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• LexisNexis and Oracle Join Forces to Prevent Fraud and Identity Abuse

  - by Tanu Sood

  Author: Mark Karlstrand About the Writer:Mark Karlstrand is a Senior Product Manager at Oracle focused on innovative security for enterprise web and mobile applications. Over the last sixteen years Mark has served as director in a number of tech startups before joining Oracle in 2007. Working with a team of talented architects and engineers Mark developed Oracle Adaptive Access Manager, a best of breed access security solution.The world’s top enterprise software company and the world leader in data driven solutions have teamed up to provide a new integrated security solution to prevent fraud and misuse of identities. LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced it has achieved Oracle Validated Integration of its Instant Authenticate product with Oracle Identity Management.Oracle provides the most complete Identity and Access Management platform. The only identity management provider to offer advanced capabilities including device fingerprinting, location intelligence, real-time risk analysis, context-aware authentication and authorization makes the Oracle offering unique in the industry. LexisNexis Risk Solutions provides the industry leading Instant Authenticate dynamic knowledge based authentication (KBA) service which offers customers a secure and cost effective means to authenticate new user or prove authentication for password resets, lockouts and such scenarios. Oracle and LexisNexis now offer an integrated solution that combines the power of the most advanced identity management platform and superior data driven user authentication to stop identity fraud in its tracks and, in turn, offer significant operational cost savings. The solution offers the ability to challenge users with dynamic knowledge based authentication based on the risk of an access request or transaction thereby offering an additional level to other authentication methods such as static challenge questions or one-time password when needed. For example, with Oracle Identity Management self-service, the forgotten password reset workflow utilizes advanced capabilities including device fingerprinting, location intelligence, risk analysis and one-time password (OTP) via short message service (SMS) to secure this sensitive flow. Even when a user has lost or misplaced his/her mobile phone and, therefore, cannot receive the SMS, the new integrated solution eliminates the need to contact the help desk. The Oracle Identity Management platform dynamically switches to use the LexisNexis Instant Authenticate service for authentication if the user is not able to authenticate via OTP. The advanced Oracle and LexisNexis integrated solution, thus, both improves user experience and saves money by avoiding unnecessary help desk calls. Oracle Identity and Access Management secures applications, Juniper SSL VPN and other web resources with a thoroughly modern layered and context-aware platform. Users don't gain access just because they happen to have a valid username and password. An enterprise utilizing the Oracle solution has the ability to predicate access based on the specific context of the current situation. The device, location, temporal data, and any number of other attributes are evaluated in real-time to determine the specific risk at that moment. If the risk is elevated a user can be challenged for additional authentication, refused access or allowed access with limited privileges. The LexisNexis Instant Authenticate dynamic KBA service plugs into the Oracle platform to provide an additional layer of security by validating a user's identity in high risk access or transactions. The large and varied pool of data the LexisNexis solution utilizes to quiz a user makes this challenge mechanism even more robust. This strong combination of Oracle and LexisNexis user authentication capabilities greatly mitigates the risk of exposing sensitive applications and services on the Internet which helps an enterprise grow their business with confidence.Resources:Press release: LexisNexis® Achieves Oracle Validated Integration with Oracle Identity Management Oracle Access Management (HTML)Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (pdf)

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• SQL SERVER – Partition Parallelism Support in expressor 3.6

  - by pinaldave

  I am very excited to learn that there is a new version of expressor’s data integration platform coming out in March of this year.  It will be version 3.6, and I look forward to using it and telling everyone about it.  Let me describe a little bit more about what will be so great in expressor 3.6: Greatly enhanced user interface Parallel Processing Bulk Artifact Upgrading The User Interface First let me cover the most obvious enhancements. The expressor Studio user interface (UI) has had some significant work done. Kudos to the expressor Engineering team; the entire UI is a visual masterpiece that is very responsive and intuitive. The improvements are more than just eye candy; they provide significant productivity gains when developing expressor Dataflows. Operator shape icons now include a description that identifies the function of each operator, instead of having to guess at the function by the icon. Operator shapes and highlighting depict the current function and status: Disabled, enabled, complete, incomplete, and error. Each status displays an appropriate message in the message panel with correction suggestions. Floating or docking property panels provide descriptive tool tips for each property as well as auto resize when adjusting the canvas, without having to search Help or the need to scroll around to get access to the property. Progress and status indicators let you know when an operation is working. “No limit” canvas with snap-to-grid allows automatic sizing and accurate positioning when you have numerous operators in the Dataflow. The inline tool bar offers quick access to pan, zoom, fit and overview functions. Selecting multiple artifacts with a right click context allows you to easily manage your workspace more efficiently. Partitioning and Parallel Processing Partitioning allows each operator to process multiple subsets of records in parallel as opposed to processing all records that flow through that operator in a single sequential set. This capability allows the user to configure the expressor Dataflow to run in a way that most efficiently utilizes the resources of the hardware where the Dataflow is running. Partitions can exist in most individual operators. Using partitions increases the speed of an expressor data integration application, therefore improving performance and load times. With the expressor 3.6 Enterprise Edition, expressor simplifies enabling parallel processing by adding intuitive partition settings that are easy to configure. Bulk Artifact Upgrading Bulk Artifact Upgrading sounds a bit intimidating, but it actually is not and it is a welcome addition to expressor Studio. In past releases, users were prompted to confirm that they wanted to upgrade their individual artifacts only when opened. This was a cumbersome and repetitive process. Now with bulk artifact upgrading, a user can easily select what artifact or group of artifacts to upgrade all at once. As you can see, there are many new features and upgrade options that will prove to make expressor Studio quicker and more efficient.  I hope I’m not the only one who is excited about all these new upgrades, and that I you try expressor and share your experience with me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• So You Want to Be a Social Media Director

  - by Mike Stiles

  Do you want to be a Social Media Director? Some say the title is already losing its relevance; that social should be a basic skill that is required and used no matter what your position is inside the enterprise. I suppose that’s visionary, and a fun thing for thought leaders to say. But in the vast majority of business organizations, we’re so far away from that reality that the thought of not having someone driving social’s implementation and guiding its proper usage conjures up images of anarchy. That said, social media has become so broad, so catch-all, and so extended across business functions, that today’s Social Media Director, depending on the size of their staff, must make jacks-of-all-trades look like one-trick-ponies. Just as the purview of the CMO has grown all-encompassing, the disciplines required of their heads of social are stacking up. Master of Content Every social pipeline you build must stay filled, with quantity and quality. Content takes time, and the job never stops. Never. And no, it’s not true that anybody can write. Master of Customer Experience You must have a passion for hearing from customers and making them really happy. Master of PR You must know how to communicate and leverage the trust you’ve built when crises strike. Couldn’t hurt to be a Master of Politics. Master of Social Technology So many social management tools on the market. You have to know what social tech ecosystem makes sense and avoid piecemeal point solutions. Master of Business Development Social for selling and prospecting is hot, and you have to know how to use social to do it. Master of Analytics Nothing else matters if you can’t prove social is helping the brand. That’s right, creative content guy has to also be a math and stats geek. Good luck with that. Master of Paid Media You’ve got to learn the language, learn the tactics, learn the vendors and learn how to measure results. Master of Education Guess who gets to teach everyone who has no clue how to use social for business. Master of Personal Likability You’ll be leading the voice, tone, image and personality of the brand. If you don’t instinctively know how to be liked by actual people, the brand will be starting from a deficit. How deep must you go in this parade of masteries? Again, that depends on your employer’s maturity level in social. Serious players recognize these as distinct disciplines requiring true experts for maximum effect. Less serious players will need you to execute personally in many of these areas. Do the best you can, and try to grow quickly at each. If you’re the sole person executing all social…well…you’re in the game of managing expectations and trying to socially educate your employer. The good news is, you should be making a certifiable killing. If you’re alone and your salary is modest, time to understand how many brands out there crave what you’ve mastered. Not to push back against thought leaders, but the need for brand social leadership has not gone away…not even a little bit. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Stefan Wagner, freeimages.com

