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• IIS 7.5 , Tomcat 7 - Isapi redirector - Fail Over - sticky sessions

  - by Jose Matias

  I have two instances of Tomcat 7.0.8 running in the same machine (Tomcat7A and Tomcat7B) and IIS 7.5 acting as front-end load-balancer with isapi-redirector 1.2.31, running on Windows 2008 R2. When i disconnect the instance wich is handling a request i can see a new instance being assigned with the same sessionid but then the user is redirected to the login page. server.xml configuration file <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="Tomcat7A"> <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.LockOutRealm"> <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/> </Realm> <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"> <Cluster className="org.apache.catalina.ha.tcp.SimpleTcpCluster" channelSendOptions="8"> <Manager className="org.apache.catalina.ha.session.DeltaManager" expireSessionsOnShutdown="false" notifyListenersOnReplication="true"/> <Channel className="org.apache.catalina.tribes.group.GroupChannel"> <Membership className="org.apache.catalina.tribes.membership.McastService" address="228.0.0.8" bind="7.3.1.22" port="45564" frequency="500" dropTime="3000"/> <Receiver className="org.apache.catalina.tribes.transport.nio.NioReceiver" address="auto" port="4200" autoBind="100" selectorTimeout="5000" maxThreads="6"/> <Sender className="org.apache.catalina.tribes.transport.ReplicationTransmitter"> <Transport className="org.apache.catalina.tribes.transport.nio.PooledParallelSender"/> </Sender> <Interceptor className="org.apache.catalina.tribes.group.interceptors.TcpFailureDetector"/> <Interceptor className="org.apache.catalina.tribes.group.interceptors.MessageDispatch15Interceptor"/> </Channel> <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.ha.tcp.ReplicationValve" filter=".*\.gif;.*\.js;.*\.jpg;.*\.htm;.*\.html;.*\.txt"/> <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.ha.session.JvmRouteBinderValve"/> <ClusterListener className="org.apache.catalina.ha.session.JvmRouteSessionIDBinderListener"/> <ClusterListener className="org.apache.catalina.ha.session.ClusterSessionListener"/> </Cluster> <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs" prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".txt" pattern="%h %l %u %t &quot;%r&quot; %s %b" resolveHosts="false"/> </Host> </Engine> worker_mount_file=C:\tomcat\iis\conf\uriworkermap_prod.properties worker.list = balancer,status worker.Tomcat7B.host = 7.3.1.22 worker.Tomcat7B.type = ajp13 worker.Tomcat7B.port = 8010 worker.Tomcat7B.lbfactor = 10 worker.Tomcat7A.host = 7.3.1.22 worker.Tomcat7A.type = ajp13 worker.Tomcat7A.port = 8009 worker.Tomcat7A.lbfactor = 10 worker.balancer.type = lb worker.balancer.sticky_session = 1 worker.balancer.balance_workers = Tomcat7B, Tomcat7A worker.status.type = status isapi_redirect log [debug] wc_get_worker_for_name::jk_worker.c (116): found a worker balancer [debug] HttpExtensionProc::jk_isapi_plugin.c (2188): got a worker for name balancer [debug] service::jk_lb_worker.c (1118): service sticky_session=1 id='89569C584CC4F58740D649C4BE655D36.Tomcat7B' [debug] get_most_suitable_worker::jk_lb_worker.c (946): searching worker for partial sessionid 89569C584CC4F58740D649C4BE655D36.Tomcat7B [debug] get_most_suitable_worker::jk_lb_worker.c (954): searching worker for session route Tomcat7B [debug] get_most_suitable_worker::jk_lb_worker.c (968): found worker Tomcat7B (Tomcat7B) for route Tomcat7B and partial sessionid 89569C584CC4F58740D649C4BE655D36.Tomcat7B [debug] service::jk_lb_worker.c (1161): service worker=Tomcat7B route=Tomcat7B [debug] ajp_get_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (3096): acquired connection pool slot=0 after 0 retries [debug] ajp_marshal_into_msgb::jk_ajp_common.c (605): ajp marshaling done [debug] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2379): processing Tomcat7B with 2 retries [debug] jk_shutdown_socket::jk_connect.c (726): About to shutdown socket 820 [7.3.1.22:24482 -> 7.3.1.22:8010] [debug] jk_shutdown_socket::jk_connect.c (797): shutting down the read side of socket 820 [7.3.1.22:24482 -> 7.3.1.22:8010] [debug] jk_shutdown_socket::jk_connect.c (808): Shutdown socket 820 [7.3.1.22:24482 -> 7.3.1.22:8010] and read 0 lingering bytes in 0 sec. [debug] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1496): (Tomcat7B) failed sending request, socket 820 is not connected any more (errno=-10000) [debug] ajp_next_connection::jk_ajp_common.c (823): (Tomcat7B) Will try pooled connection socket 896 from slot 1 [debug] jk_shutdown_socket::jk_connect.c (726): About to shutdown socket 896 [7.3.1.22:24488 -> 7.3.1.22:8010] [debug] jk_shutdown_socket::jk_connect.c (797): shutting down the read side of socket 896 [7.3.1.22:24488 -> 7.3.1.22:8010] [debug] jk_shutdown_socket::jk_connect.c (808): Shutdown socket 896 [7.3.1.22:24488 -> 7.3.1.22:8010] and read 0 lingering bytes in 0 sec. [debug] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1496): (Tomcat7B) failed sending request, socket 896 is not connected any more (errno=-10000) [info] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1567): (Tomcat7B) all endpoints are disconnected, detected by connect check (2), cping (0), send (0) [debug] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (484): socket TCP_NODELAY set to On [debug] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (608): trying to connect socket 896 to 7.3.1.22:8010 [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (626): connect to 7.3.1.22:8010 failed (errno=61) [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (959): Failed opening socket to (7.3.1.22:8010) (errno=61) [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1578): (Tomcat7B) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2543): (Tomcat7B) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=1) [debug] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2400): retry 1, sleeping for 100 ms before retrying [debug] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1572): (Tomcat7B) all endpoints are disconnected. [debug] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (484): socket TCP_NODELAY set to On [debug] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (608): trying to connect socket 896 to 7.3.1.22:8010 [info] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (626): connect to 7.3.1.22:8010 failed (errno=61) [info] ajp_connect_to_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (959): Failed opening socket to (7.3.1.22:8010) (errno=61) [error] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1578): (Tomcat7B) connecting to backend failed. Tomcat is probably not started or is listening on the wrong port (errno=61) [info] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2543): (Tomcat7B) sending request to tomcat failed (recoverable), because of error during request sending (attempt=2) [error] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2562): (Tomcat7B) connecting to tomcat failed. [debug] ajp_reset_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (757): (Tomcat7B) resetting endpoint with socket -1 (socket shutdown) [debug] ajp_done::jk_ajp_common.c (3013): recycling connection pool slot=0 for worker Tomcat7B [debug] service::jk_lb_worker.c (1374): worker Tomcat7B escalating local error to global error [info] service::jk_lb_worker.c (1388): service failed, worker Tomcat7B is in error state [debug] service::jk_lb_worker.c (1399): recoverable error... will try to recover on other worker [debug] get_most_suitable_worker::jk_lb_worker.c (946): searching worker for partial sessionid 89569C584CC4F58740D649C4BE655D36.Tomcat7B [debug] get_most_suitable_worker::jk_lb_worker.c (954): searching worker for session route Tomcat7B [debug] get_most_suitable_worker::jk_lb_worker.c (1001): found best worker Tomcat7A (Tomcat7A) using method 'Request' [debug] service::jk_lb_worker.c (1161): service worker=Tomcat7A route=Tomcat7B [debug] ajp_get_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (3096): acquired connection pool slot=0 after 0 retries [debug] ajp_marshal_into_msgb::jk_ajp_common.c (605): ajp marshaling done [debug] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2379): processing Tomcat7A with 2 retries [debug] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1572): (Tomcat7A) all endpoints are disconnected. [debug] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (484): socket TCP_NODELAY set to On [debug] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (608): trying to connect socket 896 to 7.3.1.22:8009 [debug] jk_open_socket::jk_connect.c (634): socket 896 [7.3.1.22:24496 -> 7.3.1.22:8009] connected [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): sending to ajp13 pos=4 len=615 max=8192 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0000 .4.c....HTTP/1.1 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0010 .../Accounter/pr [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0020 intFrameSet.jhtm [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0030 l...::1...::1... [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0040 localhost..P.... [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0050 ...Keep-Alive... [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0060 ..0....rimage/jp [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0070 eg,.image/gif,.i [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0080 mage/pjpeg,.appl [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0090 ication/x-ms-app [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00a0 lication,.applic [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00b0 ation/xaml+xml,. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00c0 application/x-ms [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00d0 -xbap,.*/*...Acc [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00e0 ept-Encoding...g [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00f0 zip,.deflate...A [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0100 ccept-Language.. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0110 .nb-NO....]Usern [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0120 ame=NA_jose.mati [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0130 as_AT_addenergy. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0140 no;.JSESSIONID=8 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0150 9569C584CC4F5874 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0160 0D649C4BE655D36. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0170 Tomcat7B.....loc [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0180 alhost.....http: [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0190 //localhost/Acco [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01a0 unter/NemsAccoun [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01b0 ter.jhtml....uMo [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01c0 zilla/4.0.(compa [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01d0 tible;.MSIE.8.0; [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01e0 .Windows.NT.6.1; [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01f0 .WOW64;.Trident/ [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0200 4.0;.SLCC2;..NET [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0210 .CLR.2.0.50727;. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0220 .NET4.0C;..NET4. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0230 0E)............F [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0240 rameName=Reports [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0250 _CS_EUETS....Tom [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0260 cat7B........... [debug] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1632): (Tomcat7A) request body to send 0 - request body to resend 0 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): received from ajp13 pos=0 len=238 max=8192 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0000 .....Moved.Tempo [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0010 rarily......OJSE [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0020 SSIONID=6A2507A4 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0030 626F698EC74A733C [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0040 DBA7D9FE.Tomcat7 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0050 A;.Path=/Account [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0060 er;.HttpOnly...P [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0070 ragma...no-cache [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0080 ...Cache-Control [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0090 ...no-cache....& [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 00a0 http://localhost [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 00b0 /Accounter/login [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 00c0 .jhtml.....text/ [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 00d0 html;charset=ISO [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 00e0 -8859-1.....0... [debug] ajp_unmarshal_response::jk_ajp_common.c (660): status = 302 [debug] ajp_unmarshal_response::jk_ajp_common.c (667): Number of headers is = 6 [debug] ajp_unmarshal_response::jk_ajp_common.c (723): Header[0] [Set-Cookie] = [JSESSIONID=6A2507A4626F698EC74A733CDBA7D9FE.Tomcat7A; Path=/Accounter; HttpOnly] [debug] ajp_unmarshal_response::jk_ajp_common.c (723): Header[1] [Pragma] = [no-cache] [debug] ajp_unmarshal_response::jk_ajp_common.c (723): Header[2] [Cache-Control] = [no-cache] [debug] ajp_unmarshal_response::jk_ajp_common.c (723): Header[3] [Location] = [http://localhost/Accounter/login.jhtml] [debug] ajp_unmarshal_response::jk_ajp_common.c (723): Header[4] [Content-Type] = [text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1] [debug] ajp_unmarshal_response::jk_ajp_common.c (723): Header[5] [Content-Length] = [0] [debug] start_response::jk_isapi_plugin.c (963): Starting response for URI '/Accounter/printFrameSet.jhtml' (protocol HTTP/1.1) [debug] start_response::jk_isapi_plugin.c (1063): Not using Keep-Alive [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): received from ajp13 pos=0 len=2 max=8192 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0000 ................ [debug] ajp_process_callback::jk_ajp_common.c (1943): AJP13 protocol: Reuse is OK [debug] ajp_reset_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (757): (Tomcat7A) resetting endpoint with socket 896 [debug] ajp_done::jk_ajp_common.c (3013): recycling connection pool slot=0 for worker Tomcat7A [debug] HttpExtensionProc::jk_isapi_plugin.c (2211): service() returned OK [debug] HttpFilterProc::jk_isapi_plugin.c (1851): Filter started [debug] map_uri_to_worker_ext::jk_uri_worker_map.c (1036): Attempting to map URI '/localhost/Accounter/login.jhtml' from 8 maps [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/servlet/*=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/ws/*=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/nems*.pdf=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/*.service=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/*.jhtml=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/*.json=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/jkmanager=status' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/servlet/*=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/ws/*=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/nems*.pdf=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/*.service=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (850): Attempting to map context URI '/Accounter/*.jhtml=balancer' source 'uriworkermap' [debug] find_match::jk_uri_worker_map.c (863): Found a wildchar match '/Accounter/*.jhtml=balancer' [debug] HttpFilterProc::jk_isapi_plugin.c (1938): check if [/Accounter/login.jhtml] points to the web-inf directory [debug] HttpFilterProc::jk_isapi_plugin.c (1954): [/Accounter/login.jhtml] is a servlet url - should redirect to balancer [debug] HttpFilterProc::jk_isapi_plugin.c (1994): fowarding escaped URI [/Accounter/login.jhtml] [debug] init_ws_service::jk_isapi_plugin.c (2982): Reading extension header HTTP_TOMCATWORKER0000000180000000: balancer [debug] init_ws_service::jk_isapi_plugin.c (2983): Reading extension header HTTP_TOMCATWORKERIDX0000000180000000: 5 [debug] init_ws_service::jk_isapi_plugin.c (2984): Reading extension header HTTP_TOMCATURI0000000180000000: /Accounter/login.jhtml [debug] init_ws_service::jk_isapi_plugin.c (2985): Reading extension header HTTP_TOMCATQUERY0000000180000000: (null) [debug] init_ws_service::jk_isapi_plugin.c (3040): Applying service extensions [debug] init_ws_service::jk_isapi_plugin.c (3298): Service protocol=HTTP/1.1 method=GET host=::1 addr=::1 name=localhost port=80 auth= user= uri=/Accounter/login.jhtml [debug] init_ws_service::jk_isapi_plugin.c (3310): Service request headers=9 attributes=0 chunked=no content-length=0 available=0 [debug] wc_get_worker_for_name::jk_worker.c (116): found a worker balancer [debug] HttpExtensionProc::jk_isapi_plugin.c (2188): got a worker for name balancer [debug] service::jk_lb_worker.c (1118): service sticky_session=1 id='6A2507A4626F698EC74A733CDBA7D9FE.Tomcat7A' [debug] get_most_suitable_worker::jk_lb_worker.c (946): searching worker for partial sessionid 6A2507A4626F698EC74A733CDBA7D9FE.Tomcat7A [debug] get_most_suitable_worker::jk_lb_worker.c (954): searching worker for session route Tomcat7A [debug] get_most_suitable_worker::jk_lb_worker.c (968): found worker Tomcat7A (Tomcat7A) for route Tomcat7A and partial sessionid 6A2507A4626F698EC74A733CDBA7D9FE.Tomcat7A [debug] service::jk_lb_worker.c (1161): service worker=Tomcat7A route=Tomcat7A [debug] ajp_get_endpoint::jk_ajp_common.c (3096): acquired connection pool slot=0 after 0 retries [debug] ajp_marshal_into_msgb::jk_ajp_common.c (605): ajp marshaling done [debug] ajp_service::jk_ajp_common.c (2379): processing Tomcat7A with 2 retries [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): sending to ajp13 pos=4 len=577 max=8192 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0000 .4.=....HTTP/1.1 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0010 .../Accounter/lo [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0020 gin.jhtml...::1. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0030 ..::1...localhos [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0040 t..P.......Keep- [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0050 Alive.....0....r [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0060 image/jpeg,.imag [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0070 e/gif,.image/pjp [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0080 eg,.application/ [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0090 x-ms-application [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00a0 ,.application/xa [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00b0 ml+xml,.applicat [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00c0 ion/x-ms-xbap,.* [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00d0 /*...Accept-Enco [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00e0 ding...gzip,.def [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 00f0 late...Accept-La [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0100 nguage...nb-NO.. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0110 ..]Username=NA_j [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0120 ose.matias_AT_ad [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0130 denergy.no;.JSES [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0140 SIONID=6A2507A46 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0150 26F698EC74A733CD [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0160 BA7D9FE.Tomcat7A [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0170 .....localhost.. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0180 ...http://localh [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0190 ost/Accounter/Ne [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01a0 msAccounter.jhtm [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01b0 l....uMozilla/4. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01c0 0.(compatible;.M [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01d0 SIE.8.0;.Windows [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01f0 Trident/4.0;.SLC [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 01e0 .NT.6.1;.WOW64;. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0200 C2;..NET.CLR.2.0 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0210 .50727;..NET4.0C [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0220 ;..NET4.0E)..... [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0230 .......Tomcat7A. [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_send_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1145): 0240 ................ [debug] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1621): (Tomcat7A) Statistics about invalid connections: connect check (0), cping (0), send (0) [debug] ajp_send_request::jk_ajp_common.c (1632): (Tomcat7A) request body to send 0 - request body to resend 0 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): received from ajp13 pos=0 len=135 max=8192 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0000 .....OK.....Prag [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0010 ma...no-cache... [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0020 Expires...Thu,.0 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0030 1.Jan.1970.00:00 [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0040 :00.GMT...Cache- [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0050 Control...no-cac [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0060 he...Cache-Contr [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0070 ol...no-store... [debug] ajp_connection_tcp_get_message::jk_ajp_common.c (1329): 0080 ..2995..........

