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  • Agile Like Jazz

    - by Jeff Certain
    (I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so now, thinking that it needed to be tightened up a bit to make it less rambling. Since that’s clearly not going to happen, reader beware!) I had the privilege of spending around 90 minutes last night sitting and listening to Sonny Rollins play a concert at the Disney Center in LA. If you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is, I don’t know how to explain the experience; if you know who he is, I don’t need to. Suffice it to say that he has been recording professionally for over 50 years, and helped create an entire genre of music. A true master by any definition. One of the most intriguing aspects of a concert like this, however, is watching the master step aside and let the rest of the musicians play. Not just play their parts, but really play… letting them take over the spotlight, to strut their stuff, to soak up enthusiastic applause from the crowd. Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that Sonny Rollins has been doing this for more than a half-century. Maybe it has something to do with a kind of patience you learn when you’re on the far side of 80 – and the man can still blow a mean sax for 90 minutes without stopping! Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was out there for the love of the music and the love of the show, not because he had anything to prove to anyone and, I like to think, not for the money. Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that, when you’re at that level of mastery, the other musicians are going to be good. Really good. Whatever the reasons, there was a incredible freedom on that stage – the ability to improvise, for each musician to showcase their own specialization and skills, and them come back to the common theme, back to being on the same page, as it were. All this took place in the same venue that is home to the L.A. Phil. Somehow, I can’t ever see the same kind of free-wheeling improvisation happening in that context. And, since I’m a geek, I started thinking about agility. Rollins has put together a quintet that reflects his own particular style and past. No upright bass or piano for Rollins – drums, bongos, electric guitar and bass guitar along with his sax. It’s not about the mix of instruments. Other trios, quartets, and sextets use different mixes of instruments. New Orleans jazz tends towards trombones instead of sax; some prefer cornet or trumpet. But no matter what the choice of instruments, size matters. Team sizes are something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We’re on a quest to rethink how our teams are organized. They just feel too big, too unwieldy. In fact, they really don’t feel like teams at all. Most of the time, they feel more like collections or people who happen to report to the same manager. I attribute this to a couple factors. One is over-specialization; we have a tendency to have people work in silos. Although the teams are product-focused, within them our developers are both generalists and specialists. On the one hand, we expect them to be able to build an entire vertical slice of the application; on the other hand, each developer tends to be responsible for the vertical slice. As a result, developers often work on their own piece of the puzzle, in isolation. This sort of feels like working on a jigsaw in a group – each person taking a set of colors and piecing them together to reveal a portion of the overall picture. But what inevitably happens when you go to meld all those pieces together? Inevitably, you have some sections that are too big to move easily. These sections end up falling apart under their own weight as you try to move them. Not only that, but there are other challenges – figuring out where that section fits, and how to tie it into the rest of the puzzle. Often, this is when you find a few pieces need to be added – these pieces are “glue,” if you will. The other issue that arises is due to the overhead of maintaining communications in a team. My mother, who worked in IT for around 30 years, once told me that 20% per team member is a good rule of thumb for maintaining communication. While this is a rule of thumb, it seems to imply that any team over about 6 people is going to become less agile simple because of the communications burden. Teams of ten or twelve seem like they fall into the philharmonic organizational model. Complicated pieces of music requiring dozens of players to all be on the same page requires a much different model than the jazz quintet. There’s much less room for improvisation, originality or freedom. (There are probably orchestral musicians who will take exception to this characterization; I’m calling it like I see it from the cheap seats.) And, there’s one guy up front who is running the show, whose job is to keep all of those dozens of players on the same page, to facilitate communications. Somehow, the orchestral model doesn’t feel much like a self-organizing team, either. The first violin may be the best violinist in the orchestra, but they don’t get to perform free-wheeling solos. I’ve never heard of an orchestra getting together for a jam session. But I have heard of teams that organize their work based on the developers available, rather than organizing the developers based on the work required. I have heard of teams where desired functionality is deferred – or worse yet, schedules are missed – because one critical person doesn’t have any bandwidth available. I’ve heard of teams where people simply don’t have the big picture, because there is too much communication overhead for everyone to be aware of everything that is happening on a project. I once heard Paul Rayner say something to the effect of “you have a process that is perfectly designed to give you exactly the results you have.” Given a choice, I want a process that’s much more like jazz than orchestral music. I want a process that doesn’t burden me with lots of forms and checkboxes and stuff. Give me the simplest, most lightweight process that will work – and a smaller team of the best developers I can find. This seems like the kind of process that will get the kind of result I want to be part of.

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  • Instructions on how to configure a WebLogic Cluster and use it with Oracle Http Server

    - by Laurent Goldsztejn
    On October 17th I delivered a webcast on WebLogic Clustering that included a demo with Apache as the proxy server.  I realized that many steps are needed to set up the configuration I used during the demo.  The purpose of this article is to go through these steps to show how quickly and easily one can define a new cluster and then proxy requests via an Oracle Http Server (OHS). The domain configuration wizard offers the option to create a cluster.  The administration console or WLST, the Weblogic scripting tool can also be used to define a new cluster.  It can be created at any time but the servers that will participate in it cannot be in a running state. Cluster Creation using the configuration wizard Network and architecture requirements need to be considered while choosing between unicast and multicast. Multicast Vs. Unicast with WebLogic Clustering is of great help to make the best decision between the two messaging modes.  In addition, Configure Cluster offers details on each single field displayed above. After this initial configuration page, individual servers could be assigned to this newly created cluster although servers can be added later to the cluster.  What is not recommended is for the Admin server to participate in a cluster as the main purpose of the Admin server is to perform the bulk of the processing for the domain.  Servers need to stop before being assigned to a cluster.  There is also no minimum number of servers that have to participate in the cluster. At this point the configuration should be done and the cluster created successfully.  This can easily be verified from the console. Each clustered managed server can be launched to join the cluster.   At startup the following messages should be logged for each clustered managed server: <Notice> <WeblogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to STARTING> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000197> <Listening for announcements from cluster using messaging_mode cluster messaging> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000133> <Waiting to synchronize with other running members of cluster_name>  It's time to try sending requests to the cluster and we will do this with the help of Oracle Http Server to play the role of a proxy server to demonstrate load balancing.  Proxy Server configuration  The first step is to download Weblogic Server Web Server Plugin that will enhance the web server by handling requests aimed at being sent to the Weblogic cluster.  For our test Oracle Http Server (OHS) will be used.  However plug-ins are also available for Apache Http server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Oracle iPlanet Webserver or even WebLogic Server with the HttpClusterServlet. Once OHS is installed on the system, the configuration file, mod_wl_ohs.conf, will need to be altered to include Weblogic proxy specifics. First of all, add the following directive to instruct Apache to load the Weblogic shared object module extracted from the plugins file just downloaded. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl_ohs.so and then create an IfModule directive to encapsulate the following location block so that proxy will be enabled by path (each request including /wls will be directed directly to the WebLogic Cluster).  You could also proxy requests by MIME type using MatchExpression in the Location block. <IfModule weblogic_module> <Location /wls>    SetHandler weblogic-handler    PathTrim /wls    WebLogicCluster MS1_URL:port,MS2_URL:port    Debug ON    WLLogFile        c:/tmp/global_proxy.log     WLTempDir        "c:/myTemp"    DebugConfigInfo  On </Location> </IfModule> SetHandler specifies the handler for the plug-in module  PathTrim will instruct the plug-in to trim /w ls from the URL before forwarding the request to the cluster. The list of WebLogic Servers defined in WeblogicCluster could contain a mixed set of clustered and single servers.  However, the dynamic list returned for this parameter will only contain valid clustered servers and may contain more servers if not all clustered servers are listed in WeblogicCluster. Testing proxy and load balancing It's time to start OHS web server which should at this point be configured correctly to proxy requests to the clustered servers.  By default round-robin is the load balancing strategy set by WebLogic. Testing the load balancing can be easily done by disabling cookies on your browser given that a request containing a cookie attempts to connect to the primary server. If that attempt fails, the plug-in attempts to make a connection to the next available server in the list in a round-robin fashion.  With cookies enabled, you could use two different browsers to test the load balancing with a JSP page that contains the following: <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" language="java"  %>  <%  String path = request.getContextPath();   String getProtocol=request.getScheme();   String getDomain=request.getServerName();   String getPort=Integer.toString(request.getLocalPort());   String getPath = getProtocol+"://"+getDomain+":"+getPort+path+"/"; %> <html> <body> Receiving Server <%=getPath%> </body> </html>  Assuming that you name the JSP page Test.jsp and the webapp that contains it TestApp, your browsers should open the following URL: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp  Each browser should connect to a different clustered server and this simple JSP should confirm that.  The webapp that contains the JSP needs to be deployed to the cluster. You can also verify that the load is correctly balanced by looking at the proxy log file.  Each request generates a set of log entries that starts with : timestamp ================New Request: Each request is associated with a primary server and a secondary server if one is available.  For our test request, the following entries should appear in the log as well:Using Uri /wls/TestApp/Test.jsp After trimming path: '/TestApp/Test.jsp' The final request string is '/TestApp/Test.jsp' If an exception occurs, it should also be logged in the proxy log file with the prefix:timestamp *******Exception type   WeblogicBridgeConfig DebugConfigInfo enables runtime statistics and the production of configuration information.  For security purposes, this parameter should be turned off in production. http://webserver_host:port/path/xyz.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig will display a proxy bridge page detailing the plugin configuration followed by runtime statistics which could help in diagnosing issues along with the analyzing of the proxy log file.  In our example the url would be: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig  Here is how the top section of the screen can look like: The bottom part of the page contains runtime statistics, here is a snippet of it (unrelated with the previous JSP example).   This entire plugin configuration should be very similar with other web servers, what varies is the name of the proxy server configuration file. So, as you can see, it only takes a few minutes to configure a Weblogic cluster and get servers to join it. 

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  • Looking into the JQuery Image Zoom Plugin

    - by nikolaosk
    I have been using JQuery for a couple of years now and it has helped me to solve many problems on the client side of web development.  You can find all my posts about JQuery in this link. In this post I will be providing you with a hands-on example on the JQuery Image Zoom Plugin.If you want you can have a look at this post, where I describe the JQuery Cycle Plugin.You can find another post of mine talking about the JQuery Carousel Lite Plugin here.I will be writing more posts regarding the most commonly used JQuery Plugins. I have been using extensively this plugin in my websites.You can use this plugin to move mouse around an image and see a zoomed in version of a portion of it. 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.  You can download this plugin from this link I launch Expression Web 4.0 and then I type the following HTML markup (I am using HTML 5) <html lang="en">  <head>    <title>Liverpool Legends</title>        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.8.3.min.js"> </script>     <script type="text/javascript" src="jqzoom.pack.1.0.1.js"></script>        <script type="text/javascript">        $(function () {            $(".nicezoom").jqzoom();        });    </script>       </head>  <body>    <header>        <h1>Liverpool Legends</h1>    </header>        <div id="main">            <a href="championsofeurope-large.jpg" class="nicezoom" title="Champions">        <img src="championsofeurope.jpg"  title="Champions">    </a>          </div>            <footer>        <p>All Rights Reserved</p>      </footer>     </body>  </html>   This is a very simple markup. I have added one large and one small image (make sure you use your own when trying this example) I have added references to the JQuery library (current version is 1.8.3) and the JQuery Image Zoom Plugin. Then I add 2 images in the main div element.Note the class nicezoom inside the href element. The Javascript code that makes it all happen follows.    <script type="text/javascript">        $(function () {            $(".nicezoom").jqzoom();        });    </script>     It couldn't be any simpler than that. I view my simple in Internet Explorer 10 and it works as expected. I have tested this simple solution in all major browsers and it works fine.Inside the head section we can add another Javascript script utilising some more options regarding the zoom plugin.   <script type="text/javascript">            $(function () {        var options = {                  zoomType: 'standard',                  lens:true,                  preloadImages: true,                  alwaysOn:false,                  zoomWidth: 400,                  zoomHeight: 350,                  xOffset:190,                  yOffset:80,                  position:'right'                          };          $('.nicezoom').jqzoom(options);      });         </script> I would like to explain briefly what some of those options mean. zoomType - Other admitted option values are 'reverse','drag','innerzoom' zoomWidth - The popup window width showing the zoomed area zoomHeight - The popup window height showing the zoomed area xOffset - The popup window x offset from the small image.  yOffset - The popup window y offset from the small image.  position - The popup window position.Admitted values:'right' ,'left' ,'top' ,'bottom' preloadImages - if set to true,jqzoom will preload large images. You can test it yourself and see the results in your favorite browser. Hope it helps!!!