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• An Unusual UpdatePanel

  - by João Angelo

  The code you are about to see was mostly to prove a point, to myself, and probably has limited applicability. Nonetheless, in the remote possibility this is useful to someone here it goes… So this is a control that acts like a normal UpdatePanel where all child controls are registered as postback triggers except for a single control specified by the TriggerControlID property. You could basically achieve the same thing by registering all controls as postback triggers in the regular UpdatePanel. However with this, that process is performed automatically. Finally, here is the code: public sealed class SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel : WebControl, INamingContainer { public string TriggerControlID { get; set; } [TemplateInstance(TemplateInstance.Single)] [PersistenceMode(PersistenceMode.InnerProperty)] public ITemplate ContentTemplate { get; set; } public override ControlCollection Controls { get { this.EnsureChildControls(); return base.Controls; } } protected override void CreateChildControls() { if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(this.TriggerControlID)) throw new InvalidOperationException( "The TriggerControlId property must be set."); this.Controls.Clear(); var updatePanel = new UpdatePanel() { ID = string.Concat(this.ID, "InnerUpdatePanel"), ChildrenAsTriggers = false, UpdateMode = UpdatePanelUpdateMode.Conditional, ContentTemplate = this.ContentTemplate }; updatePanel.Triggers.Add(new SingleControlAsyncUpdatePanelTrigger { ControlID = this.TriggerControlID }); this.Controls.Add(updatePanel); } } internal sealed class SingleControlAsyncUpdatePanelTrigger : UpdatePanelControlTrigger { private Control target; private ScriptManager scriptManager; public Control Target { get { if (this.target == null) { this.target = this.FindTargetControl(true); } return this.target; } } public ScriptManager ScriptManager { get { if (this.scriptManager == null) { var page = base.Owner.Page; if (page != null) { this.scriptManager = ScriptManager.GetCurrent(page); } } return this.scriptManager; } } protected override bool HasTriggered() { string asyncPostBackSourceElementID = this.ScriptManager.AsyncPostBackSourceElementID; if (asyncPostBackSourceElementID == this.Target.UniqueID) return true; return asyncPostBackSourceElementID.StartsWith( string.Concat(this.target.UniqueID, "$"), StringComparison.Ordinal); } protected override void Initialize() { base.Initialize(); foreach (Control control in FlattenControlHierarchy(this.Owner.Controls)) { if (control == this.Target) continue; bool isApplicableControl = false; isApplicableControl |= control is INamingContainer; isApplicableControl |= control is IPostBackDataHandler; isApplicableControl |= control is IPostBackEventHandler; if (isApplicableControl) { this.ScriptManager.RegisterPostBackControl(control); } } } private static IEnumerable<Control> FlattenControlHierarchy( ControlCollection collection) { foreach (Control control in collection) { yield return control; if (control.Controls.Count > 0) { foreach (Control child in FlattenControlHierarchy(control.Controls)) { yield return child; } } } } } You can use it like this, meaning that only the B2 button will trigger an async postback: <cc:SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel ID="Test" runat="server" TriggerControlID="B2"> <ContentTemplate> <asp:Button ID="B1" Text="B1" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="B2" Text="B2" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="B3" Text="B3" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Label ID="LInner" Text="LInner" runat="server" /> </ContentTemplate> </cc:SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel>

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• WPF: Running code when Window rendering is completed

  - by Ilya Verbitskiy

  WPF is full of surprises. It makes complicated tasks easier, but at the same time overcomplicates easy  task as well. A good example of such overcomplicated things is how to run code when you’re sure that window rendering is completed. Window Loaded event does not always work, because controls might be still rendered. I had this issue working with Infragistics XamDockManager. It continued rendering widgets even when the Window Loaded event had been raised. Unfortunately there is not any “official” solution for this problem. But there is a trick. You can execute your code asynchronously using Dispatcher class.   Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(new Action(() => Trace.WriteLine("DONE!", "Rendering")), DispatcherPriority.ContextIdle, null);   This code should be added to your Window Loaded event handler. It is executed when all controls inside your window are rendered. I created a small application to prove this idea. The application has one window with a few buttons. Each button logs when it has changed its actual size. It also logs when Window Loaded event is raised, and, finally, when rendering is completed. Window’s layout is straightforward.   1: <Window x:Class="OnRendered.MainWindow" 2: xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 3: xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 4: Title="Run the code when window rendering is completed." Height="350" Width="525" 5: Loaded="OnWindowLoaded"> 6: <Window.Resources> 7: <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> 8: <Setter Property="Padding" Value="7" /> 9: <Setter Property="Margin" Value="5" /> 10: <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Center" /> 11: <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Center" /> 12: </Style> 13: </Window.Resources> 14: <StackPanel> 15: <Button x:Name="Button1" Content="Button 1" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 16: <Button x:Name="Button2" Content="Button 2" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 17: <Button x:Name="Button3" Content="Button 3" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 18: <Button x:Name="Button4" Content="Button 4" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 19: <Button x:Name="Button5" Content="Button 5" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 20: </StackPanel> 21: </Window>   SizeChanged event handler simply traces that the event has happened.   1: private void OnSizeChanged(object sender, SizeChangedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: Button button = (Button)sender; 4: Trace.WriteLine("Size has been changed", button.Name); 5: }   Window Loaded event handler is slightly more interesting. First it scheduler the code to be executed using Dispatcher class, and then logs the event.   1: private void OnWindowLoaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(new Action(() => Trace.WriteLine("DONE!", "Rendering")), DispatcherPriority.ContextIdle, null); 4: Trace.WriteLine("Loaded", "Window"); 5: }   As the result I had seen these trace messages.   1: Button5: Size has been changed 2: Button4: Size has been changed 3: Button3: Size has been changed 4: Button2: Size has been changed 5: Button1: Size has been changed 6: Window: Loaded 7: Rendering: DONE!   You can find the solution in GitHub.

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• Sunshine after the iCloud release?