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• Windows Phone 7 Prototype 001: Speech Recognition on WP7

  At some point in the future it will be awesome when you can just tell your computer what to do and it does it - without typing to help those of us with a blistering 11 WPM hunk and peck technique. Siri, a mobile digital assistant using speech recognition was voted best tech at SXSW. I dont know about that one. Although, I'm sure it will get better when Apple rebuilds it and  bundles on iPhone 5. So how would you do that on WP7? There have been some videos floating around showing Bing with some voice control so obviously the phone has speech recognition. So what options are there: System.Speech? Not included in WP7/SL Nuance software like Siri? No WP7/SL version yet. Invoking the SAPI dlls on the phone? No automation factory in WP7 SL. Web services using System.Speech and mic on the phone? YES! The last one was my least favorite but that works for now. I built a quick sample app to show how to do text-to-speech and speech recognition on WP7.   @eklimczak will not be happy with the developer designed UI. In this sample there is web service with provides access to the system.speech APIs in .NET. Basically its just passing around byte arrays. On the phone its using the XNA audio frameworks to play the text-to-speech stream and to record using the microphone. The code is pretty simple and you can download from the link at the end of this post. The only things to note are adjusting the WCF config to handle larger byte uploads and the Microphone API is a little weird with that 1 second buffer. It would be nice if you could just to mic.start and mic.end which would return an array of bytes instead of managing your own stream inside the buffer ready callback. Couple of downsides to this approach: Recoding from the phone has some static. Could be my code or the my mic is bad / not calibrated right. Having to make web service calls instead of local access is not ideal (Microsoft, please add an API for the SAPI dlls) Although in the context of an app like Siri its not so bad since you need to do web service lookups to get data back Speech recognition quality really depends on either a) a limited grammar set like that pizza grammar in the sample or b) training the recognizer. For the latter it would be annoying to have users train the system. Using the System.Speech stuff youd have to have a profile for each user. So until Microsoft adds some speech client APIs on the phone or Nuance releases a wp7 product, this is a decent workaround. In the future Id like to build something similar to Siri. I shall call it Iris in homage. Im a big fan of mobile speech apps because frankly its just not safe to Google while driving. Since some of my designer co-workers have been posting UI sketches for WP7, Id like to start posting some code prototypes for things I try out on the phone. That will probably last 2 weeks, but for the moment I have like 10 posts in the queue. Sample Code 100% guaranteed to work on my emulatorDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• The Challenge with HTML5 – In Pictures

  - by dwahlin

  I love working with Web technologies and am looking forward to the new functionality that HTML5 will ultimately bring to the table (some of which can be used today). Having been through the div versus layer battle back in the IE4 and Netscape 4 days I think we’re headed down that road again as a result of browsers implementing features differently. I’ve been spending a lot of time researching and playing around with HTML5 samples and features (mainly because we’re already seeing demand for training on HTML5) and there’s a lot of great stuff there that will truly revolutionize web applications as we know them. However, browsers just aren’t there yet and many people outside of the development world don’t really feel a need to upgrade their browser if it’s working reasonably well (Mom and Dad come to mind) so it’s going to be awhile. There’s a nice test site at http://www.HTML5Test.com that runs through different HTML5 features and scores how well they’re supported. They don’t test for everything and are very clear about that on the site: “The HTML5 test score is only an indication of how well your browser supports the upcoming HTML5 standard and related specifications. It does not try to test all of the new features offered by HTML5, nor does it try to test the functionality of each feature it does detect. Despite these shortcomings we hope that by quantifying the level of support users and web developers will get an idea of how hard the browser manufacturers work on improving their browsers and the web as a development platform. The score is calculated by testing for the many new features of HTML5. Each feature is worth one or more points. Apart from the main HTML5 specification and other specifications created the W3C HTML Working Group, this test also awards points for supporting related drafts and specifications. Some of these specifications were initially part of HTML5, but are now further developed by other W3C working groups. WebGL is also part of this test despite not being developed by the W3C, because it extends the HTML5 canvas element with a 3d context. The test also awards bonus points for supporting audio and video codecs and supporting SVG or MathML embedding in a plain HTML document. These test do not count towards the total score because HTML5 does not specify any required audio or video codec. Also SVG and MathML are not required by HTML5, the specification only specifies rules for how such content should be embedded inside a plain HTML file. Please be aware that the specifications that are being tested are still in development and could change before receiving an official status. In the future new tests will be added for the pieces of the specification that are currently still missing. The maximum number of points that can be scored is 300 at this moment, but this is a moving goalpost.” It looks like their tests haven’t been updated since June, but the numbers are pretty scary as a developer because it means I’m going to have to do a lot of browser sniffing before assuming a particular feature is available to use. Not that much different from what we do today as far as browser sniffing you say? I’d have to disagree since HTML5 takes it to a whole new level. In today’s world we have script libraries such as jQuery (my personal favorite), Prototype, script.aculo.us, YUI Library, MooTools, etc. that handle the heavy lifting for us. Until those libraries handle all of the key HTML5 features available it’s going to be a challenge. Certain features such as Canvas are supported fairly well across most of the major browsers while other features such as audio and video are hit or miss depending upon what codec you want to use. Run the tests yourself to see what passes and what fails for different browsers. You can also view the HTML5 Test Suite Conformance Results at http://test.w3.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm (a work in progress). The table below lists the scores that the HTML5Test site returned for different browsers I have installed on my desktop PC and laptop. A specific list of tests run and features supported are given when you go to the site. Note that I went ahead and tested the IE9 beta and it didn’t do nearly as good as I expected it would, but it’s not officially out yet so I expect that number will change a lot. Am I opposed to HTML5 as a result of these tests? Of course not - I’m actually really excited about what it offers.  However, I’m trying to be realistic and feel it'll definitely add a new level of headache to the Web application development process having been through something like this many years ago. On the flipside, developers that are able to target a specific browser (typically Intranet apps) or master the cross-browser issues are going to release some pretty sweet applications. Check out http://html5gallery.com/ for a look at some of the more cutting-edge sites out there that use HTML5. Also check out the http://www.beautyoftheweb.com site that Microsoft put together to showcase IE9. Chrome 8 Safari 5 for Windows     Opera 10 Firefox 3.6     Internet Explorer 9 Beta (Note that it’s still beta) Internet Explorer 8

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• Write, Read and Update Oracle CLOBs with PL/SQL