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  • Moving from Tortoise to TFS

    - by MarkPearl
    The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed many of the worries that I had about how safe my code was on a shared folder and also gave us the opportunity to safely have several developers work on the same project at the same time. The only times when we have been unhappy has been when we have had SVN hell days – which pretty much occur when you are doing something out of the norm and suddenly SVN just won’t resolve conflicts or something along those lines. This happens once every 4 or 5 months and is not necessarily a problem caused directly by SVN – but a problem augmented by SVN. When you have SVN hell days you want to curse SVN! With that in mind I recently have been relooking at our source code control. I have explored using GIT and was very impressed by it and have also looked at TFS. From a source code control perspective I don’t want to get into a heated discussion on which one is better – but I do want to mention that I wear two hats in my organization – software developer & manager, and with the manager hat on I tend to sway the TFS route. So when I was given a coupon to test DiscountASP.Net Team Foundation Server Service for a year, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try TFS in a distributed environment and also make the first step towards having an integrated development management system. Some of the things that appeal to me about DiscountASP’s offering are the following… Basic management / planning facilities like to do lists inside Visual Studio Daily backup of data on the server – we are developers, not IT managers and so the more of this I could outsource the better Distributed solution – all of us work remotely and so this was a big one as well. Registering and Setting Up with DiscountASP.NET The whole registration process was simple and intuitive. The web interface is not the most visually impressive one, but it is functional and a few seconds after I clicked the last submit button a email was sitting in my inbox giving me my control panel username and suggesting that I read the “Getting Started” article. The getting started article was easy to read and understand so no complaints there either. Next to set my dev environment to work. With a few references to the getting started article I had completed the whole setup process in a matter of minutes. Ten minutes after initiating the whole thing I was logged into VS2010 and creating my first TFS project. With the service that I signed up for, I have access for 5 users – which is sufficient for my internal needs. So from what I can tell, to set the rest of us up on the system I just need to supply them with their user credentials and url. My Concerns Resolved 1) Security So, a few concerns I had about the service. First and foremost – is it secure? I would hate for someone to get access to our code and the whole idea of putting it up on the internet is a concern for me. Turning to the Knowledge Base on the DiscountASP website this is one of the first question I can see answered. According to them it is secure. I have extracted their comment below regarding this. Our TFS hosting service is secure. We only accept HTTPS connections ensuring that any client-server data transmission is encrypted. At the network level, all of our systems are protected by multiple Juniper firewalls, Tipping Point's Intrusion Detection System (see Tipping Point's case study of our use here), and we also employ DDoS mitigation to add extra layers of security. Additionally, physical access to the servers is tightly restricted. Please see the security section of this Knowledge Base article for further details. 2) Web Portal Access The other big concern I have is regarding web portal access. In the ideal world I would like to be able to give my end users access to a web portal for reporting bugs etc. When I initially read through the FAQ of the site it mentioned that there was web portal access – but from what I can see this is just for “users”. Since I am limited to 5 users for the account, it would not be practical to set up external users that we could get feedback from on bugs etc. I would be interested if this is possible – and if so if someone could post it in the comments it would be much appreciated. If this isn’t possible, it is a slight let down as we rely heavily on end user feedback to get feedback and it would have been ideal to have gotten this within the service. Other than those two items, I didn’t have any real concerns that were unresolved. So where do I go from here? So time passed by from the initial writing of this post and as work whirred in and out of my inbox I have still not had a proper opportunity to give the service a test run. Recently though things have began to slow down and then surprise surprise I had another SVN Hell day. With that experience I had a new found resolve to get our team on TFS and so today we are going to start to use the service as a team. I am hoping that I do not have TFS hell days – but if I do, I will be sure to write about them. In short - the verdict is still out on whether this service is going to be invaluable to my business or whether it will create more headaches than it is worth BUT I am hopping it will be an invaluable service. I will only really be able to determine that in a few months… till then!

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  • Benchmarking MySQL Replication with Multi-Threaded Slaves

    - by Mat Keep
    0 0 1 1145 6530 Homework 54 15 7660 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6. As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to: · Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data) · Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog) The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application data using databases - e.g. multi-tenant systems deployed in cloud environments. Multi-Threaded Slaves are just one of many enhancements to replication previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Development Release, which include: · Global Transaction Identifiers coupled with MySQL utilities for automatic failover / switchover and slave promotion · Crash Safe Slaves and Binlog · Optimized Row Based Replication · Replication Event Checksums · Time Delayed Replication These and many more are discussed in the “MySQL 5.6 Replication: Enabling the Next Generation of Web & Cloud Services” Developer Zone article  Back to the benchmark - details are as follows. Environment The test environment consisted of two Linux servers: · one running the replication master · one running the replication slave. Only the slave was involved in the actual measurements, and was based on the following configuration: - Hardware: Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M2 Server - CPU: 2 sockets, 6 cores with hyper-threading, 2930 MHz. - OS: 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.1 - Memory: 48 GB Test Procedure Initial Setup: Two MySQL servers were started on two different hosts, configured as replication master and slave. 10 sysbench schemas were created, each with a single table: CREATE TABLE `sbtest` (    `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,    `k` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',    `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    PRIMARY KEY (`id`),    KEY `k` (`k`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 10,000 rows were inserted in each of the 10 tables, for a total of 100,000 rows. When the inserts had replicated to the slave, the slave threads were stopped. The slave data directory was copied to a backup location and the slave threads position in the master binlog noted. 10 sysbench clients, each configured with 10 threads, were spawned at the same time to generate a random schema load against each of the 10 schemas on the master. Each sysbench client executed 10,000 "update key" statements: UPDATE sbtest set k=k+1 WHERE id = <random row> In total, this generated 100,000 update statements to later replicate during the test itself. Test Methodology: The number of slave workers to test with was configured using: SET GLOBAL slave_parallel_workers=<workers> Then the slave IO thread was started and the test waited for all the update queries to be copied over to the relay log on the slave. The benchmark clock was started and then the slave SQL thread was started. The test waited for the slave SQL thread to finish executing the 100k update queries, doing "select master_pos_wait()". When master_pos_wait() returned, the benchmark clock was stopped and the duration calculated. The calculated duration from the benchmark clock should be close to the time it took for the SQL thread to execute the 100,000 update queries. The 100k queries divided by this duration gave the benchmark metric, reported as Queries Per Second (QPS). Test Reset: The test-reset cycle was implemented as follows: · the slave was stopped · the slave data directory replaced with the previous backup · the slave restarted with the slave threads replication pointer repositioned to the point before the update queries in the binlog. The test could then be repeated with identical set of queries but a different number of slave worker threads, enabling a fair comparison. The Test-Reset cycle was repeated 3 times for 0-24 number of workers and the QPS metric calculated and averaged for each worker count. MySQL Configuration The relevant configuration settings used for MySQL are as follows: binlog-format=STATEMENT relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE As described in the test procedure, the slave_parallel_workers setting was modified as part of the test logic. The consequence of changing this setting is: 0 worker threads:    - current (i.e. single threaded) sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread and 1 x SQL thread    - SQL thread both reads and executes the events 1 worker thread:    - sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 1 x Worker thread    - coordinator reads the event and hands it to the worker who executes 2+ worker threads:    - parallel execution    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 2+ Worker threads    - coordinator reads events and hands them to the workers who execute them Results Figure 1 below shows that Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver ~5x higher replication performance when configured with 10 worker threads, with the load evenly distributed across our 10 x schemas. This result is compared to the current replication implementation which is based on a single SQL thread only (i.e. zero worker threads). Figure 1: 5x Higher Performance with Multi-Threaded Slaves The following figure shows more detailed results, with QPS sampled and reported as the worker threads are incremented. The raw numbers behind this graph are reported in the Appendix section of this post. Figure 2: Detailed Results As the results above show, the configuration does not scale noticably from 5 to 9 worker threads. When configured with 10 worker threads however, scalability increases significantly. The conclusion therefore is that it is desirable to configure the same number of worker threads as schemas. Other conclusions from the results: · Running with 1 worker compared to zero workers just introduces overhead without the benefit of parallel execution. · As expected, having more workers than schemas adds no visible benefit. Aside from what is shown in the results above, testing also demonstrated that the following settings had a very positive effect on slave performance: relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE For 5+ workers, it was up to 2.3 times as fast to run with TABLE compared to FILE. Conclusion As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver significant performance increases to MySQL replication when handling multiple schemas. This, and the other replication enhancements introduced in MySQL 5.6 are fully available for you to download and evaluate now from the MySQL Developer site (select Development Release tab). You can learn more about MySQL 5.6 from the documentation  Please don’t hesitate to comment on this or other replication blogs with feedback and questions. Appendix – Detailed Results

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  • Refactoring FizzBuzz

    - by MarkPearl
    A few years ago I blogger about FizzBuzz, at the time the post was prompted by Scott Hanselman who had podcasted about how surprized he was that some programmers could not even solve the FizzBuzz problem within a reasonable period of time during a job interview. At the time I thought I would give the problem a go in F# and sure enough the solution was fairly simple – I then also did a basic solution in C# but never posted it. Since then I have learned that being able to solve a problem and how you solve the problem are two totally different things. Today I decided to give the problem a retry and see if I had learnt anything new in the last year or so. Here is how my solution looked after refactoring… Solution 1 – Cheap and Nasty public class FizzBuzzCalculator { public string NumberFormat(int number) { var numDivisibleBy3 = (number % 3) == 0; var numDivisibleBy5 = (number % 5) == 0; if (numDivisibleBy3 && numDivisibleBy5) return String.Format("{0} FizzBuz", number); else if (numDivisibleBy3) return String.Format("{0} Fizz", number); else if (numDivisibleBy5) return String.Format("{0} Buz", number); return number.ToString(); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var fizzBuzz = new FizzBuzzCalculator(); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { Console.WriteLine(fizzBuzz.NumberFormat(i)); } } } My first attempt I just looked at solving the problem – it works, and could be an acceptable solution but tonight I thought I would see how far  I could refactor it… The section I decided to focus on was the mass of if..else code in the NumberFormat method. Solution 2 – Replacing If…Else with a Dictionary public class FizzBuzzCalculator { private readonly Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> _mappings; public FizzBuzzCalculator(Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> mappings) { _mappings = mappings; } public string NumberFormat(int number) { var numDivisibleBy3 = (number % 3) == 0; var numDivisibleBy5 = (number % 5) == 0; var mappedKey = new Tuple<bool, bool>(numDivisibleBy3, numDivisibleBy5); return String.Format("{0} {1}", number, _mappings[mappedKey]); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var mappings = new Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> { { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, true), "- FizzBuzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, false), "- Fizz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, true), "- Buzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, false), ""} }; var fizzBuzz = new FizzBuzzCalculator(mappings); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { Console.WriteLine(fizzBuzz.NumberFormat(i)); } Console.ReadLine(); } } In my second attempt I looked at removing the if else in the NumberFormat method. A dictionary proved to be useful for this – I added a constructor to the class and injected the dictionary mapping. One could argue that this is totally overkill, but if I was going to use this code in a large system an approach like this makes it easy to put this data in a configuration file, which would up its OC (Open for extensibility, closed for modification principle). I could of course take the OC principle even further – the check for divisibility by 3 and 5 is tightly coupled to this class. If I wanted to make it 4 instead of 3, I would need to adjust this class. This introduces my third refactoring. Solution 3 – Introducing Delegates and Injecting them into the class public delegate bool FizzBuzzComparison(int number); public class FizzBuzzCalculator { private readonly Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> _mappings; private readonly FizzBuzzComparison _comparison1; private readonly FizzBuzzComparison _comparison2; public FizzBuzzCalculator(Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> mappings, FizzBuzzComparison comparison1, FizzBuzzComparison comparison2) { _mappings = mappings; _comparison1 = comparison1; _comparison2 = comparison2; } public string NumberFormat(int number) { var mappedKey = new Tuple<bool, bool>(_comparison1(number), _comparison2(number)); return String.Format("{0} {1}", number, _mappings[mappedKey]); } } class Program { private static bool DivisibleByNum(int number, int divisor) { return number % divisor == 0; } public static bool Divisibleby3(int number) { return number % 3 == 0; } public static bool Divisibleby5(int number) { return number % 5 == 0; } static void Main(string[] args) { var mappings = new Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> { { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, true), "- FizzBuzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, false), "- Fizz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, true), "- Buzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, false), ""} }; var fizzBuzz = new FizzBuzzCalculator(mappings, Divisibleby3, Divisibleby5); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { Console.WriteLine(fizzBuzz.NumberFormat(i)); } Console.ReadLine(); } } I have taken this one step further and introduced delegates that are injected into the FizzBuzz Calculator class, from an OC principle perspective it has probably made it more compliant than the previous Solution 2, but there seems to be a lot of noise. Anonymous Delegates increase the readability level, which is what I have done in Solution 4. Solution 4 – Anon Delegates public delegate bool FizzBuzzComparison(int number); public class FizzBuzzCalculator { private readonly Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> _mappings; private readonly FizzBuzzComparison _comparison1; private readonly FizzBuzzComparison _comparison2; public FizzBuzzCalculator(Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> mappings, FizzBuzzComparison comparison1, FizzBuzzComparison comparison2) { _mappings = mappings; _comparison1 = comparison1; _comparison2 = comparison2; } public string NumberFormat(int number) { var mappedKey = new Tuple<bool, bool>(_comparison1(number), _comparison2(number)); return String.Format("{0} {1}", number, _mappings[mappedKey]); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var mappings = new Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> { { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, true), "- FizzBuzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, false), "- Fizz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, true), "- Buzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, false), ""} }; var fizzBuzz = new FizzBuzzCalculator(mappings, (n) => n % 3 == 0, (n) => n % 5 == 0); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { Console.WriteLine(fizzBuzz.NumberFormat(i)); } Console.ReadLine(); } }   Using the anonymous delegates I think the noise level has now been reduced. This is where I am going to end this post, I have gone through 4 iterations of the code from the initial solution using If..Else to delegates and dictionaries. I think each approach would have it’s pro’s and con’s and depending on the intention of where the code would be used would be a large determining factor. If you can think of an alternative way to do FizzBuzz, add a comment!