  - by Laila

  "Why should I believe them? They're the ones that brought us MobileMe? It was not our finest hour, but we learned a lot." Steve Jobs June 6th 2011 Apple's new cloud service has been met with uncritical excitement by industry commentators.  It is wonderful what a rename can do.  Apple has had a 'cloud' offering for three years called MobileMe, successor to .MAC and  iTools, so iCloud is now the fourth internet service Apple have attempted. If this had been Microsoft, there would have been catcalls all around the blogosphere.  I'll admit that there is a lot more functionality announced for iCloud than MobileMe has ever managed to achieve, but then almost anything has more functionality than MobileMe.  It's an expensive service (£120 a year in the UK, $90 in the states), launched as far back as  June 9, 2008, that has delivered very little and suffered a string of technical problems; the documentation was mainly  a community effort, built up gradually by the frustrated and angry users. It was supposed to synchronise PC Outlook calendars but couldn't manage Microsoft Exchange (Google could, of course). It used WebDAV to allow Windows users to attach to the filestore, but didn't document how to do it. The method for downloading and uploading files to the cloud-based filestore was ridiculously clunky. It allowed you to post photos on a public site, but forgot to include a way of deleting photos. I could go on with the list, but you can explore the many sites that have flourished to inhabit the support-vacuum left by Apple. MobileMe should have had all the bright new clever things announced for iCloud. Apple dropped the ball, and allowed services such as Flickr to fill the void. However, their PR skills are such that, a name-change later (the .ME.com email address remains), it has turned a rout into a victory, and hundreds of earnest bloggers have been extolling Apple's expertise in cloud matters. This must be frustrating for the other cloud providers who have quietly got the technology working right. I wish iCloud well, even though I resent the expensive mess they made of MobileMe. Apple promise that iCloud will sync files, apps, app data, and media across all the different iOS5 devices, Macs, and PCs. It also hopes to sync music across devices, but not video content. They've offered existing MobileMe users free use of the MobileMe service for a year as the product is morphed, and they will be able to transfer to iCloud when it is launched in the autumn.  On June 30, 2012, MobileMe will die, and Apple's iWeb is also soon to join iTools and .MAC in the hereafter. So why get excited about iCloud? That all depends on the level of PC integration. Whereas iOS5 machines will be full participants in the new world of data-sharing (Sorry iPod Touch users) what about .NET libraries? There is talk of synchronising 'My Pictures' libraries with iOS5 and iMac machines, but little more detail as yet. Apple has a lot to prove with iCloud and anyone with actual experience of their past attempts to get into cloud services will be wary.

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• New spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly 6.0 provides statistics for prioritizing bug fixes

  - by Jason Crease

  One problem developers face is how to prioritize the many voices providing input into software bugs. If there is something wrong with a function that is the darling of a particular user, he or she tends to want action - now! The developer's dilemma is how to ascertain that the problem is major or minor, and when it should be addressed. Now there is a new spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly that provides exactly that information in an objective manner. This might upset those used to getting their way by being the loudest or pushiest, but ultimately it will ensure that the biggest problems get the priority they deserve. Here's how it works: Feature Usage Reporting (FUR) in SmartAssembly 6.0 provides a wealth of data about how your software is used by its end-users, but in the SmartAssembly UI the data isn't mined to its full extent. The new Excel spreadsheet for FUR extracts statistics from that data and presents them in easy-to-understand forms. I developed the spreadsheet feature in Microsoft Excel, using a fair amount of VBA. The spreadsheet connects directly to the database which stores the feature-usage data, and shows a wide variety of statistics and tables extracted from that data.  You want to know what percentage of users have used the 'Export as XML' button?  No problem.  How popular is v5.3 is compared to v5.1?  There's graphs for that. You need to know whether you have more users in Russia or Brazil? There's a big pie chart for that. I recently witnessed the spreadsheet in use here at Red Gate Software. My bug is exposed as minor While testing new features in .NET Reflector, I found a usability bug in the Refresh button and filed it in the Red Gate bug-tracking system. The bug was labelled "V.NEXT MINOR," which means it would be fixed in the next point release. Although I'm a professional tester, I'm not much different than most software users when they discover a bug that affects them personally: I wanted it fixed immediately. There was an ulterior motive at play here, of course. I would get to see my colleagues put the spreadsheet to work. The Reflector team loaded up the spreadsheet to view the feature-usage statistics that SmartAssembly collected for the refresh button. The resulting statistics showed that only 8% of users have ever pressed the Refresh button, and only 2.6% of sessions involve pressing the button. When Refresh is used, it's only pressed on average 1.6 times a session, with a maximum of 8 times during a session. This was in stark contrast to what I was doing as a conscientious tester: pressing it dozens of times per session. The spreadsheet provides evidence that my bug was a minor one. On to more serious things Based on the solid evidence uncovered by the spreadsheet, the Reflector team concluded that my experience does not represent that of the vast majority of Reflector's recorded users. The Reflector team had ample data to send me back to my desk and keep the bug classified as "V.NEXT MINOR." The team then went back to fixing more serious bugs. If I'm in the shoes of the user, I might not be thoroughly happy, but I cannot deny that the evidence clearly placed me in a very small minority. Next time I'm hoping the spreadsheet will prove that my bug is more important. Find out more about Feature-Usage Reporting here. The spreadsheet is available for free download here.

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• Good DBAs Do Baselines

  - by Louis Davidson

  One morning, you wake up and feel funny. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something isn’t quite right. What now? Unless you happen to be a hypochondriac, you likely drag yourself out of bed, get on with the day and gather more “evidence”. You check your symptoms over the next few days; do you feel the same, better, worse? If better, then great, it was some temporal issue, perhaps caused by an allergic reaction to some suspiciously spicy chicken. If the same or worse then you go to the doctor for some health advice, but armed with some data to share, and having ruled out certain possible causes that are fixed with a bit of rest and perhaps an antacid. Whether you realize it or not, in comparing how you feel one day to the next, you have taken baseline measurements. In much the same way, a DBA uses baselines to gauge the gauge health of their database servers. Of course, while SQL Server is very willing to share data regarding its health and activities, it has almost no idea of the difference between good and bad. Over time, experienced DBAs develop “mental” baselines with which they can gauge the health of their servers almost as easily as their own body. They accumulate knowledge of the daily, natural state of each part of their database system, and so know instinctively when one of their databases “feels funny”. Equally, they know when an “issue” is just a passing tremor. They see their SQL Server with all of its four CPU cores running close 100% and don’t panic anymore. Why? It’s 5PM and every day the same thing occurs when the end-of-day reports, which are very CPU intensive, are running. Equally, they know when they need to respond in earnest when it is the first time they have heard about an issue, even if it has been happening every day. Nevertheless, no DBA can retain mental baselines for every characteristic of their systems, so we need to collect physical baselines too. In my experience, surprisingly few DBAs do this very well. Part of the problem is that SQL Server provides a lot of instrumentation. If you look, you will find an almost overwhelming amount of data regarding user activity on your SQL Server instances, and use and abuse of the available CPU, I/O and memory. It seems like a huge task even to work out which data you need to collect, let alone start collecting it on a regular basis, managing its storage over time, and performing detailed comparative analysis. However, without baselines, though, it is very difficult to pinpoint what ails a server, just by looking at a single snapshot of the data, or to spot retrospectively what caused the problem by examining aggregated data for the server, collected over many months. It isn’t as hard as you think to get started. You’ve probably already established some troubleshooting queries of the type SELECT Value FROM SomeSystemTableOrView. Capturing a set of baseline values for such a query can be as easy as changing it as follows: INSERT into BaseLine.SomeSystemTable (value, captureTime) SELECT Value, SYSDATETIME() FROM SomeSystemTableOrView; Of course, there are monitoring tools that will collect and manage this baseline data for you, automatically, and allow you to perform comparison of metrics over different periods. However, to get yourself started and to prove to yourself (or perhaps the person who writes the checks for tools) the value of baselines, stick something similar to the above query into an agent job, running every hour or so, and you are on your way with no excuses! Then, the next time you investigate a slow server, and see x open transactions, y users logged in, and z rows added per hour in the Orders table, compare to your baselines and see immediately what, if anything, has changed!

