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• Introducing Oracle System Assistant

  - by B.Koch

  by Josh Rosen One of the challenges with today's servers is getting the server up and running and understanding what all of the steps are once you plug the server in for the first time. So many different pieces come into play: installing drivers, updating firmware, configuring RAID, and provisioning the operating system. All of these steps must be done before you can even start using the server. Finding the latest firmware and drivers, making sure you have the right versions, and knowing that all the different software and firmware components work together properly can be a real challenge. If not done correctly, such as if you separately downloading disk firmware or controller firmware that doesn't match the existing OS drivers, you could experience bugs, performance problems, and incompatibilities. Gone are the days of having to locate the tools and drivers media that shipped with the server only to find out that newer versions of software and firmware are available on the web. Oracle has solved these challenges in the new X3-2 family of servers by introducing Oracle System Assistant. Oracle System Assistant is an innovative tool that is built-in to every new x86 server. It provides step-by-step assistance with configuring the server, updating firmware and drivers, and provisioning the operating system. Once you have completed all of the steps in the Oracle System Assistant tool, the server is ready to use. Oracle System Assistant was designed to be easy and straightforward. Starting it is as simple as pressing F9 when the server is booting. You'll need a keyboard, monitor, and mouse or you can use the remote console feature of Oracle ILOM (Integrated Lights Out Manager) to access a virtual KVM to the server from any machine. From there Oracle System Assistant will walk you through each of the steps necessary to set up your server. After configuring the network settings for Oracle System Assistant, the next step is to check for any new software or firmware for the server. Oracle System Assistant connects back to Oracle using your My Oracle Support account and downloads any updates that were made available to you for this specific server. This is where you really start to see the innovation that went into Oracle System Assistant. Firmware for Oracle ILOM and BIOS, operating system drivers, and other system firmware (including for option cards and disk drivers) come as a single bundle, downloading as a single unit, that has been engineered and tested to work together by Oracle. Oracle System Assistant figures out the right combination for your server, so you don't have to. Now that the server has the latest firmware, Oracle System Assistant will next walk you through configuring the hardware. From Oracle System Assistant, you can configure many Oracle ILOM settings, including the network settings and initial user accounts. This ensures that ILOM is accessible and ready to use. Oracle System Assistant is where all parts of the server come together. In addition to communicating with Oracle ILOM and interacting with BIOS, Oracle System Assistant understands and can configure the storage subsystem. Before installing the operating system, Oracle System Assistant can detect the storage configuration and configure RAID for all disks in the system. At this point, the server is ready to be provisioned with the host operating system. You can use Oracle System Assistant to provision a supported OS, including Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, RHEL, SuSe Linux, and Windows. And by using Oracle System Assistant, you can be sure that the proper OS drivers are installed for each of the installed hardware components. With Oracle System Assistant, initial setup of the server has never been easier. If we can innovate around problems and find solutions to make our servers easier to manage, this reduces IT costs and makes managing servers simpler. I think with Oracle System Assistant we have done just that. Josh Rosen is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle and previously spent more than a decade as a developer and architect of system management software. Josh has worked on system management for many of Oracle's hardware products ranging from the earliest blade systems to the latest Oracle x86 servers.

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• .NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

  - by RobertChipperfield

  One of the great things about working at Red Gate is getting to play with new technology - and right now, that means mobile. A few weeks ago, we decided that a little research into the tablet computing arena was due, and purely from a numbers point of view, that suggested the iPad as a good target device. A quick trip to iPhoneDevCon in San Diego later, and Marine and I came back full of ideas, and with some concept of how iOS development was meant to work. Here's how we went from there to the release of Stacks & Heaps, our geeky take on the classic "Snakes & Ladders" game. Step 1: Buy a Mac I've played with many operating systems in my time: from the original BBC Model B, through DOS, Windows, Linux, and others, but I'd so far managed to avoid buying fruit-flavoured computer hardware! If you want to develop for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, that's the first thing that needs to change. If you've not used OS X before, the first thing you'll realise is that everything is different! In the interests of avoiding a flame war in the comments section, I'll only go so far as to say that a lot of my Windows-flavoured muscle memory no longer worked. If you're in the UK, you'll also realise your keyboard is lacking a # key, and that " and @ are the other way around from normal. The wonderful Ukelele keyboard layout editor restores some sanity here, as long as you don't look at the keyboard when you're typing. I couldn't give up the PC entirely, but a handy application called Synergy comes to the rescue - it lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. There's a few limitations: Alt-Tab always seems to go to the Mac, and Windows 7's UAC dialogs require the local mouse for security reasons, but it gets you a long way at least. Step 2: Register as an Apple Developer You can register as an Apple Developer free of charge, and that lets you download XCode and the iOS SDK. You also get the iPhone / iPad emulator, which is handy, since you'll need to be a paid member before you can deploy your apps to a real device. You can either enroll as an individual, or as a company. They both cost the same ($99/year), but there's a few differences between them. If you register as a company, you can add multiple developers to your team (all for the same $99 - not $99 per developer), and you get to use your company name in the App Store. However, you'll need to send off significantly more documentation to Apple, and I suspect the process takes rather longer than for an individual, where they just need to verify some credit card details. Here's a tip: if you're registering as a company, do so as early as possible. The approval process can take a while to complete, so get the application in in plenty of time. Step 3: Learn to love the square brackets! Objective-C is the language of the iPad. C and C++ are also supported, and if you're doing some serious game development, you'll probably spend most of your time in C++ talking OpenGL, but for forms-based apps, you'll be interacting with a lot of the Objective-C SDK. Like shifting from Ctrl-C to Cmd-C, it feels a little odd at first, with the familiar string.format(.) turning into: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hello world, it's %@", [NSDate date]]; Thankfully XCode's auto-complete is normally passable, if not up to Visual Studio's standards, which coupled with a huge amount of content on Stack Overflow means you'll soon get to grips with the API. You'll need to get used to some terminology changes, though; here's an incomplete approximation: Coming from a .NET background, there's some luxuries you no longer have developing Objective C in XCode: Generics! Remember back in .NET 1.1, when all collections were just objects? Yup, we're back there now. ReSharper. Or, more generally, very much refactoring support. The not-many-keystrokes to rename a class, its file, and al references to it in Visual Studio turns into a much more painful experience in XCode. Garbage collection. This is actually rather less of an issue than you might expect: if you follow the rules, the reference counting provided by Objective C gets you a long way without too much pain. Circular references are their usual problematic self, though. Decent exception handling. You do have exceptions, but they're nowhere near as widely used. Generally, if something goes wrong, you get nil (see translation table above) back. Which brings me on to. Calling a method on a nil object isn't a failure - it just returns nil itself! There's many arguments for and against this, but personally I fall into the "stuff should fail as quickly and explicitly as possible" camp. Less specifically, I found that there's more chance of code failing at runtime rather than getting caught at compile-time: using the @selector(.) syntax to pass a method signature isn't (can't be) checked at compile-time, so the first you know about a typo is a crash when you try and call it. The solution to this is of course lots of great testing, both automated and manual, but I still find comfort in provably correct type safety being enforced in addition to testing. Step 4: Submit to the App Store Assuming you want to distribute to more than a handful of devices, you're going to need to submit your app to the Apple App Store. There's a few gotchas in terms of getting builds signed with the right certificates, and you'll be bouncing around between XCode and iTunes Connect a fair bit, but eventually you get everything checked off the to-do list, and are ready to upload your first binary! With some amount of anticipation, I pressed the Upload button in XCode, ready to release our creation into the world, but was instead greeted by an error informing me my XML file was malformed. Uh. A little Googling later, and it turned out that a simple rename from "Stacks&Heaps.app" to "StacksAndHeaps.app" worked around an XML escaping bug, and we were good to go. The next step is to wait for approval (or otherwise). After a couple of weeks of intensive development, this part is agonising. Did we make it? The Apple jury is still out at the moment, but our fingers are firmly crossed! In the meantime, you can see some screenshots and leave us your email address if you'd like us to get in touch when it does go live at the MobileFoo website. Step 5: Profit! Actually, that wasn't the idea here: Stacks & Heaps is free; there's no adverts, and we're not going to sell all your data either. So why did we do it? We wanted to get an idea of what it's like to move from coding for a desktop environment, to something completely different. We don't know whether in a year's time, the iPad will still be the dominant force, or whether Android will have smoothed out some bugs, tweaked the performance, and polished the UI, but I think it's a fairly sure bet that the tablet form factor is here to stay. We want to meet people who are using it, start chatting to them, and find out about some of the pain they're feeling. What better way to do that than do it ourselves, and get to write a cool game in the process?

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• Writing the tests for FluentPath

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Writing the tests for FluentPath is a challenge. The library is a wrapper around a legacy API (System.IO) that wasn’t designed to be easily testable. If it were more testable, the sensible testing methodology would be to tell System.IO to act against a mock file system, which would enable me to verify that my code is doing the expected file system operations without having to manipulate the actual, physical file system: what we are testing here is FluentPath, not System.IO. Unfortunately, that is not an option as nothing in System.IO enables us to plug a mock file system in. As a consequence, we are left with few options. A few people have suggested me to abstract my calls to System.IO away so that I could tell FluentPath – not System.IO – to use a mock instead of the real thing. That in turn is getting a little silly: FluentPath already is a thin abstraction around System.IO, so layering another abstraction between them would double the test surface while bringing little or no value. I would have to test that new abstraction layer, and that would bring us back to square one. Unless I’m missing something, the only option I have here is to bite the bullet and test against the real file system. Of course, the tests that do that can hardly be called unit tests. They are more integration tests as they don’t only test bits of my code. They really test the successful integration of my code with the underlying System.IO. In order to write such tests, the techniques of BDD work particularly well as they enable you to express scenarios in natural language, from which test code is generated. Integration tests are being better expressed as scenarios orchestrating a few basic behaviors, so this is a nice fit. The Orchard team has been successfully using SpecFlow for integration tests for a while and I thought it was pretty cool so that’s what I decided to use. Consider for example the following scenario: Scenario: Change extension Given a clean test directory When I change the extension of bar\notes.txt to foo Then bar\notes.txt should not exist And bar\notes.foo should exist This is human readable and tells you everything you need to know about what you’re testing, but it is also executable code. What happens when SpecFlow compiles this scenario is that it executes a bunch of regular expressions that identify the known Given (set-up phases), When (actions) and Then (result assertions) to identify the code to run, which is then translated into calls into the appropriate methods. Nothing magical. Here is the code generated by SpecFlow: [NUnit.Framework.TestAttribute()] [NUnit.Framework.DescriptionAttribute("Change extension")] public virtual void ChangeExtension() { TechTalk.SpecFlow.ScenarioInfo scenarioInfo = new TechTalk.SpecFlow.ScenarioInfo("Change extension", ((string[])(null))); #line 6 this.ScenarioSetup(scenarioInfo); #line 7 testRunner.Given("a clean test directory"); #line 8 testRunner.When("I change the extension of " + "bar\\notes.txt to foo"); #line 9 testRunner.Then("bar\\notes.txt should not exist"); #line 10 testRunner.And("bar\\notes.foo should exist"); #line hidden testRunner.CollectScenarioErrors();} The #line directives are there to give clues to the debugger, because yes, you can put breakpoints into a scenario: The way you usually write tests with SpecFlow is that you write the scenario first, let it fail, then write the translation of your Given, When and Then into code if they don’t already exist, which results in running but failing tests, and then you write the code to make your tests pass (you implement the scenario). In the case of FluentPath, I built a simple Given method that builds a simple file hierarchy in a temporary directory that all scenarios are going to work with: [Given("a clean test directory")] public void GivenACleanDirectory() { _path = new Path(SystemIO.Path.GetTempPath()) .CreateSubDirectory("FluentPathSpecs") .MakeCurrent(); _path.GetFileSystemEntries() .Delete(true); _path.CreateFile("foo.txt", "This is a text file named foo."); var bar = _path.CreateSubDirectory("bar"); bar.CreateFile("baz.txt", "bar baz") .SetLastWriteTime(DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(-2)); bar.CreateFile("notes.txt", "This is a text file containing notes."); var barbar = bar.CreateSubDirectory("bar"); barbar.CreateFile("deep.txt", "Deep thoughts"); var sub = _path.CreateSubDirectory("sub"); sub.CreateSubDirectory("subsub"); sub.CreateFile("baz.txt", "sub baz") .SetLastWriteTime(DateTime.Now); sub.CreateFile("binary.bin", new byte[] {0x00, 0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05, 0xFF}); } Then, to implement the scenario that you can read above, I had to write the following When: [When("I change the extension of (.*) to (.*)")] public void WhenIChangeTheExtension( string path, string newExtension) { var oldPath = Path.Current.Combine(path.Split('\\')); oldPath.Move(p => p.ChangeExtension(newExtension)); } As you can see, the When attribute is specifying the regular expression that will enable the SpecFlow engine to recognize what When method to call and also how to map its parameters. For our scenario, “bar\notes.txt” will get mapped to the path parameter, and “foo” to the newExtension parameter. And of course, the code that verifies the assumptions of the scenario: [Then("(.*) should exist")] public void ThenEntryShouldExist(string path) { Assert.IsTrue(_path.Combine(path.Split('\\')).Exists); } [Then("(.*) should not exist")] public void ThenEntryShouldNotExist(string path) { Assert.IsFalse(_path.Combine(path.Split('\\')).Exists); } These steps should be written with reusability in mind. They are building blocks for your scenarios, not implementation of a specific scenario. Think small and fine-grained. In the case of the above steps, I could reuse each of those steps in other scenarios. Those tests are easy to write and easier to read, which means that they also constitute a form of documentation. Oh, and SpecFlow is just one way to do this. Rob wrote a long time ago about this sort of thing (but using a different framework) and I highly recommend this post if I somehow managed to pique your interest: http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/make-bdd-your-bff-2/ And this screencast (Rob always makes excellent screencasts): http://blog.wekeroad.com/mvc-storefront/kona-3/ (click the “Download it here” link)