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  • Top 10 Browser Productivity Tips

    - by Renso
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/renso/archive/2013/10/14/top-10-browser-productivity-tips.aspxYou don’t have to be a geek to be a productive browser user. The tips below have been selected by actions users take most of the time to navigate a web-site but use long-standing keyboard or mouse actions to get them done, when there are keyboard short-cuts you can use instead. Since you hands are already on the keyboard it is almost always faster to sue a keyboard shortcut to get something done that you usually used the mouse for. For example right-clicking on something to copy it and then doing to same for pasting something is very time consuming, keyboard shortcuts have been created that simplify the task. All it takes are a few memory brain cells to remember them. Here are the tips, in no particular order:   Tip 1 Hold down the spacebar on your keyboard to page to the end of your web page rather than using your mouse. This is really a slow way of doing it. If you want to page one page at a time, hit the spacebar once, and again to page again. But if you want to page all the way to the end of the web page simply hit Ctrl+End (that is hold down the Ctrl key and hit the End button on your keyboard). To get to the top of your web page, simply hit Ctrl + Home to go all the way to the top of your web page. Tip 2 Where are my downloads? Some folks run downloads again-and-again because they do not know where the last one went and they do not see the popup, or browser note on their web page in the footer, etc. Simply hit Ctrl+J. Works in most browsers. Tip 3 Selecting a US state from a drop down box. Don’t use the mouse, takes just way too long to scroll. When you tab to the drop down box or click on it with your mouse, simply hit the first character of the state and it will be selected. For Texas for example hit the letter “T” twice on your keyboard to get to it. The same concept can be applied to any drop down box that is alphabetical or numerically sorted. Tip 4 Fixing spelling errors. All modern-day browsers support this now. You see the red wavy lines underscoring a word, yes it is a spelling error. How do you fix it? Don’t overtype it or try and fix it manually, fist right-click on it and a list of suggestions comes up. If it does not show up, like my name “Renso” and you know how to spell your name as in this example, look further down the list of options (the little window popup that appears when you right click) and you should see an option to “Add to Dictionary”. Be warned, when you add it, it only adds it to the browser you’re using’s dictionary. If you use Google Chrome, Firefox and IE, each one will have their own list. Tip 5 So you have trouble seeing the text on the screen. Or you are looking at a photo, for example in Facebook. You want to zoom in to read better or zoom into a photo a bit more. Hit Ctrl++ (hold down Ctrl key and hit the plus key – actually it’s the equal key but it is easier to remember that it is plus for bigger). Hit the minus to zoom out. Now you can’t remember what the original size was since you were so excited to hit it 20 times, or was that 21… Simply hit Ctrl+0 (that is zero) and it will reset it to the default. Tip 6 So you closed a couple of tabs in your browser. Suddenly you remember something you wanted to double-check something on one of the tabs, you cannot remember the URL ad the tab is gone forever, or is it? Simply hit Ctrl+Shift+t and it will bring back your tabs one by one each time you click the T. This has also been a great way for me to quickly close some tabs because I don’t want my boss to see I’m shopping and then hitting Ctrl+Shift+t to quickly get it back and complete my check-put and purchase. Or, for parents, when you walk into your daughter’s room and you see she quickly clicks and closes a window/tab in here browser. Not to worry my little darling, daddy will Ctrl+Shift+t and see what boys on Facebook you were talking too… Tip 7 The web browser is frozen on your PC/Laptop/Whatever, in this example it may be your Internet Explorer browser. I don’t mention Firefox or Chrome here because it probably never happens in their world. You cannot close it, it won’t respond to anything you have done s far except for the next step you are about to take, which is throw your two-day old coffee on your keyboard. This happens especially on sites that want to force you to complete a purchase order. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard on any version of windows, select TASK MANAGER. In the  First Tab, which is the Process Tab, look for the item in question. In this example you should see Internet Explorer. Right-click it and select “End Task”. It will force the thread out of memory and terminate that process. You can of course do this with any program running under your account. Tip 8 This is a personal favorite of mine. To select words in the paragraph without using the mouse. You don’t want to select one character at a time like when you use the Ctrl+arrows as it can be very slow if you want to select a lot of text. You also want to select whole words. Simply use the Ctrl+Shift_arrow (right or left depending which direction you want to go. Tip 9 I was a bit reluctant to add this one, but being in the professional services industry still come across many-a-folk that simply can’t copy-and-paste them-all text or images that reside on them screens, y’all. Ctrl+c to copy and Ctrl+v to paste it. Works a lot faster than using the mouse. You may be asking: “Well why in the devil did they not use Ctrl+p for paste…. because that is for printing. This is of course not limited to the browser world, it applies to almost any piece of software running on PC or Mac. Go try it on an image on your browser, right-click it and select copy. Open a word document and Ctrl+v to paste the image in there. Please consider copyright laws. Tip 10 Getting rid of annoying ads. Now this only works when you load a web page, meaning when you get back to the same page later you will have to do this again and you will need to learn a tool to do it, WELL WORTH IT. For example, I use GrooveShark to listen to music but I don’t like the ads they show. Install a tool like Firebug for Firefox or use the Ctrl+Shift+I on Chrome to bring up the developer toolbar. Shows at the bottom of the page. With Firefox, once you have installed Firebug as an add-on, a yellow bug should appear on the top right-hand-side of your browser, click on it to display the developer toolbar. You will need to learn how to use it, but once you know how to select an item/section on the window (usually just right-click the add you don’t want to see and select “Inspect Element”, the developer toolbar will appear (if not already there)) and then simply hit delete and it will remove the add from the screen. If you don’t know HTML you may need to play with it a bit, but once you understand how it works can open up a whole new world for you on how web pages actually work. If you can think of any others that have saved you a ton of time please let me know so I can add them to a top 99 list.

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  • Corsair Hackers Reboot

    It wasn't easy for me to attend but it was absolutely worth to go. The Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM) organised another get-together for any open source enthusiast here on the island. Strangely named "Corsair Hackers Reboot" but it stands for a positive cause: "Corsair Hackers Reboot Event A collaborative activity involving LUGM, UoM Computer Club, Fortune Way Shopping Mall and several geeks from around the island, striving to put FOSS into homes & offices. The public is invited to discover and explore Free Software & Open Source." And it was a good opportunity for me and the kids to visit the east coast of Mauritius, too. Perfect timing It couldn't have been better... Why? Well, for two important reasons (in terms of IT): End of support for Microsoft Windows XP - 08.04.2014 Release of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support - 17.04.2014 Quite funnily, those two IT dates weren't the initial reasons and only during the weeks of preparations we put those together. And therefore it was even more positive to promote the use of Linux and open source software in general to a broader audience. Getting there ... Thanks to the new motor way M3 and all the additional road work which has been completed recently it was very simple to get across the island in a very quick and relaxed manner. Compared to my trips in the early days of living in Mauritius (and riding on a scooter) it was very smooth and within less than an hour we hit Centrale de Flacq. Well, being in the city doesn't necessarily mean that one has arrived at the destination. But thanks to modern technology I had a quick look on Google Maps, and we finally managed to get a parking behind the huge bus terminal in Flacq. From there it was just a short walk to Fortune Way. The children were trying to count the number of buses... Well, lots and lots of buses - really impressive actually. What was presented? There were different areas set up. Right at the entrance one's attention was directly drawn towards the elevated hacker's stage. Similar to rock stars performing their gig there was bunch of computers, laptops and networking equipment in order to cater the right working conditions for coding/programming challenge(s) on the one hand and for the pen-testing or system hacking competition on the other hand. Personally, I was very impresses that actually Nitin took care of the pen-testing competition. He hardly started one year back with Linux in general, and Kali Linux specifically. Seeing his personal development from absolute newbie to a decent Linux system administrator within such a short period of time, is really impressive. His passion to open source software made him a living. Next, clock-wise seen, was the Kid's Corner with face-painting as the main attraction. Additionally, there were numerous paper print outs to colour. Plus a decent workstation with the educational suite GCompris. Of course, my little ones were into that. They already know GCompris since a while as they are allowed to use it on an IGEL thin client terminal here at home. To simplify my life, I set up GCompris as full-screen guest session on the server, and they can pass the login screen without any further obstacles. And because it's a thin client hooked up to a XDMCP remote session I don't have to worry about the hardware on their desk, too. The next section was the main attraction of the event: BYOD - Bring Your Own Device Well, compared to the usual context of BYOD the corsairs had a completely different intention. Here, you could bring your own laptop and a team of knowledgeable experts - read: geeks and so on - offered to fully convert your system on any Linux distribution of your choice. And even though I came later, I was told that the USB pen drives had been in permanent use. From being prepared via dd command over launching LiveCD session to finally installing a fresh Linux system on bare metal. Most interestingly, I did a similar job already a couple of months ago, while upgrading an existing Windows XP system to Xubuntu 13.10. So far, the female owner is very happy and enjoys her system almost every evening to go shopping online, checking mails, and reading latest news from the Anime world. Back to the Hackers event, Ish told me that they managed approximately 20 conversion during the day. Furthermore, Ajay and others gladly assisted some visitors with some tricky issues and by the end of the day you can call is a success. While I was around, there was a elderly male visitor that got a full-fledged system conversion to a Linux system running completely in French language. A little bit more to the centre it was Yasir's turn to demonstrate his Arduino hardware that he hooked up with an experimental electrical circuit board connected to an LCD matrix display. That's the real spirit of hacking, and he showed some minor adjustments on the fly while demo'ing the system. Also, very interesting there was a thermal sensor around. Personally, I think that platforms like the Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi have a great potential at a very affordable price in order to bring a better understanding of electronics as well as computer programming to a broader audience. It would be great to see more of those experiments during future activities. And last but not least there were a small number of vendors. Amongst them was Emtel - once again as sponsor of the general internet connectivity - and another hardware supplier from Riche Terre shopping mall. They had a good collection of Android related gimmicks, like a autonomous web cam that can convert any TV with HDMI connector into an online video chat system given WiFi. It's actually kind of awesome to have a Skype or Google hangout video session on the big screen rather than on the laptop. Some pictures of the event LUGM: Great conversations on Linux, open source and free software during the Corsair Hackers Reboot LUGM: Educational workstation running GCompris suite attracted the youngest attendees of the day. Of course, face painting had to be done prior to hacking... LUGM: Nadim demoing some Linux specifics to interested visitors. Everyone was pretty busy during the whole day LUGM: The hacking competition, here pen-testing a wireless connection and access point between multiple machines LUGM: Well prepared workstations to be able to 'upgrade' visitors' machines to any Linux operating system Final thoughts Gratefully, during the preparations of the event I was invited to leave some comments or suggestions, and the team of the LUGM did a great job. The outdoor banner was a eye-catcher, the various flyers and posters for the event were clearly written and as far as I understood from the quick chats I had with Ish, Nadim, Nitin, Ajay, and of course others all were very happy about the event execution. Great job, LUGM! And I'm already looking forward to the next Corsair Hackers Reboot event ... Crossing fingers: Very soon and hopefully this year again :) Update: In the media The event had been announced in local media, too. L'Express: Salon informatique: Hacking Challenge à Flacq

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  • MapRedux - PowerShell and Big Data

    - by Dittenhafer Solutions
    MapRedux – #PowerShell and #Big Data Have you been hearing about “big data”, “map reduce” and other large scale computing terms over the past couple of years and been curious to dig into more detail? Have you read some of the Apache Hadoop online documentation and unfortunately concluded that it wasn't feasible to setup a “test” hadoop environment on your machine? More recently, I have read about some of Microsoft’s work to enable Hadoop on the Azure cloud. Being a "Microsoft"-leaning technologist, I am more inclinded to be successful with experimentation when on the Windows platform. Of course, it is not that I am "religious" about one set of technologies other another, but rather more experienced. Anyway, within the past couple of weeks I have been thinking about PowerShell a bit more as the 2012 PowerShell Scripting Games approach and it occured to me that PowerShell's support for Windows Remote Management (WinRM), and some other inherent features of PowerShell might lend themselves particularly well to a simple implementation of the MapReduce framework. I fired up my PowerShell ISE and started writing just to see where it would take me. Quite simply, the ScriptBlock feature combined with the ability of Invoke-Command to create remote jobs on networked servers provides much of the plumbing of a distributed computing environment. There are some limiting factors of course. Microsoft provided some default settings which prevent PowerShell from taking over a network without administrative approval first. But even with just one adjustment, a given Windows-based machine can become a node in a MapReduce-style distributed computing environment. Ok, so enough introduction. Let's talk about the code. First, any machine that will participate as a remote "node" will need WinRM enabled for remote access, as shown below. This is not exactly practical for hundreds of intended nodes, but for one (or five) machines in a test environment it does just fine. C:> winrm quickconfig WinRM is not set up to receive requests on this machine. The following changes must be made: Set the WinRM service type to auto start. Start the WinRM service. Make these changes [y/n]? y Alternatively, you could take the approach described in the Remotely enable PSRemoting post from the TechNet forum and use PowerShell to create remote scheduled tasks that will call Enable-PSRemoting on each intended node. Invoke-MapRedux Moving on, now that you have one or more remote "nodes" enabled, you can consider the actual Map and Reduce algorithms. Consider the following snippet: $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose Invoke-MapRedux takes an instance of a MapReduceItem which references the Map and Reduce scriptblocks, an array of computer names which are the remote nodes, and the initial data set to be processed. As simple as that, you can start working with concepts of big data and the MapReduce paradigm. Now, how did we get there? I have published the initial version of my PsMapRedux PowerShell Module on GitHub. The PsMapRedux module provides the Invoke-MapRedux function described above. Feel free to browse the underlying code and even contribute to the project! In a later post, I plan to show some of the inner workings of the module, but for now let's move on to how the Map and Reduce functions are defined. Map Both the Map and Reduce functions need to follow a prescribed prototype. The prototype for a Map function in the MapRedux module is as follows. A simple scriptblock that takes one PsObject parameter and returns a hashtable. It is important to note that the PsObject $dataset parameter is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property which offers an array of data to be processed by the Map function. $aMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) # Indicate the job is running on the remote node. Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); # The hashtable to return $list = @{}; # ... Perform the mapping work and prepare the $list hashtable result with your custom PSObject... # ... The $dataset has a single 'Data' property which contains an array of data rows # which is a subset of the originally submitted data set. # Return the hashtable (Key, PSObject) Write-Output $list; } Reduce Likewise, with the Reduce function a simple prototype must be followed which takes a $key and a result $dataset from the MapRedux's partitioning function (which joins the Map results by key). Again, the $dataset is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property as described in the Map section. $aReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) # The hashtable to return $redux = @{}; # Return Write-Output $redux; } All Together Now When everything is put together in a short example script, you implement your Map and Reduce functions, query for some starting data, build the MapReduxItem via New-MapReduxItem and call Invoke-MapRedux to get the process started: # Import the MapRedux and SQL Server providers Import-Module "MapRedux" Import-Module “sqlps” -DisableNameChecking # Query the database for a dataset Set-Location SQLSERVER:\sql\dbserver1\default\databases\myDb $query = "SELECT MyKey, Date, Value1 FROM BigData ORDER BY MyKey"; Write-Host "Query: $query" $dataset = Invoke-SqlCmd -query $query # Build the Map function $MyMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); $list = @{}; foreach($row in $dataset.Data) { # Write-Host ("Key: " + $row.MyKey.ToString()); if($list.ContainsKey($row.MyKey) -eq $true) { $s = $list.Item($row.MyKey); $s.Sum += $row.Value1; $s.Count++; } else { $s = New-Object PSObject; $s | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name MyKey -Value $row.MyKey; $s | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -Name Sum -Value $row.Value1; $list.Add($row.MyKey, $s); } } Write-Output $list; } $MyReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) $redux = @{}; $count = 0; foreach($s in $dataset.Data) { $sum += $s.Sum; $count += 1; } # Reduce $redux.Add($s.MyKey, $sum / $count); # Return Write-Output $redux; } # Create the item data $Mr = New-MapReduxItem "My Test MapReduce Job" $MyMap $MyReduce # Array of processing nodes... $MyNodes = ("node1", "node2", "node3", "node4", "localhost") # Run the Map Reduce routine... $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose # Show the results Set-Location C:\ $MyMrResults | Out-GridView Conclusion I hope you have seen through this article that PowerShell has a significant infrastructure available for distributed computing. While it does take some code to expose a MapReduce-style framework, much of the work is already done and PowerShell could prove to be the the easiest platform to develop and run big data jobs in your corporate data center, potentially in the Azure cloud, or certainly as an academic excerise at home or school. Follow me on Twitter to stay up to date on the continuing progress of my Powershell MapRedux module, and thanks for reading! Daniel