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• Construction Paper, Legos, and Architectural Modeling

  I can remember as a kid playing with construction paper and Legos to explore my imagination. Through my exploration I was able to build airplanes, footballs, guns, and more, out of paper. Additionally I could create entire cities, robots, or anything else I could image out of Legos.  These toys, I now realize were in fact tools that gave me an opportunity to explore my ideas in the physical world through the use of modeling.  My imagination was allowed to run wild as I, unknowingly at the time, made design decisions that directly affected the models I was building from the raw materials.  To prove my point further, I can remember building a paper airplane that seemed to go nowhere when I tried to throw it. So I decided to attach a paper clip to the plane before I decided to throw it the next time to test my concept that by adding more weight to the plane that it would fly better and for longer distances. The paper airplane allowed me to model my design decision through the use of creating an artifact in that I created a paper airplane that was carrying extra weight through the incorporation of the paper clip in to the design. Also, I remember using Legos to build all sorts of creations, and these creations became artifacts of my imagination. As I further and further defined my Lego creations through the process of playing I was able to create elaborate artifacts of my imagination. These artifacts represented design decision I had made in the evolution of my creation through my child like design process. In some form or fashion the artifacts I created as a kid are very similar to the artifacts that I create when I model a software architectural concept or a software design in that the process of making decisions is directly translated in to a tangible model in the form of an architectural model. Architectural models have been defined as artifacts that depict design decisions of a system’s architecture.  The act of creating architectural models is the act of architectural modeling. Furthermore, architectural modeling is the process of creating a physical model based architectural concepts and documenting these design decisions. In the process of creating models, the standard notation used is Architectural modeling notation. This notation is the primary method of capturing the essence of design decisions regarding architecture.  Modeling notations can vary based on the need and intent of a project; typically they range from natural language to a diagram based notation. Currently, Unified Markup Language (UML) is the industry standard in terms of architectural modeling notation  because allows for architectures to be defined through a series of boxes, lines, arrows and other basic symbols that encapsulate design designs in to virtual components, connectors, configurations and interfaces.  Furthermore UML allows for additional break down of models through the use of natural language as to explain each section of the model in plain English. One of the major factors in architectural modeling is to define what is to be modeled. As a basic rule of thumb, I tend to model architecture based on the complexity of systems or sub sub-systems of architecture. Another key factor is the level of detail that is actually needed for a model. For example if I am modeling a system for a CEO to view then the low level details will be omitted. In comparison, if I was modeling a system for another engineer to actually implement I would include as much detailed information as I could to help the engineer implement my design.

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• WiX, MSDeploy and an appealing configuration/deployment paradigm

  - by alexhildyard

  I do a lot of application and server configuration; I've done this for many years and have tended to view the complexity of this strictly in terms of the complexity of the ultimate configuration to be deployed. For example, specific APIs aside, I would tend to regard installing a server certificate as a more complex activity than, say, copying a file or adding a Registry entry.My prejudice revolved around the idea of a sequential deployment script that not only had the explicit prescription to apply a specific server configuration, but also made the implicit presumption that the server in question was in a good known state. Scripts like this fail for hundreds of reasons -- the Default Website didn't exist; the application had already been deployed; the application had already been partially deployed and failed to rollback fully, and so on. And so the problem is that the more complex the configuration activity, the more scope for error in any individual part of that activity, and therefore the greater the chance the server in question will not end up at exactly the desired configuration level.Recently I was introduced to a completely different mindset, which, for want of a better turn of phrase, I will call the "make it so" mindset. It's extremely simple both to explain and to implement. In place of the head-down, imperative script you used to use, you substitute a set of checks -- much like exception handlers -- around each configuration activity, starting with a check of the current system state. Thus the configuration logic becomes: "IF these services aren't started then start them, and IF XYZ website doesn't exist then create it, and IF these shares don't exist then create them, and IF these shares aren't permissioned in some particular way, then permission them so." This works. Really well, in my experience. Scenario 1: You want to get a system into a good known state; it's already in a good known state; you quickly realise there is nothing to do.Scenario 2: You want to get the system into a good known state; your script is flawed or the system is bust; it cannot be put into that state. You know exactly where (at least part of) the problem is and why.Scenario 3: You want to get the system into a good known state; people are fiddling around with the system just now. That's fine. You do what you can, and later you come back and try it againScenario 4: No one wants to deploy anything; they want you to prove that the previous deployment was successful. So you re-run the deployment script with the "-WhatIf" flag. It reports that there was nothing to change. There's your proof.I mentioned two technologies in the title -- MSI and MSDeploy. I am thinking specifically of the conversation that took place here. Having worked with both technologies, I think Rob Mensching's response is appropriately nuanced, and in essence the difference is this: sometimes your target is either to achieve a specific new server state, or to rollback to a known good one. Then again, your target may be to configure what you can, and to understand what you can't. Implicitly MSDeploy's "rollback" is simply to redeploy the previous version, whereas a well-crafted MSI will actively put your system into that state without further intervention. Either way, if all goes well it will leave you with a system in one of two states, whereas MSDeploy could leave your system in one of many states. The key is that MSDeploy and MSI are complementary technologies; which suits you best depends as much on Operational guidance as your Configuration remit.What I wanted to say was that I have always been for atomic, transactional-based configuration, but having worked with the "make it so" paradigm, I have been favourably impressed by the actual results. I'm tempted to put a more technical post up on this in due course.

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• How can a developer realize the full value of his work [closed]

  - by Jubbat

  I, honestly, don't want to work as a developer in a company anymore after all I have seen. I want to continue developing software, yes, but not in the way I see it all around me. And I'm in London, a city that congregates lots of great developers from the whole world, so it shouldn't be a problem of location. So, what are my concerns? First of all, best case scenario: you are paying managers salary out of yours. You are consistently underpaid by making up for the average manager negative net return plus his whole salary. Typical scenario. I am a reasonably good developer with common sense who cares for readable code with attention to basic principles. I have found way too often, overconfident and arrogant developers with a severe lack of common sense. Personally, I don't want to follow TDD or Agile practices like all the cool kids nowadays. I would read about them, form my own opinion and take what I feel is useful, but don't follow it sheepishly. I want to work with people who understand that you have to design good interfaces, you absolutely have to document your code, that readability is at the top of your priorities. Also people who don't have a cargo cult mentality too. For instance, the same person who asked me about design patterns in a job interview, later told me that something like a List of Map of Vector of Map of Set (in Java) is very readable. Why would someone ask me about design patterns if they can't even grasp encapsulation? These kind of things are the norm. I've seen many examples. I've seen worse than that too, from very well paid senior devs, by the way. Every second that you spend working with people with such lack of common sense and clear thinking, you are effectively losing money by being terribly inefficient with your time. Yet, with all these inefficiencies, the average developer earns a high salary. So I tried working on my own then, although I don't like the idea. I prefer healthy exchange of opinions and ideas and task division. I then did a bit of online freelancing for a while but I think working in a sweatshop might be more enjoyable. Also, I studied computer engineering and you are in an environment in which your client will presume you don't have any formal education because there is no way to prove it. Again, you are undervalued. You could try building a product, yes. But, of course, luck is a big factor. I wonder if there is a way to work in something you can do well, software development, and be valued for the quality of your work and be paid accordingly, and where you and only you get fairly paid for the value you generate. I know that what I have written seems somehow unlikely but I strongly feel this way. Hopefully someone will understand me and has already figured this out. I don't think I'm alone in this kind of feeling.

