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• Software to monitor bill payment to mission critical IT service providers (ISP, DNS etc.)

  - by Sholom

  Hi All, The Problem: Our very likable but absent minded bookkeeper keeps neglecting to pay our IT vendors on time. Just this past week our internet service was disconnected. Same could happen to many other mission critical accounts (domain registrar, backup MX, anti-virus license, HackerSafe (McAfee secure) service and even an 800 number to name a few). As the sysadmin, i monitor my severs to make sure they are plugged into the power-outlet. I believe i should also monitor my services to make sure they are plugged in to their money-outlet. To compound the problem, when the power goes out someone else will likely notice and notify me. But if a bill is not payed, no one will ever notice until service is lost. Lost as in losing our domain name which would cause a lot more damage then the power failing on our server. [Solution] = [Doesn't work because]: Retrain the bookkeeper = Wishful thinking. Notify my manager = Already have (via email). Protects me, does not solve problem. Fire bookkeeper = What makes you so sure the next one will never forget? Bottom line: Humans are humans and sooner or later something critical will be royally messed up. We need to partner with a machine to help us out here. Anybody have the same problem? What software/solution do you use? I would like software that emails me when a bill is passed due just like i get an email when the power outlet fails. Anyone hear of anything like that? Thanks

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• Cheap Solution for Routing a Toll Free Number to a Standard POTS Number

  - by VxJasonxV

  I do some technical work for an Internet Radio Show/Podcast, and need to fix something that has been broken for a while. The hosts have a Skype-In number to take listener calls, and for convenience sake, I bought and paid for a toll free number for a period of time. I used to use Asterlink for routing calls, but they folded and sent my number to OneBox, but they're ridiculously expensive by comparison. I'm looking for a cheap solution for this one simple task. Forward toll free calls to a skype-in number. The definition of cheap is as cheap or cheaper than Asterlink was. I paid something like $2 a month, and then the termination/call rate, which was a fraction of a sent for termination, and only whole cents after some serious time on the call. A $20 preload lasted me months at a time. I don't want to be upsold too, I want a simple web based management screen (CDR/stats are fun!), and obviously, it needs to be reliable. What vendors out there are you a fan of that solves this need?

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• Best way to build / implement a corporate developer Linux distro with multiple kernels?

  - by Garen

  At work we have Linux users who understandably prefer using Ubuntu. Problem is, we also have developer tools that only work with 'officially' supported Linux distributions that use much older 2.6.18 based kernels. (And even if they worked with newer ones, the vendors could always say they won't "support" the software unless it's on one of their 'officially' supported platforms.) We could of course just tell them to use CentOS or something else 2.6.18-based, and I'm sure their response would be something like: "you can take Ubuntu from our cold, dead hands." :) Which brings to me some questions--is there any good/easy/recommended way to run something like Ubuntu as a host VM and Centos 5.x as a guest OS (with which system--Xen,KVM,VMWare, ...?), and then roll that into our own custom internal distribution that could be easily installed? KVM looks like a good high-performance option just recently included in RHEL 5.4, but if hardware support for virtualization like Intel-VT or AMD-V is necessary, then I'd guess only those folks with fairly new PCs will be able to do it. Would be very interested to hear how anyone else has addressed this kind issue. EDIT: The target audience / users of this kind of system would be developers, each one needs to run locally licensed commercial software, so building out some separate beefy central machines isn't an option unfortunately due to license restrictions. Even if that weren't the case, a couple developers could quickly eat up the resources with parallel builds. :) Ideally, I was hoping there was some step-by-step guide out there to build your own pre-built distribution that had e.g. CentOS 5.x and Ubuntu Desktop as a guest.

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• VMWare use of Gratuitous ARP REPLY

  - by trs80

  I have an ESXi cluster that hosts several Windows Server VMs and around 30 Windows workstation VMs. Packet captures show a high number of ARP replies of the form: -sender_ip: VM IP -sender_mac: VM virtual MAC -target_ip: 0.0.0.0 -target_mac: Switch interface MAC The specific addresses aren't really a concern -- they're all legitimate and we're not having any problems with communications (most of the questions surrounding GARP and VMWare have to do with ping issues, a problem we don't have). I'm looking for an explanation of the traffic pattern in an environment that functions as expected. So the question is why would I see a high number of unsolicited ARP replies? Is this a mechanism VMWare uses for some purpose? What is it? Is there an alternative? EDIT: Quick diagram: [esxi]--[switch vlan]--[inline IDS]--[fw]--(rest of network) The IDS is complaining about these unsolicited ARPs. Several IDS vendors trigger on ARP replies without a prior request, or for ARP replies that have a target IP of 0.0.0.0. The target MAC in these replies is the VLAN interface on the switch. Capture points: -The IDS grabs the offending packets -The FW can see the same ones -A VM on the ESXi host does not see these, although there is an ARP request for a specific IP on the ESXi host that has source_ip=0.0.0.0 and source_mac=[switch vlan interface]. I can't share the captures, unfortunately. Really I'm interested in finding out if this is normal for an ESXi deployment.

