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  • What's up with LDoms: Part 4 - Virtual Networking Explained

    - by Stefan Hinker
    I'm back from my summer break (and some pressing business that kept me away from this), ready to continue with Oracle VM Server for SPARC ;-) In this article, we'll have a closer look at virtual networking.  Basic connectivity as we've seen it in the first, simple example, is easy enough.  But there are numerous options for the virtual switches and virtual network ports, which we will discuss in more detail now.   In this section, we will concentrate on virtual networking - the capabilities of virtual switches and virtual network ports - only.  Other options involving hardware assignment or redundancy will be covered in separate sections later on. There are two basic components involved in virtual networking for LDoms: Virtual switches and virtual network devices.  The virtual switch should be seen just like a real ethernet switch.  It "runs" in the service domain and moves ethernet packets back and forth.  A virtual network device is plumbed in the guest domain.  It corresponds to a physical network device in the real world.  There, you'd be plugging a cable into the network port, and plug the other end of that cable into a switch.  In the virtual world, you do the same:  You create a virtual network device for your guest and connect it to a virtual switch in a service domain.  The result works just like in the physical world, the network device sends and receives ethernet packets, and the switch does all those things ethernet switches tend to do. If you look at the reference manual of Oracle VM Server for SPARC, there are numerous options for virtual switches and network devices.  Don't be confused, it's rather straight forward, really.  Let's start with the simple case, and work our way to some more sophisticated options later on.  In many cases, you'll want to have several guests that communicate with the outside world on the same ethernet segment.  In the real world, you'd connect each of these systems to the same ethernet switch.  So, let's do the same thing in the virtual world: root@sun # ldm add-vsw net-dev=nxge2 admin-vsw primary root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net admin-vsw mars root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net admin-vsw venus We've just created a virtual switch called "admin-vsw" and connected it to the physical device nxge2.  In the physical world, we'd have powered up our ethernet switch and installed a cable between it and our big enterprise datacenter switch.  We then created a virtual network interface for each one of the two guest systems "mars" and "venus" and connected both to that virtual switch.  They can now communicate with each other and with any system reachable via nxge2.  If primary were running Solaris 10, communication with the guests would not be possible.  This is different with Solaris 11, please see the Admin Guide for details.  Note that I've given both the vswitch and the vnet devices some sensible names, something I always recommend. Unless told otherwise, the LDoms Manager software will automatically assign MAC addresses to all network elements that need one.  It will also make sure that these MAC addresses are unique and reuse MAC addresses to play nice with all those friendly DHCP servers out there.  However, if we want to do this manually, we can also do that.  (One reason might be firewall rules that work on MAC addresses.)  So let's give mars a manually assigned MAC address: root@sun # ldm set-vnet mac-addr=0:14:4f:f9:c4:13 admin-net mars Within the guest, these virtual network devices have their own device driver.  In Solaris 10, they'd appear as "vnet0".  Solaris 11 would apply it's usual vanity naming scheme.  We can configure these interfaces just like any normal interface, give it an IP-address and configure sophisticated routing rules, just like on bare metal.  In many cases, using Jumbo Frames helps increase throughput performance.  By default, these interfaces will run with the standard ethernet MTU of 1500 bytes.  To change this,  it is usually sufficient to set the desired MTU for the virtual switch.  This will automatically set the same MTU for all vnet devices attached to that switch.  Let's change the MTU size of our admin-vsw from the example above: root@sun # ldm set-vsw mtu=9000 admin-vsw primary Note that that you can set the MTU to any value between 1500 and 16000.  Of course, whatever you set needs to be supported by the physical network, too. Another very common area of network configuration is VLAN tagging. This can be a little confusing - my advise here is to be very clear on what you want, and perhaps draw a little diagram the first few times.  As always, keeping a configuration simple will help avoid errors of all kind.  Nevertheless, VLAN tagging is very usefull to consolidate different networks onto one physical cable.  And as such, this concept needs to be carried over into the virtual world.  Enough of the introduction, here's a little diagram to help in explaining how VLANs work in LDoms: Let's remember that any VLANs not explicitly tagged have the default VLAN ID of 1. In this example, we have a vswitch connected to a physical network that carries untagged traffic (VLAN ID 1) as well as VLANs 11, 22, 33 and 44.  There might also be other VLANs on the wire, but the vswitch will ignore all those packets.  We also have two vnet devices, one for mars and one for venus.  Venus will see traffic from VLANs 33 and 44 only.  For VLAN 44, venus will need to configure a tagged interface "vnet44000".  For VLAN 33, the vswitch will untag all incoming traffic for venus, so that venus will see this as "normal" or untagged ethernet traffic.  This is very useful to simplify guest configuration and also allows venus to perform Jumpstart or AI installations over this network even if the Jumpstart or AI server is connected via VLAN 33.  Mars, on the other hand, has full access to untagged traffic from the outside world, and also to VLANs 11,22 and 33, but not 44.  On the command line, we'd do this like this: root@sun # ldm add-vsw net-dev=nxge2 pvid=1 vid=11,22,33,44 admin-vsw primary root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net pvid=1 vid=11,22,33 admin-vsw mars root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net pvid=33 vid=44 admin-vsw venus Finally, I'd like to point to a neat little option that will make your live easier in all those cases where configurations tend to change over the live of a guest system.  It's the "id=<somenumber>" option available for both vswitches and vnet devices.  Normally, Solaris in the guest would enumerate network devices sequentially.  However, it has ways of remembering this initial numbering.  This is good in the physical world.  In the virtual world, whenever you unbind (aka power off and disassemble) a guest system, remove and/or add network devices and bind the system again, chances are this numbering will change.  Configuration confusion will follow suit.  To avoid this, nail down the initial numbering by assigning each vnet device it's device-id explicitly: root@sun # ldm add-vnet admin-net id=1 admin-vsw venus Please consult the Admin Guide for details on this, and how to decipher these network ids from Solaris running in the guest. Thanks for reading this far.  Links for further reading are essentially only the Admin Guide and Reference Manual and can be found above.  I hope this is useful and, as always, I welcome any comments.

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  • Setup Guide for updating local system and the repository with the incremental Solaris 11.1 SRU

    - by Gurubalan
    This guide covers the steps to implement the following setup. I. Updating the local system from Solaris 11.1 to Solaris 11.1 SRU 16.5II. Setting up local system as an IPS Repository Server (HTTP interface)III. Updating the local repository with the incremental Solaris 11.1 SRU 16.5I. Updating the local system from Solaris 11.1 to Solaris 11.1 SRU 16.5We assume that the local system is currently installed with Solaris 11.1 GA and the system doesn't have internet connectivity.What I have:1. Two parts of full repo iso files downloaded from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html. Both files are concatenated to a single file using the following command. $ cat sol-11_1-repo-full.iso-a sol-11_1-repo-full.iso-b > sol-11_1-repo-full.iso I suggest to verify the downloaded file against its md5checksum value [http://download.oracle.com/otn/solaris/11_1/md5sum.txt] using the following command digest -a md5 <file-name>  // the output of this command should match the original checksum value for that file.2. Incremental repo sol-11_1_16_5_0-incr-repo.iso downloaded from MOS [Patch 18269379: ORACLE SOLARIS 11.1.16.5.0 REPO ISO IMAGE (SPARC/X86 (64-BIT)]. You can get the checksum value of incremental repo iso by clicking the check box "show digest details" when you download the file.3. The local system IP is 192.168.10.10 & port 81 is reserved for repo serverPlease note that this repo file (either full or incremental) is common for both SPARC and X86(64BIT).Steps to update the local system: 1. #mounting s11.1 full repo iso to mnt        $ mount -F hsfs /soft/sol-11_1-repo-full.iso /mnt 2. Setting the pkg publisher to full repo source         $ pkg set-publisher -g file:///mnt/repo solaris 3. Perform the update of the packages.        $ pkg updateII. Setting up local system (Oracle Solaris 11.1) as an IPS Repository Server(HTTP interface):Please note that we have already mounted the full repo iso at /mnt    1. # copying /mnt permanently to the disk location at /s11.1        #zfs create -o atime=off -o mountpoint=/s11.1 rpool/s11.1        #rsync -aP /mnt/* /s11.1     2. #unmounting mnt         #umount /mnt3. To allow clients to access the local repository via HTTP, enable the application/pkg/server Service Management Facility (SMF) service.        svccfg -s application/pkg/server setprop pkg/inst_root=<data_source>/repo        eg: $svccfg -s application/pkg/server setprop pkg/inst_root=/s11.1/repo4. Setting port# to 81      svccfg -s application/pkg/server setprop pkg/port=<port_number>      eg: svccfg -s application/pkg/server setprop pkg/port="81"5a. Enable the pkg/server service (if the service is disabled)     $svcs pkg/server     STATE          STIME    FMRI     disabled        19:55:03 svc:/application/pkg/server:default      $svcadm enable pkg/server5b. Refresh/Restart the service, if it is already online       $svcadm refresh application/pkg/server       $svcadm restart application/pkg/server6. Setting pkg publisher on repo server and repo clients:      pkg set-publisher -G '*' -g http://<ip>:<port> solaris      eg: $pkg set-publisher -G '*' -g 'http://192.168.10.10:81' solaris7. Verify the Solaris 11.1 version from the repository         $pkgrepo list -s http://192.168.10.10:81 | grep entire         solaris   entire     0.5.11,5.11-0.175.1.0.0.24.2:20120919T190135Z You will have multiple row entries if the repository is setup with incremental SRUs.III. Updating the local repository with the incremental Solaris 11.1 SRU 16.51. #mounting s11.1 incremental SRU repo iso to mnt        $ mount -F hsfs <full_path_to>/sol-11_1_sruN_bldnum_respinnum-incr-repo.iso  /mnt        $ mount -F hsfs /soft/sol-11_1_16_5_0-incr-repo.iso /mnt2. Updating the local repository        $pkgrecv -s  /mnt/repo -d /s11.1/repo '*'3. Building a Search Index    $pkgrepo -s /s11.1/repo refresh     Initiating repository refresh.4. Refresh/Restart the service       $svcadm refresh svc:/application/pkg/server       $svcadm restart svc:/application/pkg/server5. Verify the repo has the incremental SRU as well.       # pkgrepo list -s http://192.168.10.10:81 | grep entire        solaris   entire      0.5.11,5.11-0.175.1.16.0.5.0:20140218T165248Z       solaris   entire      0.5.11,5.11-0.175.1.0.0.24.2:20120919T190135Z

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  • Building an Infrastructure Cloud with Oracle VM for x86 + Enterprise Manager 12c