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• Top 5 characteristics Recruiters are looking for

  - by Maria Sandu

  Of course many skills and characteristics recruiters are looking for are job specific. But whether you are a graduate fresh out of college or seasoned in the workplace, recruiters are also looking for generic skills and attitude to see whether you are a good fit to the company. So make sure you prepare and show through examples that you have these skills. 1. Drive/passion Liking the job you are applying for is paramount and something recruiters are always looking for. Show and prove your drive for the role and/or the field you are applying for. Always be prepared to pitch yourself, this shows your drive in the role you are applying for. 2. Communication skills People often make the mistake by thinking this skill is related to how good they are able to talk about their background and expertise. This is important, but as least as important is it that you listen well to questions that are asked. Make sure you answer to the point and ask questions if you want questions to be clarified. This shows your interest in the role and the ability to communicate clearly. This also helps you building trust with the recruiter every time you speak to him/her. 3. Confidence Recruiters are looking for the best candidate for the job. So if you don’t think you are the best candidate why should the recruiter? Show with confidence, without being arrogant (think about building trust), why you are the right person for the job. Confidence also shows in your answers to difficult questions. Be confident enough to explain why some experiences went wrong and how you learnt from them. If you don’t have a direct explanation on a question, it is better to ask for a second to think instead of a random answer. 4. Vision The main reason to hire graduates for many companies is that graduates are perceived to be flexible. The organisation will train and up skill you in the direction best suitable for the organisation. However the most intense learning path is realised when you also know where you want to go. Companies are often happy to accommodate you to support with training and development, but if you don’t have a clear vision on what you want to achieve for yourself and what value you bring to the company, recruiters can decide you are not the right candidate as they are afraid you aren’t going to stay in the company. 5. Business awareness For every job you apply you will get challenged on your knowledge and interest for the market and business they are in. All companies add value in different ways in their respective markets. So make sure you are aware of what a company is doing, what their goal is and why and how they exist and how you can add value for the company in the role you are applying for. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Faster Trip to Innovation with Simplified Data Integration: Sabre Holdings Case Study

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Author: Irem Radzik, Director of Product Marketing, Data Integration, Oracle In today’s fast-paced, competitive environment, IT teams are under pressure to deliver technology solutions for many critical business initiatives as fast as possible. When the focus is on speed, it can be easy to continue to use old style, point-to-point custom scripts that grow organically to the point where they are unmanageable and too costly to maintain. As data volumes, data sources, and end users grow, uncoordinated data integration efforts create significant inefficiencies for both IT and business users. In addition to losing IT productivity due to maintaining spaghetti architecture, data integrity becomes a concern as well. Errors caused by inconsistent, data and manual data entry can prove very costly for companies and disrupt business activities. Many industry leaders recognize now that data should be moved in an automated and reliable manner across all platforms to have one version of the truth. By simplifying their data integration architecture and standardizing on a centralized approach, IT teams now accelerate time to market. Especially, using a centralized, shared-service approach brings agility, increases IT productivity, and frees up resources for innovation. One such industry leader that simplified its data integration architecture is Sabre Holdings. Sabre Holdings provides distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry, and is a winner of Oracle Excellence Awards for Fusion Middleware in 2011 in the data integration category. I had the pleasure to host Sabre Holdings on a public webcast and discuss their data integration best practices for data warehousing. In this webcast Sabre’s Amjad Saeed, presented how the company reduced complexity by consolidating systems and standardizing development on Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate for its global data warehouse development team. With Oracle’s complete real-time data integration solution, Sabre also streamlined support and maintenance operations, achieved real-time view in the execution of the integration processes, and can manage the data warehouse and business intelligence solution performance on demand. By reducing complexity and leveraging timely market insights, the company was able to decrease time to market by 40%. You can now listen to the webcast on demand: Sabre Holdings Case Study: Accelerating Innovation using Oracle Data Integration I invite you to hear directly from Sabre how to use advanced data integration capabilities to enable accelerated innovation. To learn more about Oracle’s data integration offering you can download our free resources.

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• Monitoring Windows Azure Service Bus Endpoint with BizTalk 360?

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I'm currently working with a customer who is undergoing an initiative to expose some of their line of business applications to external partners and SAAS applications and as part of this we have been looking at using the Windows Azure Service Bus. For the first part of the project we were focused on some synchronous request response scenarios where an external application would use the Service Bus relay functionality to get data from some internal applications. When we were looking at the operational monitoring side of the solution it was obvious that although most of the normal server monitoring capabilities would be required for the on premise components we would have to look at new approaches to validate that the operation of the service from outside of the organization was working as expected. A number of months ago one of my colleagues Elton Stoneman wrote about an approach I have introduced with a number of clients in the past where we implement a diagnostics service in each service component we build. This service would allow us to make a call which would flex some of the working parts of the system to prove it was working within any SLA. This approach is discussed on the following article: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2011/12/12/the-value-of-a-diagnostics-service.aspx In our solution we wanted to take the same approach but we had to consider that the service clients were external to the service. We also had to consider that by going through Windows Azure Service Bus it's not that easy to make most of your standard monitoring solutions just give you an easy way to do this. In a previous article I have described how you can use BizTalk 360 to monitor things using a custom extension to the Web Endpoint Manager and I felt that we could use this approach to provide an excellent way to monitor our service bus endpoint. The previous article is available on the following link: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/09/12/150696.aspx   The Monitoring Solution BizTalk 360 currently has an easy way to hook up the endpoint manager to a url which it will then call and if a successful response is returned it then considers the endpoint to be in a healthy state. We would take advantage of this by creating an ASP.net web page which would be called by BizTalk 360 and behind this page we would implement the functionality to call the diagnostics service on our Service Bus endpoint. The ASP.net page could include logic to work out how to handle the response from the diagnostics service. For example if the overall result of the diagnostics service was successful but the call to the diagnostics service was longer than a certain amount of time then we could return an error and indicate the service is taking too long. The following diagram illustrates the monitoring pattern.   The diagnostics service which is hosted in the line of business application allows us to ping a simple message through the Azure Service Bus relay to the WCF services in the LOB application and we they get a response back indicating that the service is working fine. To implement this I used the exact same approach I described in my previous post to create a custom web page which calls the diagnostics service and then it would return an HTTP response code which would depend on the error condition returned or a 200 if it was successful. One of the limitations of this approach is that the competing consumer pattern for listening to messages from service bus means that you cannot guarantee which server would process your diagnostics check message but with BizTalk 360 you could simply add multiple endpoint checks so that it could access the individual on-premise web servers directly to ensure that each server is working fine and then check that messages can also be processed through the cloud. Conclusion It took me about 15 minutes to get a proof of concept of this up and running which was able to monitor our web services which had been exposed via Windows Azure Service Bus. I was then able to inherit all of the monitoring benefits of BizTalk 360 to provide an enterprise class monitoring solution for our cloud enabled API.