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• Knowledge Pathways Designer - Recommended Settings

  - by ted.henson

  The General page of the Options dialog box contains the application preferences for Knowledge Pathways Designer. It is recommended that you leave certain settings as they are, unless you have a specific reason for changing them. The following are a few of the settings on the General page with an explanation of the recommended setting. They are in the order they appear on the page: Allow version 2.0 style links: This option should remain disabled unless you were using content that was created using version 2.0 of Knowledge Pathways and you want the same linking functionality that existed in that version 2.0. This feature enables you to reuse parts of titles that contain no AUs. However, keep in mind that this type of link is not a true link, but a cross between a copy and a link. To create a 2.0 style link, you drag and drop sections between titles. You can only create 2.0 style links to sections that belong to the Title AU. When creating a version 2.0 style link, your mouse pointer will change to indicate a 2.0 link is being created. Confirm deletion of outline items and Confirm deletion of titles: It is recommended that these options remain enabled to avoid deleting something by accident. Display tracking data loss warning when opening a published title: It recommended that this option be enabled so you will receive the warning message when you open the development copy of a title, reminding you of the implications of your changes. ulCopy files when converting a Section to an Assignable Unit: This option should remain enabled unless you have a specific reason for not copying the files. If this is disabled, you will (in effect) lose your content files upon converting because they will not be copied to the new AU directory on the content root. In this case, you would need to use Windows Explorer to copy your files manually. Working with Spelling Options All of the spelling options are enabled by default. Your design team can review these options to determine if you want to make changes, depending upon your specific needs. Understanding Dictionary Options You should leave the dictionary options as they are, unless you have a specific reason for changing them. While you can delete the user (customizable) dictionary, doing so is not recommended. Setting Check In/Check Out Options The ability to check in and check out titles and AUs will impact the efficiency of your design team. Decide what your check in and check out processes are before you start developing titles. The Check In/Check Out page of the Options dialog box contains two options that affect what happens when you open a title using the Open Title dialog box. Both of these options are enabled by default and are described below: Check Out for editing enabled: This option ensures that the Check Out for editing option will be selected when you open the development copy of a title from the Open Title dialog box. If this option is disabled, you must select the Check Out for editing option every time you want to check out a title for editing. Attempt to Check Out for entire branch: When this option is enabled, Designer checks out the selected title and all AUs and sections that are part of that title, provided they are available for check out. If this option is disabled, you will only check out the Title AU and anything that belongs to that Title AU (e.g., sections, questions, etc.), but not other AUs. The Check In/Check Out page of the Options dialog box also contains options that control what happens when you close a title. You can choose one option in the Check In when Closing a Title area. The option selected is a matter of preference and you should determine which option is most appropriate for your design team.

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• 30 Steps to Master ASP.NET MVC Application development

  - by Rajesh Pillai

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Welcome Readers!,   I am starting out a new series on ASP.NET  MVC skill building which will be posted over the next couple of weeks.  Let me know your thoughts on the content, which I have planned and a couple of them has been taken from ASP.NET MVC2 Cookbook. (NOTE: Only the heading has been taken, the content will be not :)).   Do let me know what you would like to see, or any additional inputs or ideas to cover in this topics.  The 30 steps are oultined below for quick reference.  Will start filling this out quickly.   Outlined is the ‘30’ step to master ASP.NET MVC.   A Peek Into Model What is a model? Different types of model Presentation/ViewModel Model Mapping (AutoMapper)   A Peak into View How view works in ASP.NET MVC? View Engine Design Custom View Engine View Best Practices Templated Helpers Partial Views   A Peak into Controller Introduction Controller Design Controller Best Practices Asynchronous Controller Custom Action Result Action Filters Controller Factory to use with IOC   Routes Explanation Routes from the database Routes from XML More complex routing   Master Pages Basics Setting Master Page Dynamically   Working with data in the view Repeating Views Array of check boxes Array of radio buttons Paged data CRUD Client side action Confirmation Dialog (modal window) jqGrid   Working with Forms   Validation Model Validation with DataAnnotations Using the xVal validation framework Client side validation with jQuery Validation Fluent Validation Model Binders   Templating Create strongly typed helper using T4 Custom View Templates with T4 Create custom MVC project template using T4   IOC AutoFac Ninject Unity Application   Areas   jQuery, Ajax and jQuery Plugins   State Maintenance Application State User state Cookies Webfarm   Error Handling View error handling Controller error handling ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers)   Authentication and Authorization User Registration form SignOn Process Password Reminder Membership and Roles Windows authentication Restricting access to all pages Restricting access to selected pages Restricting access to pages by role Restricting access to a controller Restricting access to selected area   Profiles and Themes Using Profiles Inheriting a Profile Migrating an anonymous profile Creating custom themes Using themes User personalized themes   Configuration Adding custom application settings in web.config Displaying custom error messages Accessing other web.config configuration elements Adding custom configuration elements to web.config Encrypting web.config sections   Tracing, Debugging and Logging   Caching Caching a whole page Caching pages based on route details Caching pages based on browser type and version Caching pages based custom strings Caching partial pages Caching application data Object Caching Using Microsoft Velocity Using MemCache Using AppFabric cache   Localization   HTTP Handlers and Modules   Security XSS/CSRF AnitForgery Encoding   HtmlHelpers Strongly typed helpers Writing custom helpers   Repository Pattern (Data access)   WF/WCF   Unit Testing   Mocking Framework   Integration Testing   Load / Performance Testing   Deployment    Once again let me know your thoughts on this.   Till then, Enjoy MVC'ing!!!

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• Samba4 [homes] share

  - by SambaDrivesMeCrazy

  I am having issues with the [homes] share. OS is Ubuntu 12.04. I've installed samba 4.0.3, bind9 dlz, ntp, winbind, everything but pam modules, and did all the tests from https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_AD_DC_HOWTO. Running getent passwd and getent user work just fine. Creating a simple share works just fine too. I can manage the users, GPOs, and DNS from the windows mmc snap-ins. I can join winxp,7,8 to the domain and log on perfectly. I can change my passwords from windows, etc..etc.. I could say that everything is fine and be happy :) buuuut, no, home directories do not work. Searching in here, and on our good friend google I gathered that a simple [homes] read only = no path = /storage-server/users/ and mapping the user's home folder in dsa.msc to \\server-001\username or \\server-001\homes should get me a home share I could map for my user homedir. But the snap-in give me an error saying that it cannot create the home folder because the network name has not been found (rough translation from portuguese). also, running root@server-001:/storage-server/users# smbclient //server-001/test -Utest%'12345678' -c 'ls' Domain=[MYDOMAIN] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 4.0.3] tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME Server name is alright, if I go for a simple share on the same server it opens just fine. If I map the user homedir to this simple share it works. What I want is that I dont have to go and manually make a new folder on linux everytime I create a new user on windows. It looks like permissions but I cant find any documentation on this (yes I've tried the manpages, but its hard to tell with so many options on man smb.conf alone). My smb.conf right now looks like this (pretty simple I know) # Global parameters [global] workgroup = MYDOMAIN realm = MYDOMAIN.LAN netbios name = SERVER-001 server role = active directory domain controller server services = s3fs, rpc, nbt, wrepl, ldap, cldap, kdc, drepl, winbind, ntp_signd, kcc, dnsupdate [netlogon] path = /usr/local/samba/var/locks/sysvol/mydomain.lan/scripts read only = No [sysvol] path = /usr/local/samba/var/locks/sysvol read only = No [homes] read only = no path = /storage-server/users Folder permissions /storage-server drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Fev 15 15:17 storage-server /storage-server/users drwxrwxrwx 6 root root 4096 Fev 18 17:05 users/ Yes, I was desperate enough to set 777 on the users folder... not proud of it. Any pointers in the right direction would be very welcome. Edited to include: root@server-001:/# wbinfo --user-info=test MYDOMAIN\test:*:3000045:100:test:/home/MYDOMAIN/test:/bin/false root@server-001:/# wbinfo -n test S-1-5-21-1957592451-3401938807-633234758-1128 SID_USER (1) root@server-001:/# id test uid=3000045(MYDOMAIN\test) gid=100(users) grupos=100(users) root@server-001:/# wbinfo -U 3000045 S-1-5-21-1957592451-3401938807-633234758-1128 root@server-001:/# Edit 2: getent passwd | grep test MYDOMAIN\test:*:3000045:100:test:/home/MYDOMAIN/test:/bin/false I have no idea how to change that home folder to /storage-server/users/test so I just went and ln -s /storage-server/users /home/MYDOMAIN just in case. still, no changes, same errors. Edit 3 On log.smbd I get the following error when trying to set the test user home folder to \server-001\test [2013/02/20 14:22:08.446658, 2] ../source3/smbd/service.c:418(create_connection_session_info) user 'MYDOMAIN\Administrator' (from session setup) not permitted to access this share (test)

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• Healthcare and Distributed Data Don't Mix

  - by [email protected]

  How many times have you heard the story?  Hard disk goes missing, USB thumb drive goes missing, laptop goes missing...Not a week goes by that we don't hear about our data going missing...  Healthcare data is a big one, but we hear about credit card data, pricing info, corporate intellectual property...  When I have spoken at Security and IT conferences part of my message is "Why do you give your users data to lose in the first place?"  I don't suggest they can't have access to it...in fact I work for the company that provides the premiere data security and desktop solutions that DO provide access.  Access isn't the issue.  'Keeping the data' is the issue.We are all human - we all make mistakes... I fault no one for having their car stolen or that they dropped a USB thumb drive. (well, except the thieves - I can certainly find some fault there)  Where I find fault is in policy (or lack thereof sometimes) that allows users to carry around private, and important, data with them.  Mr. Director of IT - It is your fault, not theirs.  Ms. CSO - Look in the mirror.It isn't like one can't find a network to access the data from.  You are on a network right now.  How many Wireless ones (wifi, mifi, cellular...) are there around you, right now?  Allowing employees to remove data from the confines of (wait for it... ) THE DATA CENTER is just plain indefensible when it isn't required.  The argument that the laptop had a password and the hard disk was encrypted is ridiculous.  An encrypted drive tells thieves that before they sell the stolen unit for $75, they should crack the encryption and ascertain what the REAL value of the laptop is... credit card info, Identity info, pricing lists, banking transactions... a veritable treasure trove of info people give away on an 'encrypted disk'.What started this latest rant on lack of data control was an article in Government Health IT that was forwarded to me by Denny Olson, an Oracle Principal Sales Consultant in Minnesota.  The full article is here, but the point was that a couple laptops went missing in a couple different cases, and.. well... no one knows where the data is, and yes - they were loaded with patient info.  What were you thinking?Obviously you can't steal data form a Sun Ray appliance... since it has no data, nor any storage to keep the data on, and Secure Global Desktop allows access from Macs, Linux and Windows client devices...  but in all cases, there is no keeping the data unless you explicitly allow for it in your policy.   Since you can get at the data securely from any network, why would you want to take personal responsibility for it?  Both Sun Rays and Secure Global Desktop are widely used in Healthcare... but clearly not widely enough.We need to do a better job of getting the message out -  Healthcare (or insert your business type here) and distributed data don't mix. Then add Hot Desking and 'follow me printing' and you have something that Clinicians (and CSOs) love.Thanks for putting up my blood pressure, Denny.