    - by Richard Rotter
    Cloud Computing? Everyone is talking about Cloud these days. Everyone is explaining how the cloud will help you to bring your service up and running very fast, secure and with little effort. You can find these kinds of presentations at almost every event around the globe. But what is really behind all this stuff? Is it really so simple? And the answer is: Yes it is! With the Oracle SW Stack it is! In this post, I will try to bring this down to earth, demonstrating how easy it could be to build a cloud infrastructure with Oracle's solution for cloud computing.But let me cover some basics first: How fast can you build a cloud?How elastic is your cloud so you can provide new services on demand? How much effort does it take to monitor and operate your Cloud Infrastructure in order to meet your SLAs?How easy is it to chargeback for your services provided? These are the critical success factors of Cloud Computing. And Oracle has an answer to all those questions. By using Oracle VM for X86 in combination with Enterprise Manager 12c you can build and control your cloud environment very fast and easy. What are the fundamental building blocks for your cloud? Oracle Cloud Building Blocks #1 Hardware Surprise, surprise. Even the cloud needs to run somewhere, hence you will need hardware. This HW normally consists of servers, storage and networking. But Oracles goes beyond that. There are Optimized Solutions available for your cloud infrastructure. This is a cookbook to build your HW cloud platform. For example, building your cloud infrastructure with blades and our network infrastructure will reduce complexity in your datacenter (Blades with switch network modules, splitter cables to reduce the amount of cables, TOR (Top Of the Rack) switches which are building the interface to your infrastructure environment. Reducing complexity even in the cabling will help you to manage your environment more efficient and with less risk. Of course, our engineered systems fit into the cloud perfectly too. Although they are considered as a PaaS themselves, having the database SW (for Exadata) and the application development environment (for Exalogic) already deployed on them, in general they are ideal systems to enable you building your own cloud and PaaS infrastructure. #2 Virtualization The next missing link in the cloud setup is virtualization. For me personally, it's one of the most hidden "secret", that oracle can provide you with a complete virtualization stack in terms of a hypervisor on both architectures: X86 and Sparc CPUs. There is Oracle VM for X86 and Oracle VM for Sparc available at no additional  license costs if your are running this virtualization stack on top of Oracle HW (and with Oracle Premier Support for HW). This completes the virtualization portfolio together with Solaris Zones introduced already with Solaris 10 a few years ago. Let me explain how Oracle VM for X86 works: Oracle VM for x86 consists of two main parts: - The Oracle VM Server: Oracle VM Server is installed on bare metal and it is the hypervisor which is able to run virtual machines. It has a very small footprint. The ISO-Image of Oracle VM Server is only 200MB large. It is very small but efficient. You can install a OVM-Server in less than 5 mins by booting the Server with the ISO-Image assigned and providing the necessary configuration parameters (like installing an Linux distribution). After the installation, the OVM-Server is ready to use. That's all. - The Oracle VM-Manager: OVM-Manager is the central management tool where you can control your OVM-Servers. OVM-Manager provides the graphical user interface, which is an Application Development Framework (ADF) application, with a familiar web-browser based interface, to manage Oracle VM Servers, virtual machines, and resources. The Oracle VM Manager has the following capabilities: Create virtual machines Create server pools Power on and off virtual machines Manage networks and storage Import virtual machines, ISO files, and templates Manage high availability of Oracle VM Servers, server pools, and virtual machines Perform live migration of virtual machines I want to highlight one of the goodies which you can use if you are running Oracle VM for X86: Preconfigured, downloadable Virtual Machine Templates form edelivery With these templates, you can download completely preconfigured Virtual Machines in your environment, boot them up, configure them at first time boot and use it. There are templates for almost all Oracle SW and Applications (like Fusion Middleware, Database, Siebel, etc.) available. #3) Cloud Management The management of your cloud infrastructure is key. This is a day-to-day job. Acquiring HW, installing a virtualization layer on top of it is done just at the beginning and if you want to expand your infrastructure. But managing your cloud, keeping it up and running, deploying new services, changing your chargeback model, etc, these are the daily jobs. These jobs must be simple, secure and easy to manage. The Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud provides this functionality from one management cockpit. Enterprise Manager 12c uses Oracle VM Manager to control OVM Serverpools. Once you registered your OVM-Managers in Enterprise Manager, then you are able to setup your cloud infrastructure and manage everything from Enterprise Manager. What you need to do in EM12c is: ">Register your OVM Manager in Enterprise ManagerAfter Registering your OVM Manager, all the functionality of Oracle VM for X86 is also available in Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager works as a "Manger" of the Manager. You can register as many OVM-Managers you want and control your complete virtualization environment Create Roles and Users for your Self Service Portal in Enterprise ManagerWith this step you allow users to logon on the Enterprise Manager Self Service Portal. Users can request Virtual Machines in this portal. Setup the Cloud InfrastructureSetup the Quotas for your self service users. How many VMs can they request? How much of your resources ( cpu, memory, storage, network, etc. etc.)? Which SW components (templates, assemblys) can your self service users request? In this step, you basically set up the complete cloud infrastructure. Setup ChargebackOnce your cloud is set up, you need to configure your chargeback mechanism. The Enterprise Manager collects the resources metrics, which are used in a very deep level. Almost all collected Metrics could be used in the chargeback module. You can define chargeback plans based on configurations (charge for the amount of cpu, memory, storage is assigned to a machine, or for a specific OS which is installed) or chargeback on resource consumption (% of cpu used, storage used, etc). Or you can also define a combination of configuration and consumption chargeback plans. The chargeback module is very flexible. Here is a overview of the workflow how to handle infrastructure cloud in EM: Summary As you can see, setting up an Infrastructure Cloud Service with Oracle VM for X86 and Enterprise Manager 12c is really simple. I personally configured a complete cloud environment with three X86 servers and a small JBOD san box in less than 3 hours. There is no magic in it, it is all straightforward. Of course, you have to have some experience with Oracle VM and Enterprise Manager. Experience in setting up Linux environments helps as well. I plan to publish a technical cookbook in the next few weeks. I hope you found this post useful and will see you again here on our blog. Any hints, comments are welcome!

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  • What's up with LDoms: Part 5 - A few Words about Consoles

    - by Stefan Hinker
    Back again to look at a detail of LDom configuration that is often forgotten - the virtual console server. Remember, LDoms are SPARC systems.  As such, each guest will have it's own OBP running.  And to connect to that OBP, the administrator will need a console connection.  Since it's OBP, and not some x86 BIOS, this console will be very serial in nature ;-)  It's really very much like in the good old days, where we had a terminal concentrator where all those serial cables ended up in.  Just like with other components in LDoms, the virtualized solution looks very similar. Every LDom guest requires exactly one console connection.  Envision this similar to the RS-232 port on older SPARC systems.  The LDom framework provides one or more console services that provide access to these connections.  This would be the virtual equivalent of a network terminal server (NTS), where all those serial cables are plugged in.  In the physical world, we'd have a list somewhere, that would tell us which TCP-Port of the NTS was connected to which server.  "ldm list" does just that: root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 0.4% 27d 8h 22m jupiter bound ------ 5002 20 8G mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.5% 55d 14h 10m venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.5% 56d 40m pluto inactive ------ 4 4G The column marked "CONS" tells us, where to reach the console of each domain. In the case of the primary domain, this is actually a (more) physical connection - it's the console connection of the physical system, which is either reachable via the ILOM of that system, or directly via the serial console port on the chassis. All the other guests are reachable through the console service which we created during the inital setup of the system.  Note that pluto does not have a port assigned.  This is because pluto is not yet bound.  (Binding can be viewed very much as the assembly of computer parts - CPU, Memory, disks, network adapters and a serial console cable are all put together when binding the domain.)  Unless we set the port number explicitly, LDoms Manager will do this on a first come, first serve basis.  For just a few domains, this is fine.  For larger deployments, it might be a good idea to assign these port numbers manually using the "ldm set-vcons" command.  However, there is even better magic associated with virtual consoles. You can group several domains into one console group, reachable through one TCP port of the console service.  This can be useful when several groups of administrators are to be given access to different domains, or for other grouping reasons.  Here's an example: root@sun # ldm set-vcons group=planets service=console jupiter root@sun # ldm set-vcons group=planets service=console pluto root@sun # ldm bind jupiter root@sun # ldm bind pluto root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 6.1% 27d 8h 24m jupiter bound ------ 5002 200 8G mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.6% 55d 14h 12m pluto bound ------ 5002 4 4G venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.5% 56d 42m root@sun # telnet localhost 5002 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. sun-vnts-planets: h, l, c{id}, n{name}, q:l DOMAIN ID DOMAIN NAME DOMAIN STATE 2 jupiter online 3 pluto online sun-vnts-planets: h, l, c{id}, n{name}, q:npluto Connecting to console "pluto" in group "planets" .... Press ~? for control options .. What I did here was add the two domains pluto and jupiter to a new console group called "planets" on the service "console" running in the primary domain.  Simply using a group name will create such a group, if it doesn't already exist.  By default, each domain has its own group, using the domain name as the group name.  The group will be available on port 5002, chosen by LDoms Manager because I didn't specify it.  If I connect to that console group, I will now first be prompted to choose the domain I want to connect to from a little menu. Finally, here's an example how to assign port numbers explicitly: root@sun # ldm set-vcons port=5044 group=pluto service=console pluto root@sun # ldm bind pluto root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 3.8% 27d 8h 54m jupiter active -t---- 5002 200 8G 0.5% 30m mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.6% 55d 14h 43m pluto bound ------ 5044 4 4G venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.4% 56d 1h 13m With this, pluto would always be reachable on port 5044 in its own exclusive console group, no matter in which order other domains are bound. Now, you might be wondering why we always have to mention the console service name, "console" in all the examples here.  The simple answer is because there could be more than one such console service.  For all "normal" use, a single console service is absolutely sufficient.  But the system is flexible enough to allow more than that single one, should you need them.  In fact, you could even configure such a console service on a domain other than the primary (or control domain), which would make that domain a real console server.  I actually have a customer who does just that - they want to separate console access from the control domain functionality.  But this is definately a rather sophisticated setup. Something I don't want to go into in this post is access control.  vntsd, which is the daemon providing all these console services, is fully RBAC-aware, and you can configure authorizations for individual users to connect to console groups or individual domain's consoles.  If you can't wait until I get around to security, check out the man page of vntsd. Further reading: The Admin Guide is rather reserved on this subject.  I do recommend to check out the Reference Manual. The manpage for vntsd will discuss all the control sequences as well as the grouping and authorizations mentioned here.