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• Windows XP usb drivers reinstalling upon reboot

  - by iWerner

  We have a Windows XP SP3 laptop (Acer Travelmate 7320) to which we connect a variety of astronomy equipment (a telescope, its mount, some cameras and others) all of which connect through USB. When we plug in these devices, Windows tells us that it detects the hardware and installs the driver. All of these devices then function correctly using the software that came from the vendor (unfortunately, one of the vendors does not support Vista 64, and that is why we're using our XP laptop). However when we reboot the computer we experience a variety of symptoms: Windows reports that it found new hardware for some of the devices and tries to reinstall their drivers, and for some of the other devices needs to be unplugged and plugged in again before they are detected again by the operating system, in which case Windows still tries to reinstall their drivers. It is as if Windows does not remember that it has already installed the drivers. Is this a common problem on Windows XP? If so, what can be done about it? Should we rather be looking at the laptop's firmware and drivers? We've looked into updating the drivers for the chipset, but this did not solve the problem. Thank you in advance.

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• Google Apps Domain Level Shared Contacts?

  - by dkirk

  My firm just switched to Google Apps Premiere addition 2 weeks ago and aside from the way Google handles shared contacts, things are going quite well. Previously, on our Exchange server we had numerous shared contact lists set up in the shared folders. We had a separate list for vendors, sales agents, etc.. Is there not a way to set up lists or groups such as this on the domain level in Google Apps? I have found a ton of forums with users asking the same question but no good answers unless you purchase some third party app in the marketplace. I have toyed around with the "google-shared-contacts-client" here: http://code.google.com/p/google-shared-contacts-client/ and this almost does it but it falls short when trying to group contacts on the domain level or when trying to search for a contact by company name. Are either of these things possible? I am now looking to create a Google Doc spreadsheet to share with the domain just to have a separated defined list of contacts that is search-able by various fields... Anyone who could shed some light on domain level contact sharing relating to the points above, I would be most grateful...

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• Security Token for Mac/Linux/Windows, self-managed, pref. open source?

  - by DevelopersDevelopersDevelopers

  I'm looking to buy an evaluation security token (combined smart card/usb reader) for my business that works on: Windows 7 x64 OS X 10.6.x x64 Ubuntu Linux (64 or 32 bit, 10.04 or 10.10, I can bend based on possible tokens) Functionality I need is: Login authentication Authentication for whole-disk encryption (in Linux/Windows, Mac is flexible here) Signing/encryption using PGP and x.509 certificates RSA-2048 key-capable (1024 not good enough.) I can manage the certificates myself Open source middleware/drivers (not necessarily FOSS, just source available. Can flex on this, I just want to be able to audit the code. OpenSC-compatible on Linux would be great.) Is there any token that can do all of this? Or would I need multiple ones to accomplish this? Or do I need to look at smart cards and readers to get this? I have been researching this for a while and have had a heck of a time even getting accurate information about products. Also, I am in the USA, and it appears that EU export laws prevent me from buying from there, so those vendors are out. I was looking at Feitian tokens from Gooze, but since they are in France I can't buy.

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• Power surge PC damage: How can I test all components of my PC without access to a second computer?

  - by Doug T.

  Ever since we had some crazy power surges last week my 64 bit Windows 7 PC has been acting strange. My USB network adapter disconnects from the wireless and can't detect the signal. I have to disable/reenable the adapter to detect it again. Also my wife has reported that the PC has rebooted a few times while I'm not sitting at it. Today I finally caught the reboot while I was using the PC. I got this blue screen of death. Stop Code 0x00000109: "Modification of system code or a critical data structure was detected." I followed the advice at the linked article and ran a memory test. I used memtest86 and its already found around 300,000 errors out of 8 gigs of ram. Now I'm worried -- what are the odds this is isolated to just my memory and not just a system wide problem? Isn't there a good chance that many other components are fried? More importantly, how can I test those other components? Are there tools similar to memtest I can use to test my motherboard/video card/power supply? If these are vender specific, is it typical for vendors to provide testing tools?