  - by robertphyatt

  Fun with CLOBS! If you are using Oracle, if you have to deal with text that is over 4000 bytes, you will probably find yourself dealing with CLOBs, which can go up to 4GB. They are pretty tricky, and it took me a long time to figure out these lessons learned. I hope they will help some down-trodden developer out there somehow. Here is my original code, which worked great on my Oracle Express Edition: (for all examples, the first one writes a new CLOB, the next one Updates an existing CLOB and the final one reads a CLOB back) CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PRC_WR_CLOB (        p_document      IN VARCHAR2,        p_id            OUT NUMBER) IS      lob_loc CLOB; BEGIN    INSERT INTO TBL_CLOBHOLDERDDOC (CLOBHOLDERDDOC)        VALUES (empty_CLOB())        RETURNING CLOBHOLDERDDOC, CLOBHOLDERDDOCID INTO lob_loc, p_id;    DBMS_LOB.WRITE(lob_loc, LENGTH(UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_RAW(p_document)), 1, UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_RAW(p_document)); END; / CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PRC_UD_CLOB (        p_document      IN VARCHAR2,        p_id            IN NUMBER) IS      lob_loc CLOB; BEGIN        SELECT CLOBHOLDERDDOC INTO lob_loc FROM TBL_CLOBHOLDERDDOC        WHERE CLOBHOLDERDDOCID = p_id FOR UPDATE;    DBMS_LOB.WRITE(lob_loc, LENGTH(UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_RAW(p_document)), 1, UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_RAW(p_document)); END; / CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PRC_RD_CLOB (    p_id IN NUMBER,    p_clob OUT VARCHAR2) IS    lob_loc  CLOB; BEGIN    SELECT CLOBHOLDERDDOC INTO lob_loc    FROM   TBL_CLOBHOLDERDDOC    WHERE  CLOBHOLDERDDOCID = p_id;    p_clob := UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_VARCHAR2(DBMS_LOB.SUBSTR(lob_loc, DBMS_LOB.GETLENGTH(lob_loc), 1)); END; / As you can see, I had originally been casting everything back and forth between RAW formats using the UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_VARCHAR2() and UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_RAW() functions all over the place, but it had the nasty side effect of working great on my Oracle express edition on my developer box, but having all the CLOBs above a certain size display garbage when read back on the Oracle test database server . So...I kept working at it and came up with the following, which ALSO worked on my Oracle Express Edition on my developer box:   CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PRC_WR_CLOB (     p_document      IN VARCHAR2,     p_id        OUT NUMBER) IS       lob_loc CLOB; BEGIN     INSERT INTO TBL_CLOBHOLDERDOC (CLOBHOLDERDOC)         VALUES (empty_CLOB())         RETURNING CLOBHOLDERDOC, CLOBHOLDERDOCID INTO lob_loc, p_id;     DBMS_LOB.WRITE(lob_loc, LENGTH(p_document), 1, p_document);   END; / CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PRC_UD_CLOB (     p_document      IN VARCHAR2,     p_id        IN NUMBER) IS       lob_loc CLOB; BEGIN     SELECT CLOBHOLDERDOC INTO lob_loc FROM TBL_CLOBHOLDERDOC     WHERE CLOBHOLDERDOCID = p_id FOR UPDATE;     DBMS_LOB.WRITE(lob_loc, LENGTH(p_document), 1, p_document); END; / CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PRC_RD_CLOB (     p_id IN NUMBER,     p_clob OUT VARCHAR2) IS     lob_loc  CLOB; BEGIN     SELECT CLOBHOLDERDOC INTO lob_loc     FROM   TBL_CLOBHOLDERDOC     WHERE  CLOBHOLDERDOCID = p_id;     p_clob := DBMS_LOB.SUBSTR(lob_loc, DBMS_LOB.GETLENGTH(lob_loc), 1); END; / Unfortunately, by changing my code to what you see above, even though it kept working on my Oracle express edition, everything over a certain size just started truncating after about 7950 characters on the test server! Here is what I came up with in the end, which is actually the simplest solution and this time worked on both my express edition and on the database server (note that only the read function was changed to fix the truncation issue, and that I had Oracle worry about converting the CLOB into a VARCHAR2 internally): CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PRC_WR_CLOB (        p_document      IN VARCHAR2,        p_id            OUT NUMBER) IS      lob_loc CLOB; BEGIN    INSERT INTO TBL_CLOBHOLDERDDOC (CLOBHOLDERDDOC)        VALUES (empty_CLOB())        RETURNING CLOBHOLDERDDOC, CLOBHOLDERDDOCID INTO lob_loc, p_id;    DBMS_LOB.WRITE(lob_loc, LENGTH(p_document), 1, p_document); END; / CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PRC_UD_CLOB (        p_document      IN VARCHAR2,        p_id            IN NUMBER) IS      lob_loc CLOB; BEGIN        SELECT CLOBHOLDERDDOC INTO lob_loc FROM TBL_CLOBHOLDERDDOC        WHERE CLOBHOLDERDDOCID = p_id FOR UPDATE;    DBMS_LOB.WRITE(lob_loc, LENGTH(p_document), 1, p_document); END; / CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PRC_RD_CLOB (    p_id IN NUMBER,    p_clob OUT VARCHAR2) IS BEGIN    SELECT CLOBHOLDERDDOC INTO p_clob    FROM   TBL_CLOBHOLDERDDOC    WHERE  CLOBHOLDERDDOCID = p_id; END; /   I hope that is useful to someone!

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• “Being Agile” Means No Documentation, Right?

  - by jesschadwick

  Ask most software professionals what Agile is and they’ll probably start talking about flexibility and delivering what the customer wants.  Some may even mention the word “iterations”.  But inevitably, they’ll say at some point that it means less or even no documentation.  After all, doesn’t creating, updating, and circulating painstakingly comprehensive documentation that everyone and their mother have officially signed off on go against the very core of Agile?  Of course it does!  But really, they’re missing the point! Read The Agile Manifesto. (No, seriously - read it now. It’s short. I’ll wait.)  It’s essentially a list of values.  More specifically, it’s a right-side/left-side weighted list of values:  “Value this over that”. Many people seem to get the impression that this is really a “good vs. bad” list and that those values on the right side are evil and should essentially be tossed on the floor.  This leads to the conclusion that in order to be Agile we must throw away our fancy expensive tools, document as little as possible, and scoff at the idea of a project plan.  This conclusion is quite convenient because it essentially means “less work, more productivity!” (particularly in regards to the documentation and project planning).  I couldn’t disagree with this conclusion more. My interpretation of the Manifesto targets “over” as the operative word.  It’s not just a list of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad.  It’s a list of priorities.  In other words, none of the concepts on the list should be removed from your development lifecycle – they are all important… just not equally important.  This is not a unique interpretation, in fact it says so right at the end of the manifesto! So, the next time your team sits down to tackle that big new project, don’t make the first order of business to outlaw all meetings, documentation, and project plans.  Instead, collaborate with both your team and the business members involved (you do have business members sitting in the room, directly involved in the project planning, right?) and determine the bare minimum that will allow all of you to work and communicate in the best way possible.  This often means that you can pick and choose which parts of the Agile methodologies and process work for your particular project and end up with an amalgamation of Waterfall, Agile, XP, SCRUM and whatever other methodologies the members of your team have been exposed to (my favorite is “SCRUMerfall”). The biggest implication of this is that there is no one way to implement Agile.  There is no checklist with which you can tick off boxes and confidently conclude that, “Yep, we’re Agile™!”  In fact, depending on your business and the members of your team, moving to Agile full-bore may actually be ill-advised.  Such a drastic change just ends up taking everyone out of their comfort zone which they inevitably fall back into by the end of the project.  This often results in frustration to the point that Agile is abandoned altogether because “we just need to ship something!”  Needless to say, this is far more devastating to a project. Instead, I offer this approach: keep it simple and take it slow.  If your business members or customers are only involved at the beginning phases and nowhere to be seen until the project is delivered, invite them to your daily meetings; encourage them to keep up to speed on what’s going on on a daily basis and provide feedback.  If your current process is heavy on the documentation, try to reduce it as opposed to eliminating it outright.  If you need a “TPS Change Request” signed in triplicate with a 5-day “cooling off period” before a change is implemented, try a simple bug tracking system!  Tighten the feedback loop! Finally, at the end of every “iteration” (whatever that means to you, as long as it’s relatively frequent), take as much time as you can spare (even if it’s an hour or so) and perform some kind of retrospective.  Learn from your mistakes.  Figure out what’s working for you and what’s not, then fix it.  Before you know it you’ve got a handful of iterations and/or projects under your belt and you sit down with your team to realize that, “Hey, this is working - we’re pretty Agile!”  After all, Agile is a Zen journey.  It’s a destination that you aim for, not force, and even if you never reach true “enlightenment” that doesn’t mean your team can’t be exponentially better off from merely taking the journey.

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• Seriously, It’s Time to Get Your Content Act Together

  - by Mike Stiles

  Branded content, content marketing, social content, brand journalism, we’re seeing those terms more and more. Why? The technology tools are coming together. We should know. We can gather big data, crunch it, listen to the public, moderate, respond, get to know the customer intimately, know what they like, know what they want, we can target, distribute, amplify, measure engagement and reaction, modify strategy and even automate a great deal of all that. An amazing machine, a sleek, smooth-running engine has been built such that all the parts can interact and work together to deliver peak performance and maximum output. But that engine isn’t going anywhere without any gas. Content is the gas. Yes, we curate other people’s content. We can siphon their gas. There’s tech to help with that too. But as for the creation of original, worthwhile content made for a specific audience, our audience, machines can’t do that…at least not yet. Curated content is great. But somebody has to originate the content for it to be curated and shared. And since the need for good, curated content is obviously large and the desire to share is there, it’s a winning proposition for a brand to be a consistent producer of original content. And yet, it feels like content is an issue we’re avoiding. There’s a reluctance to build a massive pipeline if you have no idea what you’re going to run through it. The C-suite often doesn’t know what content is, that it’s different from ads, where to get it, who makes it, how long it should be, what the point of it is if there’s no hard sell of the product, what it costs, how to use it, how to measure it, how to make sure it’s good, or how to make sure it will keep flowing. It could be the reason many brands aren’t pulling the trigger on socially enabling the enterprise. And that’s a shame, because there are a lot of creative, daring, experimental, uniquely talented entertainers and journalists chomping at the bit to execute content for brands. But for many corporate executives, content is “weird,” and the people who make it are even weirder. The content side of the equation is human. It’s art, but art that can be informed by data. The natural inclination is for brands to turn to their agencies for such creative endeavors. But agencies are falling into one of two categories. They’re failing to transition from ads to content. In “Content Era, What’s the Role of Agencies?” Alexander Jutkowitz says agencies were made for one-hit campaigns, not ongoing content. Or, they’re ready and capable but can’t get clients to do the right things. Agencies have to make money, even if it means continuing to do the wrong things because that’s all the client will agree to. So what we wind up with in the pipeline is advertising, marketing-heavy content, content that was obviously created or spearheaded by non-creative executives, random & inconsistent content, copy written for SEO bots, and other completely uninteresting nightmares. Frank Rose, author of “The Art of Immersion,” writes, “Content without story and excitement is noise pollution.” In the old days, you made an ad and inserted it into shows made by people who knew what they were doing. You could bask in that show’s success and leverage their audience. Now, you are tasked with attracting, amassing and holding your own audience. You may just want to make, advertise and sell your widgets. But now there’s a war on for a precious commodity, attention. People are busy. They have filters to keep uninteresting and irrelevant things out. They value their time and expect value back when they give it up. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says, "Your customers don't care about you, your products, your services…they care about themselves, their wants and their needs." Is it worth getting serious about content and doing it right? 61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers custom content (Custom Content Council). Interesting content is one of the top 3 reasons people follow brands on social (Content+). 78% of consumers think organizations that provide custom content want to build good relationships with them (TMG Custom Media). On the B2B side, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company info in a series of articles vs. an ad. So what’s the hang-up? Cited barriers to content marketing are lack of human resources (42%) and lack of budget (35%). 54% of brands don’t have a single on-site, dedicated content creator. And only 38% of brands have a content marketing strategy. Tech has built the biggest, most incredible stage for brands that’s ever been built. Putting something on that stage is your responsibility. Do a bad show, or no show at all, and you’ll be the beautiful, talented actress that never got discovered. @mikestilesPhoto: Gabriella Fabbri, stock.xchng

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• Challenge 19 – An Explanation of a Query

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  I have received a number of requests for an explanation of my winning query of TSQL Challenge 19. This involved traversing a hierarchy of employees and rolling a count of orders from subordinates up to superiors. The first concept I shall address is the hierarchyId , which is constructed within the CTE called cteTree.   cteTree is a recursive cte that will expand the parent-child hierarchy of the personnel in the table @emp.  One useful feature with a recursive cte is that data can be ‘passed’ from the parent to the child data.  The hierarchyId column is similar to the hierarchyId data type that was introduced in SQL Server 2008 and represents the position of the person within the organisation. Let us start with a simplistic example Albert manages Bob and Eddie.  Bob manages Carl and Dave. The hierarchyId will represent each person’s position in this relationship in a single field.  In this simple example we could append the userID together into a varchar field as detailed below. This will enable us to select a branch of the tree by filtering using Where hierarchyId  ‘1,2%’ to select Bob and all his subordinates.  Naturally, this is not comprehensive enough to provide a full solution, but as opposed to concatenating the Id’s together into a varchar datatyped column, we can apply the same theory to a varbinary.  By CASTing the ID’s into a datatype of varbinary(4) ,4 is used as 4 bytes of data are used to store an integer and building a hierarchyId  from those.  For example: The important point to bear in mind for later in the query is that the binary data generated is 'byte order comparable'. ie We can ORDER a dataset with it and the resulting data, will be in the order required. Now, would probably be a good time to download the example file and, after the cte ‘cteTree’, uncomment the line ‘select * from cteTree’.  Mark this and all prior code and execute.  This will show you how this theory directly relates to the actual challenge data.  The only deviation from the above, is that instead of using the ID of an employee, I have used the row_number() ranking function to order each level by LastName,Firstname.  This enables me to order by the HierarchyId in the final result set so that the result set is in the required order. Your output should be something like the below.  Notice also the ‘Level’ Column that contains the depth that the employee is within the tree.  I would encourage you to ‘play’ with the query, change the order in the row_number() or the length of the cast in the hierarchyId to see how that effects the outcome.  The next cte, ‘cteTreeWithOrderCount’, is a join between cteTree and the @ord table, and COUNT’s the number of orders per employee.  A LEFT JOIN is employed here to account for the occasion where an employee has made no sales.   Executing a ‘Select * from cteTreeWithOrderCount’ will return the result set as below.  The order here is unimportant as this is only a staging point of the data and only the final result set in a cte chain needs an Order by clause, unless TOP is utilised. cteExplode joins the above result set to the tally table (Nums) for Level Occurances.  So, if level is 2 then 2 rows are required.  This is done to expand the dataset, to create a new column (PathInc), which is the (n+1) integers contained within the heirarchyid.  For example, with the data for Robert King as given above, the below 3 rows will be returned. From this you can see that the pathinc column now contains the values for Andrew Fuller and Steven Buchanan who are Robert King’s superiors within the tree.    Finally cteSumUp, sums the orders for each person and their subordinates using the PathInc generated above, and the final select does the final simple mathematics and filters to restrict the result set to only the ‘original’ row per employee.