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  • Agile Development

    - by James Oloo Onyango
    Alot of literature has and is being written about agile developement and its surrounding philosophies. In my quest to find the best way to express the importance of agile methodologies, i have found Robert C. Martin's "A Satire Of Two Companies" to be both the most concise and thorough! Enjoy the read! Rufus Inc Project Kick Off Your name is Bob. The date is January 3, 2001, and your head still aches from the recent millennial revelry. You are sitting in a conference room with several managers and a group of your peers. You are a project team leader. Your boss is there, and he has brought along all of his team leaders. His boss called the meeting. "We have a new project to develop," says your boss's boss. Call him BB. The points in his hair are so long that they scrape the ceiling. Your boss's points are just starting to grow, but he eagerly awaits the day when he can leave Brylcream stains on the acoustic tiles. BB describes the essence of the new market they have identified and the product they want to develop to exploit this market. "We must have this new project up and working by fourth quarter October 1," BB demands. "Nothing is of higher priority, so we are cancelling your current project." The reaction in the room is stunned silence. Months of work are simply going to be thrown away. Slowly, a murmur of objection begins to circulate around the conference table.   His points give off an evil green glow as BB meets the eyes of everyone in the room. One by one, that insidious stare reduces each attendee to quivering lumps of protoplasm. It is clear that he will brook no discussion on this matter. Once silence has been restored, BB says, "We need to begin immediately. How long will it take you to do the analysis?" You raise your hand. Your boss tries to stop you, but his spitwad misses you and you are unaware of his efforts.   "Sir, we can't tell you how long the analysis will take until we have some requirements." "The requirements document won't be ready for 3 or 4 weeks," BB says, his points vibrating with frustration. "So, pretend that you have the requirements in front of you now. How long will you require for analysis?" No one breathes. Everyone looks around to see whether anyone has some idea. "If analysis goes beyond April 1, we have a problem. Can you finish the analysis by then?" Your boss visibly gathers his courage: "We'll find a way, sir!" His points grow 3 mm, and your headache increases by two Tylenol. "Good." BB smiles. "Now, how long will it take to do the design?" "Sir," you say. Your boss visibly pales. He is clearly worried that his 3 mms are at risk. "Without an analysis, it will not be possible to tell you how long design will take." BB's expression shifts beyond austere.   "PRETEND you have the analysis already!" he says, while fixing you with his vacant, beady little eyes. "How long will it take you to do the design?" Two Tylenol are not going to cut it. Your boss, in a desperate attempt to save his new growth, babbles: "Well, sir, with only six months left to complete the project, design had better take no longer than 3 months."   "I'm glad you agree, Smithers!" BB says, beaming. Your boss relaxes. He knows his points are secure. After a while, he starts lightly humming the Brylcream jingle. BB continues, "So, analysis will be complete by April 1, design will be complete by July 1, and that gives you 3 months to implement the project. This meeting is an example of how well our new consensus and empowerment policies are working. Now, get out there and start working. I'll expect to see TQM plans and QIT assignments on my desk by next week. Oh, and don't forget that your crossfunctional team meetings and reports will be needed for next month's quality audit." "Forget the Tylenol," you think to yourself as you return to your cubicle. "I need bourbon."   Visibly excited, your boss comes over to you and says, "Gosh, what a great meeting. I think we're really going to do some world shaking with this project." You nod in agreement, too disgusted to do anything else. "Oh," your boss continues, "I almost forgot." He hands you a 30-page document. "Remember that the SEI is coming to do an evaluation next week. This is the evaluation guide. You need to read through it, memorize it, and then shred it. It tells you how to answer any questions that the SEI auditors ask you. It also tells you what parts of the building you are allowed to take them to and what parts to avoid. We are determined to be a CMM level 3 organization by June!"   You and your peers start working on the analysis of the new project. This is difficult because you have no requirements. But from the 10-minute introduction given by BB on that fateful morning, you have some idea of what the product is supposed to do.   Corporate process demands that you begin by creating a use case document. You and your team begin enumerating use cases and drawing oval and stick diagrams. Philosophical debates break out among the team members. There is disagreement as to whether certain use cases should be connected with <<extends>> or <<includes>> relationships. Competing models are created, but nobody knows how to evaluate them. The debate continues, effectively paralyzing progress.   After a week, somebody finds the iceberg.com Web site, which recommends disposing entirely of <<extends>> and <<includes>> and replacing them with <<precedes>> and <<uses>>. The documents on this Web site, authored by Don Sengroiux, describes a method known as stalwart-analysis, which claims to be a step-by-step method for translating use cases into design diagrams. More competing use case models are created using this new scheme, but again, people can't agree on how to evaluate them. The thrashing continues. More and more, the use case meetings are driven by emotion rather than by reason. If it weren't for the fact that you don't have requirements, you'd be pretty upset by the lack of progress you are making. The requirements document arrives on February 15. And then again on February 20, 25, and every week thereafter. Each new version contradicts the previous one. Clearly, the marketing folks who are writing the requirements, empowered though they might be, are not finding consensus.   At the same time, several new competing use case templates have been proposed by the various team members. Each template presents its own particularly creative way of delaying progress. The debates rage on. On March 1, Prudence Putrigence, the process proctor, succeeds in integrating all the competing use case forms and templates into a single, all-encompassing form. Just the blank form is 15 pages long. She has managed to include every field that appeared on all the competing templates. She also presents a 159- page document describing how to fill out the use case form. All current use cases must be rewritten according to the new standard.   You marvel to yourself that it now requires 15 pages of fill-in-the-blank and essay questions to answer the question: What should the system do when the user presses Return? The corporate process (authored by L. E. Ott, famed author of "Holistic Analysis: A Progressive Dialectic for Software Engineers") insists that you discover all primary use cases, 87 percent of all secondary use cases, and 36.274 percent of all tertiary use cases before you can complete analysis and enter the design phase. You have no idea what a tertiary use case is. So in an attempt to meet this requirement, you try to get your use case document reviewed by the marketing department, which you hope will know what a tertiary use case is.   Unfortunately, the marketing folks are too busy with sales support to talk to you. Indeed, since the project started, you have not been able to get a single meeting with marketing, which has provided a never-ending stream of changing and contradictory requirements documents.   While one team has been spinning endlessly on the use case document, another team has been working out the domain model. Endless variations of UML documents are pouring out of this team. Every week, the model is reworked.   The team members can't decide whether to use <<interfaces>> or <<types>> in the model. A huge disagreement has been raging on the proper syntax and application of OCL. Others on the team just got back from a 5-day class on catabolism, and have been producing incredibly detailed and arcane diagrams that nobody else can fathom.   On March 27, with one week to go before analysis is to be complete, you have produced a sea of documents and diagrams but are no closer to a cogent analysis of the problem than you were on January 3. **** And then, a miracle happens.   **** On Saturday, April 1, you check your e-mail from home. You see a memo from your boss to BB. It states unequivocally that you are done with the analysis! You phone your boss and complain. "How could you have told BB that we were done with the analysis?" "Have you looked at a calendar lately?" he responds. "It's April 1!" The irony of that date does not escape you. "But we have so much more to think about. So much more to analyze! We haven't even decided whether to use <<extends>> or <<precedes>>!" "Where is your evidence that you are not done?" inquires your boss, impatiently. "Whaaa . . . ." But he cuts you off. "Analysis can go on forever; it has to be stopped at some point. And since this is the date it was scheduled to stop, it has been stopped. Now, on Monday, I want you to gather up all existing analysis materials and put them into a public folder. Release that folder to Prudence so that she can log it in the CM system by Monday afternoon. Then get busy and start designing."   As you hang up the phone, you begin to consider the benefits of keeping a bottle of bourbon in your bottom desk drawer. They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the analysis phase. BB gave a colon-stirring speech on empowerment. And your boss, another 3 mm taller, congratulated his team on the incredible show of unity and teamwork. Finally, the CIO takes the stage to tell everyone that the SEI audit went very well and to thank everyone for studying and shredding the evaluation guides that were passed out. Level 3 now seems assured and will be awarded by June. (Scuttlebutt has it that managers at the level of BB and above are to receive significant bonuses once the SEI awards level 3.)   As the weeks flow by, you and your team work on the design of the system. Of course, you find that the analysis that the design is supposedly based on is flawedno, useless; no, worse than useless. But when you tell your boss that you need to go back and work some more on the analysis to shore up its weaker sections, he simply states, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   So, you and your team hack the design as best you can, unsure of whether the requirements have been properly analyzed. Of course, it really doesn't matter much, since the requirements document is still thrashing with weekly revisions, and the marketing department still refuses to meet with you.     The design is a nightmare. Your boss recently misread a book named The Finish Line in which the author, Mark DeThomaso, blithely suggested that design documents should be taken down to code-level detail. "If we are going to be working at that level of detail," you ask, "why don't we simply write the code instead?" "Because then you wouldn't be designing, of course. And the only allowable activity in the design phase is design!" "Besides," he continues, "we have just purchased a companywide license for Dandelion! This tool enables 'Round the Horn Engineering!' You are to transfer all design diagrams into this tool. It will automatically generate our code for us! It will also keep the design diagrams in sync with the code!" Your boss hands you a brightly colored shrinkwrapped box containing the Dandelion distribution. You accept it numbly and shuffle off to your cubicle. Twelve hours, eight crashes, one disk reformatting, and eight shots of 151 later, you finally have the tool installed on your server. You consider the week your team will lose while attending Dandelion training. Then you smile and think, "Any week I'm not here is a good week." Design diagram after design diagram is created by your team. Dandelion makes it very difficult to draw these diagrams. There are dozens and dozens of deeply nested dialog boxes with funny text fields and check boxes that must all be filled in correctly. And then there's the problem of moving classes between packages. At first, these diagram are driven from the use cases. But the requirements are changing so often that the use cases rapidly become meaningless. Debates rage about whether VISITOR or DECORATOR design patterns should be used. One developer refuses to use VISITOR in any form, claiming that it's not a properly object-oriented construct. Someone refuses to use multiple inheritance, since it is the spawn of the devil. Review meetings rapidly degenerate into debates about the meaning of object orientation, the definition of analysis versus design, or when to use aggregation versus association. Midway through the design cycle, the marketing folks announce that they have rethought the focus of the system. Their new requirements document is completely restructured. They have eliminated several major feature areas and replaced them with feature areas that they anticipate customer surveys will show to be more appropriate. You tell your boss that these changes mean that you need to reanalyze and redesign much of the system. But he says, "The analysis phase is system. But he says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   You suggest that it might be better to create a simple prototype to show to the marketing folks and even some potential customers. But your boss says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it." Hack, hack, hack, hack. You try to create some kind of a design document that might reflect the new requirements documents. However, the revolution of the requirements has not caused them to stop thrashing. Indeed, if anything, the wild oscillations of the requirements document have only increased in frequency and amplitude.   You slog your way through them.   On June 15, the Dandelion database gets corrupted. Apparently, the corruption has been progressive. Small errors in the DB accumulated over the months into bigger and bigger errors. Eventually, the CASE tool just stopped working. Of course, the slowly encroaching corruption is present on all the backups. Calls to the Dandelion technical support line go unanswered for several days. Finally, you receive a brief e-mail from Dandelion, informing you that this is a known problem and that the solution is to purchase the new version, which they promise will be ready some time next quarter, and then reenter all the diagrams by hand.   ****   Then, on July 1 another miracle happens! You are done with the design!   Rather than go to your boss and complain, you stock your middle desk drawer with some vodka.   **** They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the design phase and their graduation to CMM level 3. This time, you find BB's speech so stirring that you have to use the restroom before it begins. New banners and plaques are all over your workplace. They show pictures of eagles and mountain climbers, and they talk about teamwork and empowerment. They read better after a few scotches. That reminds you that you need to clear out your file cabinet to make room for the brandy. You and your team begin to code. But you rapidly discover that the design is lacking in some significant areas. Actually, it's lacking any significance at all. You convene a design session in one of the conference rooms to try to work through some of the nastier problems. But your boss catches you at it and disbands the meeting, saying, "The design phase is over. The only allowable activity is coding. Now get back to it."   ****   The code generated by Dandelion is really hideous. It turns out that you and your team were using association and aggregation the wrong way, after all. All the generated code has to be edited to correct these flaws. Editing this code is extremely difficult because it has been instrumented with ugly comment blocks that have special syntax that Dandelion needs in order to keep the diagrams in sync with the code. If you accidentally alter one of these comments, the diagrams will be regenerated incorrectly. It turns out that "Round the Horn Engineering" requires an awful lot of effort. The more you try to keep the code compatible with Dandelion, the more errors Dandelion generates. In the end, you give up and decide to keep the diagrams up to date manually. A second later, you decide that there's no point in keeping the diagrams up to date at all. Besides, who has time?   Your boss hires a consultant to build tools to count the number of lines of code that are being produced. He puts a big thermometer graph on the wall with the number 1,000,000 on the top. Every day, he extends the red line to show how many lines have been added. Three days after the thermometer appears on the wall, your boss stops you in the hall. "That graph isn't growing quickly enough. We need to have a million lines done by October 1." "We aren't even sh-sh-sure that the proshect will require a m-million linezh," you blather. "We have to have a million lines done by October 1," your boss reiterates. His points have grown again, and the Grecian formula he uses on them creates an aura of authority and competence. "Are you sure your comment blocks are big enough?" Then, in a flash of managerial insight, he says, "I have it! I want you to institute a new policy among the engineers. No line of code is to be longer than 20 characters. Any such line must be split into two or more preferably more. All existing code needs to be reworked to this standard. That'll get our line count up!"   You decide not to tell him that this will require two unscheduled work months. You decide not to tell him anything at all. You decide that intravenous injections of pure ethanol are the only solution. You make the appropriate arrangements. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. You and your team madly code away. By August 1, your boss, frowning at the thermometer on the wall, institutes a mandatory 50-hour workweek.   Hack, hack, hack, and hack. By September 1st, the thermometer is at 1.2 million lines and your boss asks you to write a report describing why you exceeded the coding budget by 20 percent. He institutes mandatory Saturdays and demands that the project be brought back down to a million lines. You start a campaign of remerging lines. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. Tempers are flaring; people are quitting; QA is raining trouble reports down on you. Customers are demanding installation and user manuals; salespeople are demanding advance demonstrations for special customers; the requirements document is still thrashing, the marketing folks are complaining that the product isn't anything like they specified, and the liquor store won't accept your credit card anymore. Something has to give.    On September 15, BB calls a meeting. As he enters the room, his points are emitting clouds of steam. When he speaks, the bass overtones of his carefully manicured voice cause the pit of your stomach to roll over. "The QA manager has told me that this project has less than 50 percent of the required features implemented. He has also informed me that the system crashes all the time, yields wrong results, and is hideously slow. He has also complained that he cannot keep up with the continuous train of daily releases, each more buggy than the last!" He stops for a few seconds, visibly trying to compose himself. "The QA manager estimates that, at this rate of development, we won't be able to ship the product until December!" Actually, you think it's more like March, but you don't say anything. "December!" BB roars with such derision that people duck their heads as though he were pointing an assault rifle at them. "December is absolutely out of the question. Team leaders, I want new estimates on my desk in the morning. I am hereby mandating 65-hour work weeks until this project is complete. And it better be complete by November 1."   