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  • Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Creating a ModifyJeOS VirtualBox

    - by The Old Toxophilist
    Following on from my previous blog entry "Modifying the Base Template" I decided to put together a quick blog to show how to create a small VirtualBox, guest, that can be used to execute the ModifyJeOS and hence edit you templates. One of the main advantages of this is that Templates can be created away from the Exalogic Environment. For the Guest OS I chose OEL 6u3 and decided to create it as a basic server because I did not require a graphical interface but it's a simple change to create it with a GUI. Required Software Virtual Box. Oracle Enterprise Linux. Creating the VM I'll assume that the reader is experienced with Virtual Box and installing OEL and hence will make this section brief. Create VirtualBox Guest Create a new VirtualBox Guest and select oracle Linux 64 bit. Follow through the create process and select Dynamic Disk Size and the default 12GB disk size. The actual image will be a lot smaller than this but the OEL install will fail with insufficient disk space if you attempt a smaller size. Once the guest has been created attach the previously downloaded OEL 6u3 iso to the cd drive and start the guest. Install OEL On starting the guest the system will boot off the associated OEL 6u3 iso and take you through the standard installation process. Select all the appropriate information but when you reach the installation type select Basic Server because we do not need that additional packages and only need to access through the command line interface. Complete the installation and reboot the Guest. At this point we now have a basic OEL server running. Installing Guest Add-ons Before we can easily access the Guest we will need to add the VirtualBox guest add-ons. These will provide better keyboard and mouse integration and allow access the shared folders on the host machine. Before we can do this we will need to do the following: Enable Networking. Install additional rpms.  To enable the networking (eth0), that appears to be disabled by default, we can execute: ifup eth0 This will start the eth0 connection but once the Guest is rebooted the network will be down again. To resolve this you will need to edit the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file and change the ONBOOT parameter to "yes". Now we have enabled the network we will need to install a number of addition rpm. First we will need to configure the yum repository as follows: [ol6_latest] name=Oracle Linux $releasever Latest ($basearch) baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/latest/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=1 [ol6_ga_base] name=Oracle Linux $releasever GA installation media copy ($basearch) baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/0/base/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=0 [ol6_u1_base] name=Oracle Linux $releasever Update 1 installation media copy ($basearch) baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/1/base/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=0 [ol6_u2_base] name=Oracle Linux $releasever Update 2 installation media copy ($basearch) baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/2/base/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=0 [ol6_u3_base] name=Oracle Linux $releasever Update 3 installation media copy ($basearch) baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/3/base/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=0 [ol6_UEK_latest] name=Latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux $releasever ($basearch) baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/UEK/latest/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=1 [ol6_UEK_base] name=Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux $releasever ($basearch) baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/UEK/base/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=0 Once the repository has been edited we will need to execute the following yum commands: yum update yum install gcc yum install kernel-uek-devel yum install kernel-devel yum install createrepo At this point we now have all the additional packages required to install the VirtualBox Guest Add-ons. So select Devices->InstallGuest Additions on you running guest: This will simply place the VirtualBoxGuestAdditions.iso in the virtual cd and we will need to execute the following before we can run them. mkdir /media/cdrom mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom cd /media/cdrom/ ls ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run This will initiate the install and kernel rebuild. What you will notice is that during the installation a Failed will be displayed but this is simply because we have no graphical components. At this point we the installation will also have added the vboxsf group to the system and to access any shared folders we will create our user will need to be a member of this group an so the next stage is to add the root user to this group as follows: usermod -G vboxsf root cat /etc/group cat /etc/passwd init 0 Now simply shutdown the guest and add the Shared folder within your guests settings. Install ModifyJeOS Once the shared folder has been added restart the guest and change directory into the shared folder (/media/sf_<folder name>). For the next step I am assuming the ModifyJeOS rpms are located in the shared folder. We can simply execute: rpm -ivh ovm-modify-jeos-1.1.0-17.el5.noarch.rpm # Test with modifyjeos Using ModifyJeOS I have a modified MountSystemImg.sh script that should be copied into the /root/bin directory (you may need to create this) and from here it can be executed from any location: MountSystemImg.sh #!/bin/sh # The script assumes it's being run from the directory containing the System.img # Export for later i.e. during unmount export LOOP=`losetup -f` export SYSTEMIMG=/mnt/elsystem export TEMPLATEDIR=`pwd` # Make Temp Mount Directory mkdir -p $SYSTEMIMG # Create Loop for the System Image losetup $LOOP System.img kpartx -a $LOOP mount /dev/mapper/`basename $LOOP`p2 $SYSTEMIMG #Change Dir into mounted Image cd $SYSTEMIMG echo "######################################################################" echo "### ###" echo "### Starting Bash shell for editing. When completed log out to ###" echo "### Unmount the System.img file. ###" echo "### ###" echo "######################################################################" echo bash cd ~ cd $TEMPLATEDIR umount $SYSTEMIMG kpartx -d $LOOP losetup -d $LOOP rm -rf $SYSTEMIMG This script will simple create a mount directory, mount the System.img and then start a new shell in the mounted directory. On exiting the shell it will unmount the System.img. It only requires that you execute the script in the directory containing the System.img. These can be created under the mounted shared directory. In the example below I have extracted the Base template within the shared folder and then renamed it OEL_40GB_ROOT before changing into that directory and executing the script.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012Popular Releasesmenu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.1: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...iPDC - Free Phasor Data Concentrator: iPDC-v1.3.1: iPDC suite version-1.3.1, Modifications and Bug Fixed (from v 1.3.0) New User Manual for iPDC-v1.3.1 available on websites. Bug resolved : PMU Simulator TCP connection error and hang connection for client (PDC). Now PMU Simulator (server) can communicate more than one PDCs (clients) over TCP and UDP parallely. PMU Simulator is now sending the exact data frames as mentioned in data rate by user. PMU Simulator data rate has been verified by iPDC database entries and PMU Connection Tes...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks OData Feed: The AdventureWorks OData service exposes resources based on specific SQL views. The SQL views are a limited subset of the AdventureWorks database that results in several consuming scenarios: CompanySales Documents ManufacturingInstructions ProductCatalog TerritorySalesDrilldown WorkOrderRouting How to install the sample You can consume the AdventureWorks OData feed from http://services.odata.org/AdventureWorksV3/AdventureWorks.svc. You can also consume the AdventureWorks OData fe...Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.6: Sorting feeds alphabetical is now optional (see preferences window)DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.03: Major Highlights Fixed issue where mailto: links were not working when sending bulk email Fixed issue where uses did not see friendship relationships Problem is in 6.2, which does not show in the Versions Affected list above. Fixed the issue with cascade deletes in comments in CoreMessaging_Notification Fixed UI issue when using a date fields as a required profile property during user registration Fixed error when running the product in debug mode Fixed visibility issue when...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.65: Fixed null-reference error in the build task constructor.Active Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 5.0.0 RC: RC release of Active Forums 5.0.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.7 Beta: Bug in the display icon for apk's, will fix with next release Added fallback icon if unable to get the image/icon from the Cloud Service Removed some stale plugins that were either out dated or incomplete. Added handler for *.ab files for restoring backups Added plugin to create device backups Backups stored in %USERPROFILE%\Android Backups\%DEVICE_ID%\ Added custom folder icon for the android backups directory better error handling for installing an apk bug fixes for the Runn...BI System Monitor: v2.1: Data Audits report and supporting SQL, and SSIS package Environment Overview report enhancements, improving the appearance, addition of data audit finding indicators Note: SQL 2012 version coming soon.Hidden Capture (HC): Hidden Capture 1.1: Hidden Capture 1.1 by Mohsen E.Dawatgar http://Hidden-Capture.blogfa.comExt Spec: Ext Spec 0.2.1: Refined examples and improved distribution options.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: Version 1: --Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.5: Version 8.5 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine. New features include: Built-in search engine using Lucene.NET Flood control improvements Notifications improvements: sync option and mail body View Roadmap for more details webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 961aff884a9187b6e8a86d68913cdd31f8deaf83WiX Toolset: WiX Toolset v3.6: WiX Toolset v3.6 introduces the Burn bootstrapper/chaining engine and support for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5. Other minor functionality includes: WixDependencyExtension supports dependency checking among MSI packages. WixFirewallExtension supports more features of Windows Firewall. WixTagExtension supports Software Id Tagging. WixUtilExtension now supports recursive directory deletion. Melt simplifies pure-WiX patching by extracting .msi package content and updating .w...Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine (0.2.0): ????ISE?0.1.0??,?????,ISE?0.2.0?????????,???????,????????20???follow?ISE,????,??ISE??????????,??????????,?????????,?????????0.2.0??????,??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”,??????,?????????,???????,???????????????????,????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????: 1. ??“????” ??。??????????,?????????,???????????????????。??:????????,????????????,??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????,???????,???????????????,?????????????,????????,?0.2.0?,???????...GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.DotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.04: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.04 Don't forget to backup your installation before upgrade. Changes in 06.00.04 Fix: Sql Scripts for 6.003 missed object qualifiers within stored procedures Fix: added missing resource "cmdCancel.Text" in form.ascx.resx Changes in 06.00.03 Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext Changes in 06.00.02 The scripts are now compatible with SQL Azure, tested in a ne...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.New ProjectsAny-Service: AnyService is a .net 4.0 Windows service shell. It hosts any windows application in non-gui mode to run as a service.BabyCloudDrives - the multi cloud drive desktop's application: wpf ????BLACK ORANGE: Download The HPAD TEXT EDITOR and use it Wisely.. CodePlex New Release Checker: CodePlex New Release Checker is a small library that makes it easy to add, "New Version Available!" functionality to your CodePlex project.Collect: ????????!CSVManager: CSV??CSV?????,????CSV??,??????Exam Project: My Exam Project. Computer Vision, C and OpenCV-FTP: Hey guys thanks for checking out my ftp!Haushaltsbuch: 1ModMaker.Lua: ModMaker.Lua is an open source .NET library that parses and executes Lua code.MyJabbr: MyJabbr netduinoscope: Design shield and software to use netduino as oscilloscopeNetSurveillance Web Application: Net Surveillance Web ApplicationNiconicoApiHelper: ????API?????????OStega: A simple library for encrypt text into an bmp or png image.OURORM: ormTFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit: The TFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit is a set of tools that integrate with TFS 2010 to help manage configuration and deployment to various remote environments.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: A step-by-step guide for building Team Foundation Server 2012 environments that include SharePoint Server 2010, SQL Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 and more!WinRT LineChart: An attempt at creating an usable LineChart for everyone to use in his/her own Windows 8 Apps

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  • Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks&ndash;Part 1: Extensions