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• RAIDs with a lot of spindles - how to safely put to use the "wasted" space

  - by kubanczyk

  I have a fairly large number of RAID arrays (server controllers as well as midrange SAN storage) that all suffer from the same problem: barely enough spindles to keep the peak I/O performance, and tons of unused disk space. I guess it's a universal issue since vendors offer the smallest drives of 300 GB capacity but the random I/O performance hasn't really grown much since the time when the smallest drives were 36 GB. One example is a database that has 300 GB and needs random performance of 3200 IOPS, so it gets 16 disks (4800 GB minus 300 GB and we have 4.5 TB wasted space). Another common example are redo logs for a OLTP database that is sensitive in terms of response time. The redo logs get their own 300 GB mirror, but take 30 GB: 270 GB wasted. What I would like to see is a systematic approach for both Linux and Windows environment. How to set up the space so sysadmin team would be reminded about the risk of hindering the performance of the main db/app? Or, even better, to be protected from that risk? The typical situation that comes to my mind is "oh, I have this very large zip file, where do I uncompress it? Umm let's see the df -h and we figure something out in no time..." I don't put emphasis on strictness of the security (sysadmins are trusted to act in good faith), but on overall simplicity of the approach. For Linux, it would be great to have a filesystem customized to cap I/O rate to a very low level - is this possible?

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• What character can be safely used for naming files on unix/linux?

  - by Eric DANNIELOU

  Before yesterday, I used only lower case letters, numbers, dot (.) and underscore(_) for directories and file naming. Today I would like to start using more special characters. Which ones are safe (by safe I mean I will never have any problem)? ps : I can't believe this question hasn't been asked already on this site, but I've searched for the word "naming" and read canonical questions without success (mosts are about computer names). Edit #1 : (btw, I don't use upper case letters for file names. I don't remember why. But since a few month, I have production problems with upper case letters : Some OS do not support ascii!) Here's what happened yesterday at work : As usual, I had to create a self signed SSL certificate. As usual, I used the name of the website for the files : www2.example.com.key www2.example.com.crt www2.example.com.csr. Then comes the problem : Generate a wildcard self signed certificate. I did that and named the files example.com.key example.com.crt example.com.csr, which is misleading (it's a certificate for *.example.com). I came back home, started putting some stars in apache configuration files filenames and see if it works (on a useless home computer, not even stagging). Stars in file names really scares me : Some coworkers/vendors/... can do some script using rm find xarg that would lead to http://www.ucs.cam.ac.uk/support/unix-support/misc/horror, and already one answer talks about disaster. Edit #2 : Just figured that : does not need to be escaped. Anyone knows why it is not used in file names?

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• Private subnet for VM server host-only network

  - by Derek Pressnall

  At my current job, we distribute a product based on a Linux server with multiple VMs defined (using KVM / libvirt). We are planning to expose limited ports to the customer's network, and use iptables to direct inbound traffic to the appropriate internal VM. My question: is there a class of private subnets that I can use for the internal host-only network that is least likely to conflict with a client IP subnet? Specifically, if I choose a /24 out of any of the RFC-1918 defined private subnets (such as 192.168.x.x), there is a chance of conflicting with a customer-used range. I noticed that several current VM implementations default to 192.168.122.x -- is this due to an RFC that I'm not familiar with, and therefore this is a safe range to use (that most network admins would avoid)? Or did the various VM vendors just pick that range randomly? I guess I'm looking for an IP range that is more private than the existing private (RFC1918) addresses. The only other thought I had was to use one of the "Test Net" IP ranges reserved for documentation purposes (RFC 5737). Note, that I'm not worried about a customer's network blocking these IPs, as this is only internal to our server (packets get NATted before leaving the box). However this does seem more unorthodox than just sticking with the default 192.168.122.x/24 subnet.