As he leaves the conference room, he is heard to mutter: "Empowermentbah!" * * * Your boss is bald; his points are mounted on BB's wall. The fluorescent lights reflecting off his pate momentarily dazzle you. "Do you have anything to drink?" he asks. Having just finished your last bottle of Boone's Farm, you pull a bottle of Thunderbird from your bookshelf and pour it into his coffee mug. "What's it going to take to get this project done? " he asks. "We need to freeze the requirements, analyze them, design them, and then implement them," you say callously. "By November 1?" your boss exclaims incredulously. "No way! Just get back to coding the damned thing." He storms out, scratching his vacant head.   A few days later, you find that your boss has been transferred to the corporate research division. Turnover has skyrocketed. Customers, informed at the last minute that their orders cannot be fulfilled on time, have begun to cancel their orders. Marketing is re-evaluating whether this product aligns with the overall goals of the company. Memos fly, heads roll, policies change, and things are, overall, pretty grim. Finally, by March, after far too many sixty-five hour weeks, a very shaky version of the software is ready. In the field, bug-discovery rates are high, and the technical support staff are at their wits' end, trying to cope with the complaints and demands of the irate customers. Nobody is happy.   In April, BB decides to buy his way out of the problem by licensing a product produced by Rupert Industries and redistributing it. The customers are mollified, the marketing folks are smug, and you are laid off.     Rupert Industries: Project Alpha   Your name is Robert. The date is January 3, 2001. The quiet hours spent with your family this holiday have left you refreshed and ready for work. You are sitting in a conference room with your team of professionals. The manager of the division called the meeting. "We have some ideas for a new project," says the division manager. Call him Russ. He is a high-strung British chap with more energy than a fusion reactor. He is ambitious and driven but understands the value of a team. Russ describes the essence of the new market opportunity the company has identified and introduces you to Jane, the marketing manager, who is responsible for defining the products that will address it. Addressing you, Jane says, "We'd like to start defining our first product offering as soon as possible. When can you and your team meet with me?" You reply, "We'll be done with the current iteration of our project this Friday. We can spare a few hours for you between now and then. After that, we'll take a few people from the team and dedicate them to you. We'll begin hiring their replacements and the new people for your team immediately." "Great," says Russ, "but I want you to understand that it is critical that we have something to exhibit at the trade show coming up this July. If we can't be there with something significant, we'll lose the opportunity."   "I understand," you reply. "I don't yet know what it is that you have in mind, but I'm sure we can have something by July. I just can't tell you what that something will be right now. In any case, you and Jane are going to have complete control over what we developers do, so you can rest assured that by July, you'll have the most important things that can be accomplished in that time ready to exhibit."   Russ nods in satisfaction. He knows how this works. Your team has always kept him advised and allowed him to steer their development. He has the utmost confidence that your team will work on the most important things first and will produce a high-quality product.   * * *   "So, Robert," says Jane at their first meeting, "How does your team feel about being split up?" "We'll miss working with each other," you answer, "but some of us were getting pretty tired of that last project and are looking forward to a change. So, what are you people cooking up?" Jane beams. "You know how much trouble our customers currently have . . ." And she spends a half hour or so describing the problem and possible solution. "OK, wait a second" you respond. "I need to be clear about this." And so you and Jane talk about how this system might work. Some of her ideas aren't fully formed. You suggest possible solutions. She likes some of them. You continue discussing.   During the discussion, as each new topic is addressed, Jane writes user story cards. Each card represents something that the new system has to do. The cards accumulate on the table and are spread out in front of you. Both you and Jane point at them, pick them up, and make notes on them as you discuss the stories. The cards are powerful mnemonic devices that you can use to represent complex ideas that are barely formed.   At the end of the meeting, you say, "OK, I've got a general idea of what you want. I'm going to talk to the team about it. I imagine they'll want to run some experiments with various database structures and presentation formats. Next time we meet, it'll be as a group, and we'll start identifying the most important features of the system."   A week later, your nascent team meets with Jane. They spread the existing user story cards out on the table and begin to get into some of the details of the system. The meeting is very dynamic. Jane presents the stories in the order of their importance. There is much discussion about each one. The developers are concerned about keeping the stories small enough to estimate and test. So they continually ask Jane to split one story into several smaller stories. Jane is concerned that each story have a clear business value and priority, so as she splits them, she makes sure that this stays true.   The stories accumulate on the table. Jane writes them, but the developers make notes on them as needed. Nobody tries to capture everything that is said; the cards are not meant to capture everything but are simply reminders of the conversation.   As the developers become more comfortable with the stories, they begin writing estimates on them. These estimates are crude and budgetary, but they give Jane an idea of what the story will cost.   At the end of the meeting, it is clear that many more stories could be discussed. It is also clear that the most important stories have been addressed and that they represent several months worth of work. Jane closes the meeting by taking the cards with her and promising to have a proposal for the first release in the morning.   * * *   The next morning, you reconvene the meeting. Jane chooses five cards and places them on the table. "According to your estimates, these cards represent about one perfect team-week's worth of work. The last iteration of the previous project managed to get one perfect team-week done in 3 real weeks. If we can get these five stories done in 3 weeks, we'll be able to demonstrate them to Russ. That will make him feel very comfortable about our progress." Jane is pushing it. The sheepish look on her face lets you know that she knows it too. You reply, "Jane, this is a new team, working on a new project. It's a bit presumptuous to expect that our velocity will be the same as the previous team's. However, I met with the team yesterday afternoon, and we all agreed that our initial velocity should, in fact, be set to one perfectweek for every 3 real-weeks. So you've lucked out on this one." "Just remember," you continue, "that the story estimates and the story velocity are very tentative at this point. We'll learn more when we plan the iteration and even more when we implement it."   Jane looks over her glasses at you as if to say "Who's the boss around here, anyway?" and then smiles and says, "Yeah, don't worry. I know the drill by now."Jane then puts 15 more cards on the table. She says, "If we can get all these cards done by the end of March, we can turn the system over to our beta test customers. And we'll get good feedback from them."   You reply, "OK, so we've got our first iteration defined, and we have the stories for the next three iterations after that. These four iterations will make our first release."   "So," says Jane, can you really do these five stories in the next 3 weeks?" "I don't know for sure, Jane," you reply. "Let's break them down into tasks and see what we get."   So Jane, you, and your team spend the next several hours taking each of the five stories that Jane chose for the first iteration and breaking them down into small tasks. The developers quickly realize that some of the tasks can be shared between stories and that other tasks have commonalities that can probably be taken advantage of. It is clear that potential designs are popping into the developers' heads. From time to time, they form little discussion knots and scribble UML diagrams on some cards.   Soon, the whiteboard is filled with the tasks that, once completed, will implement the five stories for this iteration. You start the sign-up process by saying, "OK, let's sign up for these tasks." "I'll take the initial database generation." Says Pete. "That's what I did on the last project, and this doesn't look very different. I estimate it at two of my perfect workdays." "OK, well, then, I'll take the login screen," says Joe. "Aw, darn," says Elaine, the junior member of the team, "I've never done a GUI, and kinda wanted to try that one."   "Ah, the impatience of youth," Joe says sagely, with a wink in your direction. "You can assist me with it, young Jedi." To Jane: "I think it'll take me about three of my perfect workdays."   One by one, the developers sign up for tasks and estimate them in terms of their own perfect workdays. Both you and Jane know that it is best to let the developers volunteer for tasks than to assign the tasks to them. You also know full well that you daren't challenge any of the developers' estimates. You know these people, and you trust them. You know that they are going to do the very best they can.   The developers know that they can't sign up for more perfect workdays than they finished in the last iteration they worked on. Once each developer has filled his or her schedule for the iteration, they stop signing up for tasks.   Eventually, all the developers have stopped signing up for tasks. But, of course, tasks are still left on the board.   "I was worried that that might happen," you say, "OK, there's only one thing to do, Jane. We've got too much to do in this iteration. What stories or tasks can we remove?" Jane sighs. She knows that this is the only option. Working overtime at the beginning of a project is insane, and projects where she's tried it have not fared well.   So Jane starts to remove the least-important functionality. "Well, we really don't need the login screen just yet. We can simply start the system in the logged-in state." "Rats!" cries Elaine. "I really wanted to do that." "Patience, grasshopper." says Joe. "Those who wait for the bees to leave the hive will not have lips too swollen to relish the honey." Elaine looks confused. Everyone looks confused. "So . . .," Jane continues, "I think we can also do away with . . ." And so, bit by bit, the list of tasks shrinks. Developers who lose a task sign up for one of the remaining ones.   The negotiation is not painless. Several times, Jane exhibits obvious frustration and impatience. Once, when tensions are especially high, Elaine volunteers, "I'll work extra hard to make up some of the missing time." You are about to correct her when, fortunately, Joe looks her in the eye and says, "When once you proceed down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."   In the end, an iteration acceptable to Jane is reached. It's not what Jane wanted. Indeed, it is significantly less. But it's something the team feels that can be achieved in the next 3 weeks.   And, after all, it still addresses the most important things that Jane wanted in the iteration. "So, Jane," you say when things had quieted down a bit, "when can we expect acceptance tests from you?" Jane sighs. This is the other side of the coin. For every story the development team implements,   Jane must supply a suite of acceptance tests that prove that it works. And the team needs these long before the end of the iteration, since they will certainly point out differences in the way Jane and the developers imagine the system's behaviour.   "I'll get you some example test scripts today," Jane promises. "I'll add to them every day after that. You'll have the entire suite by the middle of the iteration."   * * *   The iteration begins on Monday morning with a flurry of Class, Responsibilities, Collaborators sessions. By midmorning, all the developers have assembled into pairs and are rapidly coding away. "And now, my young apprentice," Joe says to Elaine, "you shall learn the mysteries of test-first design!"   "Wow, that sounds pretty rad," Elaine replies. "How do you do it?" Joe beams. It's clear that he has been anticipating this moment. "OK, what does the code do right now?" "Huh?" replied Elaine, "It doesn't do anything at all; there is no code."   "So, consider our task; can you think of something the code should do?" "Sure," Elaine said with youthful assurance, "First, it should connect to the database." "And thereupon, what must needs be required to connecteth the database?" "You sure talk weird," laughed Elaine. "I think we'd have to get the database object from some registry and call the Connect() method. "Ah, astute young wizard. Thou perceives correctly that we requireth an object within which we can cacheth the database object." "Is 'cacheth' really a word?" "It is when I say it! So, what test can we write that we know the database registry should pass?" Elaine sighs. She knows she'll just have to play along. "We should be able to create a database object and pass it to the registry in a Store() method. And then we should be able to pull it out of the registry with a Get() method and make sure it's the same object." "Oh, well said, my prepubescent sprite!" "Hay!" "So, now, let's write a test function that proves your case." "But shouldn't we write the database object and registry object first?" "Ah, you've much to learn, my young impatient one. Just write the test first." "But it won't even compile!" "Are you sure? What if it did?" "Uh . . ." "Just write the test, Elaine. Trust me." And so Joe, Elaine, and all the other developers began to code their tasks, one test case at a time. The room in which they worked was abuzz with the conversations between the pairs. The murmur was punctuated by an occasional high five when a pair managed to finish a task or a difficult test case.   As development proceeded, the developers changed partners once or twice a day. Each developer got to see what all the others were doing, and so knowledge of the code spread generally throughout the team.   Whenever a pair finished something significant whether a whole task or simply an important part of a task they integrated what they had with the rest of the system. Thus, the code base grew daily, and integration difficulties were minimized.   The developers communicated with Jane on a daily basis. They'd go to her whenever they had a question about the functionality of the system or the interpretation of an acceptance test case.   Jane, good as her word, supplied the team with a steady stream of acceptance test scripts. The team read these carefully and thereby gained a much better understanding of what Jane expected the system to do. By the beginning of the second week, there was enough functionality to demonstrate to Jane. She watched eagerly as the demonstration passed test case after test case. "This is really cool," Jane said as the demonstration finally ended. "But this doesn't seem like one-third of the tasks. Is your velocity slower than anticipated?"   You grimace. You'd been waiting for a good time to mention this to Jane but now she was forcing the issue. "Yes, unfortunately, we are going more slowly than we had expected. The new application server we are using is turning out to be a pain to configure. Also, it takes forever to reboot, and we have to reboot it whenever we make even the slightest change to its configuration."   Jane eyes you with suspicion. The stress of last Monday's negotiations had still not entirely dissipated. She says, "And what does this mean to our schedule? We can't slip it again, we just can't. Russ will have a fit! He'll haul us all into the woodshed and ream us some new ones."   You look Jane right in the eyes. There's no pleasant way to give someone news like this. So you just blurt out, "Look, if things keep going like they're going, we're not going to be done with everything by next Friday. Now it's possible that we'll figure out a way to go faster. But, frankly, I wouldn't depend on that. You should start thinking about one or two tasks that could be removed from the iteration without ruining the demonstration for Russ. Come hell or high water, we are going to give that demonstration on Friday, and I don't think you want us to choose which tasks to omit."   "Aw forchrisakes!" Jane barely manages to stifle yelling that last word as she stalks away, shaking her head. Not for the first time, you say to yourself, "Nobody ever promised me project management would be easy." You are pretty sure it won't be the last time, either.   Actually, things went a bit better than you had hoped. The team did, in fact, have to drop one task from the iteration, but Jane had chosen wisely, and the demonstration for Russ went without a hitch. Russ was not impressed with the progress, but neither was he dismayed. He simply said, "This is pretty good. But remember, we have to be able to demonstrate this system at the trade show in July, and at this rate, it doesn't look like you'll have all that much to show." Jane, whose attitude had improved dramatically with the completion of the iteration, responded to Russ by saying, "Russ, this team is working hard, and well. When July comes around, I am confident that we'll have something significant to demonstrate. It won't be everything, and some of it may be smoke and mirrors, but we'll have something."   Painful though the last iteration was, it had calibrated your velocity numbers. The next iteration went much better. Not because your team got more done than in the last iteration but simply because the team didn't have to remove any tasks or stories in the middle of the iteration.   By the start of the fourth iteration, a natural rhythm has been established. Jane, you, and the team know exactly what to expect from one another. The team is running hard, but the pace is sustainable. You are confident that the team can keep up this pace for a year or more.   The number of surprises in the schedule diminishes to near zero; however, the number of surprises in the requirements does not. Jane and Russ frequently look over the growing system and make recommendations or changes to the existing functionality. But all parties realize that these changes take time and must be scheduled. So the changes do not cause anyone's expectations to be violated. In March, there is a major demonstration of the system to the board of directors. The system is very limited and is not yet in a form good enough to take to the trade show, but progress is steady, and the board is reasonably impressed.   The second release goes even more smoothly than the first. By now, the team has figured out a way to automate Jane's acceptance test scripts. The team has also refactored the design of the system to the point that it is really easy to add new features and change old ones. The second release was done by the end of June and was taken to the trade show. It had less in it than Jane and Russ would have liked, but it did demonstrate the most important features of the system. Although customers at the trade show noticed that certain features were missing, they were very impressed overall. You, Russ, and Jane all returned from the trade show with smiles on your faces. You all felt as though this project was a winner.   Indeed, many months later, you are contacted by Rufus Inc. That company had been working on a system like this for its internal operations. Rufus has canceled the development of that system after a death-march project and is negotiating to license your technology for its environment.   Indeed, things are looking up!