    - by ToStringTheory
    I don’t know about you, but when it comes to development, I prefer my environment to be as free of clutter as possible.  It may surprise you to know that I have tried ReSharper, and did not like it, for the reason that I stated above.  In my opinion, it had too much clutter.  Don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of features that I did like about it (inversion of if blocks, code feedback), but for the most part, I actually felt that it was slowing me down. Introduction Another large factor besides intrusiveness/speed in my choice to dislike ReSharper would probably be that I have become comfortable with my current setup and extensions.  I believe I have a good collection, and am quite happy with what I can accomplish in a short amount of time.  I figured that I would share some of my tips/findings regarding Visual Studio productivity here, and see what you had to say. The first section of things that I would like to cover, are Visual Studio Extensions.  In case you have been living under a rock for the past several years, Extensions are available under the Tools menu in Visual Studio: The extension manager enables integrated access to the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery online with access to a few thousand different extensions.  I have tried many extensions, but for reasons of lack reliability, usability, or features, have uninstalled almost all of them.  However, I have come across several that I find I can not do without anymore: NuGet Package Manager (Microsoft) Perspectives (Adam Driscoll) Productivity Power Tools (Microsoft) Web Essentials (Mads Kristensen) Extensions NuGet Package Manager To be honest, I debated on whether or not to put this in here.  Most people seem to have it, however, there was a time when I didn’t, and was always confused when blogs/posts would say to right click and “Add Package Reference…” which with one of the latest updates is now “Manage NuGet Packages”.  So, if you haven’t downloaded the NuGet Package Manager yet, or don’t know what it is, I would highly suggest downloading it now! Features Simply put, the NuGet Package Manager gives you a GUI and command line to access different libraries that have been uploaded to NuGet. Some of its features include: Ability to search NuGet for packages via the GUI, with information in the detail bar on the right. Quick access to see what packages are in a solution, and what packages have updates available, with easy 1-click updating. If you download a package that requires references to work on other NuGet packages, they will be downloaded and referenced automatically. Productivity Tip If you use any type of source control in Visual Studio as well as using NuGet packages, be sure to right-click on the solution and click "Enable NuGet Package Restore". What this does is add a NuGet package to the solution so that it will be checked in along side your solution, as well as automatically grab packages from NuGet on build if needed. This is an extremely simple system to use to manage your package references, instead of having to manually go into TFS and add the Packages folder. Perspectives I can't stand developing with just one monitor. Especially if it comes to debugging. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010, is that all of the panels and windows are floatable, and can dock to other screens. The only bad thing is, I don't use the same toolset with everything that I am doing. By this, I mean that I don't use all of the same windows for debugging a web application, as I do for coding a WPF application. Only thing is, Visual Studio doesn't save the screen positions for all of the undocked windows. So, I got curious one day and decided to check and see if there was an extension to help out. This is where I found Perspectives. Features Perspectives gives you the ability to configure window positions across any or your monitors, and then to save the positions in a profile. Perspectives offers a Panel to manage different presets/favorites, and a toolbar to add to the toolbars at the top of Visual Studio. Ability to 'Favorite' a profile to add it to the perspectives toolbar. Productivity Tip Take the time to setup profiles for each of your scenarios - debugging web/winforms/xaml, coding, maintenance, etc. Try to remember to use the profiles for a few days, and at the end of a week, you may find that your productivity was never better. Productivity Power Tools Ah, the Productivity Power Tools... Quite possibly one of my most used extensions, if not my most used. The tool pack gives you a variety of enhancements ranging from key shortcuts, interface tweaks, and completely new features to Visual Studio 2010. Features I don't want to bore you with all of the features here, so here are my favorite: Quick Find - Unobtrusive search box in upper-right corner of the code window. Great for searching in general, especially in a file. Solution Navigator - The 'Solution Explorer' on steroids. Easy to search for files, see defined members/properties/methods in files, and my favorite feature is the 'set as root' option. Updated 'Add Reference...' Dialog - This is probably my favorite enhancement period... The 'Add Reference...' dialog redone in a manner that resembles the Extension/Package managers. I especially love the ability to search through all of the references. "Ctrl - Click" for Definition - I am still getting used to this as I usually try to use my keyboard for everything, but I love the ability to hold Ctrl and turn property/methods/variables into hyperlinks, that you click on to see their definitions. Great for travelling down a rabbit hole in an application to research problems. While there are other commands/utilities, I find these to be the ones that I lean on the most for the usefulness. Web Essentials If you have do any type of web development in ASP .Net, ASP .Net MVC, even HTML, I highly suggest grabbing the Web Essentials right NOW! This extension alone is great for productivity in web development, and greatly decreases my development time on new features. Features Some of its best features include: CSS Previews - I say 'previews' because of the multiple kinds of previews in CSS that you get font-family, color, background/background-image previews. This is great for just tweaking UI slightly in different ways and seeing how they look in the CSS window at a glance. Live Preview - One word - awesome! This goes well with my multi-monitor setup. I put the site on one monitor in a Live Preview panel, and then as I make changes to CSS/cshtml/aspx/html, the preview window will update with each save/build automatically. For CSS, you can even turn on live-update, so as you are tweaking CSS, the style changes in real time. Great for tweaking colors or font-sizes. Outlining - Small, but I like to be able to collapse regions/declarations that are in the way of new work, or are just distracting. Commenting Shortcuts - I don't know why it wasn't included by default, but it is nice to have the key shortcuts for commenting working in the CSS editor as well. Productivity Tip When working on a site, hit CTRL-ALT-ENTER to launch the Live Preview window. Dock it to another monitor. When you make changes to the document/css, just save and glance at the other monitor. No need to alt tab, then alt tab before continuing editing. Conclusion These extensions are only the most useful and least intrusive - ones that I use every day. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010 is the extensibility options that it gives developers to utilize. Have an extension that you use that isn't intrusive, but isn't listed here? Please, feel free to comment. I love trying new things, and am always looking for new additions to my toolset of the most useful. Finally, please keep an eye out for Part 2 on key shortcuts in Visual Studio. Also, if you are visiting my site (http://tostringtheory.com || http://geekswithblogs.net/tostringtheory) from an actual browser and not a feed, please let me know what you think of the new styling!

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  • Translating Your Customizations

    - by Richard Bingham
    This blog post explains the basics of translating the customizations you can make to Fusion Applications products, with the inclusion of information for both composer-based customizations and the generic design-time customizations done via JDeveloper. Introduction Like most Oracle Applications, Fusion Applications installs on-premise with a US-English base language that is, in Release 7, supported by the option to add up to a total of 22 additional language packs (In Oracle Cloud production environments languages are pre-installed already). As such many organizations offer their users the option of working with their local language, and logically that should also apply for any customizations as well. Composer-based UI Customizations Customizations made in Page Composer take into consideration the session LOCALE, as set in the user preferences screen, during all customization work, and stores the customization in the MDS repository accordingly. As such the actual new or changed values used will only apply for the same language under which the customization was made, and text for any other languages requires a separate upload. See the Resource Bundles section below, which incidentally also applies to custom UI changes done in JDeveloper. You may have noticed this when you select the “Select Text Resource” menu option when editing the text on a page. Using this ensures that the resource bundles are used, whereas if you define a static value in Expression Builder it will never be available for translation. Notice in the screenshot below the “What’s New” custom value I have already defined using the ‘Select Text Resource’ feature is internally using the adfBundle groovy function to pull the custom value for my key (RT_S_1) from the ComposerOverrideBundle. Figure 1 – Page Composer showing the override bundle being used. Business Objects Customizing the Business Objects available in the Applications Composer tool for the CRM products, such as adding additional fields, also operates using the session language. Translating these additional values for these fields into other installed languages requires loading additional resource bundles, again as described below. Reports and Analytics Most customizations to Reports and BI Analytics are just essentially reorganizations and visualizations of existing number and text data from the system, and as such will use the appropriate values based on the users session language. Where a translated value or string exists for that session language, it will be used without the need for additional work. Extending through the addition of brand new reports and analytics requires another method of loading the translated strings, as part of what is known as ‘Localizing’ the BI Catalog and Metadata. This time it is via an export/import of XML data through the BI Administrators console, and is described in the OBIEE Admin Guide. Fusion Applications reports based on BI Publisher are already defined in template-per-locale, and in addition provide an extra process for getting the data for translation and reloading. This again uses the standard resource bundle format. Loading a custom report is illustrated in this video from our YouTube channel which shows the screen for both setting the template local and running an export for translation. Fusion Applications Menus Whilst the seeded Navigator and Global Menu values are fully translated when the additional language is installed, if they are customized then the change or new menu item will apply universally, not currently per language. This is set to change in a future release with the new UI Text Editor feature described below. More on Resource Bundles As mentioned above, to provide translations for most of your customizations you need to add values to a resource bundle. This is an industry open standard (OASIS) format XML file with the extension .xliff, and store translated values for the strings used by ADF at run-time. The general process is that these values are exported from the MDS repository, manually edited, and then imported back in again.This needs to be done by an administrator, via either WLST commands or through Enterprise Manager as per the screenshot below. This is detailed out in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. For SaaS environments the Cloud Operations team can assist. Figure 2 – Enterprise Manager’s MDS export used getting resource bundles for manual translation and re-imported on the same screen. All customized strings are stored in an override bundle (xliff file) for each locale, suffixed with the language initials, with English ones being saved to the default. As such each language bundle can be easily identified and updated. Similarly if you used JDeveloper to create your own applications as extensions to Fusion Applications you would use the native support for resource bundles, and add them into the faces-config.xml file for inclusion in your application. An example is this ADF customization video from our YouTube channel. JDeveloper also supports automatic synchronization between your underlying resource bundles and any translatable strings you add – very handy. For more information see chapters on “Using Automatic Resource Bundle Integration in JDeveloper” and “Manually Defining Resource Bundles and Locales” in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework. FND Messages and Look-ups FND Messages, as defined here, are not used for UI labels (they are known as ‘strings’), but are the responses back to users as a result of an action, such as from a page submit. Each ‘message’ is defined and stored in the related database table (FND_MESSAGES_B), with another (FND_MESSAGES_TL) holding any language-specific values. These come seeded with the additional language installs, however if you customize the messages via the “Manage Messages” task in Functional Setup Manager, or add new ones, then currently (in Release 7) you’ll need to repeat it for each language. Figure 3 – An FND Message defined in an English user session. Similarly Look-ups are stored in a translation table (FND_LOOKUP_VALUES_TL) where appropriate, and can be customized by setting the users session language and making the change  in the Setup and Maintenance task entitled “Manage [Standard|Common] Look-ups”. Online Help Yes, in fact all the seeded help is applied as part of each language pack install as part of the post-install provisioning process. If you are editing or adding custom online help then the Create Help screen provides a drop-down of which language your help customization will apply to. This is shown in the video below from our YouTube channel, and obviously you’ll need to it for each language in use. What is Coming for Translations? Currently planned for Release 8 is something called the User Interface (UI) Text Editor. This tool will allow the editing of all the text shown on the pages and forms of Fusion Application. This will provide a search based on a particular term or word, say “Worker”, and will allow it to be adjusted, say to “Employee”, which then updates all the Resource Bundles that contain it. In the case of multi-language environments, it will use the users session language (locale) to know which Resource Bundles to apply the change to. This capability will also support customization sandboxes, to help ensure changes can be tested and approved.  It is also interesting to note that the design currently allows any page-specific customizations done using Page Composer or Application Composer to over-write the global changes done via the UI Text Editor, allowing for special context-sensitive values to still be used. Further Reading and Resources The following short list provides the mains resources for digging into more detail on translation support for both Composer and JDeveloper customization projects. There is a dedicated chapter entitled “Translating Custom Text” in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. This has good examples and steps for many tasks, especially administering resource bundles. Using localization formatting (numbers, dates etc) for design-time changes is well documented in the Fusion Applications Developer Guide. For more guidelines on general design-time globalization, see either the ‘Internationalizing and Localizing Pages’ chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition) or the general Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide. The Oracle Architecture ‘A-Team’ provided a recent post on customizing the user session timeout popup, using design-time changes to resource bundles. It has detailed step-by-step examples which can be a useful illustration.

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  • Disaster, or Migration?

    - by Rob Farley
    This post is in two parts – technical and personal. And I should point out that it’s prompted in part by this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Allen Kinsel. First, the technical: I’ve had a few conversations with people recently about migration – moving a SQL Server database from one box to another (sometimes, but not primarily, involving an upgrade). One question that tends to come up is that of downtime. Obviously there will be some period of time between the old server being available and the new one. The way that most people seem to think of migration is this: Build a new server. Stop people from using the old server. Take a backup of the old server Restore it on the new server. Reconfigure the client applications (or alternatively, configure the new server to use the same address as the old) Make the new server online. There are other things involved, such as testing, of course. But this is essentially the process that people tell me they’re planning to follow. The bit that I want to look at today (as you’ve probably guessed from my title) is the “backup and restore” section. If a SQL database is using the Simple Recovery Model, then the only restore option is the last database backup. This backup could be full or differential. The transaction log never gets backed up in the Simple Recovery Model. Instead, it truncates regularly to stay small. One that’s using the Full Recovery Model (or Bulk-Logged) won’t truncate its log – the log must be backed up regularly. This provides the benefit of having a lot more option available for restores. It’s a requirement for most systems of High Availability, because if you’re making sure that a spare box is up-and-running, ready to take over, then you have to be interested in the logs that are happening on the current box, rather than truncating them all the time. A High Availability system such as Mirroring, Replication or Log Shipping will initialise the spare machine by restoring a full database backup (and maybe a differential backup if available), and then any subsequent log backups. Once the secondary copy is close, transactions can be applied to keep the two in sync. The main aspect of any High Availability system is to have a redundant system that is ready to take over. So the similarity for migration should be obvious. If you need to move a database from one box to another, then introducing a High Availability mechanism can help. By turning on the Full Recovery Model and then taking a backup (so that the now-interesting logs have some context), logs start being kept, and are therefore available for getting the new box ready (even if it’s an upgraded version). When the migration is ready to occur, a failover can be done, letting the new server take over the responsibility of the old, just as if a disaster had happened. Except that this is a planned failover, not a disaster at all. There’s a fine line between a disaster and a migration. Failovers can be useful in patching, upgrading, maintenance, and more. Hopefully, even an unexpected disaster can be seen as just another failover, and there can be an opportunity there – perhaps to get some work done on the principal server to increase robustness. And if I’ve just set up a High Availability system for even the simplest of databases, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. :) So now the personal: It’s been an interesting time recently... June has been somewhat odd. A court case with which I was involved got resolved (through mediation). I can’t go into details, but my lawyers tell me that I’m allowed to say how I feel about it. The answer is ‘lousy’. I don’t regret pursuing it as long as I did – but in the end I had to make a decision regarding the commerciality of letting it continue, and I’m going to look forward to the days when the kind of money I spent on my lawyers is small change. Mind you, if I had a similar situation with an employer, I’d do the same again, but that doesn’t really stop me feeling frustrated about it. The following day I had to fly to country Victoria to see my grandmother, who wasn’t expected to last the weekend. She’s still around a week later as I write this, but her 92-year-old body has basically given up on her. She’s been a Christian all her life, and is looking forward to eternity. We’ll all miss her though, and it’s hard to see my family grieving. Then on Tuesday, I was driving back to the airport with my family to come home, when something really bizarre happened. We were travelling down the freeway, just pulled out to go past a truck (farm-truck sized, not a semi-trailer), when a car-sized mass of metal fell off it. It was something like an industrial air-conditioner, but from where I was sitting, it was just a mass of spinning metal, like something out of a movie (one friend described it as “holidays by Michael Bay”). Somehow, and I’m really don’t know how, the part of it nearest us bounced high enough to clear the car, and there wasn’t even a scratch. We pulled over the check, and I was just thanking God that we’d changed lanes when we had, and that we remained unharmed. I had all kinds of thoughts about what could’ve happened if we’d had something that size land on the windscreen... All this has drilled home that while I feel that I haven’t provided as well for the family as I could’ve done (like by pursuing an expensive legal case), I shouldn’t even consider that I have proper control over things. I get to live life, and make decisions based on what I feel is right at the time. But I’m not going to get everything right, and there will be things that feel like disasters, some which could’ve been in my control and some which are very much beyond my control. The case feels like something I could’ve pursued differently, a disaster that could’ve been avoided in some way. Gran dying is lousy of course. An accident on the freeway would have been awful. I need to recognise that the worst disasters are ones that I can’t affect, and that I need to look at things in context – perhaps seeing everything that happens as a migration instead. Life is never the same from one day to the next. Every event has a before and an after – sometimes it’s clearly positive, sometimes it’s not. I remember good events in my life (such as my wedding), and bad (such as the loss of my father when I was ten, or the back injury I had eight years ago). I’m not suggesting that I know how to view everything from the “God works all things for good” perspective, but I am trying to look at last week as a migration of sorts. Those things are behind me now, and the future is in God’s hands. Hopefully I’ve learned things, and will be able to live accordingly. I’ve come through this time now, and even though I’ll miss Gran, I’ll see her again one day, and the future is bright.