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• Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks.  2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"?  5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools.  - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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• Navigating through a sea of hype

  - by wouldLikeACrystalBall

  This is a vague, open question, so if you have no interest in these, please leave now. A few years ago it seemed everyone thought the death of desktop software was imminent. Web applications were the future. Everyone would move to cloud-based software-as-a-service systems, and developing applications for specific end-user platforms like Windows would soon become something of a ghetto. Joel's "How Microsoft Lost the API War" was but one of many such pieces sounding the death knell for this way of software development. Flash-forward to 2010, and the hype is all around mobile devices, particularly the iPhone. Software-as-a-Service vendors--even small ones such as YCombinator startups--go out of their way to build custom applications for the iPhone and other smart phone devices; applications that can be quite sophisticated, that run only on specific hardware and software architectures and are thus inherently incompatible. Now some of you are probably thinking, "Well, only the decline of desktop software was predicted; mobile devices aren't desktops." But the term was used by those predicting its demise to mean laptops also, and really any platform capable of running a browser. What was promised was a world where HTML and related standards would supplant native applications and their inherent difficulties. We would all code to the browser, not the OS. But here we are in 2010 with the AppStore bulging and development for the iPad just revving up. A few days ago, I saw someone on Hacker News claim that the future of computing was entirely in small, portable devices. Apparently the future is underpowered, requires dexterous thumbs and induces near-sightedness. How do those who so vehemently asserted one thing now assert the opposite with equal vehemence, without making even the slightest admission of error? And further, how are we as developers supposed to sift through all of this? I bought into the whole web-standards utopianism that was in vogue back in '06-'07 and now feel like it was a mistake. Is there some formula one can apply rather than a mere appeal to experience?

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• Multiple user roles in Ruby on Rails

  - by aguynamedloren

  I am building an inventory management application with four different user types: admin, employee, manufacturer, transporter. I haven't started coding yet, but this is what I'm thinking.. Manufacturers and transporters are related with has_many :through many-to-many association with products as follows: class Manufacturer < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :products has_many :transporters, :through => :products end class Product < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :manufacturer belongs_to :transporter end class Transporter < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :products has_many :manufacturers, :through => :products end All four user types will be able to login, but they will have different permissions and views, etc. I don't think I can put them in the same table (Users), however, because they will have different requirements, ie: vendors and manufacturers must have a billing address and contact info (through validations), but admins and employees should not have these fields. If possible, I would like to have a single login screen as opposed to 4 different screens. I'm not asking for the exact code to build this, but I'm having trouble determining the best way to make it happen. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated - thanks!

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• Should we migrate from svn to Team Foundation Server 2010?

  - by Florian

  We are with 6 developer and currently use Visual Studio 2008 Professional with SVN and Visual SVN. As soon as vs2010 is released we will upgrade from vs2008 pro to vs2010 premium. However if Team Foundation Server has a proper source control included in vs2010 premium, then it does make sense to use it. We like SVN, but like tight integration of tools even better. On the internet information on SVN versus TFS 2010 seems to be scarce. Hence my question here. EDIT: This video looks very compelling. Is this marketing talk or real? Thank you all for your replies! I absolutely appreciate this. A little more background info. This is our current stack; vs2008 pro, Visual SVN, SVN, Jetbrain Teamcity. My main problem is that we use a lot of tools from different vendors which more or less integrate. Sometime more, mostly less. At least it takes a lot of time to set it up correctly. We currently do not use branches, but we want to. Therefore we have to set up SVN from scratch (we looked into it carefully). So let me rephrase my question: Should we set up SVN or start using TFS?

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• WordPress contact form email as PDF