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  • Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community

    There we go! I finally managed to push myself forward and pick up an old, actually too old, idea since I ever arrived here in Mauritius more than six years ago. I'm talking about a community for all kind of ICT connected people. In the past (back in Germany), I used to be involved in various community activities. For example, I was part of the Microsoft Community Leader/Influencer Program (CLIP) in Germany due to an FAQ on Visual FoxPro, actually Active FoxPro Pages (AFP) to be more precise. Then in 2003/2004 I addressed the responsible person of the dFPUG user group in Speyer in order to assist him in organising monthly user group meetings. Well, he handed over management completely, and attended our meetings regularly. Why did it take you so long? Well, I don't want to bother you with the details but short version is that I was too busy on either job (building up new companies) or private life (got married and we have two lovely children, eh 'monsters') or even both. But now is the time where I was starting to look for new fields given the fact that I gained some spare time. My businesses are up and running, the kids are in school, and I am finally in a position where I can commit myself again to community activities. And I love to do that! Why a new user group? Good question... And 'easy' to answer. Since back in 2007 I did my usual research, eh Google searches, to see whether there existing user groups in Mauritius and in which field of interest. And yes, there are! If I recall this correctly, then there are communities for PHP, Drupal, Python (just recently), Oracle, and Linux (which used to be even two). But... either they do not exist anymore, they are dormant, or there is only a low heart-beat, frankly speaking. And yes, I went to meetings of the Linux User Group Meta (Mauritius) back in 2010/2011 and just recently. I really like the setup and the way the LUGM is organised. It's just that I have a slightly different point of view on how a user group or community should organise itself and how to approach future members. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing others doing a very good job, I'm only saying that I'd like to do it differently. The last meeting of the LUGM was awesome; read my feedback about it. Ok, so what's up with 'Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community' or short: MSCC? As I've already written in my article on 'Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion' I think it is essential in a world of IT to stay 'connected' with a good number of other people in the same field. There is so much dynamic and every day's news that it is almost impossible to keep on track with all of them. The MSCC is going to provide a common platform to exchange experience and share knowledge between each other. You might be a newbie and want to know what to expect working as a software developer, or as a database administrator, or maybe as an IT systems administrator, or you're an experienced geek that loves to share your ideas or solutions that you implemented to solve a specific problem, or you're the business (or HR) guy that is looking for 'fresh' blood to enforce your existing team. Or... you're just interested and you'd like to communicate with like-minded people. Meetup of 26.06.2013 @ L'arabica: Of course there are laptops around. Free WiFi, power outlet, coffee, code and Linux in one go. The MSCC is technology-agnostic and spans an umbrella over any kind of technology. Simply because you can't ignore other technologies anymore in a connected IT world as we have. A front-end developer for iOS applications should have the chance to connect with a Python back-end coder and eventually with a DBA for MySQL or PostgreSQL and exchange their experience. Furthermore, I'm a huge fan of cross-platform development, and it is very pleasant to have pure Web developers - with all that HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and JS libraries stuff - and passionate C# or Java coders at the same table. This diversity of knowledge can assist and boost your personal situation. And last but not least, there are projects and open positions 'flying' around... People might like to hear others opinion about an employer or get new impulses on how to tackle down an issue at their workspace, etc. This is about community. And that's how I see the MSCC in general - free of any limitations be it by programming language or technology. Having the chance to exchange experience and to discuss certain aspects of technology saves you time and money, and it's a pleasure to enjoy. Compared to dusty books and remote online resources. It's human! Organising meetups (meetings, get-together, gatherings - you name it!) As of writing this article, the MSCC is currently meeting every Wednesday for the weekly 'Code & Coffee' session at various locations (suggestions are welcome!) in Mauritius. This might change in the future eventually but especially at the beginning I think it is very important to create awareness in the Mauritian IT world. Yes, we are here! Come and join us! ;-) The MSCC's main online presence is located at Meetup.com because it allows me to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments very easily, and any member can have a look who else is involved so that an exchange of contacts is given at any time. In combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there is a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Trello is also available as free smartphone app. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians! Recent updates The MSCC is now officially participating in the O'Reilly UK User Group programm and we are allowed to request review or recension copies of recent titles. Additionally, we have a discount code for any books or ebooks that you might like to order on shop.oreilly.com. More applications for user group sponsorship programms are pending and I'm looking forward to a couple of announcement very soon. And... we need some kind of 'corporate identity' - Over at the MSCC website there is a call for action (or better said a contest with prizes) to create a unique design for the MSCC. This would include a decent colour palette, a logo, graphical banners for Meetup, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and of course badges for our craftsmen to add to their personal blogs and websites. Please spread the word and contribute. Thanks!

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  • Windows Server 2003 - Handling hundreds of simultaneous downloads

    - by Paul Hinett
    At the moment I have a single server with 4 1TB hard disks, daily I haver over 150 MP3 music files uploaded (around 80mb each). At busy periods there is over 300 people streaming / downloading these mixes all at once, 75% of the activity is on the most recently uploaded stuff which is all on a single hard disk. My read speads on the hard disk are very low due to such high activity of 200+ reads all happening at the same time on a single hard disk (ran some tests with HDTach). What would be a logical solution to solve this, a couple of ideas I had are: Load balance with another server Install faster hard disks (what are best these days? SCSI / SATA) Spread the most accessed files over the 4 drives so it is sharing the load between all 4 disks, instead of all the most accessed (most recent) all on the most recently installed drive. Obviouslly load balance is the most expensive option, but would it dramatically help? Some help on this situation would be great!

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  • Issue 15: Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ Oracle OpenWorld

    - by rituchhibber
         ORACLE FOCUS Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange@ ORACLE OpenWorld Sylvie MichouSenior DirectorPartner Marketing & Communications and Strategic Programs RESOURCES -- Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Registration Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange SpecializationTest Fest Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder Oracle OpenWorld Promotional Toolkit for Partners Oracle Partner Events Oracle Partner Webcasts Oracle EMEA Partner News SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES If you are attending our forthcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference in San Francisco from 30 September to 4 October, you will discover a new dedicated programme of keynotes and sessions tailored especially for you, our valued partners. Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld has been created to enhance the opportunities for you to learn from and network with Oracle executives and experts. The programme also provides more informal opportunities than ever throughout the week to meet up with the people who are most important to your business: customers, prospects, colleagues and the Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels management team. Oracle remains fully focused on building the industry's most admired partner ecosystem—which today spans over 25,000 partners. This new OPN Exchange programme offers an exciting change of pace for partners throughout the conference. Now it will be possible to enjoy a fully-integrated, partner-dedicated session schedule throughout the week, as well as key social events such as the Sunday night Welcome Reception, networking lunches from Monday to Thursday at the Howard Street Tent, and a fantastic closing event on the last Thursday afternoon. In addition to the regular Oracle OpenWorld conference schedule, if you have registered for the Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld programme, you will be invited to attend a much anticipated global partner keynote presentation, plus more than 40 conference sessions aimed squarely at what's most important to you, as partners. Prominent topics for discussion will include: Oracle technologies and roadmaps and how they fit with partners' business plans; business development; regional distinctions in business practices; and much more. Each session will provide plenty of food for thought ahead of the numerous networking opportunities throughout the week, encouraging the knowledge exchange with Oracle executives, customers, prospects, and colleagues that will make this conference of even greater value for you. At Oracle we always work closely with our partners to deliver solution offerings that improve business value, simplify the IT experience and drive innovation and efficiencies for joint customers. The most important element of our new OPN Exchange is content that helps you get more from technology investments, more from your peer-to-peer connections, and more from your interactions with customers. To this end we've created some partner-specific tools which can be used by OPN members ahead of the conference itself. Crucially, a comprehensive Content Catalog already lists and organises details of every OPN Exchange session, speaker, exhibitor, demonstration and related materials. This Content Catalog can be used by all our partners to identify interesting content that you can add to your own personalised Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder, allowing more effective planning and pre-enrolment for vital sessions. There are numerous highlights that you will definitely want to include in those personal schedules. On Sunday morning, 30 September we will start the week with partner dedicated OPN Exchange sessions, following our Global Partner Keynote at 13:00 with Judson Althoff, SVP, Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales and senior executives, giving insight into Oracle's partner vision, strategy, and resources—all designed to help build and strengthen market opportunities for you. This will be followed by a number of OPN Exchange general sessions, the Oracle OpenWorld Opening Keynote with Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle and concluded with the OPN Exchange AfterDark Welcome Reception, starting at 19:30 at the Metreon. From Monday 1 to Thursday 4 October, you can attend the OPN Exchange sessions that are most relevant to your business today and over the coming year. Oracle's top product and sales leaders will be on hand to discuss Oracle's strategic direction in 40+ targeted and in-depth sessions focussing on critical success factors to develop your business. Oracle's dedication to innovation, specialization, enablement and engineering provides Oracle partners with a huge opportunity to create new services and solutions, differentiate themselves and deliver extreme value to joint customers across the globe. Oracle will even be helping over 1000 partners to earn OPN Specialization certification during the Oracle OpenWorld OPN Exchange Test Fest, which will be providing all the study materials and exams required to drive Specialization for free at the conference. You simply need to check the list of current certification tracks available, and make sure you pre-register to reserve a seat in one of the ten sessions being offered free to OPN Exchange registered attendees. And finally, let's not forget those all-important networking opportunities, which can so often provide partners with valuable long-term alliances as well as exciting new business leads. The Oracle PartnerNetwork Lounge, located at Moscone South, exhibition hall, room 100 is the place where partners can meet formally or informally with colleagues, customers, prospects, and other industry professionals. OPN Specialized partners with OPN Exchange passes can also visit the OPN Video Blogging room to record and share ideas, and at the OPN Information Station you will find consultants available to answer your questions. "For the first time ever we will have a full partner conference within OpenWorld. OPN Exchange @ OpenWorld will kick-off on the first Sunday and run the entire week. We'll have over 40 sessions throughout that time and partners will hear from our top development executives, with special sessions dedicated to partnering throughout. It's going to be a phenomenal event, and we look forward to seeing our partners there." Judson Althoff, SVP, Oracle Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales So if you haven't done so already, please register for Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld today or add OPN Exchange to your existing registration for just $100 through My Account. And if you have any further questions regarding partner activities at Oracle OpenWorld, please don't hesitate to contact the Oracle PartnerNetwork team at [email protected] will be on hand to share the very latest information about: Oracle's SPARC Superclusters: the latest Engineered Systems from Oracle, delivering radically improved performance, faster deployment and greatly reduced operational costs for mixed database and enterprise application consolidation Oracle's SPARC T4 servers: with the newly developed T4 processor and Oracle Solaris providing up to five times the single threaded performance and better overall system throughput for expanded application versatility Oracle Database Appliance: a new way to take advantage of the world's most popular database, Oracle Database 11g, in a single, easy-to-deploy and manage system. It's a complete package engineered to deliver simple, reliable and affordable database services to small and medium size businesses and departmental systems. All hardware and software components are supported together and offer customers unique pay-as-you-grow software licensing to quickly scale from two to 24 processor cores without incurring the costs and downtime usually associated with hardware upgrades Oracle Exalogic: the world's only integrated cloud machine, featuring server hardware and middleware software engineered together for maximum performance with minimum set-up and operational cost Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto grids or private clouds. It is a complete package of servers, storage, networking and software that is massively scalable, secure and redundant Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliances: providing enterprise-class NAS performance, price-performance, manageability and TCO by combining third-generation software with high-performance controllers, flash-based caches and disks Oracle Pillar Axiom Quality-of-Service: confidently consolidate storage for multiple applications into a single datacentre storage solution Oracle Solaris 11: delivering secure enterprise cloud deployments with the ability to run hundreds of virtual application with no overhead and co-engineered with other Oracle software products to provide the highest levels of security, manageability and performance Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Oracle's integrated enterprise IT management product, providing the industry's only complete, integrated and business-driven enterprise cloud management solution Oracle VM 3.0: the latest release of Oracle's server virtualisation and management solution, helping to move datacentres beyond server consolidation to improve application deployment and management. Register today and ensure your place at the Extreme Performance Tour! Extreme Performance Tour events are free to attend, but places are limited. To make sure that you don't miss out, please visit Oracle's Extreme Performance Tour website, select the city that you'd be interest in attending an event in, and then click on the 'Register Now' button for that city to secure your interest. Each individual city page also contains more in-depth information about your local event, including logistics, agenda and maybe even a preview of VIP guest speakers. -- Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Whether you attended Oracle OpenWorld 2009 or not, don't forget to save the date now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010. The event will be held a little earlier next year, from 19th-23rd September, so please don't miss out. With thousands of sessions and hundreds of exhibits and demos already lined up, there's no better place to learn how to optimise your existing systems, get an inside line on upcoming technology breakthroughs, and meet with your partner peers, Oracle strategists and even the developers responsible for the products and services that help you get better results for your end customers. Register Now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010! Perhaps you are interested in learning more about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, but don't wish to register at this time? Great! Please just enter your contact information here and we will contact you at a later date. How to Exhibit at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Sponsorship Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Advertising Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 -- Back to the welcome page