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• MEB Support to NetBackup MMS

  - by Hema Sridharan

  In MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.6, new option was introduced to support backup to tapes via SBT interface. SBT stands for System Backup to Tape, an Oracle API that helps to perform backup and restore jobs via media management software such as Oracle's Secure Backup (OSB). There are other storage managers like IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and Symantec's Netbackup (NB) which are also supported by MEB but we don't guarantee that it will function as expected for every release. MEB supports SBT API version 2.0 In this blog, I am primarily going to focus the interface of MEB and Symantec's NB. If we are using tapes for backup, ensure that tape library and tape drives are compatible. Test Setup 1. Install NB 7.5 master and media servers in Linux OS. ( NB 7.1 can also be used but for testing purpose I used NB 7.5)2. Install MEB 3.8 also in Linux OS.3. Install NB admin console in your windows desktop and configure the NB master server from there. Note: Ensure that you have root user permission to install NetBackup. Configuration Steps for MEB and NB Once MEB and NB are installed, Ensure that NB is linked to MEB by specifying the library /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/libobk.so64 in the mysqlbackup command line using --sbt-lib-path. Configure the NB master server from windows console. That is configure the storage units by specifying the Storage unit name, Disk type, Media Server name etc.  Create NetBackup policies that are user selectable. But please make sure that policy type is "Oracle".  Define the clients where MEB will be executed. Some times this will be different host where MEB is run or some times in same Media server where NB and tapes are attached. Now once the installation and configuration steps are performed for MEB and NB, the next part is the actual execution.MEB should be run as single file backup using --backup-image option with prefix sbt:(it is a tag which tells MEB that it should stream the backup image through the SBT interface) which is sent to NB client via SBT interface . The resulting backup image is stored where NB stores the images that it backs up. The following diagram shows how MEB interacts with MMS through SBT interface. Backup The following parameters should also be ready for the execution,    --sbt-lib-path : Path to SBT library specific to NetBackup MMS. SBT lib for NetBackup  is in /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/libobk.so64    --sbt-environment: Environment variables must be defined specific to NetBackup. In our example below, we use     NB_ORA_SERV=myserver.com,    NB_ORA_CLIENT=myserver.com,    NB_ORA_POLICY=NBU-MEB    ORACLE_HOME = /export/home2/tmp/hema/mysql-server/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ./mysqlbackup --port=13000 --protocol=tcp --user=root --backup-image=sbt:bkpsbtNB --sbt-lib-path=/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/libobk.so64 --sbt-environment="NB_ORA_SERV=myserver.com, NB_ORA_CLIENT=myserver.com, NB_ORA_POLICY=NBU-MEB, ORACLE_HOME=/export/home2/tmp/hema/mysql-server/” --backup-dir=/export/home2/tmp/hema/MEB_bkdir/ backup-to-image ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Once backup is completed successfully, this should appear in Activity Monitor in NetBackup Console.For restore,  image contents has to be extracted using image-to-backup-dir command and then apply-log and copy-back steps are applied. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ./mysqlbackup --sbt-lib-path=/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/libobk.so64  --backup-dir=/export/home2/tmp/hema/NBMEB/ --backup-image=sbt:bkpsbtNB image-to-backup-dir-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Now apply logs as usual, shutdown the server and perform restore, restart the server and check the data contents. ./mysqlbackup   ---backup-dir=/export/home2/tmp/hema/NBMEB/  apply-log ./mysqlbackup --datadir=/export/home2/tmp/hema/mysql-server/mysql-5.5-meb-repo/mysql-test/var/mysqld.1/data/  --backup-dir=/export/home2/tmp/hema/MEB_bkpdir/ innodb_log_files_in_group=2 --innodb_log_file_size=5M --user=root --port=13000 --protocol=tcp copy-back The NB console should show 'Restore" job as done. If you don't see that there is something wrong with MEB or NetBackup.You can also refer to more detailed steps of MEB and NB integration in whitepaper here

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• MacGyver Moments

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Denny Cherry tagged me to write about my best MacGyver Moment.  Usually I ignore blogosphere fluff and just use this space to write what I think is important.  However, #MVP10 just ended and I have a stronger sense of community.  Besides, where else would I mention my second best Macgyver moment was making a BIOS jumper out of a soda can.  Aluminum is conductive and I didn't have any real jumpers lying around. My best moment is probably my entire home computer network.  Every system but one is hand-built, usually cobbled together out of spare parts and 'adapted' from its original purpose. My Primary Domain Controller is a Dell 2300.   The Service Tag indicates it was shipped to the original owner in 1999.  Box has a PERC/1 RAID controller.  I acquired this from a previous employer for $50.  It runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.  Does DNS, DHCP, and RADIUS services as a bonus.  RADIUS authentication is used for VPN and Wireless access.  It is nice to sign in once and be done with it. The Secondary Domain Controller is an old desktop.  Dual P-III 933 with some extra drives. My VPN box is a P-II 250 with 384MB of RAM and a 21 GB hard drive.  I did a P-to-V to my Hyper-V box a year or so ago and retired the hardware again.  Dynamic DNS lets me connect no matter how often Comcast shuffles my IP. The Hyper-V box is a desktop system with 8GB RAM and an AMD Athlon 5000+ processor.  Cost me less than $500 to put together nearly two years ago.  I reasoned that if Vista and Windows 2008 were the same code then Vista 64-bit certified meant the drivers for Vista would load into Windows 2008.  Turns out I was right. Later I added three 1TB drives but wasn't too happy with how that turned out.  I recovered two of the drives yesterday and am building an iSCSI storage unit. (Much thanks to Starwind.  Great product).  I am using an old AMD 1.1GhZ box with 1.5 GB RAM (cobbled together from three old PCs) as my storave server.  The Hyper-V box is slated for an OS rebuild to 2008 R2 once I get the storage system worked out.  maybe in a week or two. A couple of DLink Gigabit switches ties everything together. Add in the Vonage box, the three PCs, the Wireless-N Access Point, the two notebooks and the XBox and you have gone from MacGyver to darn near Rube Goldberg. The only thing I really spend money on is power supplies and fans.  I buy top-of-the-line for both. I even pull and crimp my own cables. Oh, and if my kids hose up a PC, I have all of their data on a server elsewhere.  Every PC and laptop is pretty much interchangable for email and basic workstation tasks.  That helps a lot too. Of course I will tag SQLVariant.

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• Is RTD Stateless or Stateful?

  - by [email protected]

  Yes.   A stateless service is one where each request is an independent transaction that can be processed by any of the servers in a cluster.  A stateful service is one where state is kept in a server's memory from transaction to transaction, thus necessitating the proper routing of requests to the right server. The main advantage of stateless systems is simplicity of design. The main advantage of stateful systems is performance. I'm often asked whether RTD is a stateless or stateful service, so I wanted to clarify this issue in depth so that RTD's architecture will be properly understood. The short answer is: "RTD can be configured as a stateless or stateful service." The performance difference between stateless and stateful systems can be very significant, and while in a call center implementation it may be reasonable to use a pure stateless configuration, a web implementation that produces thousands of requests per second is practically impossible with a stateless configuration. RTD's performance is orders of magnitude better than most competing systems. RTD was architected from the ground up to achieve this performance. Features like automatic and dynamic compression of prediction models, automatic translation of metadata to machine code, lack of interpreted languages, and separation of model building from decisioning contribute to achieving this performance level. Because  of this focus on performance we decided to have RTD's default configuration work in a stateful manner. By being stateful RTD requests are typically handled in a few milliseconds when repeated requests come to the same session. Now, those readers that have participated in implementations of RTD know that RTD's architecture is also focused on reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with features like automatic model building, automatic time windows, automatic maintenance of database tables, automatic evaluation of data mining models, automatic management of models partitioned by channel, geography, etcetera, and hot swapping of configurations. How do you reconcile the need for a low TCO and the need for performance? How do you get the performance of a stateful system with the simplicity of a stateless system? The answer is that you make the system behave like a stateless system to the exterior, but you let it automatically take advantage of situations where being stateful is better. For example, one of the advantages of stateless systems is that you can route a message to any server in a cluster, without worrying about sending it to the same server that was handling the session in previous messages. With an RTD stateful configuration you can still route the message to any server in the cluster, so from the point of view of the configuration of other systems, it is the same as a stateless service. The difference though comes in performance, because if the message arrives to the right server, RTD can serve it without any external access to the session's state, thus tremendously reducing processing time. In typical implementations it is not rare to have high percentages of messages routed directly to the right server, while those that are not, are easily handled by forwarding the messages to the right server. This architecture usually provides the best of both worlds with performance and simplicity of configuration.   Configuring RTD as a pure stateless service A pure stateless configuration requires session data to be persisted at the end of handling each and every message and reloading that data at the beginning of handling any new message. This is of course, the root of the inefficiency of these configurations. This is also the reason why many "stateless" implementations actually do keep state to take advantage of a request coming back to the same server. Nevertheless, if the implementation requires a pure stateless decision service, this is easy to configure in RTD. The way to do it is: Mark every Integration Point to Close the session at the end of processing the message In the Session entity persist the session data on closing the session In the session entity check if a persisted version exists and load it An excellent solution for persisting the session data is Oracle Coherence, which provides a high performance, distributed cache that minimizes the performance impact of persisting and reloading the session. Alternatively, the session can be persisted to a local database. An interesting feature of the RTD stateless configuration is that it can cope with serializing concurrent requests for the same session. For example, if a web page produces two requests to the decision service, these requests could come concurrently to the decision services and be handled by different servers. Most stateless implementation would have the two requests step onto each other when saving the state, or fail one of the messages. When properly configured, RTD will make one message wait for the other before processing.   A Word on Context Using the context of a customer interaction typically significantly increases lift. For example, offer success in a call center could double if the context of the call is taken into account. For this reason, it is important to utilize the contextual information in decision making. To make the contextual information available throughout a session it needs to be persisted. When there is a well defined owner for the information then there is no problem because in case of a session restart, the information can be easily retrieved. If there is no official owner of the information, then RTD can be configured to persist this information.   Once again, RTD provides flexibility to ensure high performance when it is adequate to allow for some loss of state in the rare cases of server failure. For example, in a heavy use web site that serves 1000 pages per second the navigation history may be stored in the in memory session. In such sites it is typical that there is no OLTP that stores all the navigation events, therefore if an RTD server were to fail, it would be possible for the navigation to that point to be lost (note that a new session would be immediately established in one of the other servers). In most cases the loss of this navigation information would be acceptable as it would happen rarely. If it is desired to save this information, RTD would persist it every time the visitor navigates to a new page. Note that this practice is preferred whether RTD is configured in a stateless or stateful manner.  

