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• Understanding Process Scheduling in Oracle Solaris

  - by rickramsey

  The process scheduler in the Oracle Solaris kernel allocates CPU resources to processes. By default, the scheduler tries to give every process relatively equal access to the available CPUs. However, you might want to specify that certain processes be given more resources than others. That's where classes come in. A process class defines a scheduling policy for a set of processes. These three resources will help you understand and manage it process classes: Blog: Overview of Process Scheduling Classes in the Oracle Solaris Kernel by Brian Bream Timesharing, interactive, fair-share scheduler, fixed priority, system, and real time. What are these? Scheduling classes in the Solaris kernel. Brian Bream describes them and how the kernel manages them through context switching. Blog: Process Scheduling at the Thread Level by Brian Bream The Fair Share Scheduler allows you to dispatch processes not just to a particular CPU, but to CPU threads. Brian Bream explains how to use and provides examples. Docs: Overview of the Fair Share Scheduler by Oracle Solaris Documentation Team This official Oracle Solaris documentation set provides the nitty-gritty details for setting up classes and managing your processes. Covers: Introduction to the Scheduler CPU Share Definition CPU Shares and Process State CPU Share Versus Utilization CPU Share Examples FSS Configuration FSS and Processor Sets Combining FSS With Other Scheduling Classes Setting the Scheduling Class for the System Scheduling Class on a System with Zones Installed Commands Used With FSS -Rick Follow me on: Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Personal Twitter | YouTube | The Great Peruvian Novel

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• What Did You Do? is a Bad Question

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  Brian Moran (blog | Twitter) did a great presentation today for the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter on The Art of Questions.  One of the points that Brian made was that there are good questions and bad (or at least not-as-good) questions.  Good questions tend to open-up the conversation and engender positive reactions (perhaps even trust and respect) between the participants; and bad questions tend to close-down a conversation either through the narrow list of possible responses (e.g. strictly Yes/No) or through the negative reactions they can produce.  And this explains why I so frequently had problems troubleshooting real-time problems with users in the past.  I’ll explain that in more detail below, but before we go on, let me recommend that you watch the recording of Brian’s presentation to learn why the question Why is often problematic in the U.S. and yet we so often resort to it. For a short portion (3 years) of my career, I taught basic computer skills and Office applications in an adult vocational school, and this gave me ample opportunity to do live troubleshooting of user challenges with computers.  And like many people who ended up in computer related jobs, I also have had numerous times where I was called upon by less computer-savvy individuals to help them with some challenge they were having, whether it was part of my job or not.  One of the things that I noticed, especially during my time as a teacher, was that when I was helping somebody, typically the first question I would ask them was, “What did you do?”  This seemed to me like a good way to start my detective work trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to help the person avoid it again in the future.  I always asked it in a polite tone of voice as I was just trying to gather the facts before diving in deeper.  However; 99.999% of the time, I always got the same answer, “Nothing!”  For a long time this frustrated me because (remember I’m in detective mode at that point) I knew it could not possibly be true.  They HAD to have done SOMETHING…just tell me what were the last actions you took before this problem presented itself.  But no, they always stuck with “Nothing”.  At which point, with frustration growing, and not a little bit of disdain for their lack of helpfulness, I would usually ask them to move aside while I took over their machine and got them out of whatever they had gotten themselves into.  After a while I just grew used to the fact that this was the answer I would usually receive, but I always kept asking because for the .001% of the people who would actually tell me, I could then help them understand what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. Now, after hearing Brian’s talk, I understand what the problem was.  Even though I meant to just be in an information gathering mode, the words I was using, “What did YOU do?” have such a strong negative connotation that people would instinctively go into defense-mode and stop sharing information that might make them look bad.  Many of them probably were not even consciously aware that they had gone on the defensive, but the self-preservation instinct, especially self-preservation of the ego, is so strong that people would end up there without even realizing it. So, if “What did you do” is a bad question, what would have been better?  Well, one suggestion that Brian makes in his talk is something along the lines of, “Can you tell me what led up to this?” or “what was happening on the computer right before this came up?”  It’s subtle, but the point is to take the focus off of the person and their behavior; instead depersonalizing it and talk about events from more of a 3rd-party observer point of view.  With this approach, people will be more likely to talk about what the computer did and what they did in response to it without feeling the interrogation spotlight is on them.  They are also more likely to mention other events that occurred around the same time that may or may not be related, but which could certainly help you troubleshoot a larger problem if it is not just user actions.  And that is the ultimate goal of your asking the questions.  So yes, it does matter how you ask the question; and there are such things as good questions and bad questions.  Excellent topic Brian!  Thanks for getting the thinking gears churning! (Cross-posted to the Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog.)