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  • Shared Development Space

    - by PatrickWalker
    Currently the company I work in gives each developer their own development virtual machine. On this machine (Windows 7) they install the entire stack of the product (minus database) this stack is normally spread amongst multiple machines of differing OS (although moving towards windows 2008 and 2008r2) So when a developer has a new project they are likely to be updating only a small piece of their stack and as such the rest of it can become out of date with the latest production code. The isolation from others means some issues won't be found until the code goes into shared test environments/production. I'm suggesting a move from functional testing on these isolated machines to plugging machines into a shared environment. The goal being to move towards a deployment thats closer to production in mechanism and server type. Developers would still make code changes on their Win7 vm and run unit/component testing locally but for functionally testing they would leverage a shared enviornment. Does anyone else use a shared development environment like this? Are there many reasons against this sort of sandbox environment? The biggest drawback is a move away from only checking in code when you've done local functional testing to checking in after static testing. I'm hoping an intelligent git branching strategy can take care of this for us.

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  • top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – November 2011

    - by JuergenKress
    Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity glassfish GlassFish Marek’s JAX-RS 2.0 content from Devoxx 2011 – bit.ly/sp2NJO chriscmuir chriscmuir New blog post: ADF bug: missing af:column borders in af:table for IE7 – t.co/81np2jug chriscmuir chriscmuir Reading: Oracle’s ADF Rich Client User Interface (RCUI) Guidelines – oracle.com/webfolder/ux/m… netbeans NetBeans Team Bottlenecks be gone! #Java Performance Tuning workshop in Munich w Kirk Pepperdine, Nov 29-Dec 2: ow.ly/7Akh5 OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Creating ADF Faces Comamnd Button at Runtime ow.ly/1fM9dE alexismp Alexis MP blogged "GlassFish Back from Devoxx 2011, Mature Java EE 6 and EE 7 well on its way" – bit.ly/rP8LV0 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Usage of jQuery in ADF dlvr.it/x3t84 20 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Webcast: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c: Developer Deep Dive – Dec 1 – 11am PT / 2pm ET bit.ly/t61W4G oraclepartners ORCL PartnerNetwork Brand new Oracle WebLogic 12c will launch on December 1, 10AM PT with a global Webcast highlighting salient… t.co/aflQQ3IX OracleBlogs OracleBlogs JDeveloper and ADF at UKOUG t.co/2CQTiB9n fnimphiu Frank Nimphius Attending UKOUG? All ADF sessions at a glance: t.co/TcMNTMXp 21 Nov Favorite Retweet Reply JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Free Webinar ‘ADF Task Flows for Beginners’, information and registration t.co/66jXnGgo via javafx4you javafx4you Java Developer Workshop #2 – Dec 1, 2011 @ Oracle Aoyama center in Tokyo t.co/8p9q3W2B AMIS_Services AMIS Services #vacature #Oracle #ADF ontwikkelaars. bit.ly/AMISADF Gun jezelf een nieuwe uitdaging? Meer op: dld.bz/azZ5N OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Launch Invitation: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c t.co/bRxCKwAk fnimphiu Frank Nimphius The brand new WebLogic 12c will be released on December 1st 2011 !!! Register for online launch event t.co/pPScg4Xh glassfish GlassFish Announcing Oracle WebLogic 12c – t.co/qh8TdFEl AdamBien Adam Bien Sun Coding Conventions–The Only Standard (Stop Inventing): Code written according to the Sun Coding Conventions… t.co/qaUWp5Mz wlscommunity WebLogic Community Launch Invitation: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c wp.me/p1LMIb-4y andrejusb Andrejus Baranovskis Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog: Custom Exception Registration for ADF BC EO Attribute fb.me/1m6nXQD52 MNEMONIC01 Michel Schildmeijer Blog by Michel Schildmeijer: "Oracle WebLogic 12c has been announced" bit.ly/vk6WQL glassfish GlassFish Tab Sweep – Coherence, SBT for GlassFish, OSGi in question, Java EE plugins, … t.co/tVIL95lj OracleBlogs OracleBlogs JavaFX 2.0 at Devoxx 2011 ow.ly/1fJ5iT JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Experimenting with ADF BC Application Module Pool Tuning dlvr.it/wjLC1 OracleWebLogic Oracle WebLogic Brand New #WebLogic 12c Launch Event, Dec 1 10am PT. Hasan Rizvi, SVP Fusion Middleware. Developer session. bit.ly/weblogic12clau… JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF PopUp and Esc/Cancel operations. ADF 11g dlvr.it/whrmC JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF BPM Workspace: issue loading ADF task flows t.co/vk1gKPx5 OpenJDK OpenJDK Kelly O’Hair — OpenJDK B24 Available : t.co/1bFws6Nw JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Oracle ADF setting Task flow to use same page definition file of caller page t.co/9k6UIoYZ JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Master Detail Data presentation and CRUD Operations. Detail records in an Editable Popup. ADF 11g t.co/H8uudR0Y JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Entity Attribute Validation Rule (Business Rule) based on Master View Object Attribute Example ADF 11g t.co/1agxEQcZ oracletechnet Justin Kestelyn Webcast: Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Launch/Developer Deep-Dive (Dec. 1) t.co/OVBdGKzC JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF How to render different node icons for different tree levels dlvr.it/wY2jL JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Query Component with ‘dynamic’ view criteria dlvr.it/wXlF1 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF How to play Flash .swf file in Oracle ADF application t.co/zaSONWAH Devoxx Devoxx Duke at the #Devoxx 2011 Noxx Party! pic.twitter.com/bVJWyu1Z brhubart Bob Rhubart Adam Leftik: JavaEE adoption continues to increase, reaching 40+ million downloads this year. #qconsf11 JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF Free #ODTUG Seminar – #ADF Task Flows for Beginners – sign up today. www3.gotomeeting.com/register/13372… java Java New Project: OpenJFX j.mp/tI4k3s #javafx #openjdk #devoxx << JavaFX is open source! /via frankmunz Frank Munz WebLogic 12c launch event Dec 1st. t.co/jQKinBqN brhubart Bob Rhubart Spring to Java EE Migration | David Heffelfinger feedly.com/k/td8ccG odtug ODTUG Mark your calendars and register for our upcoming webinars: bit.ly/dWKG1C ADF Task Flows & Measuring Scalability & Performance w/TCP myfear Markus Eisele Anybody willing to take this question? Using #JavaMail with #Weblogic Server bit.ly/stJOET AMIS_Services AMIS Services 20-22 december #training #Oracle JHeadstart #11g, productief ontwikkelen met ADF. Schrijf je in op: amis.nl/trainingen/ora… AdamBien Adam Bien Stress Testing Java EE 6 Applications – Free Article In Free Java Magazine: In the November / December 2011 issu… bit.ly/vmzKkc java Java New Tech Article: Spring to #JavaEE Migration t.co/0EvdHNxb OracleBlogs OracleBlogs WebLogic Java record SPARC T4-4 Servers Set World Record on SPECjEnterprise2010 t.co/Eu1b6ZE0 OracleBlogs OracleBlogs What Is JavaFX? ow.ly/1frb6I OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat The openJDK Windows Binary Download | Adam Bien ow.ly/7fRiG wlscommunity WebLogic Community WebLogic – Java record – SPARC T4-4 Servers Set World Record on SPECjEnterprise2010 glassfish GlassFish "youtube.com/java" blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/en… OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Beta Testing Concludes: 1Z1-102 – "Oracle WebLogic Server 11g: System Administration I" (Oracle Certification) ow.ly/7fJCl wlscommunity WebLogic Community A deep dive in Oracle WebLogic! @ Contribute – November 29th, 2011 Kontich Belgium wp.me/p1LMIb-4u glassfish GlassFish Gartner’s Latest Enterprise Application Server Magic Quadrant – Oracle’s leadership t.co/aYDqipD8 OpenJDK OpenJDK Terrence Barr – Open sourcing of JavaFX: OpenJFX Project proposed – bit.ly/uKVnEl OpenJDK OpenJDK Maurizio Cimadamore – Testing overload resolution: bit.ly/vgXAbQ java Java Java User Groups Roundup, November 2011 : t.co/hea6vVnk /via @robilad << in German JavaSpotlight The Java Spotlight Java Spotlight Episode 54: Stuart Marks on the Coinification of JDK7 goo.gl/fb/3UXoM OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Article Series: Migrating Spring to Java EE 6 | Arun Gupta bit.ly/twUJtz glassfish GlassFish New Java EE 6 Hands-On lab, Devoxx-approved! bit.ly/vup5uE java Java Brian Goetz’s enthusiasm for Java is palpable! #devoxx interview adf_emg ADF EMG "ADF testing with a mock framework" – what is a mock framework? Visit the forum and see: groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/… java Java Taping a bunch of interviews today with Java experts at #devoxx. View on Parleys.com tomorrow. glassfish GlassFish New screencast to configure and run a cross-machine cluster using GlassFish 3.1.1 in < 7 mins faissalb.blogspot.com/2011/11/glassf… (via @bfaissal) glassfish GlassFish Oracle Contributor Agreements – New Home! bit.ly/tD2eLo OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Java Magazine – by and for the Java Community- inaugural issue bit.ly/tTv8UD OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat The Heroes of Java: Michael Hüttermann | @MyFear bit.ly/rYYOFe javafx4you javafx4you Development with #JavaFX on #Linux j.mp/uOpe69 #not_for_the_faint_of_heart java Java Contribute Technical Questions for Java Experts at #devoxx bit.ly/up2cN0 netbeans NetBeans Team A simple REST service using #NetBeans 7, #Java Servlet, and #JAXB: t.co/pKkufsD8 AdamBien Adam Bien The most beautiful, and portable slide of the whole #jaxcon for "Die Hard Java EE 6"session checked-in: kenai.com/projects/javae… jaxlondon JAX London Mark Little’s (@nmcl) excellent keynote from #jaxlondon ‘Middleware Everywhere…’ is available in full – t.co/8vBmtDJ1 AdamBien Adam Bien Calculator sample from "Die Hard Java EE 6" #jaxcon session checked-in: t.co/0UqaULfg OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat ADF Faces – a logic bomb in the order of bean instantiations | @ChrisCMuir bit.ly/vjqRaZ OracleBlogs OracleBlogs ODI 11g y JMS Queue de Weblogic ow.ly/1fzfQJ frankmunz Frank Munz Which WebLogic book do you recommend? Review of S. Alapati’s WebLogic 11g Administration Handbook. bit.ly/rP0RtW JDeveloper JDeveloper & ADF PageFlowScope with Unbounded Task Flows: the magic sauce for multi-browser-tab support in JDeveloper ADF applications dlvr.it/vNFgn OracleBlogs OracleBlogs 3 New ADF Insider Essential training videos published. ow.ly/1fz94q OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials book and eBook t.co/ykzwIaqs OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your Events t.co/qTgyEpY4 wlscommunity WebLogic Community Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials book and eBook andrejusb Andrejus Baranovskis Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog: Stress Testing Oracle ADF BC Applications – Intern… andrejusb.blogspot.com/2011/11/stress… OracleBlogs OracleBlogs Frank Nimphius presenting a full day of Oracle ADF in Switzerland ow.ly/1fxU78 java Java #JavaEE and #GlassFish: #JavaOne11 Slides, Demos, Replays, Hands-on Labs t.co/tLM0ehrD OracleBlogs OracleBlogs weblogic.security.SecurityInitializationException: Authentication for user weblogic denied ow.ly/1fxmiu glassfish GlassFish The Last Migration – GlassFish Wiki : t.co/Dc5FT1SJ OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat A Successful Year of @MiddlewareMagic t.co/amcGGTTk OracleWebLogic Oracle WebLogic Unbeatable Performance for your Cloud Applications with Exalogic, #OracleCoherence and #WebLogic. ow.ly/7lYKm OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Stress Testing Oracle ADF BC Applications – Passivation and Activation | @AndrejusB bit.ly/sASssL OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Review: "Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials" by Michel Schildmeijer | @MyFear t.co/ll6ra0J9 OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat GlassFish 3.1.2 themes and features | The Aquarium bit.ly/vVqr9r Andre_van_Dalen Andre van Dalen Masterclass: Advanced Oracle ADF 11g lnkd.in/M_45Pi AdamBien Adam Bien The "lunch" edition of RentACar is pushed into: kenai.com/projects/javae… #wjax AdamBien Adam Bien In munich, room munich at #wjax. Welcome to #javaee workshop. Gather your questions. 15 minutes to go lucasjellema Lucas Jellema Review by Markus of Michel’s book: t.co/41U9wvOb In short: valuable for novice WLS users, maybe not so much for die-hard WLS admin. biemond Edwin Biemond “@myfear: [blog] #Review: "#Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials" t.co/LsODcb3e” got the same conclusion on amazon glassfish GlassFish Practical advice for deploying Lift apps to GlassFish: bit.ly/t3KUml glassfish GlassFish The unbearable lightness of GlassFish t.co/v9307SEJ javafx4you javafx4you Building Java EE applications in JavaFX: JavaFX 2.0, FXML and Spring j.mp/tiMDUh andrejusb Andrejus Baranovskis Andrejus Baranovskis’s Blog: Stress Testing Oracle ADF BC Applications – Passiv… andrejusb.blogspot.com/2011/11/stress… wlscommunity WebLogic Community “@AMIS_Services: Follow @amis_services To Win a copy of SOA Suite 11g Handbook by @lucasjellema dld.bz/axD22 pls RT” excellent book! glassfish GlassFish GlassFish 3.1.2 themes and features bit.ly/uEc6uZ biemond Edwin Biemond Weblogic pre-sales exam was hard, you really need to know the versions , upgrade path and have a score above 80% monkchips James Governor The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java. JAX 2011 london keynote. how big data and the web are floating the boat. slidesha.re/u3Kzlo glassfish GlassFish Tab Sweep – Jersey, Hudson, GlassFish Hosting, GC’s compared, Spring to JavaEE, Modularity, … bit.ly/u9Cc30 oracletechnet Justin Kestelyn Oracle Tuxedo: A renewed acquaintance t.co/gp0mmf20 OTNArchBeat OTNArchBeat Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, OEPE 11.1.1.8 bit.ly/tC3eKp OracleBlogs OracleBlogs NetBeans HTML Editor and Groovy Editor in a Multiview Component (Part 2) ow.ly/1ftCeI myfear Markus Eisele [blog] #Oracle 2008 – 2011 in Gartners Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers t.co/2Bs1vgMZ myfear Markus Eisele [blog] #EclipseCon Europe – Java 7 in the Enterprise goo.gl/fb/r80df #ece2011 #java7 javafx4you javafx4you JavaFX 2.0 for Mac build b07 (developer preview) is available for download j.mp/vSwmBP Enjoy! #JavaFX #Mac OracleBlogs OracleBlogs A deep dive in Oracle WebLogic! @ Contribute November 29th, 2011 Kontich Belgium ow.ly/1fsEZs arungupta Arun Gupta #JavaEE7 slides from #jaxlondon and #jfall11 now available: slidesha.re/sh4iFq AdamBien Adam Bien Just checked-in the results of the #jaxlondon community night (somehow beer related): kenai.com/projects/javae… glassfish GlassFish GlassFish Podcast Episode #080 – User Stories, Part 3: Adam Bien and Sean Comerford (ESPN) blogs.oracle.com/glassfishpodca… glassfish GlassFish Story: t.co/jQPqihJb using GlassFish blogs.oracle.com/stories/entry/… "3000+ requests/sec" and more enterprisejava Java EE Mentions New blog post WebLogic deployment status checks for CI wp.me/pOOSs-F #weblogic #continuousintegration /vi… bit.ly/uZz0fk The become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please first login at http://partner.oracle.com and then visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress