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• Why SQL Developer Rocks for the Advanced User Too

  - by thatjeffsmith

  While SQL Developer may be ‘perfect for Oracle beginners,’ that doesn’t preclude advanced and intermediate users from getting their fair share of toys! I’ve been working with Oracle since the 7.3.4 days, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that the WAY an ‘old timer’ uses a tool like SQL Developer is radically different than the ‘beginner.’ If you’ve been reluctant to use SQL Developer because it’s a GUI, give me a few minutes to try to convince you it’s worth a second (or third) look. 1. Help when you want it, and only when you want it One of the biggest gripes any user has with a piece of software is when said software can’t get out of it’s own way. When you’re typing in a word processor, sometimes you can do without the grammar and spelling checks, the offer to auto-complete your words, and all of the additional mark-up. This drives folks to programs like Notepad++ and vi. You can disable the code insight feature so you can type unmolested by SQL Developer’s attempt to auto-complete your object names. Now, if you happen to come across a long or hard to spell object name, you can still invoke the feature on demand using Ctrl+Spacebar Code Editor – Completion Insight – Enable Completion Auto-Popup (Keyword being Auto) 2. Automatic File Tracking SQL*Minus is nice. Vi is cool. Notepad++ has a lot of features I like. But not too many editors offer automatic logging of changes to your files without having to setup a source control system. I was doing some work on my login.sql. I’m not doing anything crazy, but seeing what I had done in previous iterations was helpful. Now imagine how nice it would be to have this available for your l,000+ line scripts! Track your scripts as they change, no setup required! 3. Extend the Functionality Know SQL and XML? Wish SQL Developer did JUST a little bit more? Build your own extensions. You can have custom context menus and object pages in just a few minutes. This is an example of lazy developers writing code that write code. 4. Get Your Money’s Worth You’ve licensed Enterprise Edition. You got your Diagnostic and Tuning packs. Now start using them! Not everyone has access to Enterprise Manager, especially developers. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need help with troubleshooting and optimizing poorly performing SQL statements. ASH, AWR, Real-Time SQL Monitoring and the SQL Tuning Advisor are built into the Reports and Worksheet. Yes you could make the package calls, but that’s a whole lot of typing, and I’d rather just get to the results. 5. Profile, Debug, & Unit Testing PLSQL An Interactive Development Environment (IDE) built by the same folks that own the programming language (Hello – Oracle PLSQL!) should be complete. It should ‘hug’ the developer and empower them to churn out programs that work, run fast, and are easy to maintain. Write it, test it, debug it, and tune it. When you’re running your programs and you just want to see the data that’s returned, that shouldn’t require any special settings or workaround to make it happen either. Magic! And a whole lot more… I could go on and talk about the support for things like DataPump, RMAN, and DBMS_SCHEDULER, but you’re experts and you’re plenty busy. If you think SQL Developer is falling short somewhere, I want you to let us know about it.

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• Big Data Matters with ODI12c

  - by Madhu Nair

  contributed by Mike Eisterer On October 17th, 2013, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Data Integrator 12c (ODI12c).  This release signifies improvements to Oracle’s Data Integration portfolio of solutions, particularly Big Data integration. Why Big Data = Big Business Organizations are gaining greater insights and actionability through increased storage, processing and analytical benefits offered by Big Data solutions.  New technologies and frameworks like HDFS, NoSQL, Hive and MapReduce support these benefits now. As further data is collected, analytical requirements increase and the complexity of managing transformations and aggregations of data compounds and organizations are in need for scalable Data Integration solutions. ODI12c provides enterprise solutions for the movement, translation and transformation of information and data heterogeneously and in Big Data Environments through: The ability for existing ODI and SQL developers to leverage new Big Data technologies. A metadata focused approach for cataloging, defining and reusing Big Data technologies, mappings and process executions. Integration between many heterogeneous environments and technologies such as HDFS and Hive. Generation of Hive Query Language. Working with Big Data using Knowledge Modules  ODI12c provides developers with the ability to define sources and targets and visually develop mappings to effect the movement and transformation of data.  As the mappings are created, ODI12c leverages a rich library of prebuilt integrations, known as Knowledge Modules (KMs).  These KMs are contextual to the technologies and platforms to be integrated.  Steps and actions needed to manage the data integration are pre-built and configured within the KMs.  The Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop provides a series of KMs, specifically designed to integrate with Big Data Technologies.  The Big Data KMs include: Check Knowledge Module Reverse Engineer Knowledge Module Hive Transform Knowledge Module Hive Control Append Knowledge Module File to Hive (LOAD DATA) Knowledge Module File-Hive to Oracle (OLH-OSCH) Knowledge Module  Nothing to beat an Example: To demonstrate the use of the KMs which are part of the ODI Application Adapter for Hadoop, a mapping may be defined to move data between files and Hive targets.  The mapping is defined by dragging the source and target into the mapping, performing the attribute (column) mapping (see Figure 1) and then selecting the KM which will govern the process.  In this mapping example, movie data is being moved from an HDFS source into a Hive table.  Some of the attributes, such as “CUSTID to custid”, have been mapped over. Figure 1  Defining the Mapping Before the proper KM can be assigned to define the technology for the mapping, it needs to be added to the ODI project.  The Big Data KMs have been made available to the project through the KM import process.   Generally, this is done prior to defining the mapping. Figure 2  Importing the Big Data Knowledge Modules Following the import, the KMs are available in the Designer Navigator. 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 EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Figure 3  The Project View in Designer, Showing Installed IKMs Once the KM is imported, it may be assigned to the mapping target.  This is done by selecting the Physical View of the mapping and examining the Properties of the Target.  In this case MOVIAPP_LOG_STAGE is the target of our mapping. Figure 4  Physical View of the Mapping and Assigning the Big Data Knowledge Module to the Target Alternative KMs may have been selected as well, providing flexibility and abstracting the logical mapping from the physical implementation.  Our mapping may be applied to other technologies as well. The mapping is now complete and is ready to run.  We will see more in a future blog about running a mapping to load Hive. To complete the quick ODI for Big Data Overview, let us take a closer look at what the IKM File to Hive is doing for us.  ODI provides differentiated capabilities by defining the process and steps which normally would have to be manually developed, tested and implemented into the KM.  As shown in figure 5, the KM is preparing the Hive session, managing the Hive tables, performing the initial load from HDFS and then performing the insert into Hive.  HDFS and Hive options are selected graphically, as shown in the properties in Figure 4. Figure 5  Process and Steps Managed by the KM What’s Next Big Data being the shape shifting business challenge it is is fast evolving into the deciding factor between market leaders and others. Now that an introduction to ODI and Big Data has been provided, look for additional blogs coming soon using the Knowledge Modules which make up the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop: Importing Big Data Metadata into ODI, Testing Data Stores and Loading Hive Targets Generating Transformations using Hive Query language Loading Oracle from Hadoop Sources For more information now, please visit the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop web site, http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/data-integration/hadoop/overview/index.html Do not forget to tune in to the ODI12c Executive Launch webcast on the 12th to hear more about ODI12c and GG12c. Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Implementing a modern web application with Web API on top of old services

  - by Gaui

  My company has many WCF services which may or may not be replaced in the near future. The old web application is written in WebForms and communicates straight with these services via SOAP and returns DataTables. Now I am designing a new modern web application in a modern style, an AngularJS client which communicates with an ASP.NET Web API via JSON. The Web API then communicates with the WCF services via SOAP. In the future I want to let the Web API handle all requests and go straight to the database, but because the business logic implemented in the WCF services is complicated it's going to take some time to rewrite and replace it. Now to the problem: I'm trying to make it easy in the near future to replace the WCF services with some other data storage, e.g. another endpoint, database or whatever. I also want to make it easy to unit test the business logic. That's why I have structured the Web API with a repository layer and a service layer. The repository layer has a straight communication with the data storage (WCF service, database, or whatever) and the service layer then uses the repository (Dependency Injection) to get the data. It doesn't care where it gets the data from. Later on I can be in control and structure the data returned from the data storage (DataTable to POCO) and be able to test the logic in the service layer with some mock repository (using Dependency Injection). Below is some code to explain where I'm going with this. But my question is, does this all make sense? Am I making this overly complicated and could this be simplified in any way possible? Does this simplicity make this too complicated to maintain? My main goal is to make it as easy as possible to switch to another data storage later on, e.g. an ORM and be able to test the logic in the service layer. And because the majority of the business logic is implemented in these WCF services (and they return DataTables), I want to be in control of the data and the structure returned to the client. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Update 20/08/14 I created a repository factory, so services would all share repositories. Now it's easy to mock a repository, add it to the factory and create a provider using that factory. Any advice is much appreciated. I want to know if I'm making things more complicated than they should be. So it looks like this: 1. Repository Factory public class RepositoryFactory { private Dictionary<Type, IServiceRepository> repositories; public RepositoryFactory() { this.repositories = new Dictionary<Type, IServiceRepository>(); } public void AddRepository<T>(IServiceRepository repo) where T : class { if (this.repositories.ContainsKey(typeof(T))) { this.repositories.Remove(typeof(T)); } this.repositories.Add(typeof(T), repo); } public dynamic GetRepository<T>() { if (this.repositories.ContainsKey(typeof(T))) { return this.repositories[typeof(T)]; } throw new RepositoryNotFoundException("No repository found for " + typeof(T).Name); } } I'm not very fond of dynamic but I don't know how to retrieve that repository otherwise. 2. Repository and service // Service repository interface // All repository interfaces extend this public interface IServiceRepository { } // Invoice repository interface // Makes it easy to mock the repository later on public interface IInvoiceServiceRepository : IServiceRepository { List<Invoice> GetInvoices(); } // Invoice repository // Connects to some data storage to retrieve invoices public class InvoiceServiceRepository : IInvoiceServiceRepository { public List<Invoice> GetInvoices() { // Get the invoices from somewhere // This could be a WCF, a database, or whatever using(InvoiceServiceClient proxy = new InvoiceServiceClient()) { return proxy.GetInvoices(); } } } // Invoice service // Service that handles talking to a real or a mock repository public class InvoiceService { // Repository factory RepositoryFactory repoFactory; // Default constructor // Default connects to the real repository public InvoiceService(RepositoryFactory repo) { repoFactory = repo; } // Service function that gets all invoices from some repository (mock or real) public List<Invoice> GetInvoices() { // Query the repository return repoFactory.GetRepository<IInvoiceServiceRepository>().GetInvoices(); } }

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• Kernel oops on Linux running in VirtualBox breaks some IO-related functionality on the server