  - by lock

  I am using the below code for my WordPress site which is emailing all the form details as an HTML text but I need the details to be written into a PDF first and then have to email the PDF as an attachment. How can I achieve this? This is not a PHP code to use PHP's writePDF modules. So, any idea or any code to implement this? <div style="padding-left: 100px;"> [raw] [contact-form subject="Best Aussie Broker" to="[email protected]"] <div id="main34" style="border: 1px solid black; border-radius: 15px; width: 720px; padding: 15px;"> &nbsp; <h2><span style="color: #ff6600;">Express Application</span></h2> &nbsp; [contact-field label="First Name" type="name" required="true" /] [contact-field label="Last Name" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Email" type="email" required="true" /] [contact-field label="Purpose of Finance?" type="select" options="Home Loan,Refinance,Investment Loan,Debt Consolidation,Other" /] [contact-field label="Your deposit amount" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Amount you need to borrow?" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Brief description of the purpose for finance" type="textarea" required="true" /] <div><label></label> <input class="radio" type="radio" name="19" value="Single Application" onchange="showsingle();" /> <label class="radio">Single Application</label> <div class="clear-form"></div> <input class="radio" type="radio" name="19" value="Joint Application" onchange="showjoint();" /> <label class="radio">Joint Application</label> <div class="clear-form"></div> [contact-field label="Privacy Act" type="checkbox" required="true" /] I have read the Privacy Act 1988 (as Amended) and understand that by selecting the submit button I/we Authorize Best Aussie Broker to act on my/our behalf and manage personal information in relation to this application.<br> <a href="http://googleplex.com.au/pdf.pdf"><img src="http://googleplex.com.au/pdf.png" alt="" /> </a> </div> </div> <div id="single" style="display: none; width: 720px; border: 1px solid black; border-radius: 15px; padding: 15px; margin-top: 10px;"> <div style="padding-top: 10px; width: 720px; text-align: left;"> <h4><span style="color: #ff6600;">Last step then we will get all listed Australian vendors to fight it out for your best deal</span></h4> </div> <div> <label class="select" for="19-date-of-birth">Date of Birth</label> [contact-field label="Day" type="select" options="1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="January,February,March,April,May,June,July,August,September,October,November,December" /] [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="2000,1999,1998,1997,1996,1995,1994,1993,1992,1991,1990,1989,1988,1987,1986,1985,1984,1983,1982,1981,1980,1979,1978,197,1976,1975,1974,1973,1972,1971,1970,1969,1968,1967,1966,1965,1964,1963,1962,1961,1960,1959,1958,1957,1956,1955,1954,1953,1952,1951,1950,1949,1948,1947,1946,1945,1944,1943,1942,1941,1940,1939,1938,1937,1936,1935,1934,1933,1932,1931,1930,1929,1928,1927,1926,1925,1924,1923,1922,1921,1920, 1919,1918,1917,1916,1915,1914,1913,1912,1911,1910,1909" /] </div> [contact-field label="Address" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Suburb" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Postcode" type="text" /] <div> [contact-field label="State" type="select" options="VIC,NSW,QLD,SA,WA,TAS,NZ,Other" /] </div> [contact-field label="Best Contact" type="radio" options="Landline,Mobile" /] [contact-field label="Phone Number" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Marital Status" type="select" options="Married,Single,Other" /] [contact-field label="Residential Status" type="select" options="Renting, Home Owned, Home Mortgage, Board, Other" /] [contact-field label="Children/Dependents" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6" /] <div></div> [contact-field label="Gross Yearly Income" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Current Employer" type="text" /] <div> <label class="select" for="19-year-of-empl">Time at this employer</label> [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,More" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12" /] </div> <div style="padding-right: 15px;"></div> </div> <div id="joint" style="display: none; width: 720px; border: 1px solid black; border-radius: 15px; padding: 15px; margin-top: 10px;"> <div style="padding-top: 10px; width: 720px; text-align: left;"> <h4><span style="color: #ff6600;">Last step then we will get all listed Australian vendors to fight it out for your best deal</span></h4> </div> <div style="float: left; width: 320px;"> <div> <label class="select" for="19-date-of-birth1">Date of Birth</label> [contact-field label="Day" type="select" options="1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="January,February,March,April,May,June,July,August,September,October,November,December" /] [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="2000,1999,1998,1997,1996,1995,1994,1993,1992,1991,1990,1989,1988,1987,1986,1985,1984,1983,1982,1981,1980,1979,1978,197,1976,1975,1974,1973,1972,1971,1970,1969,1968,1967,1966,1965,1964,1963,1962,1961,1960,1959,1958,1957,1956,1955,1954,1953,1952,1951,1950,1949,1948,1947,1946,1945,1944,1943,1942,1941,1940,1939,1938,1937,1936,1935,1934,1933,1932,1931,1930,1929,1928,1927,1926,1925,1924,1923,1922,1921,1920, 1919,1918,1917,1916,1915,1914,1913,1912,1911,1910,1909" /] </div> [contact-field label="Address" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Suburb" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Postcode" type="text" /] <div> [contact-field label="State" type="select" options="VIC,NSW,QLD,SA,WA,TAS,NZ,Other" /] </div> [contact-field label="Best Contact" type="radio" options="Landline,Mobile" /] [contact-field label="Phone Number" type="text" /] <div></div> <div></div> [contact-field label="Marital Status" type="select" options="Married,Single,Other" /] [contact-field label="Residential Status" type="select" options="Renting, Home Owned, Home Mortgage, Board, Other" /] [contact-field label="Children/Dependents" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6" /] <div></div> <div><label class="text" for="netincome">Net Income</label> <input id="netincome" type="text" name="netincome" /> <select id="netincome-dropdown" name="netincome-dropdown"> <option>Monthly</option> <option>Yearly</option> </select></div> [contact-field label="Current Employer" type="text" /] <div> <label class="select" for="19-year-of-empl2">Time at this employer</label> [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,More" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12" /] </div> </div> <div style="float: right; width: 320px; padding-right: 50px;"> <div> <label class="select" for="19-date-of-birth3">Date of Birth</label> [contact-field label="Day" type="select" options="1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="January,February,March,April,May,June,July,August,September,October,November,December" /] [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="2000,1999,1998,1997,1996,1995,1994,1993,1992,1991,1990,1989,1988,1987,1986,1985,1984,1983,1982,1981,1980,1979,1978,197,1976,1975,1974,1973,1972,1971,1970,1969,1968,1967,1966,1965,1964,1963,1962,1961,1960,1959,1958,1957,1956,1955,1954,1953,1952,1951,1950,1949,1948,1947,1946,1945,1944,1943,1942,1941,1940,1939,1938,1937,1936,1935,1934,1933,1932,1931,1930,1929,1928,1927,1926,1925,1924,1923,1922,1921,1920, 1919,1918,1917,1916,1915,1914,1913,1912,1911,1910,1909" /] </div> [contact-field label="Address" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Suburb" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Postcode" type="text" /] <div> [contact-field label="State" type="select" options="VIC,NSW,QLD,SA,WA,TAS,NZ,Other" /] </div> [contact-field label="Best Contact" type="radio" options="Landline,Mobile" /] [contact-field label="Phone Number" type="text" /] <div></div> <div></div> [contact-field label="Marital Status" type="select" options="Married,Single,Other" /] [contact-field label="Residential Status" type="select" options="Renting, Home Owned, Home Mortgage, Board, Other" /] [contact-field label="Children/Dependents" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6" /] <div></div> <div><label class="text" for="netincome">Net Income</label> <input id="netincome" type="text" name="netincome" /> <select id="netincome-dropdown" name="netincome-dropdown"> <option>Monthly</option> <option>Yearly</option> </select></div> [contact-field label="Current Employer" type="text" /] <div> <label class="select" for="19-year-of-empl">Time at this employer</label> [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,More" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12" /] </div> </div> <div style="clear: both;"></div> <div></div> </div> &nbsp; [/contact-form][/raw] </div>