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• Running XPath on child node.

  - by Jeeyoung Kim

  Hi. I'm trying to do a xpath lookup on nodes returned by xpath lookup, but it doesn't seem to work as I expected.XPaths executed on the child nodes of a document seem to be executd against hthe root node of the document (in the example, the inventory tag.), instead of the root of the provided node. Am I missing something here? I'm new to XPath. Also, please don't answer "just do //book[author='Neal Stephenson'/title". I have a legitimate use case, and this is a simplified example. Code snippet DocumentBuilderFactory domFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); domFactory.setNamespaceAware(true); DocumentBuilder builder = domFactory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document doc = builder.parse("src/main/java/books.xml"); XPathFactory factory = XPathFactory.newInstance(); XPath xpath = factory.newXPath(); Node book = (Node) xpath.evaluate("//book[author='Neal Stephenson']", doc, XPathConstants.NODE); Node title = (Node) xpath.evaluate("/title", book, XPathConstants.NODE); // I get null here. Node inventory = (Node) xpath.evaluate("/inventory", book, XPathConstants.NODE); // this returns a node. book.xml <inventory> <book year="2000"> <title>Snow Crash</title> <author>Neal Stephenson</author> <publisher>Spectra</publisher> <isbn>0553380958</isbn> <price>14.95</price> </book> <book year="2005"> <title>Burning Tower</title> <author>Larry Niven</author> <author>Jerry Pournelle</author> <publisher>Pocket</publisher> <isbn>0743416910</isbn> <price>5.99</price> </book> <book year="1995"> <title>Zodiac</title> <author>Neal Stephenson</author> <publisher>Spectra</publisher> <isbn>0553573862</isbn> <price>7.50</price> </book> <!-- more books... --> </inventory>

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• C++ Unary - Operator Overload Won't Compile

  - by Brian Hooper

  I am attempting to create an overloaded unary - operator but can't get the code to compile. A cut-down version of the code is as follows:- class frag { public: frag myfunc (frag oper1, frag oper2); frag myfunc2 (frag oper1, frag oper2); friend frag operator + (frag &oper1, frag &oper2); frag operator - () { frag f; f.element = -element; return f; } private: int element; }; frag myfunc (frag oper1, frag oper2) { return oper1 + -oper2; } frag myfunc2 (frag oper1, frag oper2) { return oper1 + oper2; } frag operator+ (frag &oper1, frag &oper2) { frag innerfrag; innerfrag.element = oper1.element + oper2.element; return innerfrag; } The compiler reports... /home/brian/Desktop/frag.hpp: In function ‘frag myfunc(frag, frag)’: /home/brian/Desktop/frag.hpp:41: error: no match for ‘operator+’ in ‘oper1 + oper2.frag::operator-()’ /home/brian/Desktop/frag.hpp:16: note: candidates are: frag operator+(frag&, frag&) Could anyone suggest what I need to be doing here? Thanks.

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• Flex 3 - How to read data dynamically from XML

  - by Brian Roisentul

  Hi Everyone, I'm new at Flex and I wanted to know how to read an xml file to pull its data into a chart, using Flex Builder 3. Even though I've read and done some tutorials, I haven't seen any of them loading the data dynamically. For example, I'd like to have an xml like the following: <data> <result month="April-09"> <visitor> <value>8</value> <fullname>Brian Roisentul</fullname> <coid>C01111</coid> </visitor> <visitor> <value>15</value> <fullname>Visitor 2</fullname> <coid>C02222</coid> </visitor> <visitor> <value>20</value> <fullname>Visitor 3</fullname> <coid>C03333</coid> </visitor> </result> <result month="July-09"> <visitor> <value>15</value> <fullname>Brian Roisentul</fullname> <coid>C01111</coid> </visitor> <visitor> <value>6</value> <fullname>Visitor 2</fullname> <coid>C02222</coid> </visitor> <visitor> <value>12</value> <fullname>Visitor 3</fullname> <coid>C03333</coid> </visitor> </result> <result month="October-09"> <visitor> <value>10</value> <fullname>Brian Roisentul</fullname> <coid>C01111</coid> </visitor> <visitor> <value>14</value> <fullname>Visitor 2</fullname> <coid>C02222</coid> </visitor> <visitor> <value>6</value> <fullname>Visitor 3</fullname> <coid>C03333</coid> </visitor> </result> </data> and then loop through every "visitor" xml item and draw their values, and display their "fullname" when the mouse is over their line. If you need some extra info, please let me just know. Thanks, Brian

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• How do you educate your teammates without seeming condescending or superior?