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• Add Hotmail & Live Email Accounts to Outlook 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Microsoft has recently been promoting upcoming updates to their Hotmail service, promising to make it an even better webmail service. But Microsoft’s revamped Outlook 2010 is already here. Here’s how to integrate Hotmail with Outlook. Outlook 2010 works with a wide variety of email accounts, including POP3, IMAP, and Exchange accounts.  The only problem with POP3 and IMAP accounts is that they only sync email, but not your calendar and contacts like Exchange does.  Hotmail, however, lets you sync your email, contacts, and calendar with Outlook with the Hotmail Connector.  This lets you keep all of your PIM data accessible from everywhere.  Let’s look at how we can set this up on our account. Getting Started The easiest way to add Hotmail to Outlook is to first install the Outlook Hotmail Connector (link below).  Make sure Outlook is closed first, and then proceed with the installation as usual. If you enter your Hotmail account into the New Account setup in Outlook before installing the Hotmail Connector, Outlook will prompt you to download the Hotmail Connector.  However, you’ll have to exit Outlook before you can install the Connector, and then will have to re-enter your information when you restart Outlook, so it’s easier to just install it first. Add Your Hotmail Account to Outlook Now you’re ready to add your Hotmail account to Outlook.  If this is the first time you’ve run Outlook 2010, you’ll be greeted with the following screen.  Click Next to proceed with setup. Then select Yes and click Next again. If you’ve already got an email account setup in Outlook, you can add a new account by clicking File and then selecting Add account. Now, enter your Hotmail account information, and click Next. Outlook will search for your account settings and automatically setup your account with the Hotmail connector we previously installed. If you entered your password incorrectly previously, you may see the following popup.  Re-enter your password and click OK, and Outlook will re-verify your settings. Once everything’s finished and setup, you’ll see the following completion screen.  Click Finish to complete the setup and check out your Hotmail in Outlook. Welcome to your Hotmail account in Outlook 2010.  You’ll notice a small notification at the bottom of the window notifying you that you’re connected to Windows Live Hotmail.  Now your email will synchronize with your Hotmail account, and your Outlook calendar and contacts will be synced with your Live calendar and contacts, respectively.  This is the closest you can get to full Exchange without an Exchange account, and in our experience it works great.  In fact, Hotmail Sync seems to work faster than IMAP sync for us. Setup Hotmail With POP3 Access If you need to access your Hotmail email account but don’t want to install the Outlook Connector, then you can add it with POP3 sync.  We recommend going with the Outlook Connector for the best experience, but if you can’t install it (eg. you’re not allowed to install applications on your work PC) then this is a good alternative. To do this, follow our tutorial on setting up a Gmail POP3 account in Outlook. Although the article concentrates on Gmail, the settings are essentially the same. The only thing you’ll want to change is the Incoming and Outgoing mail server. Incoming mail server – pop3.live.com Outgoing mail server – smtp.live.com User name – your Hotmail or Live email address Incoming Server (POP3) – 995 Outgoing Server (SMTP) – 587 Also, check This server requires and encrypted connection Just as in the Gmail example, select TLS for the type of encrypted connection.  Then, on the bottom, make sure to uncheck the box to Remove messages from the server after a number of days.  This way your messages will still be accessible from your Hotmail account online. Conclusion Even though Hotmail is generally not as popular as Gmail, it works great with Outlook integration.  If you’re a heavy user of Windows Live services, or want to try them out, Outlook Connector is the easiest way to keep your desktop activity synced with the cloud.  If you’re just one of the millions of Hotmail users who want to access their old Hotmail account alongside their other accounts, this method works great for you too. If you’re using Outlook 2003 or 2007, check out our article on using Hotmail from Microsoft Outlook. Links Download Outlook Hotmail Connector 32-bit Download Outlook Hotmail Connector 64-bit – note, only for users of Office 2010 x64 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use Hotmail from Microsoft OutlookHow to add any POP3 Email Account to HotmailHow to Send and Receive Hotmail from Your Gmail AccountAdd Your Gmail To Windows Live MailManage Your Windows Live Account in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes

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• Building the Elusive Windows Phone Panorama Control

  When the Windows Phone 7 Developer SDK was released a couple of weeks ago at MIX10 many people noticed the SDK doesnt include a template for a Panorama control.   Here at Clarity we decided to build our own Panorama control for use in some of our prototypes and I figured I would share what we came up with. There have been a couple of implementations of the Panorama control making their way through the interwebs, but I didnt think any of them really nailed the experience that is shown in the simulation videos.   One of the key design principals in the UX Guide for Windows Phone 7 is the use of motion.  The WP7 OS is fairly stripped of extraneous design elements and makes heavy use of typography and motion to give users the necessary visual cues.  Subtle animations and wide layouts help give the user a sense of fluidity and consistency across the phone experience.  When building the panorama control I was fairly meticulous in recreating the motion as shown in the videos.  The effect that is shown in the application hubs of the phone is known as a Parallax Scrolling effect.  This this pseudo-3D technique has been around in the computer graphics world for quite some time. In essence, the background images move slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in 2D.  Here is an example of the traditional use: http://www.mauriciostudio.com/.  One of the animation gems I've learned while building interactive software is the follow animation.  The premise is straightforward: instead of translating content 1:1 with the interaction point, let the content catch up to the mouse or finger.  The difference is subtle, but the impact on the smoothness of the interaction is huge.  That said, it became the foundation of how I achieved the effect shown below.   Source Code Available HERE Before I briefly describe the approach I took in creating this control..and Ill add some **asterisks ** to the code below as my coding skills arent up to snuff with the rest of my colleagues.  This code is meant to be an interpretation of the WP7 panorama control and is not intended to be used in a production application.  1.  Layout the XAML The UI consists of three main components :  The background image, the Title, and the Content.  You can imagine each  these UI Elements existing on their own plane with a corresponding Translate Transform to create the Parallax effect.  2.  Storyboards + Procedural Animations = Sexy As I mentioned above, creating a fluid experience was at the top of my priorities while building this control.  To recreate the smooth scroll effect shown in the video we need to add some place holder storyboards that we can manipulate in code to simulate the inertia and snapping.  Using the easing functions built into Silverlight helps create a very pleasant interaction.    3.  Handle the Manipulation Events With Silverlight 3 we have some new touch event handlers.  The new Manipulation events makes handling the interactivity pretty straight forward.  There are two event handlers that need to be hooked up to enable the dragging and motion effects: the ManipulationDelta event :  (the most relevant code is highlighted in pink) Here we are doing some simple math with the Manipulation Deltas and setting the TO values of the animations appropriately. Modifying the storyboards dynamically in code helps to create a natural feel.something that cant easily be done with storyboards alone.   And secondly, the ManipulationCompleted event:  Here we take the Final Velocities from the Manipulation Completed Event and apply them to the Storyboards to create the snapping and scrolling effects.  Most of this code is determining what the next position of the viewport will be.  The interesting part (shown in pink) is determining the duration of the animation based on the calculated velocity of the flick gesture.  By using velocity as a variable in determining the duration of the animation we can produce a slow animation for a soft flick and a fast animation for a strong flick. Challenges to the Reader There are a couple of things I didnt have time to implement into this control.  And I would love to see other WPF/Silverlight approaches.  1.  A good mechanism for deciphering when the user is manipulating the content within the panorama control and the panorama itself.   In other words, being able to accurately determine what is a flick and what is click. 2.  Dynamically Sizing the panorama control based on the width of its content.  Right now each control panel is 400px, ideally the Panel items would be measured and then panorama control would update its size accordingly.  3.  Background and content wrapping.  The WP7 UX guidelines specify that the content and background should wrap at the end of the list.  In my code I restrict the drag at the ends of the list (like the iPhone).  It would be interesting to see how this would effect the scroll experience.     Well, Its been fun building this control and if you use it Id love to know what you think.  You can download the Source HERE or from the Expression Gallery  Erik Klimczak  | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• To ORM or Not to ORM. That is the question&hellip;

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  UPDATE:  Thanks for the feedback and comments.  I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations.  I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping.  According to Wikipedia it is defined as the following: Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a "virtual object database" that can be used from within the programming language. Why should you care?  Basically it allows you to map your business objects in code to their persistence layer behind them. And better yet, why would you want to do this?  Let me outline it in the following points: Development speed.  No more need to map repetitive tasks query results to object members.  Once the map is created the code is rendered for you. Persistence portability.  The ORM knows how to map SQL specific syntax for the persistence engine you choose.  It does not matter if it is SQL Server, Oracle and another database of your choosing. Standard/Boilerplate code is simplified.  The basic CRUD operations are consistent and case use database metadata for basic operations. So how does this help?  Well, let’s compare some of the ORM tools that I have used and/or researched.  I have been interested in ORM for some time now.  My ORM of choice for a long time was NHibernate and I still believe it has a strong case in some business situations.  However, you have to take business considerations into account and the law of diminishing returns.  Because of these two factors, my recent activity and experience has been around DevExpress eXpress Persistence Objects (XPO).  The primary reason for this is because they have the DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) that sits on top of XPO.  With this added value, the data model can be created (either database first of code first) and the Web and Windows client can be created from these maps.  While out of the box they provide some simple list and detail screens, you can verify easily extend and modify these to your liking.  DevExpress has done a tremendous job of providing enough framework while also staying out of the way when you need to extend it.  This sounds worse than it really is.  What I mean by this is that if you choose to follow DevExpress coding style and recommendations, the hooks and extension points provided allow you to do some pretty heavy lifting while also not worrying about the basics. I have put together a list of the top features that I have used to compare the limited list of ORM’s that I have exposure with.  Again, the biggest selling point in my opinion is that XPO is just a solid as any of the other ORM’s but with the added layer of XAF they become unstoppable.  And then couple that with the EDMX modeling tools and code generation, it becomes a no brainer. Designer Features Entity Framework NHibernate Fluent w/ Nhibernate Telerik OpenAccess DevExpress XPO DevExpress XPO/XAF plus Liekhus Tools Uses XML to map relationships - Yes - - -   Visual class designer interface Yes - - - - Yes Management integrated w/ Visual Studio Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports schema first approach Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports model first approach Yes - - Yes Yes Yes Supports code first approach Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Attribute driven coding style Yes - Yes - Yes Yes                 I have a very small team and limited resources with a lot of responsibilities.  In order to keep up with our customers, we must rely on tools like these.  We use the EDMX tool so that we can create a visual representation of the applications with our customers.  Second, we rely on the code generation so that we can focus on the business problems at hand and not whether a field is mapped correctly.  This keeps us from requiring as many junior level developers on our team.  I have also worked on multiple teams where they believed in writing their own “framework”.  In my experiences and opinion this is not the route to take unless you have a team dedicated to supporting just the framework.  Each time that I have worked on custom frameworks, the framework eventually becomes old, out dated and full of “performance” enhancements specific to one or two requirements.  With an ORM, there are a lot smarter people than me working on the bigger issue of persistence and performance.  Again, my recommendation would be to use an available framework and get to working on your business domain problems.  If your coding is not making money for you, why are you working on it?  Do you really need to be writing query to object member code again and again? Thanks