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  • DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

    - by Argenis
      This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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  • WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF&ndash;Part 2: The Service

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    OK – so let’s first start with a simple WCF service and connect that to ADFS 2 for authentication. The service itself simply echoes back the user’s claims – just so we can make sure it actually works and to see how the ADFS 2 issuance rules emit claims for the service: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "urn:leastprivilege:samples")] public interface IService {     [OperationContract]     List<ViewClaim> GetClaims(); } public class Service : IService {     public List<ViewClaim> GetClaims()     {         var id = Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity as IClaimsIdentity;         return (from c in id.Claims                 select new ViewClaim                 {                     ClaimType = c.ClaimType,                     Value = c.Value,                     Issuer = c.Issuer,                     OriginalIssuer = c.OriginalIssuer                 }).ToList();     } } The ViewClaim data contract is simply a DTO that holds the claim information. Next is the WCF configuration – let’s have a look step by step. First I mapped all my http based services to the federation binding. This is achieved by using .NET 4.0’s protocol mapping feature (this can be also done the 3.x way – but in that scenario all services will be federated): <protocolMapping>   <add scheme="http" binding="ws2007FederationHttpBinding" /> </protocolMapping> Next, I provide a standard configuration for the federation binding: <bindings>   <ws2007FederationHttpBinding>     <binding>       <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential">         <message establishSecurityContext="false">           <issuerMetadata address="https://server/adfs/services/trust/mex" />         </message>       </security>     </binding>   </ws2007FederationHttpBinding> </bindings> This binding points to our ADFS 2 installation metadata endpoint. This is all that is needed for svcutil (aka “Add Service Reference”) to generate the required client configuration. I also chose mixed mode security (SSL + basic message credential) for best performance. This binding also disables session – you can control that via the establishSecurityContext setting on the binding. This has its pros and cons. Something for a separate blog post, I guess. Next, the behavior section adds support for metadata and WIF: <behaviors>   <serviceBehaviors>     <behavior>       <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="true" />       <federatedServiceHostConfiguration />     </behavior>   </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> The next step is to add the WIF specific configuration (in <microsoft.identityModel />). First we need to specify the key material that we will use to decrypt the incoming tokens. This is optional for web applications but for web services you need to protect the proof key – so this is mandatory (at least for symmetric proof keys, which is the default): <serviceCertificate>   <certificateReference storeLocation="LocalMachine"                         storeName="My"                         x509FindType="FindBySubjectDistinguishedName"                         findValue="CN=Service" /> </serviceCertificate> You also have to specify which incoming tokens you trust. This is accomplished by registering the thumbprint of the signing keys you want to accept. You get this information from the signing certificate configured in ADFS 2: <issuerNameRegistry type="...ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry">   <trustedIssuers>     <add thumbprint="d1 … db"           name="ADFS" />   </trustedIssuers> </issuerNameRegistry> The last step (promised) is to add the allowed audience URIs to the configuration – WCF clients use (by default – and we’ll come back to this) the endpoint address of the service: <audienceUris>   <add value="https://machine/soapadfs/service.svc" /> </audienceUris> OK – that’s it – now we have a basic WCF service that uses ADFS 2 for authentication. The next step will be to set-up ADFS to issue tokens for this service. Afterwards we can explore various options on how to use this service from a client. Stay tuned… (if you want to have a look at the full source code or peek at the upcoming parts – you can download the complete solution here)

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, September 03, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, September 03, 2012Popular ReleasesMetodología General Ajustada - MGA: 03.01.03: Cambios Aury: Ajuste del margen del reporte. Visualización de la columna de Supuestos en la parte del módulo de Decisión. Cambios John: Integración de código con cambios enviados por Aury Niño. Generación de instaladores. Soporte técnico por correo electrónico y telefónico.Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine (0.2.0): ????ISE?0.1.0??,?????,ISE?0.2.0?????????,???????,????????20???follow?ISE,????,??ISE??????????,??????????,?????????,?????????0.2.0??????,??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”,??????,?????????,???????,???????????????????,????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????: 1. ??“????” ??。??????????,?????????,???????????????????。??:????????,????????????,??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????,???????,???????????????,?????????????,????????,?0.2.0?,???????...Thisismyusername's codeplex page.: HTML5 Mulititouch Fruit Ninja Proof of Concept: This is an example of how you could create a game such as Fruit Ninja using HTML5's multitouch capabilities. Sorry this example doesn't have great graphics. If I had my own webpage, I could store some graphics and upload the game there and it might look halfway decent, but since I'm only using a Codeplex page and most mobile devices can't open .zip files, the fruits are just circles. I hope you enjoy reading the source code anyway.GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.TSQL Code Smells Finder: POC 1.01: Proof of concept 1.01 TSQLDomTest.ps1 and Errors.Txt are requiredConfuser: Confuser build 76542: This is a build of changeset 76542.Reactive State Machine: ReactiveStateMachine-beta: TouchStateMachine now supports Microsoft Surface 2.0 SDK. The TouchStateMachine is an extension to the Reactive State Machine. Reactive State Machine uses NuGet for dependency managementSharePoint Column & View Permission: SharePoint Column and View Permission v1.2: Version 1.2 of this project. If you will find any bugs please let me know at enti@zoznam.sk or post your findings in Issue TrackerMihmojsos OS: Mihmojsos OS 3 (Smart Rabbit): !Mihmojsos OS 3 Smart Rabbit Mihmojsos Smart Rabbit is now availableDotNetNuke Translator: 01.00.00 Beta: First release of the project.YNA: YNA 0.2 alpha: Wath's new since 0.1 alpha ? A lot of changes but there are the most interresting : StateManager is now better and faster Mouse events for all YnObjects (Sprites, Images, texts) A really big improvement for YnGroup Gamepad support And the news : Tiled Map support (need refactoring) Isometric tiled map support (need refactoring) Transition effect like "FadeIn" and "FadeOut" (YnTransition) Timers (YnTimer) Path management (YnPath, need more refactoring) Downloads All downloads...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 5.1.0.2: fixed several issues with streaming modeUrlPager: UrlPager 1.2: Fixed bug in which url parameters will lost after paging; ????????url???bug;Sofire Suite: Sofire v1.5.0.0: Sofire v1.5.0.0 ?? ???????? ?????: 1、?? 2、????EntLib.com????????: EntLib.com???????? v3.0: EntLib eCommerce Solution ???Microsoft .Net Framework?????????????????????。Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.2.1: Major linear algebra rework since v2.1, now available on Codeplex as well (previous versions were only available via NuGet). Since v2.2.0: Student-T density more robust for very large degrees of freedom Sparse Kronecker product much more efficient (now leverages sparsity) Direct access to raw matrix storage implementations for advanced extensibility Now also separate package for signed core library with a strong name (we dropped strong names in v2.2.0) Also available as NuGet packages...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks Databases – 2012, 2008R2 and 2008: About this release This release consolidates AdventureWorks databases for SQL Server 2012, 2008R2 and 2008 versions to one page. Each zip file contains an mdf database file and ldf log file. This should make it easier to find and download AdventureWorks databases since all OLTP versions are on one page. There are no database schema changes. For each release of the product, there is a light-weight and full version of the AdventureWorks sample database. The light-weight version is denoted by ...Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke Project Templates V1.1 for VS2012: This release is specifically for Visual Studio 2012 Support, distributed through the Visual Studio Extensions gallery at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ After you build in Release mode the installable packages (source/install) can be found in the INSTALL folder now, within your module's folder, not the packages folder anymore Check out the blog post for all of the details about this release. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Blogs/EntryId/3471/New-Visual-Studio-2012-Projec...New ProjectsBPVote4PPT: BPVote For PowerPointCosmo OS: La semplicità in un OSFinancial Analytic Tools: C#.Net Financial Analytic ToolsGeminiMVC: An Open Source CMS written in ASP.net MVC 4 with speed, extensibility, and ease-of-us in mind.JQuery SharePoint Autocomplete People Picker: This JQUery bundle provides an autocomplete people picker based on SharePoint profiles. It can be hosted on the SharePoint itself or on remote applications.Kerbal Space Program PartModule Library: This project is designed to add various functionalities to custom parts for the space program simulation game Kerbal Space Program.KeyboardRemapper: This tool to remaps keys in the keyboard. If you have more than one keyboard or an additional keypad, you can remap the keys of the each keyboard independentlyKHStudent: ??????Localized DataAnnotations with T4 templates: Simplified DataAnnotations localization using T4 templates.MfcLightToolkit: Supports development for small and simple MFC application. Provides asynchronous programming model like .NET, file download, easy control resizing, and so on.Müslüm ÖZTÜRK Code Lib: Test amaçli olusturulan projemdirPolska: Testproject in how a polish grammerprogram can look like.QueueLessApp: Here is the codeRusIS.CMS: aaaSGPS: Projeto de controle de produtos e serviçosStemmersNet: Stemmers pack for .Net FrameworkTrabajo Final de Ingenieria - Javier Vallejos: Tesis Final de la carrera de Ingenieria - Universidad Abierta Interamericana.TSQL Code Smells Finder: TSQL 'smells' findersXNA and Data Driven Design: This project includes links for XNA and Data Driven DesignXNA and System Testing: This project includes code for XNA and System TestingYUGI-AR Project: an open source project for yugioh based augmented reality???????? ? ?????????????: ???? ??????? ??????? ?????????????? ??????????? ?????????? ??? ? ????? ?????? ? ? ??? ??? ????? ? ??? ?????????? ????????????.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 29, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 29, 2013Popular ReleasesAudioWordsDownloader: AudioWordsDownloader 1.1 build 88: New features -------- list of words (mp3 files) is available upon typing when a download path is defined list of download paths is added paths history settings added Bug fixed ----- case mismatch in word search field fixed path not exist bug fixed when history has been used path, when filled from dialog, not stored refresh autocomplete list after path change word sought is deleted when path is changed at the end sought word list is deleted word list not refreshed download end...Activity Viewer 2012: Activity Viewer 2012 V 5.0.0.3: Planning to add new features: 1. Import/Export rules 2. Tabular mode multi servers connections.Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Alpha 0.8.3.0: Version 0.8.3.0 emphasis on the FIlteredStream and ease how to manage Exceptions that can occur due to the network or any other issue you might encounter. Will be available through nuget the 29/09/2013. FilteredStream Features provided by the Twitter Stream API - Ability to track specific keywords - Ability to track specific users - Ability to track specific locations Additional features - Detect the reasons the tweet has been retrieved from the Filtered API. You have access to both the ma...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.5: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????,????,?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????,??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??,????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.5 ???? AcPlay????????v3.5 ????????,???????????30% ?? ???????GoodManga.net???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??Acfun?????????? ??Bilibili??????????? ?????????flvcd???????? ??SfAcg????????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ????32...OfflineBrowser: Release v1.2: This release includes some multi-threading support, a better progress bar, more JavaScript fixes, and a help system. This release is also portable (can run with no issues from a flash drive).CtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.0.0.34288 Release: This release of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer includes the following significant features: Stereoscopic 3D display support. Based on Firestorm viewer 4.4.2 codebase. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-0-0-34288-release Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/privacy Disclaimer: This software is not provided or supported by Linden Lab, the makers of ...CrmSvcUtil Generate Attribute Constants: Generate Attribute Constants (1.0.5018.28159): Built against version 5.0.15 of the CRM SDK Fixed issue where constant for primary key attribute was being duplicated in all entity classes Added ability to override base class for entity classesC# Intellisense for Notepad++: Release v1.0.6.0: Added support for classless scripts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.CS-Script for Notepad++: Release v1.0.6.0: Added support for classless scripts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.SimpleExcelReportMaker: Serm 0.02: SourceCode and SampleMagick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.7.001: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.7.0. Breaking changes: - ToBitmap method of MagickImage returns a png instead of a bmp. - Changed the value for full transparency from 255(Q8)/65535(Q16) to 0. - MagickColor now uses floats instead of Byte/UInt16.Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.578b: With the feedback received over the renaming of Movie Folders, and files, there has been some refinement done. As well as I would like to introduce Blu-Ray movie folder support, for Pre-Frodo and Frodo onwards versions of XBMC. To start with, Context menu option for renaming movies, now has three sub options: Movie & Folder, Movie only & Folder only. The option Manual Movie Rename needs to be selected from Movie Preferences, but the autoscrape boxes do not need to be selected. Blu Ray Fo...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen v2.1.3.api release: This is for the brave at heart, this is the maint release to update to the new movie api. please send feedback on fix requests.FFXIV Crafting Simulator: Crafting Simulator 2.3: - Major refactoring of the code behind. - Added a current durability and a current CP textbox.DNN CMS Platform: 07.01.02: Major HighlightsAdded the ability to manage the Vanity URL prefix Added the ability to filter members in the member directory by role Fixed issue where the user could inadvertently click the login button multiple times Fixed issues where core classes could not be used in out of process cache provider Fixed issue where profile visibility submenu was not displayed correctly Fixed issue where the member directory was broken when Convert URL to lowercase setting was enabled Fixed issu...Rawr: Rawr 5.4.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Sample MVC4 EF Codefirst Architecture: RazMVCWebApp ver 1.1: Signal R sample is added.CODE Framework: 4.0.30923.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.JayData -The unified data access library for JavaScript: JayData 1.3.2 - Indian Summer Edition: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like WebAPI, OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SQLite, HTML5 localStorage, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with KendoUI, Angular.js, Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video KendoUI examples: JayData example site Examples for map integration JayData example site What's new in JayData 1.3.2 - Indian Summer Edition For detai...ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.12.0.0: sync with rev. 2892 of the java version new PDF417 decoder improved Aztec decoder global speed improvements direct Kinect support for ColorImageFrame better Structured Append support many other small bug fixes and improvementsNew ProjectsCACHEDB: CLIENT-DATABASE || CLIENT_CACHEDB-DATABASEClassic WiX Burn Theme: A WiX Burn theme inspired by the classic WiX wizard user interface.CryptStr.Fody: A post-build weaver that encrypts literal strings in your .NET assemblies without breaking ClickOnce.Easy Code: A setting framework.EduSoft: This is a school eg.GameStuff: GameStuff is a library of Physics and Geometrics concepts for video game. Nekora Test Project: Nekora test projectPopCorn Console Game: Simple console gameRadioController: This project started from people installing Tablets in Mustangs. You would typically loose most control of the radio. This projects brings that back!Random searcher i pochodne: Wyszukiwarka plików multimedialnych i czego dusza zapragnie.SporkRandom: A .NET (C#, Visual Basic) interface for the true random number generator service of random.org