  - by Dan Tao

  I work with three other guys; I'll call them Adam, Brian, and Chris. Adam and Brian are bright guys. Give them a problem; they will figure out a way to solve it. When it comes to OOP, though, they know very little about it and aren't particularly interested in learning. Pure procedural code is their MO. Chris, on the other hand, is an OOP guy all the way -- and a cocky, condescending one at that. He is constantly criticizing the work Adam and Brian do and talking to me as if I must share his disdain for the two of them. When I say that Adam and Brian aren't interested in learning about OOP, I suspect Chris is the primary reason. This hasn't bothered me too much for the most part, but there have been times when, looking at some code Adam or Brian wrote, it has pained me to think about how a problem could have been solved so simply using inheritance or some other OOP concept instead of the unmaintainable mess of 1,000 lines of code that ended up being written instead. And now that the company is starting a rather ambitious new project, with Adam assigned to the task of getting the core functionality in place, I fear the result. Really, I just want to help these guys out. But I know that if I come across as just another holier-than-thou developer like Chris, it's going to be massively counterproductive. I've considered: Team code reviews -- everybody reviews everybody's code. This way no one person is really in a position to look down on anyone else; besides, I know I could learn plenty from the other members on the team as well. But this would be time-consuming, and with such a small team, I have trouble picturing it gaining much traction as a team practice. Periodic e-mails to the team -- this would entail me sending out an e-mail every now and then discussing some concept that, based on my observation, at least one team member would benefit from learning about. The downside to this approach is I do think it could easily make me come across as a self-appointed expert. Keeping a blog -- I already do this, actually; but so far my blog has been more about esoteric little programming tidbits than straightforward practical advice. And anyway, I suspect it would get old pretty fast if I were constantly telling my coworkers, "Hey guys, remember to check out my new blog post!" This question doesn't need to be specifically about OOP or any particular programming paradigm or technology. I just want to know: how have you found success in teaching new concepts to your coworkers without seeming like a condescending know-it-all? It's pretty clear to me there isn't going to be a sure-fire answer, but any helpful advice (including methods that have worked as well as those that have proved ineffective or even backfired) would be greatly appreciated. UPDATE: I am not the Team Lead on this team. Chris is. UPDATE 2: Made community wiki to accord with the general sentiment of the community (fancy that).

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• Security and the Mobile Workforce

  - by tobyehatch

  Now that many organizations are moving to the BYOD philosophy (bring your own devices), security for phones and tablets accessing company sensitive information is of paramount importance. I had the pleasure to interview Brian MacDonald, Principal Product Manager for Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Mobile Products, about this subject, and he shared some wonderful insight about how the Oracle Mobile Security Tool Kit is addressing mobile security and doing some pretty cool things.  With the rapid proliferation of phones and tablets, there is a perception that mobile devices are a security threat to corporate IT, that mobile operating systems are not secure, and that there are simply too many ways to inadvertently provide access to critical analytic data outside the firewall. Every day, I see employees working on mobile devices at the airport, while waiting for their airplanes, and using public WIFI connections at coffee houses and in restaurants. These methods are not typically secure ways to access confidential company data. I asked Brian to explain why. “The native controls for mobile devices and applications are indeed insufficiently secure for corporate deployments of Business Intelligence and most certainly for businesses where data is extremely critical - such as financial services or defense - although it really applies across the board. The traditional approach for accessing data from outside a firewall is using a VPN connection which is not a viable solution for mobile. The problem is that once you open up a VPN connection on your phone or tablet, you are creating an opening for the whole device, for all the software and installed applications. Often the VPN connection by itself provides insufficient encryption – if any – which means that data can be potentially intercepted.” For this reason, most organizations that deploy Business Intelligence data via mobile devices will only do so with some additional level of control. So, how has the industry responded? What are companies doing to address this very real threat? Brian explained that “Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) software vendors have rapidly created solutions for mobile devices that provide a vast array of services for controlling, managing and establishing enterprise mobile usage policies. On the device front, vendors now support full levels of encryption behind the firewall, encrypted local data storage, credential management such as federated single-sign-on as well as remote wipe, geo-fencing and other risk reducing features (should a device be lost or stolen). More importantly, these software vendors have created methods for providing these capabilities on a per application basis, allowing for complete isolation of the application from the mobile operating system. Finally, there are tools which allow the applications themselves to be distributed through enterprise application stores allowing IT organizations to manage who has access to the apps, when updates to the applications will happen, and revoke access after an employee leaves. So even though an employee may be using a personal device, access to company data can be controlled while on or near the company premises. So do the Oracle BI mobile products integrate with the MDM and MAM vendors? Brian explained that our customers use a wide variety of mobile security vendors and may even have more than one in-house. Therefore, Oracle is ensuring that users have a choice and a mechanism for linking together Oracle’s BI offering with their chosen vendor’s secure technology. The Oracle BI Mobile Security Toolkit, which is a version of the Oracle BI Mobile HD application, delivered through the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) in its component parts, helps Oracle users to build their own version of the Mobile HD application, sign it with their own enterprise development certificates, link with their security vendor of choice, then deploy the combined application through whichever means they feel most appropriate, including enterprise application stores.  Brian further explained that Oracle currently supports most of the major mobile security vendors, has close relationships with each, and maintains strong partnerships enabling both Oracle and the vendors to test, update and release a cooperating solution in lock-step. Oracle also ensures that as new versions of the Oracle HD application are made available on the Apple iTunes store, the same version is also immediately made available through the Security Toolkit on OTN.  Rest assured that as our workforce continues down the mobile path, company sensitive information can be secured.  To listen to the entire podcast, click here. To learn more about the Oracle BI Mobile HD, click  here To learn more about the BI Mobile Security Toolkit, click here 