  - by Kristoffer E

  We are having problems with CentOS release 6.3 running in VirtualBox on Windows 7 machines. The symptoms are the following: Everything works as normal for several hours, even days. Then something happens which breaks the system. What we still can do after this something happens: Access the web server Use existing SSH sessions to run top and free What does not work: Starting new SSH sessions (hangs after username and password is entered) Running ls in existing SSH sessions (hangs) SSI includes from our web servers that fetch data from remote machines probably more What we see on the server when this something happens is the following: Load average go from basically nothing to around 3 CPU usage is still low (5%) Disk activity is low (running iostat) Plenty of memory available Plenty of disk space available In /var/log/messages we get the following: Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: e1000 0000:00:03.0: eth0: Detected Tx Unit Hang Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: Tx Queue <0> Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: TDH <2e> Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: TDT <30> Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: next_to_use <30> Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: next_to_clean <2e> Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: buffer_info[next_to_clean] Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: time_stamp <1038284db> Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: next_to_watch <2f> Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: jiffies <103828b42> Jun 14 01:10:48 devvm kernel: next_to_watch.status <0> Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: e1000 0000:00:03.0: eth0: Detected Tx Unit Hang Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: Tx Queue <0> Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: TDH <2e> Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: TDT <30> Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: next_to_use <30> Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: next_to_clean <2e> Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: buffer_info[next_to_clean] Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: time_stamp <1038284db> Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: next_to_watch <2f> Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: jiffies <103829312> Jun 14 01:10:50 devvm kernel: next_to_watch.status <0> Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: ------------[ cut here ]------------ Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: WARNING: at net/sched/sch_generic.c:261 dev_watchdog+0x26d/0x280() (Not tainted) Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: Hardware name: VirtualBox Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0 (e1000): transmit queue 0 timed out Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: Modules linked in: vboxsf(U) ipv6 ppdev parport_pc parport microcode sg vboxguest(U) i2c_piix4 i2c_core e1000 snd_intel8x0 snd_ac97_codec ac97_bus snd_seq snd_seq_device snd_pcm snd_timer snd soundcore snd_page_alloc pcnet32 mii ext4 mbcache jbd2 sd_mod crc_t10dif ahci dm_mirror dm_region_hash dm_log dm_mod [last unloaded: scsi_wait_scan] Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.32-279.el6.x86_64 #1 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: Call Trace: Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: <IRQ> [<ffffffff8106b747>] ? warn_slowpath_common+0x87/0xc0 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8106b836>] ? warn_slowpath_fmt+0x46/0x50 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff814595fd>] ? dev_watchdog+0x26d/0x280 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81099138>] ? sched_clock_cpu+0xb8/0x110 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81459390>] ? dev_watchdog+0x0/0x280 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8107e897>] ? run_timer_softirq+0x197/0x340 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff810a21c0>] ? tick_sched_timer+0x0/0xc0 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8102b40d>] ? lapic_next_event+0x1d/0x30 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81073ec1>] ? __do_softirq+0xc1/0x1e0 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81096c50>] ? hrtimer_interrupt+0x140/0x250 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8100c24c>] ? call_softirq+0x1c/0x30 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8100de85>] ? do_softirq+0x65/0xa0 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81073ca5>] ? irq_exit+0x85/0x90 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81505be0>] ? smp_apic_timer_interrupt+0x70/0x9b Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8100bc13>] ? apic_timer_interrupt+0x13/0x20 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: <EOI> [<ffffffff810387cb>] ? native_safe_halt+0xb/0x10 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff810149cd>] ? default_idle+0x4d/0xb0 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81009e06>] ? cpu_idle+0xb6/0x110 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff814e433a>] ? rest_init+0x7a/0x80 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81c21f7b>] ? start_kernel+0x424/0x430 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81c2133a>] ? x86_64_start_reservations+0x125/0x129 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81c21438>] ? x86_64_start_kernel+0xfa/0x109 Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: ---[ end trace 2c7bb984812cf120 ]--- Jun 14 01:10:52 devvm kernel: e1000 0000:00:03.0: eth0: Reset adapter Jun 14 01:10:53 devvm abrtd: Directory 'oops-2013-06-14-01:10:53-1537-0' creation detected Jun 14 01:10:53 devvm abrt-dump-oops: Reported 1 kernel oopses to Abrt Jun 14 01:10:53 devvm abrtd: Can't open file '/var/spool/abrt/oops-2013-06-14-01:10:53-1537-0/uid': No such file or directory Jun 14 01:10:55 devvm kernel: Bridge firewalling registered After this we see for a while, every two minutes: Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: INFO: task events/0:19 blocked for more than 120 seconds. Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: events/0 D 0000000000000000 0 19 2 0x00000000 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: ffff880116c4fb90 0000000000000046 00000000ffffffff 0000000000000008 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: 0000000000016680 0000000000016680 ffff880028210400 0000000000016680 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: ffff880116c4daf8 ffff880116c4ffd8 000000000000fb88 ffff880116c4daf8 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: Call Trace: Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8105b483>] ? perf_event_task_sched_out+0x33/0x80 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff814fe6a5>] schedule_timeout+0x215/0x2e0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8100975d>] ? __switch_to+0x13d/0x320 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff814fe323>] wait_for_common+0x123/0x180 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81060250>] ? default_wake_function+0x0/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff814fe43d>] wait_for_completion+0x1d/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8108d093>] __cancel_work_timer+0x1b3/0x1e0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8108cbe0>] ? wq_barrier_func+0x0/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8108d0f0>] cancel_work_sync+0x10/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffffa01c5ca5>] e1000_down_and_stop+0x25/0x50 [e1000] Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffffa01cb695>] e1000_down+0x155/0x200 [e1000] Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffffa01cbcb0>] ? e1000_reset_task+0x0/0xe0 [e1000] Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffffa01cbd1e>] e1000_reset_task+0x6e/0xe0 [e1000] Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8108c760>] worker_thread+0x170/0x2a0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff810920d0>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x40 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8108c5f0>] ? worker_thread+0x0/0x2a0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81091d66>] kthread+0x96/0xa0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8100c14a>] child_rip+0xa/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81091cd0>] ? kthread+0x0/0xa0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8100c140>] ? child_rip+0x0/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: INFO: task parted:8069 blocked for more than 120 seconds. Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: parted D 0000000000000003 0 8069 7994 0x00000080 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: ffff8800908b3bb8 0000000000000082 0000000000000000 ffff88010ab50080 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: ffff880116c7d500 0000000000000001 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: ffff88010ab50638 ffff8800908b3fd8 000000000000fb88 ffff88010ab50638 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: Call Trace: Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff814fe6a5>] schedule_timeout+0x215/0x2e0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff814fe323>] wait_for_common+0x123/0x180 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff81060250>] ? default_wake_function+0x0/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8112b6d0>] ? lru_add_drain_per_cpu+0x0/0x10 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff814fe43d>] wait_for_completion+0x1d/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8108d177>] flush_work+0x77/0xc0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8108cbe0>] ? wq_barrier_func+0x0/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8108d2f3>] schedule_on_each_cpu+0x133/0x180 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff811ad440>] ? invalidate_bh_lru+0x0/0x50 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8112ae35>] lru_add_drain_all+0x15/0x20 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff811adf6a>] invalidate_bdev+0x2a/0x50 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8125e9a4>] blkdev_ioctl+0x3b4/0x6e0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff811b381c>] block_ioctl+0x3c/0x40 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8118dec2>] vfs_ioctl+0x22/0xa0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8118e064>] do_vfs_ioctl+0x84/0x580 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8118e5e1>] sys_ioctl+0x81/0xa0 Jun 14 01:14:22 devvm kernel: [<ffffffff8100b0f2>] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b In /var/spool/abrt/oops-2013-06-14-01:10:53-1537-0 we can see the following information: In backtrace: WARNING: at net/sched/sch_generic.c:261 dev_watchdog+0x26d/0x280() (Not tainted) Hardware name: VirtualBox NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0 (e1000): transmit queue 0 timed out Modules linked in: vboxsf(U) ipv6 ppdev parport_pc parport microcode sg vboxguest(U) i2c_piix4 i2c_core e1000 snd_intel8x0 snd_ac97_codec ac97_bus snd_seq snd_seq_device snd_pcm snd_timer snd soundcore snd_page_alloc pcnet32 mii ext4 mbcache jbd2 sd_mod crc_t10dif ahci dm_mirror dm_region_hash dm_log dm_mod [last unloaded: scsi_wait_scan] Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.32-279.el6.x86_64 #1 Call Trace: <IRQ> [<ffffffff8106b747>] ? warn_slowpath_common+0x87/0xc0 [<ffffffff8106b836>] ? warn_slowpath_fmt+0x46/0x50 [<ffffffff814595fd>] ? dev_watchdog+0x26d/0x280 [<ffffffff81099138>] ? sched_clock_cpu+0xb8/0x110 [<ffffffff81459390>] ? dev_watchdog+0x0/0x280 [<ffffffff8107e897>] ? run_timer_softirq+0x197/0x340 [<ffffffff810a21c0>] ? tick_sched_timer+0x0/0xc0 [<ffffffff8102b40d>] ? lapic_next_event+0x1d/0x30 [<ffffffff81073ec1>] ? __do_softirq+0xc1/0x1e0 [<ffffffff81096c50>] ? hrtimer_interrupt+0x140/0x250 [<ffffffff8100c24c>] ? call_softirq+0x1c/0x30 [<ffffffff8100de85>] ? do_softirq+0x65/0xa0 [<ffffffff81073ca5>] ? irq_exit+0x85/0x90 [<ffffffff81505be0>] ? smp_apic_timer_interrupt+0x70/0x9b [<ffffffff8100bc13>] ? apic_timer_interrupt+0x13/0x20 <EOI> [<ffffffff810387cb>] ? native_safe_halt+0xb/0x10 [<ffffffff810149cd>] ? default_idle+0x4d/0xb0 [<ffffffff81009e06>] ? cpu_idle+0xb6/0x110 [<ffffffff814e433a>] ? rest_init+0x7a/0x80 [<ffffffff81c21f7b>] ? start_kernel+0x424/0x430 [<ffffffff81c2133a>] ? x86_64_start_reservations+0x125/0x129 [<ffffffff81c21438>] ? x86_64_start_kernel+0xfa/0x109 In cmdline: ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_01-lv_root rd_NO_LUKS LANG=en_US.UTF-8 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=sv-latin1 rd_NO_MD SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 rd_LVM_LV=vg_01/lv_root crashkernel=129M@0M rhgb quiet rd_LVM_LV=vg_01/lv_swap rd_NO_DM rhgb quie Additional information: # uname -a Linux devvm 2.6.32-279.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jun 22 12:19:21 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux # cat /etc/redhat-release CentOS release 6.3 (Final) VirtualBox version 4.2.6. Any insight in how we can proceed with troubleshooting this is appreciated. If you need more information, just let me know.

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• The SmartAssembly Rearchitecture

  - by Simon Cooper

  You may have noticed that not a lot has happened to SmartAssembly in the past few months. However, the team has been very busy behind the scenes working on an entirely new version of SmartAssembly. SmartAssembly 6.5 Over the past few releases of SmartAssembly, the team had come to the realisation that the current 'architecture' - grown organically, way before RedGate bought it, from a simple name obfuscator over the years into a full-featured obfuscator and assembly instrumentation tool - was simply not up to the task. Not for what we wanted to do with it at the time, and not what we have planned for the future. Not only was it not up to what we wanted it to do, but it was severely limiting our development capabilities; long-standing bugs in the root architecture that couldn't be fixed, some rather...interesting...design decisions, and convoluted logic that increased the complexity of any bugfix or new feature tenfold. So, we set out to fix this. Earlier this year, a new engine was written on which SmartAssembly would be based. Over the following few months, each feature was ported over to the new engine and extensively tested by our existing unit and integration tests. The engine was linked into the existing UI (no easy task, due to the tight coupling between the UI and old engine), and existing RedGate products were tested on the new SmartAssembly to ensure the new engine acted in the same way. The result is SmartAssembly 6.5. The risks of a rearchitecture Are there risks to rearchitecting a product like SmartAssembly? Of course. There was a lot of undocumented behaviour in the old engine, and as part of the rearchitecture we had to find this behaviour, define it, and document it. In the process we found some behaviour of the old engine that simply did not make sense; hence the changes in pruning & obfuscation behaviour in the release notes. All the special edge cases we had to find, document, and re-implement. There was a chance that these special cases would not be found until near the end of the project, when everything is functionally complete and interacting together. By that stage, it would be hard to go back and change anything without a whole lot of extra work, delaying the release by months. We always knew this was a possibility; our initial estimate of the time required was '4 months, ± 4 months'. And that was including various mitigation strategies to reduce the likelihood of these issues being found right at the end. Fortunately, this worst-case did not happen. However, the rearchitecture did produce some benefits. As well as numerous bug fixes that we could not fix any other way, we've also added logging that lets you find out exactly why a particular field or property wasn't pruned or obfuscated. There's a new command line interface, we've tested it with WP7.1 and Silverlight 5, and we've added a new option to error reporting to improve the performance of instrumented apps by ~10%, at the cost of inaccurate line numbers in reports. So? What differences will I see? Largely none. SmartAssembly 6.5 produces the same output as SmartAssembly 6.2. The performance of 6.5 will be much faster for some users, and generally the same as 6.2 for the remaining. If you've encountered a bug with previous versions of SmartAssembly, I encourage you to try 6.5, as it has most likely been fixed in the rearchitecture. If you encounter a bug with 6.5, please do tell us; we'll be doing another release quite soon, so we'll aim to fix any issues caused by 6.5 in that release. Most importantly, the new architecture finally allows us to implement some Big Things with SmartAssembly we've been planning for many months; these will fundamentally change how you build, release and monitor your application. Stay tuned for further updates!