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  • Best of "The Moth" 2009

    Not wanting to break the tradition (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) below are some blog posts I picked from my blogging last year. As you can see by comparing with the links above, 2009 marks my lowest output yet with only 64 posts, but hopefully the quality has not been lowered ;-) 1. Parallel Computing was a strong focus of course. You can find links to most of that content aggregated in the post where I shared my entire parallelism session. Related to that was the link to the screencast I shared of the Parallel Computing Features Tour.2. Parallel Debugging is obviously part of the parallel computing links above, but I created more in depth content around that area of Visual Studio 2010 since it is the one I directly own. I aggregated all the links to that content in my post: Parallel Debugging.3. High Performance Computing through clusters is an area I'll be focusing more next year (besides parallelism on a single node on the client captured above) and I started introducing the topic on my blog this year. Read the (currently) 6 posts bottom up from my category on HPC.4. Windows 7 Task Manager. In April I shared a screenshot which was the most "borrowed" item from my blog (I should have watermarked it ;-)5. Windows Phone non-support in VS2010. Did my bit to spread clarification of the story.6. Window positions in Visual Studio is a long post, but one that I strongly advise all VS users to read and benefit from.7. Bug Triage gives you a glimpse into one thing all (Microsoft) product teams do.If you haven't yet, you can subscribe via one of the options on the left. Either way, thank you for staying tuned… Happy New Year! Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • Virus that tries to brute force attack Active Directory users (in alphabetical order)?

    - by Nate Pinchot
    Users started complaining about slow network speed so I fired up Wireshark. Did some checking and found many PCs sending packets similar to the following: (screenshot) http://imgur.com/45VlI.png I blurred out the text for the username, computer name and domain name (since it matches the internet domain name). Computers are spamming the Active Directory servers trying to brute force hack passwords. It will start with Administrator and go down the list of users in alphabetical order. Physically going to the PC finds no one anywhere near it and this behavior is spread across the network so it appears to be a virus of some sort. Scanning computers which have been caught spamming the server with Malwarebytes, Super Antispyware and BitDefender (this is the antivirus the client has) yields no results. This is an enterprise network with about 2500 PCs so doing a rebuild is not a favorable option. My next step is to contact BitDefender to see what help they can provide. Has anybody seen anything like this or have any ideas what it could possibly be?

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  • Oracle's Primavera P6 Analytics Now Available!

    - by mark.kromer
    Oracle's Primavera product team has announced this week that general availability of our first Oracle BI (OBI) based analytical product with pre-built business intelligence dashboards, reports and KPIs built in. P6 Analytics uses OBI's drill-down capabilities, summarizations, hierarchies and other BI features to provide knowledge to your business users to make the best decisions on portfolios, projects, schedules & resources with deep insights. Without needing to launch into the P6 tool, your executives, PMO, project sponsors, etc. can view up to date project performance information as well as historic trends of project performance. Using web-based portal technology, P6 Analytics makes it easy to manage by exception and then drill down to quickly identify root cause analysis of problem projects. At the same time, a brand new version of the P6 Reporting Database R2 was just announded and is also now available. This updated reporting database provides you with 4 star schemas with spread data and includes P6 activity, project and resource codes. You can use the data warehouse and ETL functions of the P6 Reporting Database R2 with your own reporting tools or build dashboards that utilize the hierarchies & drill down to the day-level on scheduled activities using Busines Objects, Cognos, Microsoft, etc. Both of these products can be downloaded from E-Delivery under the Primavera applications section in the P6 EPPM v7.0 media pack. I put some examples below of the resource utilization, earned value, landing page and portfolio analysis dashboards that come out of the box with P6 Analytics to give you these deep insights into your projects & portfolios on day 1 of using the tool. Please send an email to Karl or me if you have any questions or would like more information. Oracle Technology Network and the Oracle.com marketing sites are currently being refreshed with further details of these exciting new releases of the Primavera BI and data warehouse products. Lastly, scroll below for some screenshots of the new P6 Analytics R1 product using OBIEE! Thanks, Mark Kromer

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  • Not Playing Nice Together

    - by David Douglass
    One of the things I’ve noticed is that two industry trends are not playing nice together, those trends being multi-core CPUs and massive hard drives.  It’s not a problem if you keep your cores busy with compute intensive work, but for software developers the beauty of multi-core CPUs (along with gobs of RAM and a 64 bit OS) is virtualization.  But when you have only one hard drive (who needs another when it holds 2 TB of data?) you wind up with a serious hard drive bottleneck.  A solid state drive would definitely help, and might even be a complete solution, but the cost is ridiculous.  Two TB of solid state storage will set you back around $7,000!  A spinning 2 TB drive is only $150. I see a couple of solutions for this.  One is the mainframe concept of near and far storage: put the stuff that will be heavily access on a solid state drive and the rest on a spinning drive.  Another solution is multiple spinning drives.  Instead of a single 2 TB drive, get four 500 GB drives.  In total, the four 500 GB drives will cost about $100 more than the single 2 TB drive.  You’ll need to be smart about what drive you place things on so that the load is spread evenly.  Another option, for better performance, would be four 10,000 RPM 300 GB drives, but that would cost about $800 more than the singe 2 TB drive and would deliver only 1.2 TB of space. All pricing based on Microcenter as of March 14, 2010.

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  • .NET Rocks is on the Road Again!

    - by Scott Spradlin
    Carl and Richard are loading up the DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV) and driving to our town again to show off their favorite bits of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! Richard talks about Web load testing and Carl talks about Silverlight 4.0 and multimedia. And to make the night even more fun, they are going to bring a mystery rock star from the Visual Studio world to the event and interview them for a special .NET Rocks Road Trip show series. Along the way we’ll be giving away some great prizes, showing off some awesome technology and having a ton of laughs. So come out to the most fun you can have in a geeky evening - and learn a few things along the way about web load testing and Silverlight 4! And one lucky person at the event will win "Ride Along with Carl and Richard" and get to board the RV and ride with the boys to the next town on the tour -- Chicago. (don’t worry, they will get you home again!) So come out to the most fun you can have in a geeky evening – and find out what’s new and cool in Visual Studio 2010! To get insure we have sufficient food for everyone, please register for this event at http://stlnet.eventbrite.com This registration information will only be used to obtain accurate counts for food preparation. All other answers are optional and will be used for purely statistical analysis. No information will be shared outside the St. Louis .NET User Group. Here is a list of prizes to be given away at the event: Telerik Premium Collection Pre-Emptive One Year Commercial Runtime Intelligence license Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler Quest Toad Extension for Visual Studio DevExpress Code Rush and Refactor Pro Grape City Active Report/BI Suite Grape City Spread 5.0 JetBrains Resharper Component One Studio for ASP.NET Component One Studio for Silverlight Please check out the event sponsors: Visit http://www.dotnetrocks.com/roadtrip for more information! Thursday, April 29, 2010 6:00 pm - Food and social 6:30 pm - .NET Rocks Interview 7:15 pm - Richard Campbell 8:00 pm - Carl Franklin 8:45 pm - prizes!