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• Azure Boot Camp

  - by Brian Schroer

  Belated thanks to Perficient for sponsoring (and providing lunch, which was a nice unadvertised surprise) and to Avichal Jain and Brian Blanchard for presenting at the St. Louis Azure Boot Camp May 13-14. There was a little more upfront discussion of “What is Cloud Computing and Why is it important?” than I thought necessary (I would think that people signing up for a two-day Azure event would already be convinced that it’s a worthwhile thing), but we put on our boots and fired up Visual Studio soon enough. The good news for developers, as with most of Microsoft’s recent initiatives (e.g Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 development), is that you can leverage the skills you already have. If you’ve developed service-oriented applications, you’ve got a big head start. If a free Azure Boot Camp event is coming to your area (here’s the schedule), be sure to check it out. If not, you can download the slides and labs from their web site and “throw your own”.

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• How to parse org.w3c.dom.Element RPX XML response

  - by Kenshin

  I am using rpxnow in Java, how do I use org.w3c.dom API to get the field identifier in this XML reponse for example? <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <rsp stat='ok'> <profile> <displayName> brian </displayName> <identifier> http://brian.myopenid.com/ </identifier> <preferredUsername> brian </preferredUsername> <providerName> Other </providerName> <url> http://brian.myopenid.com/ </url> </profile> </rsp>

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• Problem with installing programs

  - by Brian Buck

  I am unable to install programs for the Ubuntu 10.10 system. These download ok, but when attempting to install them, the following message is displayed: AN ERROR OCCURRED WHILE OPENING THE ARCHIVE END-OF-CENTRAL-DIRECTORY SIGNATURE NOT FOUND etc....... ZIPINFO: CANNOT FIND ZIPFILE DIRECTORY IN etc...... As I am new to Ubuntu and also fairly "green" as far as computer terminology is concerned, I have no idea what this means and don't have a clue on how to fix it. Can you help please? Many thanks, Brian Buck

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• Google Webmaster Tools Index dropped to Zero [closed]

  - by Brian Anderson

  Earlier this year I rebuilt my website using ZenCart. Immediately I saw a drop in index status from 59 to 0. I then signed up for Google Webmaster Tools and noticed the Index status took a dramatic drop and has never recovered. I have worked to add content and I know I am not done, but have not seen any recovery of this index since. What confuses me is when I look at the sitemap status under Optimization it shows me there are 1239 submitted and 1127 pages indexed. Most of my pages have fallen off page one for relevant search terms and some are as far back as page 7 or 8 where they used to be on the first page. I have made some changes in the past week to robots.txt and sitemap.xml, but have not seen any improvements. Can anyone tell me what might be going on here? My website is andersonpens.net. Thanks! Brian

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• Help on using paperclip plugin

  - by Brian Roisentul

  I've just installed this plugin, created the migrations, added everything I needed to make it work(I didn't install ImageMagick yet). The problem is when I get the upload control parameter to save it in my controller, I get something like this: #<File:C:\Users\Brian\AppData\Local\Temp\RackMultipart.2560.6677> instead of a simple string, like C:\Users\Brian\AppData\Local\Temp\RackMultipart.2560.6677 And if I try to read it I get the following exception: TypeError backtrace must be Array of String What am I doing wrong? How do I read it or simply get rid of the # and < symbols?

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• Urban Turtle is such an awesome product !

  - by Vincent Grondin

  Mario Cardinal, the host of the Visual Studio Talk Show, is quite happy these days. He works with the Urban Turtle team and they received significant support from Microsoft. Brian Harry, who is the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server, has published an outstanding blog post about Urban Turtle that says: "...awesome Scrum experience for TFS.” You can read Brian Harry's blog post at the following URL: http://urbanturtle.com/awesome.