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• Securing Flexfield Value Sets in EBS 12.2

  - by Sara Woodhull

  Release 12.2 includes a new feature: flexfield value set security. This new feature gives you additional options for ensuring that different administrators have non-overlapping responsibilities, which in turn provides checks and balances for sensitive activities.  Separation of Duties (SoD) is one of the key concepts of internal controls and is a requirement for many regulations including: Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) European Union Data Protection Directive. Its primary intent is to put barriers in place to prevent fraud or theft by an individual acting alone. Implementing Separation of Duties requires minimizing the possibility that users could modify data across application functions where the users should not normally have access. For flexfields and report parameters in Oracle E-Business Suite, values in value sets can affect functionality such as the rollup of accounting data, job grades used at a company, and so on. Controlling access to the creation or modification of value set values can be an important piece of implementing Separation of Duties in an organization. New Flexfield Value Set Security feature Flexfield value set security allows system administrators to restrict users from viewing, adding or updating values in specific value sets. Value set security enables role-based separation of duties for key flexfields, descriptive flexfields, and report parameters. For example, you can set up value set security such that certain users can view or insert values for any value set used by the Accounting Flexfield but no other value sets, while other users can view and update values for value sets used for any flexfields in Oracle HRMS. You can also segregate access by Operating Unit as well as by role or responsibility.Value set security uses a combination of data security and role-based access control in Oracle User Management. Flexfield value set security provides a level of security that is different from the previously-existing and similarly-named features in Oracle E-Business Suite: Function security controls whether a user has access to a specific page or form, as well as what operations the user can do in that screen. Flexfield value security controls what values a user can enter into a flexfield segment or report parameter (by responsibility) during routine data entry in many transaction screens across Oracle E-Business Suite. Flexfield value set security (this feature, new in Release 12.2) controls who can view, insert, or update values for a particular value set (by flexfield, report, or value set) in the Segment Values form (FNDFFMSV). The effect of flexfield value set security is that a user of the Segment Values form will only be able to view those value sets for which the user has been granted access. Further, the user will be able to insert or update/disable values in that value set if the user has been granted privileges to do so.  Flexfield value set security affects independent, dependent, and certain table-validated value sets for flexfields and report parameters. Initial State of the Feature upon Upgrade Because this is a new security feature, it is turned on by default.  When you initially install or upgrade to Release 12.2.2, no users are allowed to view, insert or update any value set values (users may even think that their values are missing or invalid because they cannot see the values).  You must explicitly set up access for specific users by enabling appropriate grants and roles for those users.We recommend using flexfield value set security as part of a comprehensive Separation of Duties strategy. However, if you choose not to implement flexfield value set security upon upgrading to or installing Release 12.2, you can enable backwards compatibility--users can access any value sets if they have access to the Values form--after you upgrade. The feature does not affect day-to-day transactions that use flexfields.  However, you must either set up specific grants and roles or enable backwards compatibility before users can create new values or update or disable existing values. For more information, see: Release 12.2 Flexfield Value Set Security Documentation Update for Patch 17305947:R12.FND.C (Document 1589204.1) R12.2 TOI: Implement and Use Application Object Library (AOL) - Flexfields Security and Separation of Duties for Value Sets (recorded training)

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• Routes on a sphere surface - Find geodesic?

  - by CaNNaDaRk

  I'm working with some friends on a browser based game where people can move on a 2D map. It's been almost 7 years and still people play this game so we are thinking of a way to give them something new. Since then the game map was a limited plane and people could move from (0, 0) to (MAX_X, MAX_Y) in quantized X and Y increments (just imagine it as a big chessboard). We believe it's time to give it another dimension so, just a couple of weeks ago, we began to wonder how the game could look with other mappings: Unlimited plane with continous movement: this could be a step forward but still i'm not convinced. Toroidal World (continous or quantized movement): sincerely I worked with torus before but this time I want something more... Spherical world with continous movement: this would be great! What we want Users browsers are given a list of coordinates like (latitude, longitude) for each object on the spherical surface map; browsers must then show this in user's screen rendering them inside a web element (canvas maybe? this is not a problem). When people click on the plane we convert the (mouseX, mouseY) to (lat, lng) and send it to the server which has to compute a route between current user's position to the clicked point. What we have We began writing a Java library with many useful maths to work with Rotation Matrices, Quaternions, Euler Angles, Translations, etc. We put it all together and created a program that generates sphere points, renders them and show them to the user inside a JPanel. We managed to catch clicks and translate them to spherical coords and to provide some other useful features like view rotation, scale, translation etc. What we have now is like a little (very little indeed) engine that simulates client and server interaction. Client side shows points on the screen and catches other interactions, server side renders the view and does other calculus like interpolating the route between current position and clicked point. Where is the problem? Obviously we want to have the shortest path to interpolate between the two route points. We use quaternions to interpolate between two points on the surface of the sphere and this seemed to work fine until i noticed that we weren't getting the shortest path on the sphere surface: We though the problem was that the route is calculated as the sum of two rotations about X and Y axis. So we changed the way we calculate the destination quaternion: We get the third angle (the first is latitude, the second is longitude, the third is the rotation about the vector which points toward our current position) which we called orientation. Now that we have the "orientation" angle we rotate Z axis and then use the result vector as the rotation axis for the destination quaternion (you can see the rotation axis in grey): What we got is the correct route (you can see it lays on a great circle), but we get to this ONLY if the starting route point is at latitude, longitude (0, 0) which means the starting vector is (sphereRadius, 0, 0). With the previous version (image 1) we don't get a good result even when startin point is 0, 0, so i think we're moving towards a solution, but the procedure we follow to get this route is a little "strange" maybe? In the following image you get a view of the problem we get when starting point is not (0, 0), as you can see starting point is not the (sphereRadius, 0, 0) vector, and as you can see the destination point (which is correctly drawn!) is not on the route. The magenta point (the one which lays on the route) is the route's ending point rotated about the center of the sphere of (-startLatitude, 0, -startLongitude). This means that if i calculate a rotation matrix and apply it to every point on the route maybe i'll get the real route, but I start to think that there's a better way to do this. Maybe I should try to get the plane through the center of the sphere and the route points, intersect it with the sphere and get the geodesic? But how? Sorry for being way too verbose and maybe for incorrect English but this thing is blowing my mind! EDIT: This code version is related to the first image: public void setRouteStart(double lat, double lng) { EulerAngles tmp = new EulerAngles ( Math.toRadians(lat), 0, -Math.toRadians(lng)); //set route start Quaternion qtStart.setInertialToObject(tmp); //do other stuff like drawing start point... } public void impostaDestinazione(double lat, double lng) { EulerAngles tmp = new AngoliEulero( Math.toRadians(lat), 0, -Math.toRadians(lng)); qtEnd.setInertialToObject(tmp); //do other stuff like drawing dest point... } public V3D interpolate(double totalTime, double t) { double _t = t/totalTime; Quaternion q = Quaternion.Slerp(qtStart, qtEnd, _t); RotationMatrix.inertialQuatToIObject(q); V3D p = matInt.inertialToObject(V3D.Xaxis.scale(sphereRadius)); //other stuff, like drawing point ... return p; } //mostly taken from a book! public static Quaternion Slerp(Quaternion q0, Quaternion q1, double t) { double cosO = q0.dot(q1); double q1w = q1.w; double q1x = q1.x; double q1y = q1.y; double q1z = q1.z; if (cosO < 0.0f) { q1w = -q1w; q1x = -q1x; q1y = -q1y; q1z = -q1z; cosO = -cosO; } double sinO = Math.sqrt(1.0f - cosO*cosO); double O = Math.atan2(sinO, cosO); double oneOverSinO = 1.0f / senoOmega; k0 = Math.sin((1.0f - t) * O) * oneOverSinO; k1 = Math.sin(t * O) * oneOverSinO; // Interpolate return new Quaternion( k0*q0.w + k1*q1w, k0*q0.x + k1*q1x, k0*q0.y + k1*q1y, k0*q0.z + k1*q1z ); } A little dump of what i get (again check image 1): Route info: Sphere radius and center: 200,000, (0.0, 0.0, 0.0) Route start: lat 0,000 °, lng 0,000 ° @v: (200,000, 0,000, 0,000), |v| = 200,000 Route end: lat 30,000 °, lng 30,000 ° @v: (150,000, 86,603, 100,000), |v| = 200,000 Qt dump: (w, x, y, z), rot. angle°, (x, y, z) rot. axis Qt start: (1,000, 0,000, -0,000, 0,000); 0,000 °; (1,000, 0,000, 0,000) Qt end: (0,933, 0,067, -0,250, 0,250); 42,181 °; (0,186, -0,695, 0,695) Route start: lat 30,000 °, lng 10,000 ° @v: (170,574, 30,077, 100,000), |v| = 200,000 Route end: lat 80,000 °, lng -50,000 ° @v: (22,324, -26,604, 196,962), |v| = 200,000 Qt dump: (w, x, y, z), rot. angle°, (x, y, z) rot. axis Qt start: (0,962, 0,023, -0,258, 0,084); 31,586 °; (0,083, -0,947, 0,309) Qt end: (0,694, -0,272, -0,583, -0,324); 92,062 °; (-0,377, -0,809, -0,450)

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• NHibernate 3.0 and FluentNHibernate, how to get up and running&hellip;.