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• Extreme Makeover, Phone Edition: Comcasts xfinity

  Mobile Makeover For many companies the first foray into Windows Phone 7 (WP7) may be in porting their existing mobile apps. It is tempting to simply transfer existing functionality, avoiding the additional design costs. Readdressing business needs and taking advantage of the WP7 platform can reduce cost and is essential to a successful re-launch. To better understand the advantage of new development lets examine a conceptual upgrade of Comcasts existing mobile app. Before Comcast has a great mobile app that provides several key features. The ability to browse the lineup using a guide, a client for Comcast email accounts, On Demand gallery, and much more. We will leverage these and build on them using some of the incredible WP7 features.   After With the proliferation of DVRs (Digital Video Recorders) and a variety of media devices (TV, PC, Mobile) content providers are challenged to find creative ways to build their brands. Every client touch point must provide both value added services as well as opportunities for marketing and up-sale; WP7 makes it easy to focus on those opportunities. The new app is an excellent vehicle for presenting Comcasts newly rebranded TV, Voice, and Internet services. These services now fly under the banner of xfinity and have been expanded to provide the best experience for Comcast customers. The Windows Phone 7 app will increase the surface area of this service revolution.   The home menu is simplified and highlights Comcasts Triple Play: Voice, TV, and Internet. The inbox has been replaced with a messages view, and message management is handled by a WP7 hub. The hub presents emails, tweets, and IMs from Comcast and other viewers the user follows on Twitter.  The popular view orders shows based on the users viewing history and current cable package. The first show Glee is both popular and participating in a conceptual co-marketing effort, so it receives prime positioning. The second spot goes to a hit show on a premium channel, in this example HBOs The Pacific, encouraging viewers to upgrade for this premium content. The remaining spots are ordered based on viewing history and popularity. Tapping the play button moves the user to the theatre where they can watch previews or full episodes streaming from Fancast. Tapping an extra presents the user with show details as well as interactive content that may be included as part of co-marketing efforts. Co-Marketing with Dynamic Content The success of Comcasts services are tied to the success of the networks and shows it purveys, making co-marketing efforts essential. In this concept FOX is co-marketing its popular show Glee. A customized panorama is updated with the latest gleeks tweets, streaming HD episodes, and extras featuring photos and video of the cast. If WP7 apps can be dynamically extended with web hosted .xap files, including sandboxed partner experiences would enable interactive features such as the Gleek Peek, in which a viewer can select a character from a panorama to view the actors profile. This dynamic inline experience has a tailored appeal to aspiring creatives and is technically possible with Windows Phone 7.   Summary The conceptual Comcast mobile app for Windows Phone 7 highlights just a few of the incredible experiences and business opportunities that can be unlocked with this latest mobile solution. It is critical that organizations recognize and take full advantage of these new capabilities. Simply porting existing mobile applications does not leverage these powerful tools; re-examining existing applications and upgrading them to Windows Phone 7 will prove essential to the continued growth and success of your brand.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Property overwrite behaviour

  - by jeremyj

  I thought it worth sharing about property overwrite behaviour because i found it confusing at first in the hope of preventing some learning pain for the uninitiated with MSBuild :-)The confusion for me came because of the redundancy of using a Condition statement in a _project_ level property to test that a property has not been previously set. What i mean is that the following two statements are always identical in behaviour, regardless if the property has been supplied on the command line -  <PropertyGroup>    <PropA Condition=" '$(PropA)' == '' ">PropA set at project level</PropA>  </PropertyGroup>has the same behaviour regardless of command line override as -  <PropertyGroup>     <PropA>PropA set at project level</PropA>   </PropertyGroup>  i.e. the two above property declarations have the same result whether the property is overridden on the command line or not.To prove this experiment with the following .proj file -<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><Project ToolsVersion="4.0" >  <PropertyGroup>    <PropA Condition=" '$(PropA)' == '' ">PropA set at project level</PropA>  </PropertyGroup>  <Target Name="Target1">    <Message Text="PropA: $(PropA)"/>  </Target>  <Target Name="Target2">    <PropertyGroup>      <PropA>PropA set in Target2</PropA>    </PropertyGroup>    <Message Text="PropA: $(PropA)"/>  </Target>  <Target Name="Target3">    <PropertyGroup>      <PropA Condition=" '$(PropA)' == '' ">PropA set in Target3</PropA>    </PropertyGroup>    <Message Text="PropA: $(PropA)"/>  </Target>  <Target Name="Target4">    <PropertyGroup>      <PropA Condition=" '$(PropA)' != '' ">PropA set in Target4</PropA>    </PropertyGroup>    <Message Text="PropA: $(PropA)"/>  </Target></Project>Try invoking it using both of the following invocations and observe its output -1)>msbuild blog.proj /t:Target1;Target2;Target3;Target42)>msbuild blog.proj /t:Target1;Target2;Target3;Target4 "/p:PropA=PropA set on command line"Then try those two invocations with the following three variations of specifying PropA at the project level -1)  <PropertyGroup>     <PropA Condition=" '$(PropA)' == '' ">PropA set at project level</PropA>   </PropertyGroup> 2)   <PropertyGroup>     <PropA>PropA set at project level</PropA>   </PropertyGroup>3)  <PropertyGroup>     <PropA Condition=" '$(PropA)' != '' ">PropA set at project level</PropA>   </PropertyGroup>

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• IIS6 Log time recording problems

  - by Hafthor

  On three separate occasions on two separate servers at nearly the same times, 6.9 hours seemingly went by without any data being written to the IIS logs, but, on closer inspection, it appears that it was all recorded all at once. Here's the facts as I know them: Windows Server 2003 R2 w/ IIS6 Logging using GMT, server local time GMT-7. Application was still operating and I have SQL data to prove that Time gaps appear in log file, not across two # headers appear at gap Load balancer pings every 30 seconds No caching Here's info on a particular case: an entry appears for 2009-09-21 18:09:27 then #headers the next entry is for 2009-09-22 01:21:54, and so are the next 1600 entries in this log file and 370 in the next log file. about half of the ~2000 entries on 2009-09-22 01:21:54 are load balancer pings (est. at 2/min for 6.9hrs = 828 pings) then entries are recorded as normal. I believe that these events may coincide with me deploying an ASP.NET application update into those machines. Here's some relevant content from the logs in question: ex090921.log line 3684 2009-09-21 17:54:40 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 2009-09-21 17:55:11 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 2009-09-21 17:55:42 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 2009-09-21 17:56:13 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 2009-09-21 17:56:45 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 #Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 #Version: 1.0 #Date: 2009-09-21 18:04:37 #Fields: date time cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status sc-bytes cs-bytes time-taken 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 3078 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 109 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 278 122 3828 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 278 122 0 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 278 122 0 ... continues until line 5449 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 <eof> ex090922.log #Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 #Version: 1.0 #Date: 2009-09-22 00:00:16 #Fields: date time cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status sc-bytes cs-bytes time-taken 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 ... continues until line 367 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 2009-09-22 01:04:30 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 ... back to normal behavior Note the seemingly correct date/time written to the #header of the new log file. Also note that /ping.aspx returned 404 then switched to 200 just as the problem started. I rename the "I'm alive page" so the load balancer stops sending requests to the server while I'm working on it. What you see here is me renaming it back so the load balancer will use the server. So, this problem definitely coincides with me re-enabling the server. Any ideas?