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• The Jack LaLanne School of Sysadmins

  - by rickramsey

  Two of my childhood heroes were Tarzan and Jack LaLanne. Tarzan was an obvious choice: what boy wouldn't want to spend his days bungee jumping through the jungle with his own pack of gorillas? Jack Lalanne had a disturbing habit of wearing stretch pants, but he was so damn fit for an old guy that you couldn't help but be impressed. Especially back then, when nobody knew what a dumb bell was, much less Cross-Fit. Here's what he did to celebrate his 70th birthday. Sooner or later we all face a choice in our careers: surrender to the life of a has-been like Bruce Sprinsteen's baseball player or become an unstoppable sysadmin like Jack Lalanne. If you'd rather keep on fighting like Jack, give these resources a look. Brian Bream's blog provides specific suggestions for keeping your skills up to date. The video interviews describe the types of technologies that are challenging what you used to know. Blog: The Old School Sysadmin - A Dying Breed? by Brian Bream "The sysadmin role has been far too dependent on performing repetitive tasks and working in a reactionary mode ... the sysadmin must grow a much larger skill set to be successful. Don’t grow vertically in one technology, grow horizontally amongst many technologies." Just one of the suggestions Brian Bream provides in this excellent blog post. Video: Freeing the Sysadmin From Repetitive Tasks Interview with Marshall Choy Marshall Choy, Director of Optimized Solutions at Oracle was once a sysadmin. And a Solaris engineer. He explains what optimized solutions are, how they are developed and tested, how they handle patching, and how these vertically integrated systems impact the job and duties of a sysadmin. Video: The Oracle Database Appliance Interview with Bob Thome Bob Thome, Senior Director of Product Management, explains what makes the Database Appliance simple, reliable, and affordable, and how it could change the economies and processes of the data center. Video: Why Pinellas County Chose Oracle Exalytics Interview with Gautham Gautham (pronounced like Batman's Gotham) recently led an effort to refresh the Pinellas County hardware systems. He'll explain what they were looking for, why they chose Oracle Exalytics, how they became convinced it was the right decision, and how it changed the way they managed their data center. Video: DTrace for System Administrators Interview with Brendan Gregg This video interview will give you an idea of some of the value-add tasks you can perform when you are freed from the reactive mode that Brian Bream describes in his blog. Brendan Gregg describes the best ways for sysadmins to tune deployed applications to get more performance out of them in their particular computing environment photograph of Ford Mustang GT 500 taken at Gateway Museum copyright by Rick Ramsey -Rick Follow me on: Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Personal Twitter | YouTube | The Great Peruvian Novel

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• Play Your Position Until the Play Breaks Down&hellip;then Do Whatever it Takes.

  - by AjarnMark

  If I didn’t know better, I would think that K. Brian Kelley (blog | twitter) has been listening in on conversations with my boss. In his recent blog post Successful Teams: Knowing When to Step Out of Your Role, Brian describes quite clearly a philosophy that my boss has been trying to get across to everyone in the department.  We have been using sports analogies, like how important it is to play your position, until the play breaks down (such as a fumble) and then do whatever it takes it to cover each other / recover the ball / win.  While we like having very skilled people who could do a lot of different tasks, it is important that you first do your assigned tasks, and only once those are complete, or failure of the larger mission is probable, do you consider walking away from them to help someone else with their responsibilities. The thing that you cannot afford, especially on a lean team, is the really nice guy who is always trying to help out other people, but in doing so, is never quite getting his own responsibilities taken care of.  Yes, if the Running Back drops the football, you want any member of the team in the vicinity to jump on it, whether that is the leading blocker or the Quarterback.  But until the fumble happens, you want the leading blocker to focus on doing his job, and block for the Running Back.  If the blocker is doing any other job than his primary responsibility, you’re probably going to lose. This sounds logical enough, but it is really easy to go astray with the best of intentions.  This is especially true on a small, tight-knit team, where it is really easy to get sucked into someone else’s task or problem, doubly so if you think you can do it better or faster than them.  Now you are really setting yourself up for failure.  The right thing is to let the other person do the job, even if it seems less efficient in the short-run, so that you can focus on the tasks which require your expertise.  Don’t break formation…don’t abandon your assignment, until it is clear that mission failure is imminent, and even then, as Brian writes, it should be with the agreement of the mission leader. Thanks, Brian, for putting it so well.  This has been distributed throughout our department.

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• Toronto SharePoint Camp 2011 - Thank-you!