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• Payment Processors - What do I need to know if I want to accept credit cards on my website?

  - by Michael Pryor

  This question talks about different payment processors and what they cost, but I'm looking for the answer to what do I need to do if I want to accept credit card payments? Assume I need to store credit card numbers for customers, so that the obvious solution of relying on the credit card processor to do the heavy lifting is not available. PCI Data Security, which is apparently the standard for storing credit card info, has a bunch of general requirements, but how does one implement them? And what about the vendors, like Visa, who have their own best practices? Do I need to have keyfob access to the machine? What about physically protecting it from hackers in the building? Or even what if someone got their hands on the backup files with the sql server data files on it? What about backups? Are there other physical copies of that data around? Tip: If you get a merchant account, you should negotiate that they charge you "interchange-plus" instead of tiered pricing. With tiered pricing, they will charge you different rates based on what type of Visa/MC is used -- ie. they charge you more for cards with big rewards attached to them. Interchange plus billing means you only pay the processor what Visa/MC charges them, plus a flat fee. (Amex and Discover charge their own rates directly to merchants, so this doesn't apply to those cards. You'll find Amex rates to be in the 3% range and Discover could be as low as 1%. Visa/MC is in the 2% range). This service is supposed to do the negotiation for you (I haven't used it, this is not an ad, and I'm not affiliated with the website, but this service is greatly needed.) This blog post gives a complete rundown of handling credit cards (specifically for the UK).