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  • 5 Lessons learnt in localization / multi language support in WPF

    - by MarkPearl
    For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on how to improve it. Two of the most dominant suggestions that we received were… Support for imperial measurements (the original program only supported the metric system) Multi language support (we had someone who volunteered to translate the program into Japanese for us). I am not going to dive into the Imperial to Metric support in todays blog post, but I would like to cover a few brief lessons we learned in adding support for multi-language functionality in the software. I have sectioned them below under different lessons. Lesson 1 – Build multi-language support in from the start So the first lesson I learnt was if you know you are going to do multi language support – build it in from the very beginning! One of the power points of WPF/Silverlight is data binding in XAML and so while it wasn’t to painful to retro fit multi language support into the programing, it was still time consuming and a bit tedious to go through mounds and mounds of views and would have been a minor job to have implemented this while the form was being designed. Lesson 2 – Accommodate for varying word lengths using Grids The next lesson was a little harder to learn and was learnt a bit further down the road in the development cycle. We developed everything in English, assuming that other languages would have similar character length words for equivalent meanings… don’t!. A word that is short in your language may be of varying character lengths in other languages. Some language like Dutch and German allow for concatenation of nouns which has the potential to create really long words. We picked up a few places where our views had been structured incorrectly so that if a word was to long it would get clipped off or cut out. To get around this we began using the WPF grid extensively with column widths that would automatically expand if they needed to. Generally speaking the grid replacement got round this hurdle, and if in future you have a choice between a stack panel or a grid – think twice before going for the easier option… often the grid will be a bit more work to setup, but will be more flexible. Lesson 3 – Separate the separators Our initial run through moving the words to a resource dictionary led us to make what I thought was one potential mistake. If we had a label like the following… “length : “ In the resource dictionary we put it as a single entry. This is fine until you start using a word more than once. For instance in our scenario we used the word “length’ frequently. with different variations of the word with grammar and separators included in the resource we ended up having what I would consider a bloated dictionary. When we removed the separators from the words and put them as their own resources we saw a dramatic reduction in dictionary size… so something that looked like this… “length : “ “length. “ “length?” Was reduced to… “length” “:” “?” “.” While this may not seem like a reduction at first glance, consider that the separators “:?.” are used everywhere and suddenly you see a real reduction in bloat. Lesson 4 – Centralize the Language Dictionary This lesson was learnt at the very end of the project after we had already had a release candidate out in the wild. Because our translations would be done on a volunteer basis and remotely, we wanted it to be really simple for someone to translate our program into another language. As a common design practice we had tiered the application so that we had a business logic layer, a ui layer, etc. The problem was in several of these layers we had resource files specific for that layer. What this resulted in was us having multiple resource files that we would need to send to our translators. To add to our problems, some of the wordings were duplicated in different resource files, which would result in additional frustration from our translators as they felt they were duplicating work. Eventually the workaround was to make a separate project in VS2010 with just the language translations. We then exposed the dictionary as public within this project and made it as a reference to the other projects within the solution. This solved out problem as now we had a central dictionary and could remove any duplication's. Lesson 5 – Make a dummy translation file to test that you haven’t missed anything The final lesson learnt about multi language support in WPF was when checking if you had forgotten to translate anything in the inline code, make a test resource file with dummy data. Ideally you want the data for each word to be identical. In our instance we made one which had all the resource key values pointing to a value of test. This allowed us point the language file to our test resource file and very quickly browse through the program and see if we had missed any linking. The alternative to this approach is to have two language files and swap between the two while running the program to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, but the downside of dual language file approach is that it is much a lot harder spotting a mistake if everything is different – almost like playing Where’s Wally / Waldo. It is much easier spotting variance in uniformity – meaning when you put the “test’ keyword for everything, anything that didn’t say “test” stuck out like a sore thumb. So these are my top five lessons learnt on implementing multi language support in WPF. Feel free to make any suggestions in the comments section if you feel maybe something is more important than one of these or if I got it wrong!

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  • Execution plan warnings–The final chapter

    - by Dave Ballantyne
    In my previous posts (here and here), I showed examples of some of the execution plan warnings that have been added to SQL Server 2012.  There is one other warning that is of interest to me : “Unmatched Indexes”. Firstly, how do I know this is the final one ?  The plan is an XML document, right ? So that means that it can have an accompanying XSD.  As an XSD is a schema definition, we can poke around inside it to find interesting things that *could* be in the final XML file. The showplan schema is stored in the folder Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\schemas\sqlserver\2004\07\showplan and by comparing schemas over releases you can get a really good idea of any new functionality that has been added. Here is the section of the Sql Server 2012 showplan schema that has been interesting me so far : <xsd:complexType name="AffectingConvertWarningType"> <xsd:annotation> <xsd:documentation>Warning information for plan-affecting type conversion</xsd:documentation> </xsd:annotation> <xsd:sequence> <!-- Additional information may go here when available --> </xsd:sequence> <xsd:attribute name="ConvertIssue" use="required"> <xsd:simpleType> <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string"> <xsd:enumeration value="Cardinality Estimate" /> <xsd:enumeration value="Seek Plan" /> <!-- to be extended here --> </xsd:restriction> </xsd:simpleType> </xsd:attribute> <xsd:attribute name="Expression" type ="xsd:string" use="required" /></xsd:complexType><xsd:complexType name="WarningsType"> <xsd:annotation> <xsd:documentation>List of all possible iterator or query specific warnings (e.g. hash spilling, no join predicate)</xsd:documentation> </xsd:annotation> <xsd:choice minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="unbounded"> <xsd:element name="ColumnsWithNoStatistics" type="shp:ColumnReferenceListType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" /> <xsd:element name="SpillToTempDb" type="shp:SpillToTempDbType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" /> <xsd:element name="Wait" type="shp:WaitWarningType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" /> <xsd:element name="PlanAffectingConvert" type="shp:AffectingConvertWarningType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" /> </xsd:choice> <xsd:attribute name="NoJoinPredicate" type="xsd:boolean" use="optional" /> <xsd:attribute name="SpatialGuess" type="xsd:boolean" use="optional" /> <xsd:attribute name="UnmatchedIndexes" type="xsd:boolean" use="optional" /> <xsd:attribute name="FullUpdateForOnlineIndexBuild" type="xsd:boolean" use="optional" /></xsd:complexType> I especially like the “to be extended here” comment,  high hopes that we will see more of these in the future.   So “Unmatched Indexes” was a warning that I couldn’t get and many thanks must go to Fabiano Amorim (b|t) for showing me the way.   Filtered indexes were introduced in Sql Server 2008 and are really useful if you only need to index only a portion of the data within a table.  However,  if your SQL code uses a variable as a predicate on the filtered data that matches the filtered condition, then the filtered index cannot be used as, naturally,  the value in the variable may ( and probably will ) change and therefore will need to read data outside the index.  As an aside,  you could use option(recompile) here , in which case the optimizer will build a plan specific to the variable values and use the filtered index,  but that can bring about other problems.   To demonstrate this warning, we need to generate some test data :   DROP TABLE #TestTab1GOCREATE TABLE #TestTab1 (Col1 Int not null, Col2 Char(7500) not null, Quantity Int not null)GOINSERT INTO #TestTab1 VALUES (1,1,1),(1,2,5),(1,2,10),(1,3,20), (2,1,101),(2,2,105),(2,2,110),(2,3,120)GO and then add a filtered index CREATE INDEX ixFilter ON #TestTab1 (Col1)WHERE Quantity = 122 Now if we execute SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #TestTab1 WHERE Quantity = 122 We will see the filtered index being scanned But if we parameterize the query DECLARE @i INT = 122SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #TestTab1 WHERE Quantity = @i The plan is very different a table scan, as the value of the variable used in the predicate can change at run time, and also we see the familiar warning triangle. If we now look at the properties pane, we will see two pieces of information “Warnings” and “UnmatchedIndexes”. So, handily, we are being told which filtered index is not being used due to parameterization.

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  • DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

    - by Argenis
      This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups have completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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  • Nginx Subdomain Problem

    - by user292299
    i can't access my subdomain on localhost. my localdomain is localhost.dev and it's work.but i want to auto subdomain for php script (username.localhost.dev) i try this server { listen 80 default_server; listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; access_log /var/www/access.log; error_log /var/www/error.log; root /var/www; index index.php index.html index.htm; # Make site accessible from http://localhost/ server_name localhost.dev ***.localhost.dev**; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404. try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules } location /f2/public/ { try_files $uri $uri/ /f2/public/index.php?$args; } location /doc/ { alias /usr/share/doc/; autoindex on; allow 127.0.0.1; allow ::1; deny all; } # Only for nginx-naxsi used with nginx-naxsi-ui : process denied requests #location /RequestDenied { # proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; #} #error_page 404 /404.html; # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # #error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; #location = /50x.html { # root /usr/share/nginx/html; #} # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 # location ~ \.php$ { # fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; # # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini # # # With php5-cgi alone: # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # # With php5-fpm: # fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; # fastcgi_index index.php; # include fastcgi_params; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; } # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root # concurs with nginx's one # #location ~ /\.ht { # deny all; #} } it's not working.i change server_name for testing server_name localhost.dev asd.localhost.dev; i can't access asd.localhost.dev and i try this double server{} section # You may add here your # server { # ... # } # statements for each of your virtual hosts to this file ## # You should look at the following URL's in order to grasp a solid understanding # of Nginx configuration files in order to fully unleash the power of Nginx. # http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls # http://wiki.nginx.org/QuickStart # http://wiki.nginx.org/Configuration # # Generally, you will want to move this file somewhere, and start with a clean # file but keep this around for reference. Or just disable in sites-enabled. # # Please see /usr/share/doc/nginx-doc/examples/ for more detailed examples. ## server { listen 80 default_server; listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; access_log /var/www/access.log; error_log /var/www/error.log; root /var/www; index index.php index.html index.htm; # Make site accessible from http://localhost/ server_name localhost.dev; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404. try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules } location /f2/public/ { try_files $uri $uri/ /f2/public/index.php?$args; } location /doc/ { alias /usr/share/doc/; autoindex on; allow 127.0.0.1; allow ::1; deny all; } # Only for nginx-naxsi used with nginx-naxsi-ui : process denied requests #location /RequestDenied { # proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; #} #error_page 404 /404.html; # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # #error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; #location = /50x.html { # root /usr/share/nginx/html; #} # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 # location ~ \.php$ { # fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; # # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini # # # With php5-cgi alone: # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # # With php5-fpm: # fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; # fastcgi_index index.php; # include fastcgi_params; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; } # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root # concurs with nginx's one # #location ~ /\.ht { # deny all; #} } ############################### server { access_log /var/www/access.log; error_log /var/www/error.log; root /var/www; index index.php index.html index.htm; # Make site accessible from http://localhost/ server_name asd.localhost.dev; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404. try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules } location /f2/public/ { try_files $uri $uri/ /f2/public/index.php?$args; } location /doc/ { alias /usr/share/doc/; autoindex on; allow 127.0.0.1; allow ::1; deny all; } # Only for nginx-naxsi used with nginx-naxsi-ui : process denied requests #location /RequestDenied { # proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; #} #error_page 404 /404.html; # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # #error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; #location = /50x.html { # root /usr/share/nginx/html; #} # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 # location ~ \.php$ { # fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; # # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini # # # With php5-cgi alone: # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # # With php5-fpm: # fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; # fastcgi_index index.php; # include fastcgi_params; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; } # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root # concurs with nginx's one # #location ~ /\.ht { # deny all; #} } # another virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration # #server { # listen 8000; # listen somename:8080; # server_name somename alias another.alias; # root html; # index index.html index.htm; # # location / { # try_files $uri $uri/ =404; # } #} # HTTPS server # #server { # listen 443; # server_name localhost; # # root html; # index index.html index.htm; # # ssl on; # ssl_certificate cert.pem; # ssl_certificate_key cert.key; # # ssl_session_timeout 5m; # # ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; # ssl_ciphers ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv3:+EXP; # ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; # # location / { # try_files $uri $uri/ =404; # } #} i can't success

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  • Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 10 &ndash; In Depth TCP/IP Networking