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• Getting a Web Resource Url in non WebForms Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  WebResources in ASP.NET are pretty useful feature. WebResources are resources that are embedded into a .NET assembly and can be loaded from the assembly via a special resource URL. WebForms includes a method on the ClientScriptManager (Page.ClientScript) and the ScriptManager object to retrieve URLs to these resources. For example you can do: ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources), ControlResources.JQUERY_SCRIPT_RESOURCE); GetWebResourceUrl requires a type (which is used for the assembly lookup in which to find the resource) and the resource id to lookup. GetWebResourceUrl() then returns a nasty old long URL like this: WebResource.axd?d=-b6oWzgbpGb8uTaHDrCMv59VSmGhilZP5_T_B8anpGx7X-PmW_1eu1KoHDvox-XHqA1EEb-Tl2YAP3bBeebGN65tv-7-yAimtG4ZnoWH633pExpJor8Qp1aKbk-KQWSoNfRC7rQJHXVP4tC0reYzVw2&t=634533278261362212 While lately excessive resource usage has been frowned upon especially by MVC developers who tend to opt for content distributed as files, I still think that Web Resources have their place even in non-WebForms applications. Also if you have existing assemblies that include resources like scripts and common image links it sure would be nice to access them from non-WebForms pages like MVC views or even in plain old Razor Web Pages. Where's my Page object Dude? Unfortunately natively ASP.NET doesn't have a mechanism for retrieving WebResource Urls outside of the WebForms engine. It's a feature that's specifically baked into WebForms and that relies specifically on the Page HttpHandler implementation. Both Page.ClientScript (obviously) and ScriptManager rely on a hosting Page object in order to work and the various methods off these objects require control instances passed. The reason for this is that the script managers can inject scripts and links into Page content (think RegisterXXXX methods) and for that a Page instance is required. However, for many other methods - like GetWebResourceUrl() - that simply return resources or resource links the Page reference is really irrelevant. While there's a separate ClientScriptManager class, it's marked as sealed and doesn't have any public constructors so you can't create your own instance (without Reflection). Even if it did the internal constructor it does have requires a Page reference. No good… So, can we get access to a WebResourceUrl generically without running in a WebForms Page instance? We just have to create a Page instance ourselves and use it internally. There's nothing intrinsic about the use of the Page class in ClientScript, at least for retrieving resources and resource Urls so it's easy to create an instance of a Page for example in a static method. For our needs of retrieving ResourceUrls or even actually retrieving script resources we can use a canned, non-configured Page instance we create on our own. The following works just fine: public static string GetWebResourceUrl(Type type, string resource ) { Page page = new Page(); return page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(type, resource); } A slight optimization for this might be to cache the created Page instance. Page tends to be a pretty heavy object to create each time a URL is required so you might want to cache the instance: public class WebUtils { private static Page CachedPage { get { if (_CachedPage == null) _CachedPage = new Page(); return _CachedPage; } } private static Page _CachedPage; public static string GetWebResourceUrl(Type type, string resource) { return CachedPage.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(type, resource); } } You can now use GetWebResourceUrl in a Razor page like this: <!DOCTYPE html> <html <head> <script src="@WebUtils.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources),ControlResources.JQUERY_SCRIPT_RESOURCE)"> </script> </head> <body> <div class="errordisplay"> <img src="@WebUtils.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources),ControlResources.WARNING_ICON_RESOURCE)" /> This is only a Test! </div> </body> </html> And voila - there you have WebResources served from a non-Page based application. WebResources may be a on the way out, but legacy apps have them embedded and for some situations, like fallback scripts and some common image resources I still like to use them. Being able to use them from non-WebForms applications should have been built into the core ASP.NETplatform IMHO, but seeing that it's not this workaround is easy enough to implement.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Nginx and client certificates from hierarchical OpenSSL-based certification authorities

  - by Fmy Oen

  I'm trying to set up root certification authority, subordinate certification authority and to generate the client certificates signed by any of this CA that nginx 0.7.67 on Debian Squeeze will accept. My problem is that root CA signed client certificate works fine while subordinate CA signed one results in "400 Bad Request. The SSL certificate error". Step 1: nginx virtual host configuration: server { server_name test.local; access_log /var/log/nginx/test.access.log; listen 443 default ssl; keepalive_timeout 70; ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; ssl_ciphers AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:RC4-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:RC4-MD5; ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/server.crt; ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/server.key; ssl_client_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem; ssl_verify_client on; ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m; ssl_session_timeout 5m; location / { proxy_pass http://testsite.local/; } } Step 2: PKI infrastructure organization for both root and subordinate CA (based on this article): # mkdir ~/pki && cd ~/pki # mkdir rootCA subCA # cp -v /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf rootCA/ # cd rootCA/ # mkdir certs private crl newcerts; touch serial; echo 01 > serial; touch index.txt; touch crlnumber; echo 01 > crlnumber # cp -Rvp * ../subCA/ Almost no changes was made to rootCA/openssl.cnf: [ CA_default ] dir = . # Where everything is kept ... certificate = $dir/certs/rootca.crt # The CA certificate ... private_key = $dir/private/rootca.key # The private key and to subCA/openssl.cnf: [ CA_default ] dir = . # Where everything is kept ... certificate = $dir/certs/subca.crt # The CA certificate ... private_key = $dir/private/subca.key # The private key Step 3: Self-signed root CA certificate generation: # openssl genrsa -out ./private/rootca.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -x509 -new -key ./private/rootca.key -out certs/rootca.crt -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/rootca.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:rootca Email Address []: Step 4: Subordinate CA certificate generation: # cd ../subCA # openssl genrsa -out ./private/subca.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/subca.key -out subca.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/subca.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:subca Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: Step 5: Subordinate CA certificate signing by root CA certificate: # cd ../rootCA/ # openssl ca -in ../subCA/subca.csr -extensions v3_ca -config openssl.cnf Using configuration from openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/rootca.key: Check that the request matches the signature Signature ok Certificate Details: Serial Number: 1 (0x1) Validity Not Before: Feb 4 10:49:43 2013 GMT Not After : Feb 4 10:49:43 2014 GMT Subject: countryName = AU stateOrProvinceName = Some-State organizationName = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd commonName = subca X509v3 extensions: X509v3 Subject Key Identifier: C9:E2:AC:31:53:81:86:3F:CD:F8:3D:47:10:FC:E5:8E:C2:DA:A9:20 X509v3 Authority Key Identifier: keyid:E9:50:E6:BF:57:03:EA:6E:8F:21:23:86:BB:44:3D:9F:8F:4A:8B:F2 DirName:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca serial:9F:FB:56:66:8D:D3:8F:11 X509v3 Basic Constraints: CA:TRUE Certificate is to be certified until Feb 4 10:49:43 2014 GMT (365 days) Sign the certificate? [y/n]:y 1 out of 1 certificate requests certified, commit? [y/n]y ... # cd ../subCA/ # cp -v ../rootCA/newcerts/01.pem certs/subca.crt Step 6: Server certificate generation and signing by root CA (for nginx virtual host): # cd ../rootCA # openssl genrsa -out ./private/server.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/server.key -out server.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/server.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:test.local Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: # openssl ca -in server.csr -out certs/server.crt -config openssl.cnf Step 7: Client #1 certificate generation and signing by root CA: # openssl genrsa -out ./private/client1.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/client1.key -out client1.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/client1.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:Client #1 Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: # openssl ca -in client1.csr -out certs/client1.crt -config openssl.cnf Step 8: Client #1 certificate converting to PKCS12 format: # openssl pkcs12 -export -out certs/client1.p12 -inkey private/client1.key -in certs/client1.crt -certfile certs/rootca.crt Step 9: Client #2 certificate generation and signing by subordinate CA: # cd ../subCA/ # openssl genrsa -out ./private/client2.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/client2.key -out client2.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/client2.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:Client #2 Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: # openssl ca -in client2.csr -out certs/client2.crt -config openssl.cnf Step 10: Client #2 certificate converting to PKCS12 format: # openssl pkcs12 -export -out certs/client2.p12 -inkey private/client2.key -in certs/client2.crt -certfile certs/subca.crt Step 11: Passing server certificate and private key to nginx (performed with OS superuser privileges): # cd ../rootCA/ # cp -v certs/server.crt /etc/nginx/ssl/ # cp -v private/server.key /etc/nginx/ssl/ Step 12: Passing root and subordinate CA certificates to nginx (performed with OS superuser privileges): # cat certs/rootca.crt > /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem # cat ../subCA/certs/subca.crt >> /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem client.pem file look like this: # cat /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAJ/7VmaN048RMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMFYxCzAJBgNV BAYTAkFVMRMwEQYDVQQIEwpTb21lLVN0YXRlMSEwHwYDVQQKExhJbnRlcm5ldCBX aWRnaXRzIFB0eSBMdGQxDzANBgNVBAMTBnJvb3RjYTAeFw0xMzAyMDQxMDM1NTda ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- Certificate: Data: Version: 3 (0x2) Serial Number: 1 (0x1) ... -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIID4DCCAsigAwIBAgIBATANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADBWMQswCQYDVQQGEwJBVTET MBEGA1UECBMKU29tZS1TdGF0ZTEhMB8GA1UEChMYSW50ZXJuZXQgV2lkZ2l0cyBQ dHkgTHRkMQ8wDQYDVQQDEwZyb290Y2EwHhcNMTMwMjA0MTA0OTQzWhcNMTQwMjA0 ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- It looks like everything is working fine: # service nginx reload # Reloading nginx configuration: Enter PEM pass phrase: # nginx. # Step 13: Installing *.p12 certificates in browser (Firefox in my case) gives the problem I've mentioned above. Client #1 = 200 OK, Client #2 = 400 Bad request/The SSL certificate error. Any ideas what should I do? Update 1: Results of SSL connection test attempts: # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/rootCA/certs/rootca.crt -cert ~/pki/rootCA/certs/client1.crt -key ~/pki/rootCA/private/client1.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client1.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify return:1 depth=0 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = test.local verify return:1 --- Certificate chain 0 s:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=test.local i:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIDpjCCAo6gAwIBAgIBAjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADBWMQswCQYDVQQGEwJBVTET MBEGA1UECBMKU29tZS1TdGF0ZTEhMB8GA1UEChMYSW50ZXJuZXQgV2lkZ2l0cyBQ dHkgTHRkMQ8wDQYDVQQDEwZyb290Y2EwHhcNMTMwMjA0MTEwNjAzWhcNMTQwMjA0 ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- 1 s:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca i:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAJ/7VmaN048RMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMFYxCzAJBgNV BAYTAkFVMRMwEQYDVQQIEwpTb21lLVN0YXRlMSEwHwYDVQQKExhJbnRlcm5ldCBX aWRnaXRzIFB0eSBMdGQxDzANBgNVBAMTBnJvb3RjYTAeFw0xMzAyMDQxMDM1NTda ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- --- Server certificate subject=/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=test.local issuer=/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca --- Acceptable client certificate CA names /C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca /C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca --- SSL handshake has read 3395 bytes and written 2779 bytes --- New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is AES256-SHA Server public key is 2048 bit Secure Renegotiation IS supported Compression: zlib compression Expansion: zlib compression SSL-Session: Protocol : TLSv1 Cipher : AES256-SHA Session-ID: 15BFC2029691262542FAE95A48078305E76EEE7D586400F8C4F7C516B0F9D967 Session-ID-ctx: Master-Key: 23246CF166E8F3900793F0A2561879E5DB07291F32E99591BA1CF53E6229491FEAE6858BFC9AACAF271D9C3706F139C7 Key-Arg : None PSK identity: None PSK identity hint: None SRP username: None TLS session ticket: 0000 - c2 5e 1d d2 b5 6d 40 23-b2 40 89 e4 35 75 70 07 .^...m@#[email protected]. 0010 - 1b bb 2b e6 e0 b5 ab 10-10 bf 46 6e aa 67 7f 58 ..+.......Fn.g.X 0020 - cf 0e 65 a4 67 5a 15 ba-aa 93 4e dd 3d 6e 73 4c ..e.gZ....N.=nsL 0030 - c5 56 f6 06 24 0f 48 e6-38 36 de f1 b5 31 c5 86 .V..$.H.86...1.. ... 0440 - 4c 53 39 e3 92 84 d2 d0-e5 e2 f5 8a 6a a8 86 b1 LS9.........j... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359989684 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) --- Everything seems fine with Client #2 and root CA certificate but request returns 400 Bad Request error: # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/rootCA/certs/rootca.crt -cert ~/pki/subCA/certs/client2.crt -key ~/pki/subCA/private/client2.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client2.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify return:1 depth=0 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = test.local verify return:1 ... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359989989 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Server: nginx/0.7.67 Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:00:43 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 231 Connection: close <html> <head><title>400 The SSL certificate error</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center> <center>The SSL certificate error</center> <hr><center>nginx/0.7.67</center> </body> </html> closed Verification fails with Client #2 certificate and subordinate CA certificate: # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/subCA/certs/subca.crt -cert ~/pki/subCA/certs/client2.crt -key ~/pki/subCA/private/client2.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client2.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify error:num=19:self signed certificate in certificate chain verify return:0 ... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359990354 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 19 (self signed certificate in certificate chain) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request ... Still getting 400 Bad Request error with concatenated CA certificates and Client #2 (but still everything ok with Client #1): # cat certs/rootca.crt ../subCA/certs/subca.crt > certs/concatenatedca.crt # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/rootCA/certs/concatenatedca.crt -cert ~/pki/subCA/certs/client2.crt -key ~/pki/subCA/private/client2.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client2.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify return:1 depth=0 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = test.local verify return:1 --- ... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359990772 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request ... Update 2: I've managed to recompile nginx with enabled debug. Here is the part of successfull conection by Client #1 track: 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 accept: <MY IP ADDRESS> fd:3 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 event timer add: 3: 60000:2856497512 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 kevent set event: 3: ft:-1 fl:0025 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 malloc: 28805200:660 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 malloc: 28834400:1024 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 posix_memalign: 28860000:4096 @16 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http check ssl handshake 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 https ssl handshake: 0x16 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL server name: "test.local" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_do_handshake: -1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL handshake handler: 0 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 verify:1, error:0, depth:1, subject:"/C=AU /ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 verify:1, error:0, depth:0, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=Client #1",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_do_handshake: 1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL: TLSv1, cipher: "AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http process request line 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: -1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http process request line 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: 1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: 524 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: -1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http request line: "GET / HTTP/1.1" And here is the part of unsuccessfull conection by Client #2 track: 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 accept: <MY_IP_ADDRESS> fd:3 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 event timer add: 3: 60000:2855488975 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 kevent set event: 3: ft:-1 fl:0025 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 malloc: 28805200:660 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 malloc: 28834400:1024 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 posix_memalign: 28860000:4096 @16 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 http check ssl handshake 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 https ssl handshake: 0x16 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL server name: "test.local" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_do_handshake: -1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL handshake handler: 0 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_do_handshake: -1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL handshake handler: 0 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 verify:0, error:20, depth:1, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 verify:0, error:27, depth:1, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 verify:1, error:27, depth:0, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=Client #2",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_do_handshake: 1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL: TLSv1, cipher: "AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 http process request line 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_read: 1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_read: 524 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_read: -1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 http request line: "GET / HTTP/1.1" So I'm getting OpenSSL error #20 and then #27. According to verify documentation: 20 X509_V_ERR_UNABLE_TO_GET_ISSUER_CERT_LOCALLY: unable to get local issuer certificate the issuer certificate could not be found: this occurs if the issuer certificate of an untrusted certificate cannot be found. 27 X509_V_ERR_CERT_UNTRUSTED: certificate not trusted the root CA is not marked as trusted for the specified purpose.