  - by erobillard

  The 5th Annual Toronto SharePoint Camp was last Saturday and it was another terrific success. Thanks to the TSPUG executive committee and the small army of volunteers who made it happen, and to the smiling faces of this year's 200+ attendees for making it all worthwhile. BIG Congratulations to the recipient of our first ever Toronto SharePoint Community Champion Award : Brian Lalancette . Brian was nominated by members of TSPUG and selected from all nominees by the TSPUG Executive for his tireless...(read more)

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• Google I/O 2012 - What's New in Google Maps

  Google I/O 2012 - What's New in Google Maps Brian McClendon, Dylan Lorimer, Thor Mitchell There is a lot of exciting things happening in the world of Maps at Google. Come and join us as we kick off the Maps track at Google I/O 2012 with a dive into the cutting edge of online maps with Google's Vice President of Google Maps and Earth, Brian McClendon, For all I/O 2012 sessions, go to developers.google.com From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 4780 54 ratings Time: 51:32 More in Science & Technology

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• AppFabric Caching Feedback

  - by Michael Stephenson

  We are running a survey to collect feedback around scenarios where people were experimenting with velocity on windows 2003 in the CTP but are now in a position where the beta requires windows 2008. We would like to understand how important this scenario is precieved to be. If you are in the Connected Systems Community and would like to provide feedback please complete the following survey http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N3VKZWN

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• NServiceBus Generic Host and mqsvc.exe high CPU

  - by Michael Stephenson

  We have been doing some work with NServiceBus recently and observed some unusual behaviour which was caused by our mistake and seemed worthy of a small post.   The Scenario In our solution we were doing some standard NServiceBus stuff by pushing a message to a queue using NServiceBus.  We had a direct send/receive scenario rather than a publish/subscribe one.   The background process which was meant to collect the message and then process it was a normal NServiceBus message handler.  We would run the NServiceBus.Host.exe which would find the handler and then do the usual NServiceBus magic.   The Problem In this solution we were creating some automated tests around this module of the integration process to ensure that it would work well.  We had two tests.   Test 1 This test would start NServiceBus.Host.exe using the Process object, then seed a message to the queue via our web service façade sitting above the queue which wrapped NServiceBus.  The background process would then process the message and the test would check the message had been processed fine.   If all was well then the NServiceBus.Host.exe process was stopped.   Test 2 In test 2 we would do a very similar thing except that instead of starting the process the test would install NServiceBus.Host.exe as a windows service and then start the service before the test and once the test was executed it would stop the test.   The Results of the Tests Test 1 worked really well, however in test 2 we found that it didn’t really work at all, instead of doing the background process we were finding that between mqsvc.exe and NServiceBus.Host.exe the CPU on the machine was maxed and nothing was really happening.   The Solution After trying a few things we found it was the permissions on the queue were not set correctly.  Once this was resolved it all worked fine and CPU was not excessive and ran just like the console application.   I think the couple of take aways from this are:   Make sure you set the windows service for NserviceBus Generic Host to the right credentials When you install the generic host as a windows service then by default it will use the default windows credentials.  For any production like scenario you should be using a domain account to run the process as via the windows service. Make sure you have the queue set with the right permissions For the credentials you have used to configure the generic host as a windows service you should ensure that this user has the appropriate permissions for any queues it will interact with. Make sure you turn on the right logging configuration in NServiceBus When this wasnt working correctly we didnt know there was an issue, we were just experiencing the high CPU condition.  I am a little surprised that there wasnt something logged and that the process didnt crash.  I guess this could be by design bearing in mind that the process could be monitoring many queues.  In this point Im just saying that originally we didnt have all of the log4net logging which is available from NServiceBus turned on.  Its probably a good idea to have this turned on and configured until you are happy your solution is working fine.   Thanks to Ahmed Hashmi on my team who got this working in the end.

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• Using NServiceBus behind a custom web service