  - by DesigningCode

  First up. Its actually really easy. I’m not very religious about my DB tech, I don’t really care, I just want something that works.  So I’m happy to consider all options if they provide an advantage, and recently I was considering jumping from NHibernate to EF 4.0.  However before ditching NHibernate and jumping to EF 4.0 I thought I should try the head version of NHibernates trunk and the Head version of FluentNHibernate. I currently have a “Repository / Unit of Work” Framework built up around these two techs.  All up it makes my life pretty simple for dealing with databases.   The problem is the current release of NHibernate + the Linq provider wasn’t too hot for our purposes.  Especially trying to plug it into older VB.NET code.   The Linq provider spat the dummy with VB.NET lambdas.  Mainly because in C# Query().Where(l => l.Name.Contains("x") || l.Name.Contains("y")).ToList(); is not the same as the VB.NET Query().Where(Function(l) l.Name.Contains("x") Or l.Name.Contains("y")).ToList VB.NET seems to spit out … well…. something different :-) so anyways… Compiling your own version of NHibernate and FluentNHibernate.  It’s actually pretty easy! First you’ll need to install tortisesvn NAnt and Git if you don’t already have them.  NHibernate first step, get the subversion trunk https://nhibernate.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nhibernate/trunk/ into a directory somewhere.  eg \thirdparty\nhibernate Then use NAnt to build it.   (if you open the .sln it will show errors in that  AssemblyInfo.cs doesn’t exist ) to build it, there is a .txt document with sample command line build instructions,  I simply used :- NAnt -D:project.config=release clean build >output-release-build.log *wait* *wait* *wait* and ta da, you will have a bin directory with all the release dlls. FluentNHibernate This was pretty simple. there’s instructions here :- http://wiki.fluentnhibernate.org/Getting_started#Installation basically, with git, create a directory, and you issue the command git clone git://github.com/jagregory/fluent-nhibernate.git and wait, and soon enough you have the source. Now, from the bin directory that NHibernate spit out, take everything and dump it into the subdirectory “fluent-nhibernate\tools\NHibernate” Now, to build, you can use rake….which a ruby build system, however you can also just open the solution and build.   Which is what I did.  I had a few problems with the references which I simply re-added using the new ones.  Once built, I just took all the NHibnerate dlls, and the fluent ones and replaced my existing NHibernate / Fluent and killed off the old linq project. All I had to change is the places that used  .Linq<T>  and replace them with .Query<T>  (which was easy as I had wrapped it already to isolate my code from such changes) and hey presto, everything worked.  Even the VB.NET linq calls. I need to do some more testing as I’ve only done basic smoke tests, but its all looking pretty good, so for now, I will stick to NHibernate!

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• maintaining a growing, diverse codebase with continuous integration

  - by Nate

  I am in need of some help with philosophy and design of a continuous integration setup. Our current CI setup uses buildbot. When I started out designing it, I inherited (well, not strictly, as I was involved in its design a year earlier) a bespoke CI builder that was tailored to run the entire build at once, overnight. After a while, we decided that this was insufficient, and started exploring different CI frameworks, eventually choosing buildbot. One of my goals in transitioning to buildbot (besides getting to enjoy all the whiz-bang extras) was to overcome some of the inadequacies of our bespoke nightly builder. Humor me for a moment, and let me explain what I have inherited. The codebase for my company is almost 150 unique c++ Windows applications, each of which has dependencies on one or more of a dozen internal libraries (and many on 3rd party libraries as well). Some of these libraries are interdependent, and have depending applications that (while they have nothing to do with each other) have to be built with the same build of that library. Half of these applications and libraries are considered "legacy" and unportable, and must be built with several distinct configurations of the IBM compiler (for which I have written unique subclasses of Compile), and the other half are built with visual studio. The code for each compiler is stored in two separate Visual SourceSafe repositories (which I am simply handling using a bunch of ShellCommands, as there is no support for VSS). Our original nightly builder simply took down the source for everything, and built stuff in a certain order. There was no way to build only a single application, or pick a revision, or to group things. It would launched virtual machines to build a number of the applications. It wasn't very robust, it wasn't distributable. It wasn't terribly extensible. I wanted to be able to overcame all of these limitations in buildbot. The way I did this originally was to create entries for each of the applications we wanted to build (all 150ish of them), then create triggered schedulers that could build various applications as groups, and then subsume those groups under an overall nightly build scheduler. These could run on dedicated slaves (no more virtual machine chicanery), and if I wanted I could simply add new slaves. Now, if we want to do a full build out of schedule, it's one click, but we can also build just one application should we so desire. There are four weaknesses of this approach, however. One is our source tree's complex web of dependencies. In order to simplify config maintenace, all builders are generated from a large dictionary. The dependencies are retrieved and built in a not-terribly robust fashion (namely, keying off of certain things in my build-target dictionary). The second is that each build has between 15 and 21 build steps, which is hard to browse and look at in the web interface, and since there are around 150 columns, takes forever to load (think from 30 seconds to multiple minutes). Thirdly, we no longer have autodiscovery of build targets (although, as much as one of my coworkers harps on me about this, I don't see what it got us in the first place). Finally, aformentioned coworker likes to constantly bring up the fact that we can no longer perform a full build on our local machine (though I never saw what that got us, either, considering that it took three times as long as the distributed build; I think he is just paranoically phobic of ever breaking the build). Now, moving to new development, we are starting to use g++ and subversion (not porting the old repository, mind you - just for the new stuff). Also, we are starting to do more unit testing ("more" might give the wrong picture... it's more like any), and integration testing (using python). I'm having a hard time figuring out how to fit these into my existing configuration. So, where have I gone wrong philosophically here? How can I best proceed forward (with buildbot - it's the only piece of the puzzle I have license to work on) so that my configuration is actually maintainable? How do I address some of my design's weaknesses? What really works in terms of CI strategies for large, (possibly over-)complex codebases?

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• Thoughts on C# Extension Methods

  - by Damon

  I'm not a huge fan of extension methods.  When they first came out, I remember seeing a method on an object that was fairly useful, but when I went to use it another piece of code that method wasn't available.  Turns out it was an extension method and I hadn't included the appropriate assembly and imports statement in my code to use it.  I remember being a bit confused at first about how the heck that could happen (hey, extension methods were new, cut me some slack) and it took a bit of time to track down exactly what it was that I needed to include to get that method back.  I just imagined a new developer trying to figure out why a method was missing and fruitlessly searching on MSDN for a method that didn't exist and it just didn't sit well with me. I am of the opinion that if you have an object, then you shouldn't have to include additional assemblies to get additional instance level methods out of that object.  That opinion applies to namespaces as well - I do not like it when the contents of a namespace are split out into multiple assemblies.  I prefer to have static utility classes instead of extension methods to keep things nicely packaged into a cohesive unit.  It also makes it abundantly clear where utility methods are used in code.  I will concede, however, that it can make code a bit more verbose and lengthy.  There is always a trade-off. Some people harp on extension methods because it breaks the tenants of object oriented development and allows you to add methods to sealed classes.  Whatever.  Extension methods are just utility methods that you can tack onto an object after the fact.  Extension methods do not give you any more access to an object than the developer of that object allows, so I say that those who cry OO foul on extension methods really don't have much of an argument on which to stand.  In fact, I have to concede that my dislike of them is really more about style than anything of great substance. One interesting thing that I found regarding extension methods is that you can call them on null objects. Take a look at this extension method: namespace ExtensionMethods {   public static class StringUtility   {     public static int WordCount(this string str)     {       if(str == null) return 0;       return str.Split(new char[] { ' ', '.', '?' },         StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries).Length;     }   }   } Notice that the extension method checks to see if the incoming string parameter is null.  I was worried that the runtime would perform a check on the object instance to make sure it was not null before calling an extension method, but that is apparently not the case.  So, if you call the following code it runs just fine. string s = null; int words = s.WordCount(); I am a big fan of things working, but this seems to go against everything I've come to know about instance level methods.  However, an extension method is really a static method masquerading as an instance-level method, so I suppose it would be far more frustrating if it failed since there is really no reason it shouldn't succeed. Although I'm not a fan of extension methods, I will say that if you ever find yourself at an impasse with a die-hard fan of either the utility class or extension method approach, then there is a common ground.  Extension methods are defined in static classes, and you call them from those static classes as well as directly from the objects they extend.  So if you build your utility classes using extension methods, then you can have it your way and they can have it theirs. 

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• Code Contracts: validating arrays and collections

  - by DigiMortal

  Validating collections before using them is very common task when we use built-in generic types for our collections. In this posting I will show you how to validate collections using code contracts. It is cool how much awful looking code you can avoid using code contracts. Failing code Let’s suppose we have method that calculates sum of all invoices in collection. We have class Invoice and one of properties it has is Sum. I don’t introduce here any complex calculations on invoices because we have another problem to solve in this topic. Here is our code. public static decimal CalculateTotal(IList<Invoice> invoices) {     var sum = invoices.Sum(p => p.Sum);     return sum; } This method is very simple but it fails when invoices list contains at least one null. Of course, we can test if invoice is null but having nulls in lists like this is not good idea – it opens green way for different coding bugs in system. Our goal is to react to bugs ASAP at the nearest place they occur. There is one more way how to make our method fail. It happens when invoices is null. I thing it is also one common bugs during development and it even happens in production environments under some conditions that are usually hardly met. Now let’s protect our little calculation method with code contracts. We need two contracts: invoices cannot be null invoices cannot contain any nulls Our first contract is easy but how to write the second one? Solution: Contract.ForAll Preconditions in code are checked using Contract.Ensures method. This method takes boolean value as argument that sais if contract holds or not. There is also method Contract.ForAll that takes collection and predicate that must hold for that collection. Nice thing is ForAll returns boolean. So, we have very simple solution. public static decimal CalculateTotal(IList<Invoice> invoices) {     Contract.Requires(invoices != null);     Contract.Requires(Contract.ForAll<Invoice>(invoices, p => p != null));       var sum = invoices.Sum(p => p.Sum);     return sum; } And here are some lines of code you can use to test the contracts quickly. var invoices = new List<Invoice>(); invoices.Add(new Invoice()); invoices.Add(null); invoices.Add(new Invoice()); //CalculateTotal(null); CalculateTotal(invoices); If your code is covered with unit tests then I suggest you to write tests to check that these contracts hold for every code run. Conclusion Although it seemed at first place that checking all elements in collection may end up with for-loops that does not look so nice we were able to solve our problem nicely. ForAll method of contract class offered us simple mechanism to check collections and it does it smoothly the code-contracts-way. P.S. I suggest you also read devlicio.us blog posting Validating Collections with Code Contracts by Derik Whittaker.

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• Thoughts on ODTUG Kscope12

  - by thatjeffsmith

  The rodeo rocked! This wasn’t my first rodeo, and it wasn’t my first Kscope, but it was probably my favorite one. What is Kscope? It’s the annual conference for the Oracle Development Tools User Group. 1,000+ attendees from 20+ countries with an average Jeff Klout score of 65. I just made that metric and score up, but this conference attracts the best and brightest in the Oracle database space. I’m not just talking about the speakers either. The attendees are all top notch. They actively participate in sessions, make an effort to get to know their fellow conference mates, and often turn into volunteers and speakers. Developers that enjoy unit testing, understand the importance of modeling your data, and are eager to understand the Oracle CBO – these are traits that describe the ‘average’ ODTUG developer. 2012′s event was held in San Antonio. Yes, it was very hot. But this might have been the nicest Marriott property I’ve ever visited, and I’ve stayed at some nice ones in Hawaii and St. Thomas. They had free WiFi everywhere – the rooms, the Conference Center, the lobby, bars, everywhere. And it worked. The after hours events were very fun. I embarrassed myself several times, but that’s OK. The rodeo was an awesome event and the Thirsty Games experience was something I hope does not make it onto YouTube or Facebook — talking to you Chet Justice. I finally got to meet and spend some time with some folks I’ve always wanted to get to know better, @timothyjgorman, @alexgorbachev, @lj_dobson, @dschleis, @kentGraziano, @chriscmuir, @GaloBalda, @patch72, and many, many more! I even made some new friends thanks to the Mentor program and @carol_finn. 2013′s event will be in New Orleans. If you haven’t joined ODTUG or haven’t made it to Kscope, go ahead and mark your calendars. I had 3 presentations this year. Sunday’s was not a good performance, and I want to apologize to anyone who was there and was hoping for more. My Tips and Debugging sessions on Monday and Tuesday were more to my liking, and I enjoyed them as a presenter. I hope you enjoyed them as an attendee. I understand that my slidedecks were corrupted on the ODTUG site, and I’m working with the coordinator now to get those fixed ASAP. Apparently the 2 most well-received Tips was the /*CSV*/ formatting hint and recalling your previous SQL history via the keyboard. I’ll be doing a follow-up webinar with ODTUG in a few weeks for those members that weren’t able to see my Tips and Debugger sessions in San Antonio. I’ll be sure to post details on that here when I have the details. My next scheduled conference is Oracle Open World, and I may have a couple of shows after that to round out 2012.