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• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 22 (sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats Dynamic Management Function is used to return information about the fragmentation levels, page counts, depth, number of levels, record counts, etc. about the indexes on your database instance. One row is returned for each level in a given index, which we will discuss more later. The function takes a total of 5 input parameters which are (1) database_id, (2) object_id, (3) index_id, (4) partition_number, and (5) the mode of the scan level that you would like to run. Let’s use this function with our AdventureWorks2012 database to better illustrate the information it provides. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL) As you can see from the result set, there is a lot of beneficial information returned from this DMF. The first couple of columns in the result set (database_id, object_id, index_id, partition_number, index_type_desc, alloc_unit_type_desc) are either self-explanatory or have been explained in our previous blog sessions so I will not go into detail about these at this time. The next column in the result set is the index_depth which represents how deep the index goes. For example, If we have a large index that contains 1 root page, 3 intermediate levels, and 1 leaf level, our index depth would be 5. The next column is the index_level which refers to what level (of the depth) a particular row is referring to. Next is probably one of the most beneficial columns in this result set, which is the avg_fragmentation_in_percent. This column shows you how fragmented a particular level of an index may be. Many people use this column within their index maintenance jobs to dynamically determine whether they should do REORG’s or full REBUILD’s of a given index. The fragment count represents the number of fragments in a leaf level while the avg_fragment_size_in_pages represents the number of pages in a fragment. The page_count column tells you how many pages are in a particular index level. From my result set above, you see the the remaining columns all have NULL values. This is because I did not specify a ‘mode’ in my query and as a result it used the ‘LIMITED’ mode by default. The LIMITED mode is meant to be lightweight so it does collect information for every column in the result set. I will re-run my query again using the ‘DETAILED’ mode and you will see we now have results for these rows. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, ‘DETAILED’)   From the remaining columns, you see we get even more detailed information such as how many records are in a particular index level (record_count). We have a column for ghost_record_count which represents the number of records that have been marked for deletion, but have not physically been removed by the background ghost cleanup process. We later see information on the MIN, MAX, and AVG record size in bytes. The forwarded_record_count column refers to records that have been updated and now no longer fit within the row on the page anymore and thus have to be moved. A forwarded record is left in the original location with a pointer to the new location. The last column in the result set is the compressed_page_count column which tells you how many pages in your index have been compressed. This is a very powerful DMF that returns good information about the current indexes in your system. However, based on the mode you select, it could be a very resource intensive function so be careful with how you use it. For more information on this Dynamic Management Function, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188917.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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• My History with Agile

  - by Robert May

  I’m going to write my history with Agile here.  That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read.  Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews.  I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had.  I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree.  I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented.  I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job.  I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit.  I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly.  How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot.  They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then.  I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all.  The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years.  I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic.  I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun.  That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG.  I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB.  You really can do anything with Perl.  At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today.  One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well.  Smart guy.  I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff.  I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency.  I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects.  5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time.  That was all Microsoft DNS technologies.  SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment.  I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out.  Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic.  I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it.  Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies.  I was more into the management of development.  I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

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• Building the Elusive Windows Phone Panorama Control

  When the Windows Phone 7 Developer SDK was released a couple of weeks ago at MIX10 many people noticed the SDK doesnt include a template for a Panorama control.   Here at Clarity we decided to build our own Panorama control for use in some of our prototypes and I figured I would share what we came up with. There have been a couple of implementations of the Panorama control making their way through the interwebs, but I didnt think any of them really nailed the experience that is shown in the simulation videos.   One of the key design principals in the UX Guide for Windows Phone 7 is the use of motion.  The WP7 OS is fairly stripped of extraneous design elements and makes heavy use of typography and motion to give users the necessary visual cues.  Subtle animations and wide layouts help give the user a sense of fluidity and consistency across the phone experience.  When building the panorama control I was fairly meticulous in recreating the motion as shown in the videos.  The effect that is shown in the application hubs of the phone is known as a Parallax Scrolling effect.  This this pseudo-3D technique has been around in the computer graphics world for quite some time. In essence, the background images move slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in 2D.  Here is an example of the traditional use: http://www.mauriciostudio.com/.  One of the animation gems I've learned while building interactive software is the follow animation.  The premise is straightforward: instead of translating content 1:1 with the interaction point, let the content catch up to the mouse or finger.  The difference is subtle, but the impact on the smoothness of the interaction is huge.  That said, it became the foundation of how I achieved the effect shown below.   Source Code Available HERE Before I briefly describe the approach I took in creating this control..and Ill add some **asterisks ** to the code below as my coding skills arent up to snuff with the rest of my colleagues.  This code is meant to be an interpretation of the WP7 panorama control and is not intended to be used in a production application.  1.  Layout the XAML The UI consists of three main components :  The background image, the Title, and the Content.  You can imagine each  these UI Elements existing on their own plane with a corresponding Translate Transform to create the Parallax effect.  2.  Storyboards + Procedural Animations = Sexy As I mentioned above, creating a fluid experience was at the top of my priorities while building this control.  To recreate the smooth scroll effect shown in the video we need to add some place holder storyboards that we can manipulate in code to simulate the inertia and snapping.  Using the easing functions built into Silverlight helps create a very pleasant interaction.    3.  Handle the Manipulation Events With Silverlight 3 we have some new touch event handlers.  The new Manipulation events makes handling the interactivity pretty straight forward.  There are two event handlers that need to be hooked up to enable the dragging and motion effects: the ManipulationDelta event :  (the most relevant code is highlighted in pink) Here we are doing some simple math with the Manipulation Deltas and setting the TO values of the animations appropriately. Modifying the storyboards dynamically in code helps to create a natural feel.something that cant easily be done with storyboards alone.   And secondly, the ManipulationCompleted event:  Here we take the Final Velocities from the Manipulation Completed Event and apply them to the Storyboards to create the snapping and scrolling effects.  Most of this code is determining what the next position of the viewport will be.  The interesting part (shown in pink) is determining the duration of the animation based on the calculated velocity of the flick gesture.  By using velocity as a variable in determining the duration of the animation we can produce a slow animation for a soft flick and a fast animation for a strong flick. Challenges to the Reader There are a couple of things I didnt have time to implement into this control.  And I would love to see other WPF/Silverlight approaches.  1.  A good mechanism for deciphering when the user is manipulating the content within the panorama control and the panorama itself.   In other words, being able to accurately determine what is a flick and what is click. 2.  Dynamically Sizing the panorama control based on the width of its content.  Right now each control panel is 400px, ideally the Panel items would be measured and then panorama control would update its size accordingly.  3.  Background and content wrapping.  The WP7 UX guidelines specify that the content and background should wrap at the end of the list.  In my code I restrict the drag at the ends of the list (like the iPhone).  It would be interesting to see how this would effect the scroll experience.     Well, Its been fun building this control and if you use it Id love to know what you think.  You can download the Source HERE or from the Expression Gallery  Erik Klimczak  | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Another sound not working post

  - by Thomas Smart

  Tried all the other "sound not working" posts i think, lost count. purge/reinstall alsa and pulse, reboot, add user to audio group, various lines in the alsa config file such as "options snd-hda-intel model=" then tried different options like generic, auto, basic, default, etc. tried pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload a few times, with and without rebooting. Hardware: 16gb ram, core I7-4790, Intel Haswell mboard with onboard sound and graphics Multimedia: Audio Adapter: HDA-Intel-HDA Intel HDMI OS: Ubuntu server 14.04 with ubuntu-desktop installed. GUI sound settings lists only the dummy sound card alsamixer -c 0 ¦ Card: HDA Intel HDMI F1: Help ¦ ¦ Chip: Intel Haswell HDMI F2: System information ¦ ¦ View: F3:[Playback] F4: Capture F5: All F6: Select sound card ¦ ¦ Item: S/PDIF ¦ ¦ +--+ ¦ ¦ ¦OO¦ ¦ ¦ +--+ ¦ ¦ < S/PDIF > ¦ aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 aplay -L default Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server null Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture) pulse PulseAudio Sound Server hdmi:CARD=HDMI,DEV=0 HDA Intel HDMI, HDMI 0 HDMI Audio Output dmix:CARD=HDMI,DEV=3 HDA Intel HDMI, HDMI 0 Direct sample mixing device dsnoop:CARD=HDMI,DEV=3 HDA Intel HDMI, HDMI 0 Direct sample snooping device hw:CARD=HDMI,DEV=3 HDA Intel HDMI, HDMI 0 Direct hardware device without any conversions plughw:CARD=HDMI,DEV=3 HDA Intel HDMI, HDMI 0 Hardware device with all software conversions cat /proc/asound/cards 0 [HDMI ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel HDMI HDA Intel HDMI at 0xf7d14000 irq 46 cat /proc/asound/devices 1: : sequencer 2: [ 0- 3]: digital audio playback 3: [ 0- 0]: hardware dependent 4: [ 0] : control 33: : timer mplayer -ao alsa:device=hdmi /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/system-ready.ogg MPlayer 1.1-4.8 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team mplayer: could not connect to socket mplayer: No such file or directory Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control. Playing /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/system-ready.ogg. libavformat version 54.20.4 (external) Mismatching header version 54.20.3 libavformat file format detected. [lavf] stream 0: audio (vorbis), -aid 0 Load subtitles in /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/ ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders libavcodec version 54.35.0 (external) AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 1 ch, floatle, 80.0 kbit/5.67% (ratio: 10000->176400) Selected audio codec: [ffvorbis] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg Vorbis) ========================================================================== [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: confmisc.c:768:(parse_card) cannot find card '1' [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:4248:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_driver returned error: No such file or directory [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: confmisc.c:392:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:4248:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such file or directory [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: confmisc.c:1251:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:4248:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:4727:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory [AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: pcm.c:2239:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM hdmi [AO_ALSA] Playback open error: No such file or directory Failed to initialize audio driver 'alsa:device=hdmi' Could not open/initialize audio device -> no sound. Audio: no sound Video: no video Exiting... (End of file) mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.3 /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/system-ready.ogg MPlayer 1.1-4.8 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team mplayer: could not connect to socket mplayer: No such file or directory Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control. Playing /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/system-ready.ogg. libavformat version 54.20.4 (external) Mismatching header version 54.20.3 libavformat file format detected. [lavf] stream 0: audio (vorbis), -aid 0 Load subtitles in /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/ ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders libavcodec version 54.35.0 (external) AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 1 ch, floatle, 80.0 kbit/5.67% (ratio: 10000->176400) Selected audio codec: [ffvorbis] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg Vorbis) ========================================================================== [AO_ALSA] Format floatle is not supported by hardware, trying default. AO: [alsa] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample) Video: no video Starting playback... A: 0.4 (00.4) of 0.8 (00.7) 0.1% Exiting... (End of file) Thank you for your time and help :)

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• Simple Excel Export with EPPlus