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  • Open vSwitch and Xen Private Networks

    - by Joe
    I've read about the possibilities of using Open vSwitch with Xen to route traffic between domUs on multiple physical hosts. I'd like to be able to group the multiple domUs I have spread out across multiple physical hosts into a number of private networks. However, I've found no documentation on how to integrate Open vSwitch with Xen (rather than XenServer) and am unsure how I should go about doing so and then creating the private networks described. As you might have gathered then - from research I think Open vSwitch can do what I need it to, but I just can't find anything giving me a push in the right direction of how to actually use it to do so! This may well be because Open vSwitch is quite new (version 1.0 released on May 17). Any pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated!

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  • many partitions on a single filegroup?¿ does it make sense?

    - by river0
    Hi, I'm designing a datawarehouse solution and I'm a newbie in disk configuration issues, let me explain you. Our storage is spread over 6 storage enlosures having each of them 5 raid-1 disk arrays, and having 2 LUNS defined per each disk array, which makes a total 48 LUNS (this is following Microsoft fast track recommendations for datawarehouse architectures). I would like to partition my data, on other projects I have worked before, we always followed a 1 partition - 1 filegroup rule. On the microsoft fast track recomendations it is advised to create a filegroup and then for that filegroup a data file per each lun... but I pretend to have a week level partitioning... if I apply that rule I think that I'll get too many files and a complex layout. I'm thinking of just creating just one filegroup (with the 48 lun data files), but still create the partitions since I want to keep soem of the benefits of partitions like partition switching... Is this scenario not recommended? What would you suggest?

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  • VSTO is Free But Aspose is Speed

    - by Ken Cox [MVP]
    I’ve taken over the completion, deployment, and maintenance of an ASP.NET Web site that generates Office documents using VSTO. VSTO’s a decent concept and works fine for small-scale scenarios like a desktop app or small intranet. However, with multiple simultaneous requests via ASP.NET, we found the Web server performance suffered badly. To spread out the server’s workload, I implemented MSMQ task queuing via a WCF Windows service.  That helped a lot. IIS didn’t drag with only one VSTO/Office instance running. But I  still found it taking too long to produce a single report. A nicely formatted VSTO Excel document was taking 45 minutes.  (The client  didn’t know any better and therefore considered 45 minutes tolerable.) On my own time, I pulled out an old copy of Aspose.Total for .NET. Within an hour, I had converted the VSTO Excel C# code to Aspose Cells code. The improvement was astonishing: Instead of the 45-minutes, the report took under a minute! I’ve pasted the client’s exact chat response after he tried the speedy Aspose version: “WWWWWOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Microsoft’s VSTO is a free product while the Aspose components cost $$$.  Certainly, it can be a tough call when budgets are tight. If you’re trying to convince the client to shell out for something more suitable for the application, get an eval version of Aspose.Total and offer a direct comparison demo. Ken Full Disclosure: Aspose (like several other component vendors) gives free copies of their suite to MVPs and other .NET influencers.

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  • Great Blogs About Oracle Solaris 11

    - by Markus Weber
    Now that Oracle Solaris 11 has been released, why not blog about blogs. There is of course a tremendous amount of resource and information available, but valuable insights directly from people actually building the product is priceless. Here's a list of such great blogs. NOTE: If you think we missed some good ones, please let us know in the comments section !  Topic Title Author Top 11 Things My 11 favourite Solaris 11 features Darren Moffat Top 11 Things These are 11 of my favorite things! Mike Gerdts Top 11 Things 11 reason to love Solaris 11     Jim Laurent SysAdmin Resources Solaris 11 Resources for System Administrators Rick Ramsey Overview Oracle Solaris 11: The First Cloud OS Larry Wake Overview What's a "Cloud Operating System"? Harry Foxwell Overview What's New in Oracle Solaris 11 Jeff Victor Try it ! Virtually the fastest way to try Solaris 11 (and Solaris 10 zones) Dave Miner Upgrade Upgrading Solaris 11 Express b151a with support to Solaris 11 Alan Hargreaves IPS The IPS System Repository Tim Foster IPS Building a Solaris 11 repository without network connection Jim Laurent IPS IPS Self-assembly – Part 1: overlays Tim Foster IPS Self assembly – Part 2: multiple packages delivering configuration Tim Foster Security Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS Darren Moffat Security User home directory encryption with ZFS Darren Moffat Security Password (PAM) caching for Solaris su - "a la sudo" Darren Moffat Security Completely disabling root logins on Solaris 11 Darren Moffat Security OpenSSL Version in Solaris Darren Moffat Security Exciting Crypto Advances with the T4 processor and Oracle Solaris 11 Valerie Fenwick Performance Critical Threads Optimization Rafael Vanoni Performance SPARC T4-2 Delivers World Record SPECjvm2008 Result with Oracle Solaris 11 BestPerf Blog Performance Recent Benchmarks Using Oracle Solaris 11 BestPerf Blog Predictive Self Healing Introducing SMF Layers Sean Wilcox Predictive Self Healing Oracle Solaris 11 - New Fault Management Features Gavin Maltby Desktop What's new on the Solaris 11 Desktop? Calum Benson Desktop S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system Alan Coopersmith Desktop Accessible Oracle Solaris 11 - released! Peter Korn

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  • what is acceptable datastore latency on VMware ESXi host?

    - by BeowulfNode42
    Looking at our performance figures on our existing VMware ESXi 4.1 host at the Datastore/Real-time performance data Write Latency Avg 14 ms Max 41 ms Read Latency Avg 4.5 ms Max 12 ms People don't seem to be complaining too much about it being slow with those numbers. But how much higher could they get before people found it to be a problem? We are reviewing our head office systems due to running low on storage space, and are tossing up between buying a 2nd VM host with DAS or buying some sort of NAS for SMB file shares in the near term and maybe running VMs from it in the longer term. Currently we have just under 40 staff at head office with 9 smaller branches spread across the country. Head office is runnning in an MS RDS session based environment with linux ERP and mail systems. In total 22 VMs on a single host with DAS made from a RAID 10 made of 6x 15k SAS disks.

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  • Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure

    - by Josh Holmes
    This is a cool use of Azure. The city of Miami tool their “311” data around potholes, trash pickup issues, recycling issues, broken sidewalks and the like and put that data in Azure. The next step is that they leveraged Bing Maps and Silverlight to visualize those issues spread on a map of the city. The solution takes advantage of virtually unlimited storage and processing power, provides the ability to quickly address service requests and implement updates even during peak times such as hurricane season. If things change, the City can bring the solution on site or move to a physical facility, all based on  need and cost-effectiveness. As a result, residents logging on to Miami 311 can see on average 4,500 issues in progress - not represented as a ‘list', but located on a map in relation to other projects in their neighborhood .  A simple click on the map allows them to easily drill down to more and more specific details if they want. In short, they have turned what used to be represented by a meaningless list of data into useful information, and created  actionable and consumable knowledge that is relevant to the citizens of Miami. For Miami, their ‘service call to the city' becomes an interactive process they can follow - and the City has a new tool to manage and deliver outcomes. … When the city made the move to the web, they chose tools they knew and software they trust. The Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform made it easy to do, and they used both Bing mapping and Silverlight to build a user friendly front end. According to Port25 (Miami 311: Built on Windows Azure - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft), it took two people 8 days to implement the whole system and they are going to open source their solution so that other cities can leverage it. I haven’t seen yet where and how they are going to release it but I’ll keep you posted if I find out.

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  • scalability: when to use CDN?

    - by ajsie
    i've read about CDN but dont know exactly what it is for. lets say i've got an international social network (text and image content), and it's growing in traffic from different countries, do i have use of CDN? the picture i got from the sources i've read is that it copy your content and put it in many servers spread out over the world so that users will fetch it from the nearest point. does this mean that every server has a copy of my mysql database and the image files? is this the proper way to make your web service available for the world? cause how else could you set up a servers through out the world, contacting hosting companies for each country?

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  • The Retail Week Conference 2012 - Interview with Paul Dickson

    - by user801960
    Recently we attended the Retail Week Conference at the Hilton London Metropole Hotel in London. The conference proves to be an inspirational meeting of retail minds and the insight gained from both the speakers and the other delegates is invaluable. In particular we enjoyed hearing from Charlie Mayfield, Chairman at John Lewis Partnership, about understanding how the consumer is viewing the ever changing world of retail; a session on how to encourage brand-loyal multichannel activities from Robin Terrell of House of Fraser with Alan White of the N Brown Group, Vince Russell from The Cloud and Lucy Neville-Rolfe from Tesco; and a fascinating session from Tim Steiner, Chief Executive of Ocado, about how the business makes it as easy as possible for consumers to shop on their various platforms, which included some surprising usage statistics. Oracle's own Vice President of Retail, Paul Dickson, also held a session with Richard Pennycook, Group Finance Director at Morrisons, about the role of technology in accelerating and supporting the business strategy. Morrisons' 'Evolve' programme takes a litte-and-often approach to updating its technology infrastructure to spread cost and keep the adoption process gentle for staff, and the session explored how the process works and how Oracle's technology underpins the programme to optimise their operations using actionable insight. We had a quick chat with Paul Dickson at the session to get his thoughts on the programme - the video is below. We also filmed the whole presentation, so keep checking back on this blog if you're interested in seeing it.

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  • Have you changed your coding style recently? It wasn't hard wasn't it?

    - by Ernelli
    I've used to write code in C-like languages using the Allman style, regarding the position of braces. void foo(int bar) { if(bar) { //... } else return; //... } Now the last two years I have been working mostly in JavaScript and when we adopted jslint as part of our QA process, I had to adopt to the Crockford way of doing things. So I had to change the coding style into: function foo(bar) { if (bar) { //... } else { return; } //... } Now apart from comparing a C/C++ example with JavaScript, I must say that my JavaScript-Crockford-coding style now has spread into my C/C++/Java coding when I revise old projects and work on code in those languages that for example has no problem with single line statements or ambiguous newline insertion. I used to consider the later format very awkward, I have never had any problems with adapting my coding style to the one chosen by my predecessors, except for when I was a Junior developer mostly being the solve developer on legacy projects and the first thing I did was to change the indenting style. But now after a couple of months I consider the Allman style a little bit too spacious and feel more comfortable with the K&R-like style. Have you changed your coding style during your career?

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  • St. Louis Day of .NET 2011

    - by Scott Spradlin
    The St. Louis .NET User Group is proud to announce that the St. Louis Day of .NET 2011 developers conference is officially open for registration. The fee for the two-day event remains the same as last year at $200.00 per attendee. However, if you register now through July 1, you will qualify for an “early bird” discount of $75.00, making the total cost only $125.00 per attendee. Act quickly to take advantage of this discount! (Invoicing is available for groups of 5 or more.) There are already 33 confirmed speakers and 51 confirmed sessions, with more being added each week. You can find biographies of the speakers, as well as abstracts of the scheduled sessions, on our conference web site. A full agenda will be provided soon and a mobile session builder is being constructed. The event will once again be held in the Ameristar Casino & Resort this year. Hotel rooms are available on-site, as they have been the prior two years. Friday night will we will host our annual attendee social networking night, where you can grab a bite to eat and talk with speakers and sponsors in a relaxed atmosphere. This will be held in the nightclub area of the Ameristar and is exclusively available to the attendees at no additional charge. A large part of the success of this event is due to the ongoing support of our great sponsors. If your organization would be interested in a sponsorship opportunity, details are available on the web site, or you can email [email protected]. Thanks to the current sponsors who have already stepped forward for this year’s event! Register today! You are encouraged to tweet, blog, or otherwise help spread the word! http://www.StLouisDayOfDotNet.com

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