  - by Michael Stephenson

  In this post I'd like to talk about an architecture scenario we had recently and how we were able to utilise NServiceBus to help us address this problem. Scenario Cognos is a reporting system used by one of my clients. A while back we developed a web service façade to allow line of business applications to be able to access reports from Cognos to support their various functions. The service was intended to provide access to reports which were quick running reports or pre-generated reports which could be accessed real-time on demand. One of the key aims of the web service was to provide a simple generic interface to allow applications to get any report without needing to worry about the complex .net SDK for Cognos. The web service also supported multi-hop kerberos delegation so that report data could be accesses under the context of the end user. This service was working well for a period of time. The Problem The problem we encountered was that reports were now also required to be available to batch processes. The original design was optimised for low latency so users would enjoy a positive experience, however when the batch processes started to request 250+ concurrent reports over an extended period of time you can begin to imagine the sorts of problems that come into play. The key problems this new scenario caused are: Users may be affected and the latency of on demand reports was significantly slower The Cognos infrastructure was not scaled sufficiently to be able to cope with these long peaks of load From a cost perspective it just isn't feasible to scale the Cognos infrastructure to be able to handle the load when it is only for a couple of hour window each night. We really needed to introduce a second pattern for accessing this service which would support high through-put scenarios. We also had little control over the batch process in terms of being able to throttle its load. We could however make some changes to the way it accessed the reports. The Approach My idea was to introduce a throttling mechanism between the Web Service Façade and Cognos. This would allow the batch processes to push reports requests hard at the web service which we were confident the web service can handle. The web service would then queue these requests and process them behind the scenes and make a call back to the batch application to provide the report once it had been accessed. In terms of technology we had some limitations because we were not able to use WCF or IIS7 where the MSMQ-Activated WCF services could have helped, but we did have MSMQ as an option and I thought NServiceBus could do just the job to help us here. The flow of how this would work was as follows: The batch applications would send a request for a report to the web service The web service uses NServiceBus to send the message to a Queue The NServiceBus Generic Host is running as a windows service with a message handler which subscribes to these messages The message handler gets the message, accesses the report from Cognos The message handler calls back to the original batch application, this is decoupled because the calling application provides a call back url The report gets into the batch application and is processed as normal This approach looks something like the below diagram: The key points are an application wanting to take advantage of the batch driven reports needs to do the following: Implement our call back contract Make a call to the service providing a call back url Provide a correlation ID so it knows how to tie each response back to its request What does NServiceBus offer in this solution So this scenario is not the typical messaging service bus type of solution people implement with NServiceBus, but it did offer the following: Simplified interaction with MSMQ Offered the ability to configure the number of processes working through the queue so we could find a balance between load on Cognos versus the applications end to end processing time NServiceBus offers retries and a way to manage failed messages NServiceBus offers a high availability setup The simple thing is that NServiceBus gave us the platform to build the solution on. We just implemented a message handler which functionally processed a message and we could rely on NServiceBus to do all of the hard work around managing the queues and all of the lower level things that would have took ages to write to any kind of robust level. Conclusion With this approach we were able to deal with a fairly significant performance issue with out too much rework. Hopefully this write up gives people some insight into ideas on how to leverage the excellent NServiceBus framework to help solve integration and high through-put scenarios.

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• I want to hit Apex SQL with a big stick

  - by Michael Stephenson

  <Whinge> Thought id just have a little whinge about this product which caused me a load of grief the other day..... So the background was that my development machine had a completely full hard disk which I needed to sort out.  Upon investigation I found the issue was that the msdb database had managed to get very large. This was caused because a long time ago (and I cant even remember why) I tried out Apex SQL.  After a few days I decided to uninstall it and thought nothing more of it.  What I didnt realise was that uninstalling it doesnt actually uninstall it (and it doesnt inform you about this), but there was still some assemblies left on my machine.  Everytime SQL Server was running it was starting the Apex SQL Connection monitor which was then running in the background and regularly recording information in the msdb database.  Over time it had recorded enough to fill the disk. The below article advises how to sort this out by removing this fully so if your having a problem then try this out:http://knowledgebase.apexsql.com/2007/08/how-to-uninstall-apexsqlconnectionmonit_09.htm Once this was sorted out its interesting to read the above article because I just dont think the approach used by the vendor of this software is a very good one.  So for the Apex team just wanted to pass on a thought: If I want to uninstall your product you should tell me if stuff is left on the machine especially if a process will be running which is going to fill my machine with useless data, </Whinge>

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• UK Connected Systems User Group Recap from July

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/07/29/153557.aspxJust a note to recap some of the discussion and activity from the recent UK Connected Systems User Group in July.AppFx.ServiceBusWe discussed some of the implementation details of the AppFx.ServiceBus codeplex project.  This brought up some discussion around peoples experiences with Windows Azure Service Bus and how this codeplex project can help.  The slides from this presentation are available at the following location.https://appfxservicebus.codeplex.com/downloads/get/711481BizTalk Maturity AssessmentThe session around the BizTalk Maturity Assessment brought up some interesting discussions.  I have created a video about the content from this session which is available online.To findout more about the BizTalk Maturity Assessment refer to:http://www.biztalkmaturity.com/To view the video refer to:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ1eC5SCDogOther NewsHybrid Organisation EventThe next user group session will be a full day event on the 11th September called The Hybrid Organisation.  We have some great sessions lined up and you can findout more about this event on the following link:http://ukcsug-hybridintegration-sept2013.eventbrite.com/Saravana's BizTalk Services VideosSaravana has recently published some BizTalk Services videos that he wanted to share with everyone.http://blogs.biztalk360.com/windows-azure-biztalk-serviceshello-word-and-hybrid-scenarios-demo-videos/Hope to see everyone soon and let me know if anyone has any questionsRegardsMike