  - by Jesse Taber

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/10/30/simple-excel-export-with-epplus.aspxAnyone I’ve ever met who works with an application that sits in front of a lot of data loves it when they can get that data exported to an Excel file for them to mess around with offline. As both developer and end user of a little website project that I’ve been working on, I found myself wanting to be able to get a bunch of the data that the application was collecting into an Excel file. The great thing about being both an end user and a developer on a project is that you can build the features that you really want! While putting this feature together I came across the fantastic EPPlus library. This library is certainly very well known and popular, but I was so impressed with it that I thought it was worth a quick blog post. This library is extremely powerful; it lets you create and manipulate Excel 2007/2010 spreadsheets in .NET code with a high degree of flexibility. My only gripe with the project is that they are not touting how insanely easy it is to build a basic Excel workbook from a simple data source. If I were running this project the approach I’m about to demonstrate in this post would be front and center on the landing page for the project because it shows how easy it really is to get started and serves as a good way to ease yourself in to some of the more advanced features. The website in question uses RavenDB, which means that we’re dealing with POCOs to model the data throughout all layers of the application. I love working like this so when it came time to figure out how to export some of this data to an Excel spreadsheet I wanted to find a way to take an IEnumerable<T> and just have it dumped to Excel with each item in the collection being modeled as a single row in the Excel worksheet. Consider the following class: public class Employee { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public decimal HourlyRate { get; set; } public DateTime HireDate { get; set; } } Now let’s say we have a collection of these represented as an IEnumerable<Employee> and we want to be able to output it to an Excel file for offline querying/manipulation. As it turns out, this is dead simple to do with EPPlus. Have a look: public void ExportToExcel(IEnumerable<Employee> employees, FileInfo targetFile) { using (var excelFile = new ExcelPackage(targetFile)) { var worksheet = excelFile.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("Sheet1"); worksheet.Cells["A1"].LoadFromCollection(Collection: employees, PrintHeaders: true); excelFile.Save(); } } That’s it. Let’s break down what’s going on here: Create a ExcelPackage to model the workbook (Excel file). Note that the ‘targetFile’ value here is a FileInfo object representing the location on disk where I want the file to be saved. Create a worksheet within the workbook. Get a reference to the top-leftmost cell (addressed as A1) and invoke the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, passing it our collection of Employee objects. Behind the scenes this is reflecting over the properties of the type provided and pulling out any public members to become columns in the resulting Excel output. The ‘PrintHeaders’ parameter tells EPPlus to grab the name of the property and put it in the first row. Save the Excel file All of the heavy lifting here is being done by the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, and that’s a good thing. Now, this was really easy to do, but it has some limitations. Using this approach you get a very plain, un-styled Excel worksheet. The column widths are all set to the default. The number format for all cells is ‘General’ (which proves particularly interesting if you have a DateTime property in your data source). I’m a “no frills” guy, so I wasn’t bothered at all by trading off simplicity for style and formatting. That said, EPPlus has tons of samples that you can download that illustrate how to apply styles and formatting to cells and a ton of other advanced features that are way beyond the scope of this post.

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• Logging WebSocket Frames using Chrome Developer Tools, Net-internals and Wireshark (TOTD #184)

  - by arungupta

  TOTD #183 explained how to build a WebSocket-driven application using GlassFish 4. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will explain how do view/debug on-the-wire messages, or frames as they are called in WebSocket parlance, over this upgraded connection. This blog will use the application built in TOTD #183. First of all, make sure you are using a browser that supports WebSocket. If you recall from TOTD #183 then WebSocket is combination of Protocol and JavaScript API. A browser supporting WebSocket, or not, means they understand your web pages with the WebSocket JavaScript. caniuse.com/websockets provide a current status of WebSocket support in different browsers. Most of the major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari already support WebSocket for the past few versions. As of this writing, IE still does not support WebSocket however its planned for a future release. Viewing WebSocket farmes require special settings because all the communication happens over an upgraded HTTP connection over a single TCP connection. If you are building your application using Java, then there are two common ways to debug WebSocket messages today. Other language libraries provide different mechanisms to log the messages. Lets get started! Chrome Developer Tools provide information about the initial handshake only. This can be viewed in the Network tab and selecting the endpoint hosting the WebSocket endpoint. You can also click on "WebSockets" on the bottom-right to show only the WebSocket endpoints. Click on "Frames" in the right panel to view the actual frames being exchanged between the client and server. The frames are not refreshed when new messages are sent or received. You need to refresh the panel by clicking on the endpoint again. To see more detailed information about the WebSocket frames, you need to type "chrome://net-internals" in a new tab. Click on "Sockets" in the left navigation bar and then on "View live sockets" to see the page. Select the box with the address to your WebSocket endpoint and see some basic information about connection and bytes exchanged between the client and the endpoint. Clicking on the blue text "source dependency ..." shows more details about the handshake. If you are interested in viewing the exact payload of WebSocket messages then you need a network sniffer. These tools are used to snoop network traffic and provide a lot more details about the raw messages exchanged over the network. However because they provide lot more information so they need to be configured in order to view the relevant information. Wireshark (nee Ethereal) is a pretty standard tool for sniffing network traffic and will be used here. For this blog purpose, we'll assume that the WebSocket endpoint is hosted on the local machine. These tools do allow to sniff traffic across the network though. Wireshark is quite a comprehensive tool and we'll capture traffic on the loopback address. Start wireshark, select "loopback" and click on "Start". By default, all traffic information on the loopback address is displayed. That includes tons of TCP protocol messages, applications running on your local machines (like GlassFish or Dropbox on mine), and many others. Specify "http" as the filter in the top-left. Invoke the application built in TOTD #183 and click on "Say Hello" button once. The output in wireshark looks like Here is a description of the messages exchanged: Message #4: Initial HTTP request of the JSP page Message #6: Response returning the JSP page Message #16: HTTP Upgrade request Message #18: Upgrade request accepted Message #20: Request favicon Message #22: Responding with favicon not found Message #24: Browser making a WebSocket request to the endpoint Message #26: WebSocket endpoint responding back You can also use Fiddler to debug your WebSocket messages. How are you viewing your WebSocket messages ? Here are some references for you: JSR 356: Java API for WebSocket - Specification (Early Draft) and Implementation (already integrated in GlassFish 4 promoted builds) TOTD #183 - Getting Started with WebSocket in GlassFish Subsequent blogs will discuss the following topics (not necessary in that order) ... Binary data as payload Custom payloads using encoder/decoder Error handling Interface-driven WebSocket endpoint Java client API Client and Server configuration Security Subprotocols Extensions Other topics from the API

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• Unit testing is… well, flawed.

  - by Dewald Galjaard

  Hey someone had to say it. I clearly recall my first IT job. I was appointed Systems Co-coordinator for a leading South African retailer at store level. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with an honest day’s labor and in fact I highly recommend it, however I’m obliged to refer to the designation cautiously; in reality all I had to do was monitor in-store prices and two UNIX front line controllers. If anything went wrong – I only had to phone it in… Luckily that wasn’t all I did. My duties extended to some other interesting annual occurrence – stock take. Despite a bit more curious affair, it was still a tedious process that took weeks of preparation and several nights to complete.  Then also I remember that no matter how elaborate our planning was, the entire exercise would be rendered useless if we couldn’t get the basics right – that being the act of counting. Sounds simple right? We’ll with a store which could potentially carry over tens of thousands of different items… we’ll let’s just say I believe that’s when I first became a coffee addict. In those days the act of counting stock was a very humble process. Nothing like we have today. A staff member would be assigned a bin or shelve filled with items he or she had to sort then count. Thereafter they had to record their findings on a complementary piece of paper. Every night I would manage several teams. Each team was divided into two groups - counters and auditors. Both groups had the same task, only auditors followed shortly on the heels of the counters, recounting stock levels, making sure the original count correspond to their findings. It was a simple yet hugely responsible orchestration of people and thankfully there was one fundamental and golden rule I could always abide by to ensure things run smoothly – No-one was allowed to audit their own work. Nope, not even on nights when I didn’t have enough staff available. This meant I too at times had to get up there and get counting, or have the audit stand over until the next evening. The reason for this was obvious - late at night and with so much to do we were prone to make some mistakes, then on the recount, without a fresh set of eyes, you were likely to repeat the offence. Now years later this rule or guideline still holds true as we develop software (as far removed as software development from counting stock may be). For some reason it is a fundamental guideline we’re simply ignorant of. We write our code, we write our tests and thus commit the same horrendous offence. Yes, the procedure of writing unit tests as practiced in most development houses today – is flawed. Most if not all of the tests we write today exercise application logic – our logic. They are based on the way we believe an application or method should/may/will behave or function. As we write our tests, our unit tests mirror our best understanding of the inner workings of our application code. Unfortunately these tests will therefore also include (or be unaware of) any imperfections and errors on our part. If your logic is flawed as you write your initial code, chances are, without a fresh set of eyes, you will commit the same error second time around too. Not even experience seems to be a suitable solution. It certainly helps to have deeper insight, but is that really the answer we should be looking for? Is that really failsafe? What about code review? Code review is certainly an answer. You could have one developer coding away and another (or team) making sure the logic is sound. The practice however has its obvious drawbacks. Firstly and mainly it is resource intensive and from what I’ve seen in most development houses, given heavy deadlines, this guideline is seldom adhered to. Hardly ever do we have the resources, money or time readily available. So what other options are out there? A quest to find some solution revealed a project by Microsoft Research called PEX. PEX is a framework which creates several test scenarios for each method or class you write, automatically. Think of it as your own personal auditor. Within a few clicks the framework will auto generate several unit tests for a given class or method and save them to a single project. PEX help to audit your work. It lends a fresh set of eyes to any project you’re working on and best of all; it is cost effective and fast. Check them out at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/ In upcoming posts we’ll dive deeper into how it works and how it can help you.   Certainly there are more similar frameworks out there and I would love to hear from you. Please share your experiences and insights.

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• Messaging Systems – Handshaking, Reconciliation and Tracking for Data Transparency

  - by Ahsan Alam

  As many corporations build business partnerships with other organizations, the need to share information becomes necessary. Large amount of data sharing using snail mail, email and/or fax are quickly becoming a thing of the past. More and more organizations are relying heavily on Ftp and/or Web Service to exchange data. Corporations apply wide range of technologies and techniques based on available resources and data transfer needs. Sometimes, it involves simple home-grown applications. Other times, large investments are made on products like BizTalk, TIBCO etc. Complexity of information management also varies significantly from one organizations to another. Some may deal with handful of simple steps to process and manage shared data; whereas others may rely on fairly complex processes with heavy interaction with internal and external systems in order to serve the business needs. It is not surprising that many of these systems end up becoming black boxes over a period of time. Consequently, people and business start to rely more and more on developers and support personnel just to extract simple information adding to the loss of productivity. One of the most important factor in any business is transparency to data irrespective of technology preferences and the complexity of business processes. Not knowing the state of data could become very costly to the business. Being involved in messaging systems for some time now, I have heard the same type of questions over and over again. Did we transmit messages successfully? Did we get responses back? What is the expected turn-around-time? Did the system experience any errors? When one company transmits data to one or more company, it may invoke a set of processes that could complete in matter of seconds, or it could days. As data travels from one organizations to another, the uncertainty grows, and the longer it takes to track uncertain state of the data the costlier it gets for the business, So, in every business scenario, it's extremely important to be aware of the state of the data.   Architects of messaging systems can take several steps to aid with data transparency. Some forms of data handshaking and reconciliation mechanism as well as extensive data tracking can be incorporated into the system to provide clear visibility to the data. What do I mean by handshaking and reconciliation? Some might consider these to be a single concept; however, I like to consider them in two unique categories. Handshaking serves as message receipts or acknowledgment. When one transmits messages to another, the receiver must acknowledge each message by sending immediate responses for each transaction. Whenever we use Web Services, handshaking is often achieved utilizing request/reply pattern. Similarly, if Ftp is used, a receiver can acknowledge by dropping messages for the sender as soon as the files are picked up. These forms of handshaking or acknowledgment informs the message sender and receiver that a successful transaction has occurred. I have mentioned earlier that it could take anywhere from a few seconds to a number of days before shared data is completely processed. In addition, whenever a batched transaction is used, processing time for each data element inside the batch could also vary significantly. So, in order to successfully manage data processing, reconciliation becomes extremely important; otherwise it may result into data loss or in some cases hefty penalty. Reconciliation can be done in many ways. Partner organizations can share and compare ad hoc reports to achieve reconciliation. On the other hand, partners can agree on some type of systematic reconciliation messages. Systems within responsible parties can trigger messages to partners as soon as the data process completes.   Next step in the data transparency is extensive data tracking. Some products such as BizTalk and TIBCO provide built-in functionality for data tracking; however, built-in functionality may not always be adequate. Sometimes additional tracking system (or databases) needs to be built in order monitor all types of data flow including, message transactions, handshaking, reconciliation, system errors and many more. If these types of data are captured, then these can be presented to business users in any forms or fashion. When business users are empowered with such information, then the reliance on developers and support teams decreases dramatically.   In today's collaborative world of information sharing, data transparency is key to the success of every business. The state of business data will constantly change. However, when people have easier access to various states of data, it allows them to make better and quicker decisions. Therefore, I feel that data handshaking, reconciliation and tracking is very important aspect of messaging systems.