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• Dynamic DNS with Comcast

  - by colithium

  I've just recently moved across town. Previously, I had Dynamic DNS set up so I could remotely connect to my desktop (primarily to use TightVNC). My ISP was Comcast and I'm in the Denver, Colorado area. Currently, I'm still with Comcast and still in Denver. My router connects to the internet just fine and my Dynamic DNS record over at DynDNS did get updated with my router's current external IP address. So my router, DynDNS, and public DNS records all agree what my IP address is. However, I can't actually connect to anything from the outside world. My trace route to Google looks something like: Tracing route to google.com [74.125.19.147] 1 3 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1 (this is the internal IP address of my router) 2 * * * Request timed out. 3 9 ms 8 ms 10 ms te-8-2-ur02.wheatridge.co.denver.comcast.net [68.85.221.177] 4 12 ms 12 ms 19 ms te-0-8-0-2-ar02.aurora.co.denver.comcast.net [68.86.103.97] 5 16 ms 13 ms 11 ms pos-0-3-0-0-cr01.denver.co.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.91.1] 6 28 ms 28 ms 27 ms pos-0-9-0-0-cr01.dallas.tx.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.85.174] 7 29 ms 27 ms 28 ms pos-0-1-0-0-pe01.1950stemmons.tx.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.86.94] 8 66 ms 108 ms * 75.149.231.70 9 65 ms 68 ms 93 ms 72.14.233.77 10 67 ms 66 ms 66 ms 72.14.233.111 11 67 ms 67 ms 69 ms 216.239.43.144 12 68 ms 71 ms 73 ms 209.85.249.30 13 66 ms 66 ms 68 ms nuq04s01-in-f147.1e100.net [74.125.19.147] This is what the trace route looks like from an outside source to my DynDNS domain name: traceroute to 98.245.67.65 (98.245.67.65) 1 illuminati-130 138.67.130.61 2 138.67.63.253 138.67.63.253 3 vermiculite 138.67.253.20 4 csm-ct-gw 138.67.253.244 5 138.67.253.2 138.67.253.2 6 ge-7-24-ar01.denver.co.denver.comcast.net 68.86.128.17 7 te-0-4-0-0-ar02.denver.co.denver.comcast.net 68.86.179.21 8 te-9-3-ur01.wheatridge.co.denver.comcast.net 68.86.103.18 9 * * * {Times Out} Now my guess is, whatever is sitting just beyond my router (what the modem connects to) is gumming things up. Even though the routes aren't EXACTLY the same, that appears to be the spot that the trace route either stops or doesn't get a response. My question is, for Comcast networks (particularly in Denver), what would be the device that typically sits there? Is there anything I can do about it? That device seems to not respond to PING but does forward it along when I'm going outwards. But it looks like it eats it when the request is coming in. It's hard to prove that from these logs but I'm assuming that's the case because my router used to accept connections from the outside and I haven't changed anything on it.

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• XP OEM licensing when reinstalling Windows XP

  - by mindas

  My wife has managed to buy a Dell laptop she was using at her ex-employer that just went bust. The problem with it is the OS (Windows XP) which takes ages to boot and is generally disproportionally slow to the hardware of the machine. So my aim is to sacrifice a day and reinstall it. The problem I am slightly worried about is the licensing/registration/activation hell. Apart from the sticker (with WinXP license key), the laptop has no other paperwork proving this license is legitimate. I believe this was originally an OEM license. Unfortunately, I don't have the the installation CD. This computer also has MS Office installed (which I would like to retain) but it none of MS Office apps would launch due to some obscure error complaining about lack of free disk space (which computer has plenty of). I have absolutely no clue what kind of license this MS Office was. And because the company has gone into the administration, there is no way of getting this information nor installable media. I believe that by buying the hardware I have also acquired the software which I can use as I see fit. Correct me if I'm wrong. Above said, my question would be: What is the easiest way of reinstalling the XP? By easiest I mean avoiding spending my time to prove Microsoft support I've got the right to use the software (insert your computer says noooo joke here) but still being able to get to fresh virgin activated legal state of the XP. I used to work as a sysadmin many years ago so I am not afraid of any technical difficulties. The same question applies to MS Office. I imagine the process would consist of backing up all the data, pulling some bits from the registry and using that on the fresh install. As for reinstall I'd expect to use some sort of OEM Windows repair CD from Dell, right? Are those freely available? My other box (HP) has such a thing and it can't be used on any other brand. I'm sure somebody had to go through this licensing hell and could share his/her tips. Thanks in advance.

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• XP OEM licensing when reinstalling Windows XP

  - by mindas

  My wife has managed to buy a Dell laptop she was using at her ex-employer that just went bust. The problem with it is the OS (Windows XP) which takes ages to boot and is generally disproportionally slow to the hardware of the machine. So my aim is to sacrifice a day and reinstall it. The problem I am slightly worried about is the licensing/registration/activation hell. Apart from the sticker (with WinXP license key), the laptop has no other paperwork proving this license is legitimate. I believe this was originally an OEM license. Unfortunately, I don't have the the installation CD. This computer also has MS Office installed (which I would like to retain) but it none of MS Office apps would launch due to some obscure error complaining about lack of free disk space (which computer has plenty of). I have absolutely no clue what kind of license this MS Office was. And because the company has gone into the administration, there is no way of getting this information nor installable media. I believe that by buying the hardware I have also acquired the software which I can use as I see fit. Correct me if I'm wrong. Above said, my question would be: What is the easiest way of reinstalling the XP? By easiest I mean avoiding spending my time to prove Microsoft support I've got the right to use the software (insert your computer says noooo joke here) but still being able to get to fresh virgin activated legal state of the XP. I used to work as a sysadmin many years ago so I am not afraid of any technical difficulties. The same question applies to MS Office. I imagine the process would consist of backing up all the data, pulling some bits from the registry and using that on the fresh install. As for reinstall I'd expect to use some sort of OEM Windows repair CD from Dell, right? Are those freely available? My other box (HP) has such a thing and it can't be used on any other brand. I'm sure somebody had to go through this licensing hell and could share his/her tips. Thanks in advance.

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• Moving Windows XP from ICH10R RAID 5 to single disk using Linux [migrated]

  - by tudor

  A friend's machine running Windows XP refused to boot recently which is running 3 SATA disks on RAID 5 (which was previously upgraded from RAID 1 not by me). I have determined there to be a disk failure. The disks have been replaced many times in the past few years. I wish to backup the RAID5 partition before I try anything to fix it. The RAID chipset used is ICH10R/DO. So, I plugged in an extra IDE drive and an Ubuntu USB key and looked at the RAID. The partitioning is a mess, but I did find at least one degraded but working RAID array with two partitions, one 79GB and the other 86GB. Then I: 1) Partitioned my IDE disk using fdisk to have a partition of 80GB and bootable, and marked as NTFS. 2) dd the contents of the array to the partition 3) disconnected everything else 4) inserted a Windows XP CD and ran fixboot, fixmbr, and bootcfg. They all run ok and claim that they worked. (e.g. bootcfg detects the Windows partition, fixboot returns saying that it was written correctly.) However, I'm still getting an error like "DISK FAILURE, BOOT DISK NOT FOUND". I have tried running the GRUB rescue disk, which also runs ok, but won't boot into Windows. It just stops with a flashing cursor after chainloader +1, boot. One clue may be that the partitions appear to be wack. One disk has a 79GB RAID partition on a 500GB drive with a offset, the second disk has a 320GB RAID partition across the whole drive. Additionally, the BIOS lists the RAID size as being 149GB. I don't see how this works. How are they even assembling the array when the partitions are so different? I have also tried running the Windows XP automated repair tool, but that didn't work either. I'm presuming this is something simple. Perhaps Windows is attempting to boot into RAID and, upon not finding it, simply crashing? Perhaps the 79GB partitions offset means that it's looking into the disk by that much? Please help!! To clarify: I want to make the single IDE disk bootable with a copy of the array so that I can prove/disprove that it's just that Windows has become corrupted, and use windows tools to correct it before attempting the same thing on the RAID array. That way I have a working backup and can show the process I used to fix it.