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• User Group Meeting Summary - April 2010

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Thanks to everyone who could make it to what turned out to be an excellent SBUG event.  First some thanks to:  Speakers: Anthony Ross and Elton Stoneman Host: The various people at Hitachi who helped to organise and arrange the venue.   Session 1 - Getting up and running with Windows Mobile and the Windows Azure Service Bus In this session Anthony discussed some considerations for using Windows Mobile and the Windows Azure Service Bus from a real-world project which Hitachi have been working on with EasyJet.  Anthony also walked through a simplified demo of the concepts which applied on the project.   In addition to the slides and demo it was also very interesting to discuss with the guys involved on this project to hear about their real experiences developing with the Azure Service Bus and some of the limitations they have had to work around in Windows Mobiles ability to interact with the service bus.   On the back of this session we will look to do some further activities around this topic and the guys offered to share their wish list of features for both Windows Mobile and Windows Azure which we will look to share for user group discussion.   Another interesting point was the cost aspects of using the ISB which were very low.   Session 2 - The Enterprise Cache In the second session Elton used a few slides which are based around one of his customer scenario's where they are looking into the concept of an Enterprise Cache within the organisation.  Elton discusses this concept and also a codeplex project he is putting together which allows you to take advantage of a cache with various providers such as Memcached, AppFabric Caching and Ncache.   Following the presentation it was interesting to hear peoples thoughts on various aspects such as the enterprise cache versus an out of process application cache.  Also there was interesting discussion around how people would like to search the cache in the future.   We will again look to put together some follow-up activity on this   Meeting Summary Following the meeting all slide decks are saved in the skydrive location where we keep content from all meetings: http://cid-40015ea59a1307c8.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/SBUG/SBUG%20Meetings/2010%20April   Remember that the details of all previous events are on the following page. http://uksoabpm.org/Events.aspx   Competition We had three copies of the Windows Identity Foundation Patterns and Practices book that were raffles on the night, it would be great to hear any feedback on the book from those who won it.   Recording The user group meeting was recorded and we will look to make this available online sometime soon.   UG Business The following things were discussed as general UG topics:   We will change the name of the user group to the UK Connected Systems User Group to we are more inline with other user groups who cover similar topics and we believe this will help us to attract more members.  The content or focus of the user group is not expected to change.   The next meeting is 26th May and can be registered at the following link: http://sbugmay2010.eventbrite.com/

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• No endpoint listening at.........

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I was having some very frustrating behaviour on our build server and while I found a number of articles online with similar error messages none of them helped me.  I thought I would just explain this here incase if helps me or anyone else in future.The error message we were getting is:There was no endpoint listening at http://localhostStubs.ExternalApplication/SampleService.svc that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more detailsOur scenario is as follows:We have a solution where a WCF service application hosting the WCF routing service is listening to the Windows Azure Service Bus Relay.  We have an acceptance test project in the solution which sends a message to the service bus which is then received by the WCF routing service and routed to SampleService.svc which is hosted in another IIS application on the same box.  A response is flowed back through to the test.  In the tests there are 5 scenarios simulating a successful message, and various error conditions.  On my developer machine it was working absolutely fine every time, and a clean build on my developer machine worked fine.  On the build server however one or more of the tests would fail each time with the above error message.  There didnt seem to be any pattern to which test would fail.The solution was building on a Windows 2008 R2 machine with IIS 7 and AppFabric Server installed with auto-start configured for the IIS Application which would be listening to service bus.After lots of searching online and looking at logs etc it turned out to be a simple solution to just restart the WAS service (Windows Process Activation Service) and the services it advised you to restart with it.  Hope this helps someone else

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• Behaviour Driven Maturity Model

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/07/02/153326.aspxFor anyone who is interested I have written a small paper about the theory behind the BizTalk Maturity Assessment using a generic framework I have called the "Behaviour Driven Maturity Model" and then how it could be applied to the assessment of other subjects.The paper is on the following link:http://btsmaturity.blob.core.windows.net/behaviour-driven-model/Behaviour%20Based%20Maturity%20Model%20-%20Introduction.pdfIf you would like to create a model for a different subject area based on the details of this paper then I would encourage this as much as possible, all I ask is the following:1. Let us know your doing it so we can help tell people about each others activities2. Make it free to the community3. Reference back to BizTalkMaturity.com as the source of your model

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