does not load the row. It rolls back the row 100th previously inserted into Target_1 and does not attempt to load row 100 to Target_3. Then, if there are remaining rows, OWB will continue loading them, resuming with loading rows to Target_1. The mapping completes with 99 rows inserted into each target. ¦ Set-based/ Automatic Commit: Configuration of Example mapping: Result: What’s happening: When OWB encounters the error inserting into Target_2, it does not load any rows and reports an error for the table. It does, however, continue to insert rows into Target_3 and does not roll back the rows previously inserted into Target_1. The mapping completes with one error message for Target_2, no rows inserted into Target_2, and 100 rows inserted into Target_1 and Target_3 separately. ¦ Row-based/Automatic Commit: Configuration of Example mapping: Result: What’s happening: OWB evaluates each row separately for loading into the targets. Loading continues in this way until OWB encounters an error loading row 100 to Target_2 and reports the error. OWB does not roll back row 100th from Target_1, does insert it into Target_3. If there are remaining rows, it will continue to load them. The mapping completes with 99 rows inserted into Target_2 and 100 rows inserted into each of the other targets. Note: Automatic Correlated commit is not applicable for row-based (target only). If you design a mapping with the row-based (target only) and correlated commit combination, OWB runs the mapping but does not perform the correlated commit. In set-based mode, correlated commit may impact the size of your rollback segments. Space for rollback segments may be a concern when you merge data (insert/update or update/insert). Correlated commit operates transparently with PL/SQL bulk processing code. The correlated commit strategy is not available for mappings run in any mode that are configured for Partition Exchange Loading or that include a Queue, Match Merge, or Table Function operator. If you want to practice in your own environment, you can follow the steps: 1. Import the MDL file: commit_operating_mode.mdl 2. Fix the location for oracle module ORCL and deploy all tables under it. 3. Insert sample records into SOURCE table, using below plsql code: begin     for i in 1..99     loop         insert into source values(i, 'col_'||i);     end loop;     insert into source values(99, 'col_99'); end; 4. Configure MAPPING_1 to any combinations of operating mode and commit strategy you want to test. And make sure feature TLO of mapping is open. 5. Deploy Mapping “MAPPING_1”. 6. Run the mapping and check the result.

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• Physical Directories vs. MVC View Paths

  - by Rick Strahl

  This post falls into the bucket of operator error on my part, but I want to share this anyway because it describes an issue that has bitten me a few times now and writing it down might keep it a little stronger in my mind. I've been working on an MVC project the last few days, and at the end of a long day I accidentally moved one of my View folders from the MVC Root Folder to the project root. It must have been at the very end of the day before shutting down because tests and manual site navigation worked fine just before I quit for the night. I checked in changes and called it a night. Next day I came back, started running the app and had a lot of breaks with certain views. Oddly custom routes to these controllers/views worked, but stock /{controller}/{action} routes would not. After a bit of spelunking I realized that "Hey one of my View Folders is missing", which made some sense given the error messages I got. I looked in the recycle bin - nothing there, so rather than try to figure out what the hell happened, just restored from my last SVN checkin. At this point the folders are back… but… view access  still ends up breaking for this set of views. Specifically I'm getting the Yellow Screen of Death with: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current context Here's the full error: Server Error in '/ClassifiedsWeb' Application. Compilation ErrorDescription: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.Compiler Error Message: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current contextSource Error: Line 1: @model ClassifiedsWeb.EntryViewModel Line 2: @{ Line 3: ViewBag.Title = Model.Entry.Title + " - " + ClassifiedsBusiness.App.Configuration.ApplicationName; Source File: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml    Line: 1 Compiler Warning Messages: Show Detailed Compiler Output: Show Complete Compilation Source: Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.272 Here's what's really odd about this error: The views now do exist in the /Views/Classifieds folder of the project, but it appears like MVC is trying to execute the views directly. This is getting pretty weird, man! So I hook up some break points in my controllers to see if my controller actions are getting fired - and sure enough it turns out they are not - but only for those views that were previously 'lost' and then restored from SVN. WTF? At this point I'm thinking that I must have messed up one of the config files, but after some more spelunking and realizing that all the other Controller views work, I give up that idea. Config's gotta be OK if other controllers and views are working. Root Folders and MVC Views don't mix As I mentioned the problem was the fact that I inadvertantly managed to drag my View folder to the root folder of the project. Here's what this looks like in my FUBAR'd project structure after I copied back /Views/Classifieds folder from SVN: There's the actual root folder in the /Views folder and the accidental copy that sits of the root. I of course did not notice the /Classifieds folder at the root because it was excluded and didn't show up in the project. Now, before you call me a complete idiot remember that this happened by accident - an accidental drag probably just before shutting down for the night. :-) So why does this break? MVC should be happy with views in the /Views/Classifieds folder right? While MVC might be happy, IIS is not. The fact that there is a physical folder on disk takes precedence over MVC's routing. In other words if a URL exists that matches a route the pysical path is accessed first. What happens here is that essentially IIS is trying to execute the .cshtml pages directly without ever routing to the Controller methods. In the error page I showed above my clue should have been that the view was served as: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml rather than c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Views\Classifieds\Show.cshtml But of course I didn't notice that right away, just skimming to the end and looking at the file name. The reason that /classifieds/list actually fires that file is that the ASP.NET Web Pages engine looks for physical files on disk that match a path. IOW, when calling Web Pages you drop the .cshtml off the Razor page and IIS will serve that just fine. So: /classifieds/list looks and tries to find /classifieds/list.cshtml and executes that script. And that is exactly what's happening. Web Pages is trying to execute the .cshtml file and it fails because Web Pages knows nothing about the @model tag which is an MVC specific template extension. This is why my breakpoints in the controller methods didn't fire and it also explains why the error mentions that the @model key word is invalid (@model is an MVC provided template enhancement to the Razor Engine). The solution of course is super simple: Delete the accidentally created root folder and the problem is solved. Routing and Physical Paths I've run into problems with this before actually. In the past I've had a number of applications that had a physical /Admin folder which also would conflict with an MVC Admin controller. More than once I ended up wondering why the index route (/Admin/) was not working properly. If a physical /Admin folder exists /Admin will not route to the Index action (or whatever default action you have set up, but instead try to list the directory or show the default document in the folder. The only way to force the index page through MVC is to explicitly use /Admin/Index. Makes perfect sense once you realize the physical folder is there, but that's easy to forget in an MVC application. As you might imagine after a few times of running into this I gave up on the Admin folder and moved everything into MVC views to handle those operations. Still it's one of those things that can easily bite you, because the behavior and error messages seem to point at completely different  problems. Moral of the story is: If you see routing problems where routes are not reaching obvious controller methods, always check to make sure there's isn't a physical path being mapped by IIS instead. That way you won't feel stupid like I did after trying a million things for about an hour before discovering my sloppy mousing behavior :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC   IIS7   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• techniques for an AI for a highly cramped turn-based tactics game