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• FireFox 6 Super Slow? Cache Settings Corruption

  - by Rick Strahl

  For those of you that follow me on Twitter, you've probably seen some of my tweets regarding major performance problems I've seen with the install of FireFox 6.0. FireFox 6.0 was released a couple of weeks ago and is treated as a 'force feed' update for FireFox 5.0. I'm not sure what the deal is with this braindead versioning that Mozilla is doing with major version releases coming out, what now every other month? Seriously that's retarded especially given the limited number of new features these releases bring, and the upgrade pain for plug-ins that the major version release causes. Anyway, after the FireFox updater bugged me long enough I finally gave in last week and updated to FireFox 6. Immediately after install I noticed terrible performance. Everything was running at a snail's pace with Web pages loading slowly and most content actually slowly 'painting' the page. A typical sign of content downloading slowly. However these are pages that should be mostly cached on my system and even repeated accesses ran just as slow. Just for a reality check I ran the same sites in Chrome (blazing fast) and IE (fast enough :-)) but FireFox - dog on a stick. Why so slow Boss? While complaining lots of people recommended to ditch FireFox - use Chrome, yada yada yada. Yeah, Chrome is fast and getting better but I have a number of plug-ins that I use in FF that I can't easily give up. So I suffered and started looking around more closely at what was happening. The first thing I noticed when accessing pages was that I continually saw accesses to the Google CDN downloading jQuery and jQuery UI. UI especially is pretty heavy in size and currently I'm in a location with a fairly slow IP connection where large files are a bit of an issue. However, seeing the CDN urls pop up repeatedly raised a flag with me. That stuff should be caching and it looked like each and every hit was reloading these scripts and various images over and over again. Fired up FireBug and sure enough I saw something like this on a repeated hit to my blog: Those two highlights are jquery and the main CSS file for the site and both are being loaded fully and taking a while to load. However, since this page had been loaded before, these items should be cached and show 304 requests instead of the full HTTP requests returning 200 result codes. In short it looked like FireFox was not caching ANY content at all and constantly reloading all page resources. No wonder things were running dog slow. Once I realized what the problem was I took a look in the about:config settings and lo and behold a bunch of the cache settings were set to not cache: In my case ALL the main cache flags were set to false for some reason that I can't figure out.  It appears that after the FireFox 6 update these flags somehow mysteriously changed and performance took a nose dive. Switching the .enable flags back to true and resetting all the cache settings tote default reverted performance back to the way it's supposed to be: reasonably fast and snappy as soon as content is cached and accessed again  from cache. I try not to muck with the about:config settings much (other than turning off the IPV6 option) but when there are problems access to these features can be really nice. However, I treat this as a last resort so it took me quite some time before I started looking through ALL the settings. This takes a while, not knowing what I was looking for exactly. If Web load performance is slow it's a good idea to check the cache settings. I have no idea what hosed these settings for me - I certainly didn't explicitly set them in about:config and while in FireFox's Options dialog I didn't see any option that would affect global caching like this, so this remains a mystery to me. Anyway, I hope that this is helpful to some, in case some of you end up running into a similar issue.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in FireFox   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Not so long ago in a city not so far away by Carlos Martin

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is the story of how the EMEA Presales Center turned an Oracle intern into a trusted technology advisor for both Oracle’s Sales and customers. It was the summer of 2011 when I was finishing my Computer Engineering studies as well as my internship at Oracle when I was offered what could possibly be THE dream job for any young European Computer Engineer. Apart from that, it also seemed like the role was particularly tailored to me as I could leverage almost everything I learned at University and during the internship. And all of it in one of the best cities to live in, not only from my home country but arguably from Europe: Malaga! A day at EPC As part of the EPC Technology pillar, and later on completely focused on WebCenter, there was no way to describe a normal day on the job as each day had something unique. Some days I was researching documentation in order to elaborate accurate answers for a customer’s question within a Request for Information or Proposal (RFI/RFP), other days I was doing heavy programming in order to bring a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a customer to life and last not but least, some days I presented to the customer via webconference the demo I built for them the past weeks. So as you can see, the role has research, development and presentation, could you ask for more? Well, don’t worry because there IS more! Internationality As the organization’s name suggests, EMEA Presales Center, it is the Center of Presales within Europe, Middle East and Africa so I got the chance to work with great professionals from all this regions, expanding my network and learning things from one country to apply them to others. In addition to that, the teams based in the Malaga office are comprised of many young professionals hailing mainly from Western and Central European countries (although there are a couple of exceptions!) with very different backgrounds and personalities which guaranteed many laughs and stories during lunch or coffee breaks (or even while working on projects!). Furthermore, having EPC offices in Bucharest and Bangalore and thanks to today’s tele-presence technologies, I was working every day with people from India or Romania as if they were sitting right next to me and the bonding with them got stronger day by day. Career development Apart from the research and self-study I’ve earlier mentioned, one of the EPC’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is that 15% of your time is spent on training so you get lots and lots of trainings in order to develop both your technical product knowledge and your presentation, negotiation and other soft skills. Sometimes the training is via webcast, sometimes the trainer comes to the office and sometimes, the best times, you get to travel abroad in order to attend a training, which also helps you to further develop your network by meeting face to face with many people you only know from some email or instant messaging interaction. And as the months go by, your skills improving at a very fast pace, your relevance increasing with each new project you successfully deliver, it’s only a matter of time (and a bit of self-promoting!) that you get the attention of the manager of a more senior team and are offered the opportunity to take a new step in your professional career. For me it took 2 years to move to my current position, Technology Sales Consultant at the Oracle Direct organization. During those 2 years I had built a good relationship with the Oracle Direct Spanish sales and sales managers, who are also based in the Malaga office. I supported their former Sales Consultant in a couple of presentations and demos and were very happy with my overall performance and attitude so even before the position got eventually vacant, I got a heads-up from then in advance that their current Sales Consultant was going to move to a different position. To me it felt like a natural step, same as when I joined EPC, I had at least a 50% of the “homework” already done but wanted to experience that extra 50% to add new product and soft skills to my arsenal. The rest is history, I’ve been in the role for more than half a year as I’m writing this, achieved already some important wins, gained a lot of trust and confidence in front of customers and broadened my view of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware portfolio. I look back at the 2 years I spent in EPC and think: “boy, I’d recommend that experience to absolutely anyone with the slightest interest in IT, there are so many different things you can do as there are different kind of roles you can end up taking thanks to the experience gained at EPC” /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• How to restore your production database without needing additional storage

  - by David Atkinson

  Production databases can get very large. This in itself is to be expected, but when a copy of the database is needed the database must be restored, requiring additional and costly storage.  For example, if you want to give each developer a full copy of your production server, you’ll need n times the storage cost for your n-developer team. The same is true for any test databases that are created during the course of your project lifecycle. If you’ve read my previous blog posts, you’ll be aware that I’ve been focusing on the database continuous integration theme. In my CI setup I create a “production”-equivalent database directly from its source control representation, and use this to test my upgrade scripts. Despite this being a perfectly valid and practical thing to do as part of a CI setup, it’s not the exact equivalent to running the upgrade script on a copy of the actual production database. So why shouldn’t I instead simply restore the most recent production backup as part of my CI process? There are two reasons why this would be impractical. 1. My CI environment isn’t an exact copy of my production environment. Indeed, this would be the case in a perfect world, and it is strongly recommended as a good practice if you follow Jez Humble and David Farley’s “Continuous Delivery” teachings, but in practical terms this might not always be possible, especially where storage is concerned. It may just not be possible to restore a huge production database on the environment you’ve been allotted. 2. It’s not just about the storage requirements, it’s also the time it takes to do the restore. The whole point of continuous integration is that you are alerted as early as possible whether the build (yes, the database upgrade script counts!) is broken. If I have to run an hour-long restore each time I commit a change to source control I’m just not going to get the feedback quickly enough to react. So what’s the solution? Red Gate has a technology, SQL Virtual Restore, that is able to restore a database without using up additional storage. Although this sounds too good to be true, the explanation is quite simple (although I’m sure the technical implementation details under the hood are quite complex!) Instead of restoring the backup in the conventional sense, SQL Virtual Restore will effectively mount the backup using its HyperBac technology. It creates a data and log file, .vmdf, and .vldf, that becomes the delta between the .bak file and the virtual database. This means that both read and write operations are permitted on a virtual database as from SQL Server’s point of view it is no different from a conventional database. Instead of doubling the storage requirements upon a restore, there is no ‘duplicate’ storage requirements, other than the trivially small virtual log and data files (see illustration below). The benefit is magnified the more databases you mount to the same backup file. This technique could be used to provide a large development team a full development instance of a large production database. It is also incredibly easy to set up. Once SQL Virtual Restore is installed, you simply run a conventional RESTORE command to create the virtual database. This is what I have running as part of a nightly “release test” process triggered by my CI tool. RESTORE DATABASE WidgetProduction_Virtual FROM DISK=N'D:\VirtualDatabase\WidgetProduction.bak' WITH MOVE N'WidgetProduction' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vmdf', MOVE N'WidgetProduction_log' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_log_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vldf', NORECOVERY, STATS=1, REPLACE GO RESTORE DATABASE WidgetProduction_Virtual WITH RECOVERY   Note the only change from what you would do normally is the naming of the .vmdf and .vldf files. SQL Virtual Restore intercepts this by monitoring the extension and applies its magic, ensuring the ‘virtual’ restore happens rather than the conventional storage-heavy restore. My automated release test then applies the upgrade scripts to the virtual production database and runs some validation tests, giving me confidence that were I to run this on production for real, all would go smoothly. For illustration, here is my 8Gb production database: And its corresponding backup file: Here are the .vldf and .vmdf files, which represent the only additional used storage for the new database following the virtual restore.   The beauty of this product is its simplicity. Once it is installed, the interaction with the backup and virtual database is exactly the same as before, as the clever stuff is being done at a lower level. SQL Virtual Restore can be downloaded as a fully functional 14-day trial. Technorati Tags: SQL Server

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• How to restore your production database without needing additional storage

  - by David Atkinson

  Production databases can get very large. This in itself is to be expected, but when a copy of the database is needed the database must be restored, requiring additional and costly storage.  For example, if you want to give each developer a full copy of your production server, you'll need n times the storage cost for your n-developer team. The same is true for any test databases that are created during the course of your project lifecycle. If you've read my previous blog posts, you'll be aware that I've been focusing on the database continuous integration theme. In my CI setup I create a "production"-equivalent database directly from its source control representation, and use this to test my upgrade scripts. Despite this being a perfectly valid and practical thing to do as part of a CI setup, it's not the exact equivalent to running the upgrade script on a copy of the actual production database. So why shouldn't I instead simply restore the most recent production backup as part of my CI process? There are two reasons why this would be impractical. 1. My CI environment isn't an exact copy of my production environment. Indeed, this would be the case in a perfect world, and it is strongly recommended as a good practice if you follow Jez Humble and David Farley's "Continuous Delivery" teachings, but in practical terms this might not always be possible, especially where storage is concerned. It may just not be possible to restore a huge production database on the environment you've been allotted. 2. It's not just about the storage requirements, it's also the time it takes to do the restore. The whole point of continuous integration is that you are alerted as early as possible whether the build (yes, the database upgrade script counts!) is broken. If I have to run an hour-long restore each time I commit a change to source control I'm just not going to get the feedback quickly enough to react. So what's the solution? Red Gate has a technology, SQL Virtual Restore, that is able to restore a database without using up additional storage. Although this sounds too good to be true, the explanation is quite simple (although I'm sure the technical implementation details under the hood are quite complex!) Instead of restoring the backup in the conventional sense, SQL Virtual Restore will effectively mount the backup using its HyperBac technology. It creates a data and log file, .vmdf, and .vldf, that becomes the delta between the .bak file and the virtual database. This means that both read and write operations are permitted on a virtual database as from SQL Server's point of view it is no different from a conventional database. Instead of doubling the storage requirements upon a restore, there is no 'duplicate' storage requirements, other than the trivially small virtual log and data files (see illustration below). The benefit is magnified the more databases you mount to the same backup file. This technique could be used to provide a large development team a full development instance of a large production database. It is also incredibly easy to set up. Once SQL Virtual Restore is installed, you simply run a conventional RESTORE command to create the virtual database. This is what I have running as part of a nightly "release test" process triggered by my CI tool. RESTORE DATABASE WidgetProduction_virtual FROM DISK=N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction.bak' WITH MOVE N'WidgetProduction' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vmdf', MOVE N'WidgetProduction_log' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_log_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vldf', NORECOVERY, STATS=1, REPLACE GO RESTORE DATABASE mydatabase WITH RECOVERY   Note the only change from what you would do normally is the naming of the .vmdf and .vldf files. SQL Virtual Restore intercepts this by monitoring the extension and applies its magic, ensuring the 'virtual' restore happens rather than the conventional storage-heavy restore. My automated release test then applies the upgrade scripts to the virtual production database and runs some validation tests, giving me confidence that were I to run this on production for real, all would go smoothly. For illustration, here is my 8Gb production database: And its corresponding backup file: Here are the .vldf and .vmdf files, which represent the only additional used storage for the new database following the virtual restore.   The beauty of this product is its simplicity. Once it is installed, the interaction with the backup and virtual database is exactly the same as before, as the clever stuff is being done at a lower level. SQL Virtual Restore can be downloaded as a fully functional 14-day trial. Technorati Tags: SQL Server

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• Supporting users if they're not on your site

  - by Roger Hart

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

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