    - by MarkPearl
    After reading this section you should be able to Understand methods of network design unique to TCP/IP networks, including subnetting, CIDR, and address translation Explain the differences between public and private TCP/IP networks Describe protocols used between mail clients and mail servers, including SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 Employ multiple TCP/IP utilities for network discovery and troubleshooting Designing TCP/IP-Based Networks The following sections explain how network and host information in an IPv4 address can be manipulated to subdivide networks into smaller segments. Subnetting Subnetting separates a network into multiple logically defined segments, or subnets. Networks are commonly subnetted according to geographic locations, departmental boundaries, or technology types. A network administrator might separate traffic to accomplish the following… Enhance security Improve performance Simplify troubleshooting The challenges of Classful Addressing in IPv4 (No subnetting) The simplest type of IPv4 is known as classful addressing (which was the Class A, Class B & Class C network addresses). Classful addressing has the following limitations. Restriction in the number of usable IPv4 addresses (class C would be limited to 254 addresses) Difficult to separate traffic from various parts of a network Because of the above reasons, subnetting was introduced. IPv4 Subnet Masks Subnetting depends on the use of subnet masks to identify how a network is subdivided. A subnet mask indicates where network information is located in an IPv4 address. The 1 in a subnet mask indicates that corresponding bits in the IPv4 address contain network information (likewise 0 indicates the opposite) Each network class is associated with a default subnet mask… Class A = 255.0.0.0 Class B = 255.255.0.0 Class C = 255.255.255.0 An example of calculating  the network ID for a particular device with a subnet mask is shown below.. IP Address = 199.34.89.127 Subnet Mask = 255.255.255.0 Resultant Network ID = 199.34.89.0 IPv4 Subnetting Techniques Subnetting breaks the rules of classful IPv4 addressing. Read page 490 for a detailed explanation Calculating IPv4 Subnets Read page 491 – 494 for an explanation Important… Subnetting only applies to the devices internal to your network. Everything external looks at the class of the IP address instead of the subnet network ID. This way, traffic directed to your network externally still knows where to go, and once it has entered your internal network it can then be prioritized and segmented. CIDR (classless Interdomain Routing) CIDR is also known as classless routing or supernetting. In CIDR conventional network class distinctions do not exist, a subnet boundary can move to the left, therefore generating more usable IP addresses on your network. A subnet created by moving the subnet boundary to the left is known as a supernet. With CIDR also came new shorthand for denoting the position of subnet boundaries known as CIDR notation or slash notation. CIDR notation takes the form of the network ID followed by a forward slash (/) followed by the number of bits that are used for the extended network prefix. To take advantage of classless routing, your networks routers must be able to interpret IP addresses that don;t adhere to conventional network class parameters. Routers that rely on older routing protocols (i.e. RIP) are not capable of interpreting classless IP addresses. Internet Gateways Gateways are a combination of software and hardware that enable two different network segments to exchange data. A gateway facilitates communication between different networks or subnets. Because on device cannot send data directly to a device on another subnet, a gateway must intercede and hand off the information. Every device on a TCP/IP based network has a default gateway (a gateway that first interprets its outbound requests to other subnets, and then interprets its inbound requests from other subnets). The internet contains a vast number of routers and gateways. If each gateway had to track addressing information for every other gateway on the Internet, it would be overtaxed. Instead, each handles only a relatively small amount of addressing information, which it uses to forward data to another gateway that knows more about the data’s destination. The gateways that make up the internet backbone are called core gateways. Address Translation An organizations default gateway can also be used to “hide” the organizations internal IP addresses and keep them from being recognized on a public network. A public network is one that any user may access with little or no restrictions. On private networks, hiding IP addresses allows network managers more flexibility in assigning addresses. Clients behind a gateway may use any IP addressing scheme, regardless of whether it is recognized as legitimate by the Internet authorities but as soon as those devices need to go on the internet, they must have legitimate IP addresses to exchange data. When a clients transmission reaches the default gateway, the gateway opens the IP datagram and replaces the client’s private IP address with an Internet recognized IP address. This process is known as NAT (Network Address Translation). TCP/IP Mail Services All Internet mail services rely on the same principles of mail delivery, storage, and pickup, though they may use different types of software to accomplish these functions. Email servers and clients communicate through special TCP/IP application layer protocols. These protocols, all of which operate on a variety of operating systems are discussed below… SMTP (Simple Mail transfer Protocol) The protocol responsible for moving messages from one mail server to another over TCP/IP based networks. SMTP belongs to the application layer of the ODI model and relies on TCP as its transport protocol. Operates from port 25 on the SMTP server Simple sub-protocol, incapable of doing anything more than transporting mail or holding it in a queue MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) The standard message format specified by SMTP allows for lines that contain no more than 1000 ascii characters meaning if you relied solely on SMTP you would have very short messages and nothing like pictures included in an email. MIME us a standard for encoding and interpreting binary files, images, video, and non-ascii character sets within an email message. MIME identifies each element of a mail message according to content type. MIME does not replace SMTP but works in conjunction with it. Most modern email clients and servers support MIME POP (Post Office Protocol) POP is an application layer protocol used to retrieve messages from a mail server POP3 relies on TCP and operates over port 110 With POP3 mail is delivered and stored on a mail server until it is downloaded by a user Disadvantage of POP3 is that it typically does not allow users to save their messages on the server because of this IMAP is sometimes used IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) IMAP is a retrieval protocol that was developed as a more sophisticated alternative to POP3 The single biggest advantage IMAP4 has over POP3 is that users can store messages on the mail server, rather than having to continually download them Users can retrieve all or only a portion of any mail message Users can review their messages and delete them while the messages remain on the server Users can create sophisticated methods of organizing messages on the server Users can share a mailbox in a central location Disadvantages of IMAP are typically related to the fact that it requires more storage space on the server. Additional TCP/IP Utilities Nearly all TCP/IP utilities can be accessed from the command prompt on any type of server or client running TCP/IP. The syntaxt may differ depending on the OS of the client. Below is a list of additional TCP/IP utilities – research their use on your own! Ipconfig (Windows) & Ifconfig (Linux) Netstat Nbtstat Hostname, Host & Nslookup Dig (Linux) Whois (Linux) Traceroute (Tracert) Mtr (my traceroute) Route

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  • “It’s only test code…”

    - by Chris George
    “Let me hack this in, it’s only test code”, “Don’t worry about getting it reviewed, it’s only test code”, “It doesn’t have to be elegant or efficient, it’s only test code”… do these phrases sound familiar? Chances are if you’ve working with test automation, at one point or other you will have heard these phrases, you have probably even used them yourself! What is certain is that code written under this “it’s only test code” mantra will come back and bite you in the arse! I’ve recently encountered a case where a test was giving a false positive, therefore hiding a real product bug because that test code was very badly written. Firstly it was very difficult to understand what the test was actually trying to achieve let alone how it was doing it, and this complexity masked a simple logic error. These issues are real and they do happen. Let’s take a step back from this and look at what we are trying to do. We are writing test code that tests product code, and we do this to create a suite of tests that will help protect our software against regressions. This test code is making sure that the product behaves as it should by employing some sort of expected result verification. The simple cases of these are generally not a problem. However, automation allows us to explore more complex scenarios in many more permutations. As this complexity increases then so does the complexity of the test code. It is at this point that code which has not been architected properly will cause problems.   Keep your friends close… So, how do we make sure we are doing it right? The development teams I have worked on have always had Test Engineers working very closely with their Software Engineers. This is something that I have always tried to take full advantage of. They are coding experts! So run your ideas past them, ask for advice on how to structure your code, help you design your data structures. This may require a shift in your teams viewpoint, as contrary to this section title and folklore, Software Engineers are not actually the mortal enemy of Test Engineers. As time progresses, and test automation becomes more and more ingrained in what we do, the two roles are converging more than ever. Over the 16 years I have spent as a Test Engineer, I have seen the grey area between the two roles grow significantly larger. This serves to strengthen the relationship and common bond between the two roles which helps to make test code activities so much easier!   Pair for the win Possibly the best thing you could do to write good test code is to pair program on the task. This will serve a few purposes. you will get the benefit of the Software Engineers knowledge and experience the Software Engineer will gain knowledge on the testing process. Sharing the love is a wonderful thing! two pairs of eyes are always better than one… And so are two brains. Between the two of you, I will guarantee you will derive more useful test cases than if it was just one of you.   Code reviews Another policy which certainly pays dividends is the practice of code reviews. By having one of your peers review your code before you commit it serves two purposes. Firstly, it forces you to explain your code. Just the act of doing this will often pick up errors in your code. Secondly, it gets yet another pair of eyes on your code! I cannot stress enough how important code reviews are. The benefits they offer apply as much to product code as test code. In short, Software and Test Engineers should all be doing them! It can be extended even further by getting test code reviewed by a Software Engineer and a Test Engineer, and likewise product code. This serves to keep both functions in the loop with changes going on within your code base.   Learn from your devs I briefly touched on this earlier but I’d like to go into more detail here. Pairing with your Software Engineers when writing your test code is such an amazing opportunity to improve your coding skills. As I sit here writing this article waiting to be called into court for jury service, it reminds me that it takes a lot of patience to be a Test Engineer, almost as much as it takes to be a juror! However tempting it is to go rushing in and start writing your automated tests, resist that urge. Discuss what you want to achieve then talk through the approach you’re going to take. Then code it up together. I find it really enlightening to ask questions like ‘is there a better way to do this?’ Or ‘is this how you would code it?’ The latter question, especially, is where I learn the most. I’ve found that most Software Engineers will be reluctant to show you the ‘right way’ to code something when writing tests because they perceive the ‘right way’ to be too complicated for the Test Engineer (e.g. not mentioning LINQ and instead doing something verbose). So by asking how THEY would code it, it unleashes their true dev-ness and advanced code usually ensues! I would like to point out, however, that you don’t have to accept their method as the final answer. On numerous occasions I have opted for the more simple/verbose solution because I found the code written by the Software Engineer too advanced and therefore I would find it unreadable when I return to the code in a months’ time! Always keep the target audience in mind when writing clever code, and in my case that is mostly Test Engineers.  

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  • Oracle B2B - Synchronous Request Reply

    - by cdwright
    Introduction So first off, let me say I didn't create this demo (although I did modify it some). I got it from a member of the B2B development technical staff. Since it came with only a simple readme file, I thought I would take some time and write a more detailed explanation about how it works. Beginning with Oracle SOA Suite PS5 (11.1.1.6), B2B supports synchronous request reply over http using the b2b/syncreceiver servlet. I’m attaching the demo to this blog which includes a SOA composite archive that needs to be deployed using JDeveloper, a B2B repository with two agreements that need to be deployed using the B2B console, and a test xml file that gets sent to the b2b/syncreceiver servlet using your favorite SOAP test tool (I'm using Firefox Poster here). You can download the zip file containing the demo here. The demo works by sending the sample xml request file (req.xml) to http://<b2bhost>:8001/b2b/syncreceiver using the SOAP test tool.  The syncreceiver servlet keeps the socket connection open between itself and the test tool so that it can synchronously send the reply message back. When B2B receives the inbound request message, it is passed to the SOA composite through the default B2B Fabric binding. A simple reply is created in BPEL and returned to B2B which then sends the message back to the test tool using that same socket connection. I’ll show you the B2B configuration first, then we’ll look at the soa composite. Configuring B2B No additional configuration necessary in order to use the syncreceiver servlet. It is already running when you start SOA. After importing the GC_SyncReqRep.zip repository file into B2B, you’ll have the typical GlobalChips host trading partner and the Acme remote trading partner. Document Management The repository contains two very simple custom XML document definitions called Orders and OrdersResponse. In order to determine the trading partner agreement needed to process the inbound Orders document, you need to know two things about it; what is it and where it came from. So let’s look at how B2B identifies the appropriate document definition for the message. The XSD’s for these two document definitions themselves are not particularly interesting. Whenever you're dealing with custom XML documents, B2B identifies the appropriate document definition for each XML message using an XPath Identification Expression. The expression is entered for each of these document definitions under the document administration tab in the B2B console. The full XPATH expression for the Orders document is  //*[local-name()='shiporder']/*[local-name()='shipto']/*[local-name()='name']/text(). You can see this path in the XSD diagram below and how it uniquely identifies this message. The OrdersReponse document is identified in the same way. The XPath expression for it is //*[local-name()='Response']/*[local-name()='Status']/text(). You can see how it’s path differs uniquely identifying the reply from the request. Trading Partner Profile The trading partner profiles are very simple too. For GlobalChips, a generic identifier is being used to identify the sender of the response document using the host trading partner name. For Acme, a generic identifier is also being used to identify the sender of the inbound request using the remote trading partner name. The document types are added for the remote trading partner as usual. So the remote trading partner Acme is the sender of the Orders document, and it is the receiver of the OrdersResponse document. For the remote trading partner only, there needs to be a dummy channel which gets used in the outbound response agreement. The channel is not actually used. It is just a necessary place holder that needs to be there when creating the agreement. Trading Partner Agreement The agreements are equally simple. There is no validation and translation is not an option for a custom XML document type. For the InboundAgreement (request) the document definition is set to OrdersDef. In the Agreement Parameters section the generic identifiers have been added for the host and remote trading partners. That’s all that is needed for the inbound transaction. For the OutboundAgreement (response), the document definition is set to OrdersResponseDef and the generic identifiers for the two trading partners are added. The remote trading partner dummy delivery channel is also added to the agreement. SOA Composite Import the SOA composite archive into JDeveloper as an EJB JAR file. Open the composite and you should have a project that looks like this. In the composite, open the b2bInboundSyncSvc exposed service and advance through the setup wizard. Select your Application Server Connection and advance to the Operations window. Notice here that the B2B binding is set to Receive. It is not set for Synchronous Request Reply. Continue advancing through the wizard as you normally would and select finish at the end. Now open BPELProcess1 in the composite. The BPEL process is set as a Synchronous Request Reply as you can see below. The while loop is there just to give the process something to do. The actual reply message is prepared in the assignResponseValues assignment followed by an Invoke of the B2B binding. Open the replyResponse Invoke and go to the properties tab. You’ll see that the fromTradingPartnerId, toTradingPartner, documentTypeName, and documentProtocolRevision properties have been set. Testing the Configuration To test the configuration, I used Firefox Poster. Enter the URL for the b2b/syncreceiver servlet and browse for the req.xml file that contains the test request message. In the Headers tab, add the property ‘from’ and give it the value ‘Acme’. This is how B2B will know where the message is coming from and it will use that information along with the document type name to find the right trading partner agreement. Now post the message. You should get back a response with a status of ‘200 OK’. That’s all there is to it.

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