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• T4 Performance Counters explained

  - by user13346607

  Now that T4 is out for a few month some people might have wondered what details of the new pipeline you can monitor. A "cpustat -h" lists a lot of events that can be monitored, and only very few are self-explanatory. I will try to give some insight on all of them, some of these "PIC events" require an in-depth knowledge of T4 pipeline. Over time I will try to explain these, for the time being these events should simply be ignored. (Side note: some counters changed from tape-out 1.1 (*only* used in the T4 beta program) to tape-out 1.2 (used in the systems shipping today) The table only lists the tape-out 1.2 counters) 0 0 1 1058 6033 Oracle Microelectronics 50 14 7077 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} pic name (cpustat) Prose Comment Sel-pipe-drain-cycles, Sel-0-[wait|ready], Sel-[1,2] Sel-0-wait counts cycles a strand waits to be selected. Some reasons can be counted in detail; these are: Sel-0-ready: Cycles a strand was ready but not selected, that can signal pipeline oversubscription Sel-1: Cycles only one instruction or µop was selected Sel-2: Cycles two instructions or µops were selected Sel-pipe-drain-cycles: cf. PRM footnote 8 to table 10.2 Pick-any, Pick-[0|1|2|3] Cycles one, two, three, no or at least one instruction or µop is picked Instr_FGU_crypto Number of FGU or crypto instructions executed on that vcpu Instr_ld dto. for load Instr_st dto. for store SPR_ring_ops dto. for SPR ring ops Instr_other dto. for all other instructions not listed above, PRM footnote 7 to table 10.2 lists the instructions Instr_all total number of instructions executed on that vcpu Sw_count_intr Nr of S/W count instructions on that vcpu (sethi %hi(fc000),%g0 (whatever that is))  Atomics nr of atomic ops, which are LDSTUB/a, CASA/XA, and SWAP/A SW_prefetch Nr of PREFETCH or PREFETCHA instructions Block_ld_st Block loads or store on that vcpu IC_miss_nospec, IC_miss_[L2_or_L3|local|remote]\ _hit_nospec Various I$ misses, distinguished by where they hit. All of these count per thread, but only primary events: T4 counts only the first occurence of an I$ miss on a core for a certain instruction. If one strand misses in I$ this miss is counted, but if a second strand on the same core misses while the first miss is being resolved, that second miss is not counted This flavour of I$ misses counts only misses that are caused by instruction that really commit (note the "_nospec") BTC_miss Branch target cache miss ITLB_miss ITLB misses (synchronously counted) ITLB_miss_asynch dto. but asynchronously [I|D]TLB_fill_\ [8KB|64KB|4MB|256MB|2GB|trap] H/W tablewalk events that fill ITLB or DTLB with translation for the corresponding page size. The “_trap” event occurs if the HWTW was not able to fill the corresponding TLB IC_mtag_miss, IC_mtag_miss_\ [ptag_hit|ptag_miss|\ ptag_hit_way_mismatch] I$ micro tag misses, with some options for drill down Fetch-0, Fetch-0-all fetch-0 counts nr of cycles nothing was fetched for this particular strand, fetch-0-all counts cycles nothing was fetched for all strands on a core Instr_buffer_full Cycles the instruction buffer for a strand was full, thereby preventing any fetch BTC_targ_incorrect Counts all occurences of wrongly predicted branch targets from the BTC [PQ|ROB|LB|ROB_LB|SB|\ ROB_SB|LB_SB|RB_LB_SB|\ DTLB_miss]\ _tag_wait ST_q_tag_wait is listed under sl=20. These counters monitor pipeline behaviour therefore they are not strand specific: PQ_...: cycles Rename stage waits for a Pick Queue tag (might signal memory bound workload for single thread mode, cf. Mail from Richard Smith) ROB_...: cycles Select stage waits for a ROB (ReOrderBuffer) tag LB_...: cycles Select stage waits for a Load Buffer tag SB_...: cycles Select stage waits for Store Buffer tag combinations of the above are allowed, although some of these events can overlap, the counter will only be incremented once per cycle if any of these occur DTLB_...: cycles load or store instructions wait at Pick stage for a DTLB miss tag [ID]TLB_HWTW_\ [L2_hit|L3_hit|L3_miss|all] Counters for HWTW accesses caused by either DTLB or ITLB misses. Canbe further detailed by where they hit IC_miss_L2_L3_hit, IC_miss_local_remote_remL3_hit, IC_miss I$ prefetches that were dropped because they either miss in L2$ or L3$ This variant counts misses regardless if the causing instruction commits or not DC_miss_nospec, DC_miss_[L2_L3|local|remote_L3]\ _hit_nospec D$ misses either in general or detailed by where they hit cf. the explanation for the IC_miss in two flavours for an explanation of _nospec and the reasoning for two DC_miss counters DTLB_miss_asynch counts all DTLB misses asynchronously, there is no way to count them synchronously DC_pref_drop_DC_hit, SW_pref_drop_[DC_hit|buffer_full] L1-D$ h/w prefetches that were dropped because of a D$ hit, counted per core. The others count software prefetches per strand [Full|Partial]_RAW_hit_st_[buf|q] Count events where a load wants to get data that has not yet been stored, i. e. it is still inside the pipeline. The data might be either still in the store buffer or in the store queue. If the load's data matches in the SB and in the store queue the data in buffer takes precedence of course since it is younger [IC|DC]_evict_invalid, [IC|DC|L1]_snoop_invalid, [IC|DC|L1]_invalid_all Counter for invalidated cache evictions per core St_q_tag_wait Number of cycles pipeline waits for a store queue tag, of course counted per core Data_pref_[drop_L2|drop_L3|\ hit_L2|hit_L3|\ hit_local|hit_remote] Data prefetches that can be further detailed by either why they were dropped or where they did hit St_hit_[L2|L3], St_L2_[local|remote]_C2C, St_local, St_remote Store events distinguished by where they hit or where they cause a L2 cache-to-cache transfer, i.e. either a transfer from another L2$ on the same die or from a different die DC_miss, DC_miss_\ [L2_L3|local|remote]_hit D$ misses either in general or detailed by where they hit cf. the explanation for the IC_miss in two flavours for an explanation of _nospec and the reasoning for two DC_miss counters L2_[clean|dirty]_evict Per core clean or dirty L2$ evictions L2_fill_buf_full, L2_wb_buf_full, L2_miss_buf_full Per core L2$ buffer events, all count number of cycles that this state was present L2_pipe_stall Per core cycles pipeline stalled because of L2$ Branches Count branches (Tcc, DONE, RETRY, and SIT are not counted as branches) Br_taken Counts taken branches (Tcc, DONE, RETRY, and SIT are not counted as branches) Br_mispred, Br_dir_mispred, Br_trg_mispred, Br_trg_mispred_\ [far_tbl|indir_tbl|ret_stk] Counter for various branch misprediction events.  Cycles_user counts cycles, attribute setting hpriv, nouser, sys controls addess space to count in Commit-[0|1|2], Commit-0-all, Commit-1-or-2 Number of times either no, one, or two µops commit for a strand. Commit-0-all counts number of times no µop commits for the whole core, cf. footnote 11 to table 10.2 in PRM for a more detailed explanation on how this counters interacts with the privilege levels

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• Any reliable polygon normal calculation code?

  - by Jenko

  Do you have any reliable face normal calculation code? I'm using this but it fails when faces are 90 degrees upright or similar. // the normal point var x:Number = 0; var y:Number = 0; var z:Number = 0; // if is a triangle with 3 points if (points.length == 3) { // read vertices of triangle var Ax:Number, Bx:Number, Cx:Number; var Ay:Number, By:Number, Cy:Number; var Az:Number, Bz:Number, Cz:Number; Ax = points[0].x; Bx = points[1].x; Cx = points[2].x; Ay = points[0].y; By = points[1].y; Cy = points[2].y; Az = points[0].z; Bz = points[1].z; Cz = points[2].z; // calculate normal of a triangle x = (By - Ay) * (Cz - Az) - (Bz - Az) * (Cy - Ay); y = (Bz - Az) * (Cx - Ax) - (Bx - Ax) * (Cz - Az); z = (Bx - Ax) * (Cy - Ay) - (By - Ay) * (Cx - Ax); // if is a polygon with 4+ points }else if (points.length > 3){ // calculate normal of a polygon using all points var n:int = points.length; x = 0; y = 0; z = 0 // ensure all points above 0 var minx:Number = 0, miny:Number = 0, minz:Number = 0; for (var p:int = 0, pl:int = points.length; p < pl; p++) { var po:_Point3D = points[p] = points[p].clone(); if (po.x < minx) { minx = po.x; } if (po.y < miny) { miny = po.y; } if (po.z < minz) { minz = po.z; } } if (minx > 0 || miny > 0 || minz > 0){ for (p = 0; p < pl; p++) { po = points[p]; po.x -= minx; po.y -= miny; po.z -= minz; } } var cur:int = 1, prev:int = 0, next:int = 2; for (var i:int = 1; i <= n; i++) { // using Newell method x += points[cur].y * (points[next].z - points[prev].z); y += points[cur].z * (points[next].x - points[prev].x); z += points[cur].x * (points[next].y - points[prev].y); cur = (cur+1) % n; next = (next+1) % n; prev = (prev+1) % n; } } // length of the normal var length:Number = Math.sqrt(x * x + y * y + z * z); // if area is 0 if (length == 0) { return null; }else{ // turn large values into a unit vector x = x / length; y = y / length; z = z / length; }

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• My First Iteration Zero

  - by onefloridacoder

  I recently watched a web cast that covered the idea of planning from the concept stage to the product backlog.  It was the first content I had seen related to Iteration Zero and it made a lot of sense from a planning and engagement perspective where the customer is concerned.  It illuminated some of the problems I’ve experienced with getting a large project of the ground.  The idea behind this is to just figure out get everyone to understand what needs to be constructed and to build the initial feature set from a *very* high level.  Once that happens other parts of the high level construction start to take place.  You end up with a feature list that describes what the business wants the system to do, and what it potentially may (or may not) interact with.  Low tech tools are used to create UI mockups that can be used as a starting point for some of the key UI pieces. Toward the end of the webcast they speaker introduced something that was new to me.  He referred to it as an executable skeleton or the steel thread.  The idea with this part of the webcast was to describe walking through the different mocked layers of the application.  Not all layers and collaborators are involved at this stage since it’s Iteration Zero, and each layer is either hard-coded or completely mocked to provide a 35K foot view of how the different layers layers work together.  So imagine two actors on each side of a layer diagram and the flow goes down from the upper left side down through a a consumer, thorough a service layer and then back up the service layer to the destination/actor. I would imagine much could be discussed moving through new/planned or existing/legacy layers, or a little of both to see what’s implied by the current high-level design. One part of the web cast has the business and design team creating the product box (think of your favorite cereal or toy box) with all of the features and even pictures laid out on the outside of the box.  The notion here is that if you handed this box to someone and told them your system was inside they would have an understanding of what the system would be able to do, or the features it could provide.    One of the interesting parts of the webcast was where the speaker described that he worked with a couple of groups in the same room and each group came up with a different product box – the point is that each group had a different idea of what the system was supposed to do.  At this point of the project I thought that to be valuable considering my experience has been that historically this has taken longer than a week to realize that the business unit and design teams see the high level solution differently.  Once my box is finished I plan on moving to the next stage of solution definition which is to plan the UI for this small application using Excel, to map out the UI elements.  I’m my own customer so it feels like cheating, but taking these slow deliberate steps have already provided a few learning opportunities.    So I resist the urge to load all of my user stories into my newly installed VS2010  TFS project and try to reduce or add to, the number of user stories and/or refine the high level estimates I’ve come up with so far.

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