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• GPO Software Uninstall Not Taking Place

  - by burmat

  I am having some trouble with my software GPO's and can't seem to find any answers using Google. I successfully deployed software using my policy but when I delete another, the uninstallation of the software does not take place. What I did: Deployed software using a GPO, used gpupdate /force on the workstation to update, reboot, and install the software Deleted another software installation by: Right-Click All Tasks Remove 'Immediately uninstall the software from users and computers' From there, I did another gpupdate /force to try and get the GPO to refresh and uninstall the software on the workstation. This did not work. I then forced replication between my domain controllers and ran another gpupdate /force on the workstation and this did not uninstall the software. There are not error logs or indications that the uninstall is being triggered when I go into the event viewer, and I know for a fact that the policy is working in other aspects. So my questions is: Where do I look next to find the answer as to why GPO software deployments are working but un-installations are not, based off of what I have already tried? Thank you in advance. UPDATE: After using gpresult /z, there is no indication of a pending un-installation or removal of software. Under the section entitled "Software Installations", the software I am trying to uninstall is not listed. There is no other indication that the software I am trying to uninstall even exists. I also turned on RSoP logging and did (yet another) gpupdate /force to yield no blatant results. There is no indication that an uninstall event was even triggered, let alone incapability or failure. Although I am sure I marked it to uninstall in case of two events (the falling out of the scope of management, as well as the removal of the entry), I am beginning to think the entry just never triggered something that should have been triggered. UPDATE #2: After troubleshooting this (frustrating) application assignment, I have chalked it up as a fluke. I have tested with other software to make sure that the uninstall of other application assignments is actually working, so I am assuming it is something related to the package directly. There is the possibility that my problem resides in something related to what @joeqwerty linked in a comment below but because I can't go back in time, I don't think I will be able to prove it. I will probably be running a script via another GPO to guarantee the un-installation of left over package installs. For now, Evan Anderson is getting the answer because of the debugging information I was able to put to good use. Thank you to everyone that helped contribute so far!

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• Flickering issue in external monitor when used with Acer Aspire One D260 netbook (Intel GMA 3150)

  - by seyenne

  I recently purchased a Acer netbook, Aspire One D260. It runs flawlessly. Yesterday I bought a Samsung 23" TFT with a native resolution of 1920x1080. According to the information found in the internet and my local computer dealer, the Intel chipset can handle the native resolution of the monitor. However, this is only partly the case. I use the VGA cable to connect, the monitor instantly switches to the native resolution and now the problem: Occasionally, especially the first 2 hours after booting up, I have a flickering all over the screen, sometimes the entire screen is shaking and spinning around like crazy. I figured out that lowering the resolution avoids the flicker but this helps only for some time. I can rule out that it's the monitor's problem since I found no issues with another notebook. Right now, I have no problems with the netbook, for about 30 minutes I didn't experience any issues... But I don't know for how long, it occurs without warning :-) I'm worried that if I would bring the netbook back to the dealer and explain my problem, after testing it on an external screen in the local shop, everything works just fine... And I won't get helped with the problem because I can't prove it. (I'm currently in Thailand and over here, customer service is nothing like back home in Germany) What can I do? Is this a driver related issue? (I installed the latest GPU driver) Is it because of the VGA cable? (But why does it work sometimes without any problems and with no issues on the other notebook) I monitored the GPU/CPU temperature, nothing changes really over time.. Can it simply be a faulty GPU and is a replacement justifiable? I'm really stressed now because for the time I'm writing, the flickering didn't occur... but for sure, soon or later it will happen again.. I forgot to mention, the problem also happens if the netbook runs on battery, unplugged. So the only hardware that is plugged is the TFT screen. ...........and here it comes again, flickering has just begun. NEED HELP! Thank you all for reading through this and giving any suggestions if possible. Cheers

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• Windows DHCP Server - get notification when a non-AD joined device gets an IP address

  - by TheCleaner

  SCENARIO To simplify this down to it's easiest example: I have a Windows 2008 R2 standard DC with the DHCP server role. It hands out IPs via various IPv4 scopes, no problem there. WHAT I'D LIKE I would like a way to create a notification/eventlog entry/similar whenever a device gets a DHCP address lease and that device IS NOT a domain joined computer in Active Directory. It doesn't matter to me whether it is custom Powershell, etc. Bottom line = I'd like a way to know when non-domain devices are on the network without using 802.1X at the moment. I know this won't account for static IP devices. I do have monitoring software that will scan the network and find devices, but it isn't quite this granular in detail. RESEARCH DONE/OPTIONS CONSIDERED I don't see any such possibilities with the built in logging. Yes, I'm aware of 802.1X and have the ability to implement it long-term at this location but we are some time away from a project like that, and while that would solve network authentication issues, this is still helpful to me outside of 802.1X goals. I've looked around for some script bits, etc. that might prove useful but the things I'm finding lead me to believe that my google-fu is failing me at the moment. I believe the below logic is sound (assuming there isn't some existing solution): Device receives DHCP address Event log entry is recorded (event ID 10 in the DHCP audit log should work (since a new lease is what I'd be most interested in, not renewals): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd759178.aspx) At this point a script of some kind would probably have to take over for the remaining "STEPS" below. Somehow query this DHCP log for these event ID 10's (I would love push, but I'm guessing pull is the only recourse here) Parse the query for the name of the device being assigned the new lease Query AD for the device's name IF not found in AD, send a notification email If anyone has any ideas on how to properly do this, I'd really appreciate it. I'm not looking for a "gimme the codez" but would love to know if there are alternatives to the above list or if I'm not thinking clear and another method exists for gathering this information. If you have code snippets/PS commands you'd like to share to help accomplish this, all the better.

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• IIS6 Log time recording problems

  - by Hafthor

  On three separate occasions on two separate servers at nearly the same times, 6.9 hours seemingly went by without any data being written to the IIS logs, but, on closer inspection, it appears that it was all recorded all at once. Here's the facts as I know them: Windows Server 2003 R2 w/ IIS6 Logging using GMT, server local time GMT-7. Application was still operating and I have SQL data to prove that Time gaps appear in log file, not across two # headers appear at gap Load balancer pings every 30 seconds No caching Here's info on a particular case: an entry appears for 2009-09-21 18:09:27 then #headers the next entry is for 2009-09-22 01:21:54, and so are the next 1600 entries in this log file and 370 in the next log file. about half of the ~2000 entries on 2009-09-22 01:21:54 are load balancer pings (est. at 2/min for 6.9hrs = 828 pings) then entries are recorded as normal. I believe that these events may coincide with me deploying an ASP.NET application update into those machines. Here's some relevant content from the logs in question: ex090921.log line 3684 2009-09-21 17:54:40 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 2009-09-21 17:55:11 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 2009-09-21 17:55:42 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 2009-09-21 17:56:13 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 2009-09-21 17:56:45 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 0 #Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 #Version: 1.0 #Date: 2009-09-21 18:04:37 #Fields: date time cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status sc-bytes cs-bytes time-taken 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 3078 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 404 0 0 3733 122 109 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 278 122 3828 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 278 122 0 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 278 122 0 ... continues until line 5449 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 <eof> ex090922.log #Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 #Version: 1.0 #Date: 2009-09-22 00:00:16 #Fields: date time cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status sc-bytes cs-bytes time-taken 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 ... continues until line 367 2009-09-22 01:04:06 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 2009-09-22 01:04:30 GET /ping.aspx - 80 200 0 0 277 122 0 ... back to normal behavior Note the seemingly correct date/time written to the #header of the new log file. Also note that /ping.aspx returned 404 then switched to 200 just as the problem started. I rename the "I'm alive page" so the load balancer stops sending requests to the server while I'm working on it. What you see here is me renaming it back so the load balancer will use the server. So, this problem definitely coincides with me re-enabling the server. Any ideas?

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