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• Creating an SQL variable character column > 255 characters supporting multiple databases

  - by Piers

  I have an application that stores data through an ODBC data source of the user's choosing. So far it has worked well on a range of database systems (e.g. JET, Oracle, SQL Server), as the SQL syntax is fairly simple. Now I am running into a problem where I need to store more than 255 characters in my strings. Previously I created the table using column type VARCHAR (255). Now if I try to create a table using, e.g. VARCHAR (512) then it falls over on Access databases. I know that I can use the MEMO type for Access, but this is non-standard SQL and will thus likely fail on other database systems (e.g. Oracle). Is there any widely supported SQL standard for creating text columns wider than 255 characters, or do I need to find another solution? The alternatives seem to me to be: 1) Profile the database system and customise the SQL CREATE TABLE command based on the database system. I don't like this as it defeats the purpose of using ODBC. 2) Add extra columns of 255 chars as required (e.g. LONGSTRING1, LONGSTRING2, ...) and concatenate after reading. I don't like this because it means the number of columns can vary between tables and it complicates read/write. Are there any other viable alternatives to these two options? Or is it possible to have an SQL compliant CREATE TABLE command supported by the majority of database vendors, that supports strings longer than 255 chars?

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• Common one-to-many table for multiple entities

  - by Ben V

  Suppose I have two tables, Customer and Vendor. I want to have a common address table for customer and vendor addresses. Customers and Vendors can both have one to many addresses. Option 1 Add columns for the AddressID to the Customer and Vendor tables. This just doesn't seem like a clean solution to me. Customer Vendor Address -------- --------- --------- CustomerID VendorID AddressID AddressID1 AddressID1 Street AddressID2 AddressID2 City... Option 2 Move the foreign key to the Address table. For a Customer, Address.CustomerID will be populated. For a Vendor, Address.VendorID will be populated. I don't like this either - I shouldn't need to modify the address table every time I want to use it for another entity. Customer Vendor Address -------- --------- --------- CustomerID VendorID AddressID CustomerID VendorID Option 3 I've also seen this - only 1 foreign key column on the Address table with another column to identify which foreign key table the address belongs to. I don't like this one because it requires all the foreign key tables to have the same type of ID. It also seems messy once you start coding against it. Customer Vendor Address -------- --------- --------- CustomerID VendorID AddressID FKTable FKID So, am I just too picky, or is there something I haven't thought of?

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• Rails - strip xml import from whitespace and line break

  - by val_to_many

  Hey folks, I am stuck with something quite simple but really annoying: I have an xml file with one node, where the content includes line breaks and whitspaces. Sadly I can't change the xml. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <ProductFeed> ACME Ltd. Fooproduct Foo Root :: Bar Category I get to the node and can read from it without trouble: url = "http://feeds.somefeed/feed.xml.gz" @source = open((url), :http_basic_authentication=>["USER", "PW"]) @gz = Zlib::GzipReader.new(@source) @result = @gz.read @doc = Nokogiri::XML(@result) @doc.xpath("/ProductFeed/Vendors/Vendor").each do |manuf| vendor = manuf.css("Name").first.text manuf.xpath("//child::Product").each do |product| product_name = product.css("Name").text foocat = product.css("Category").text puts "#{vendor} ---- #{product_name} ---- #{foocat} " end end This results in: ACME Ltd. ---- Fooproduct ---- Foo Root :: Bar Category Obviously there are line breaks and tab stops or spaces in the string returned by product.css("Category").text. Does anyone know how to strip the result from linebreaks and taps or spaces right here? Alternatively I could do that in the next step, where I do a find on 'foocat' like barcat = Category.find_by_foocat(foocat) Thanks for helping! Val

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• Character Set Issues when Upgrading from Symfony 2.0.* to Symfony 2.1.*?

  - by Adam Stacey

  I have recently upgraded my staging test site to the latest version of Symfony and updated all the vendors using composer as instructed in the upgrade document that comes with the download. Everything has all updated fine, but I have noticed now that some bits of HTML are not displaying in the Twig templates. I did a comparison with the current live site and it appears to be a character set issue. As an example I had a drop down list that had the following value in: Kitchen Ducting > Ducting Kits > Ducting Kit 4” / 100mm In the updated site the drop-down list item just appeared blank. When I used Twig's raw function it then displayed the item again, but with the dreaded question mark in a black diamond. Kitchen Ducting > Ducting Kits > Ducting Kit 4? / 100mm Things that you should know that may help: The staging test site and live site are both on the same server. In my httpd.conf file I have 'AddDefaultCharset utf-8'. In my php.ini file I have 'default_charset = "utf-8"'. The HTML file served has the Content-Type meta tag 'content="text/html; charset=utf-8"' My database is InnoDB and uses 'utf8' as the default character set and 'utf8_general_ci' as default collation. All tables in the database also use the defaults. I looked into BOM with UTF8, but could not work out if that was a problem or not?