  - by Adam M.

  I'm trying to write an AI for a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. I can't change the game rules in any way, only upgrade the AI. I have experience programming AI for classic board games (basically minimax and its variants), but I think the branching factor is too great for the approach to be reasonable here. I'll describe the game and some current AI flaws that I'd like to fix. I'd like to hear ideas for applicable techniques. I'm a decent enough programmer, so I only need the ideas, not an implementation (though that's always appreciated). I'd rather not expend effort chasing (too many) dead ends, so although speculation and brainstorming are good and probably helpful, I'd prefer to hear from somebody with actual experience solving this kind of problem. For those who know it, the game is the land battle mini-game in Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) and you can skim/skip the next two paragraphs. For those who don't, here's briefly how it works. The battle is turn-based and takes place on a 16x16 grid. There are three terrain types: clear (no hindrance), forest (hinders movement, ranged attacks, and sight), and rock (impassible, but does not hinder attacks or sight). The map is randomly generated with roughly equal amounts of each type of terrain. Because there are many rock and forest tiles, movement is typically very cramped. This is tactically important. The terrain is not flat; higher terrain gives minor bonuses. The terrain is known to both sides. The player is always the attacker and the AI is always the defender, so it's perfectly valid for the AI to set up a defensive position and just wait. The player wins by killing all defenders or by getting a unit to the city gates (a tile on the other side of the map). There are very few units on each side, usually 4-8. Because of this, it's crucial not to take damage without gaining some advantage from it. Units can take multiple actions per turn. All units on one side move before any units on the other side. Order of execution is important, and interleaving of actions between units is often useful. Units have melee and ranged attacks. Melee attacks vary widely in strength; ranged attacks have the same strength but vary in range. The main challenges I face are these: Lots of useful move combinations start with a "useless" move that gains no immediate advantage, or even loses advantage, in order to set up a powerful flank attack in the future. And, since the player units are stronger and have longer range, the AI pretty much always has to take some losses before they can start to gain kills. The AI must be able to look ahead to distinguish between sacrificial actions that provide a future benefit and those that don't. Because the terrain is so cramped, most of the tactics come down to achieving good positioning with multiple units that work together to defend an area. For instance, two defenders can often dominate a narrow pass by positioning themselves so an enemy unit attempting to pass must expose itself to a flank attack. But one defender in the same pass would be useless, and three units can defend a slightly larger pass. Etc. The AI should be able to figure out where the player must go to reach the city gates and how to best position its few units to cover the approaches, shifting, splitting, or combining them appropriately as the player moves. Because flank attacks are extremely deadly (and engineering flank attacks is key to the player strategy), the AI should be competent at moving its units so that they cover each other's flanks unless the sacrifice of a unit would give a substantial benefit. They should also be able to force flank attacks on players, for instance by threatening a unit from two different directions such that responding to one threat exposes the flank to the other. The AI should attack if possible, but sometimes there are no good ways to approach the player's position. In that case, the AI should be able to recognize this and set up a defensive position of its own. But the AI shouldn't be vulnerable to a trivial exploit where the player repeatedly opens and closes a hole in his defense and shoots at the AI as it approaches and retreats. That is, the AI should ideally be able to recognize that the player is capable of establishing a solid defense of an area, even if the defense is not currently in place. (I suppose if a good unit allocation algorithm existed, as needed for the second bullet point, the AI could run it on the player units to see where they could defend.) Because it's important to choose a good order of action and interleave actions between units, it's not as simple as just finding the best move for each unit in turn. All of these can be accomplished with a minimax search in theory, but the search space is too large, so specialized techniques are needed. I thought about techniques such as influence mapping, but I don't see how to use the technique to great effect. I thought about assigning goals to the units. This can help them work together in some limited way, and the problem of "how do I accomplish this goal?" is easier to solve than "how do I win this battle?", but assigning good goals is a hard problem in itself, because it requires knowing whether the goal is achievable and whether it's a good use of resources. So, does anyone have specific ideas for techniques that can help cleverize this AI? Update: I found a related question on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133273/ai-for-a-final-fantasy-tactics-like-game The selected answer gives a decent approach to choosing between alternative actions, but it doesn't seem to have much ability to look into the future and discern beneficial sacrifices from wasteful ones. It also focuses on a single unit at a time and it's not clear how it could be extended to support cooperation between units in defending or attacking.

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