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• How to setup relationships in contact Database

  - by Walt

  I am currently embarking on a new venture to learn PHP and MySQL. I have done some simple databases in the past using Access, but this one is to be a web-centric database for tracking a myriad of data including contacts and project information. I will need to link the various tables in various relationships, and I am not sure the best way to do that. Since I am just starting out with PHP/MySQL I am researching online sources for learning as much as possible. If anyone has recommendations on books or websites, I would appreciate it. In setting up my tables, one major area that I am concerned with is contacts. I will have a variety of contacts that include: employees, clients, vendors, subcontractors, etc.. and a single contact can be multiple types and each type would have various additional fields that pertain to them. My thought was to have one contacts table that links to other tables for the various contact types. I'm not sure which field type or setup of table options are best... Thoughts? This scenario will likely play out in other areas of the database as well for projects and products. Any pointers/direction would be appreciated. WES

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• Would making plain int 64-bit break a lot of reasonable code?

  - by R..

  Until recently, I'd considered the decision by most systems implementors/vendors to keep plain int 32-bit even on 64-bit machines a sort of expedient wart. With modern C99 fixed-size types (int32_t and uint32_t, etc.) the need for there to be a standard integer type of each size 8, 16, 32, and 64 mostly disappears, and it seems like int could just as well be made 64-bit. However, the biggest real consequence of the size of plain int in C comes from the fact that C essentially does not have arithmetic on smaller-than-int types. In particular, if int is larger than 32-bit, the result of any arithmetic on uint32_t values has type signed int, which is rather unsettling. Is this a good reason to keep int permanently fixed at 32-bit on real-world implementations? I'm leaning towards saying yes. It seems to me like there could be a huge class of uses of uint32_t which break when int is larger than 32 bits. Even applying the unary minus or bitwise complement operator becomes dangerous unless you cast back to uint32_t. Of course the same issues apply to uint16_t and uint8_t on current implementations, but everyone seems to be aware of and used to treating them as "smaller-than-int" types.

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• CakePHP: Interaction between different files/classes

  - by Alexx Hardt

  Hey, I'm cloning a commercial student management system. Students use the frontend to apply for lectures, uni staff can modify events (time, room, etc). The core of the app will be the algortihm which distributes the seats to students. I already asked about it here: How to implement a seat distribution algorithm for uni lectures Now, I found a class for that algorithm here: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/file/10779.html I put the 'class GA' into app/vendors. I need to write a 'class Solution', which represents one object (a child, and later a parent for the evolutionary process). I'll also have to write functions mutate(), crossover() and fitness(). fitness calculates a score of a solution, based on if there are overbooked courses etc; crossover() is the crazy monkey sex function which produces a child from two parents, and mutate() modifies a child after crossover. Now, the fitness()-function needs to access a few related models, and their find()-functions. It evaluates a solution's fitness by checking e.g. if there are overbooked courses, or unfulfilled wishes, and penalizes that. Where would I put the ga.php, solution.php and the three functions? ga.php has to access the functions, but the functions have to access the models. I also don't want to call any App::import()'s from within the fitness()-function, because it gets called many thousand times when the algorithm runs. Hope someone can help me. Thanks in advance =)

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• How to "push" updates to individual cells in a (ASP.NET) web page table/grid?

  - by dommer

  I'm building something similar to a price comparison site. This will be developed in ASP.NET/WebForms/C#/.NET 3.5. The site will be used by the public, so I have no control over the client side - and the application isn't so central to their lives that they'll go out of their way to make it work. I want to have a table/grid that displays products in rows, vendors in columns, and prices in the cells. Price updates will be arriving (at the server) continuously, and I'd like to "push" any updates to the clients' browsers - ideally only updating what has changed. So, if Vendor A changes their price on Product B, I'd want to immediately update the relevant cell in all the browsers that are viewing this information. I don't want to use any browser plug-ins (e.g. Silverlight). Javascript is fine. What's the best approach to take? Presumably my options are: 1) have the client page continuously poll the server for updates, locate the correct cell and update it; or 2) have the server be able to send updates to all the open browser pages which are listening for these updates. The first one would seem the most plausible, but I don't want to constrain the assembled wisdom of the SO community. I'm happy to purchase any third party components (e.g. a grid) that might help with this. I already have the DevExpress grid/ajax components if they provide anything useful.

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