bryan head - Page 257 - Developer IT

body onload cache not clearing

- by Mad Cow

I'm using an image swapping function generated by Dreamweaver to allow an image to change when moused over. The images are small. I have a problem because the images are getting stored in cache and without clearing it out I cant get the new images to show. It works on some browsers, but unfortunately not on all... I've read about putting "a random query" into the javascript to force the page to reload, but I dont know where to put it (the code was generated for me by dreamweaver). A subset of my code is : <script type="text/javascript"> function MM_preloadImages() { //v3.0 var d=document; if(d.images){ if(!d.MM_p) d.MM_p=new Array(); var i,j=d.MM_p.length,a=MM_preloadImages.arguments; for(i=0; i<a.length; i++) if (a[i].indexOf("#")!=0){ d.MM_p[j]=new Image; d.MM_p[j++].src=a[i];}} } function MM_swapImgRestore() { //v3.0 var i,x,a=document.MM_sr; for(i=0;a&&i<a.length&&(x=a[i])&&x.oSrc;i++) x.src=x.oSrc; } function MM_findObj(n, d) { //v4.01 var p,i,x; if(!d) d=document; if((p=n.indexOf("?"))>0&&parent.frames.length) { d=parent.frames[n.substring(p+1)].document; n=n.substring(0,p);} if(!(x=d[n])&&d.all) x=d.all[n]; for (i=0;!x&&i<d.forms.length;i++) x=d.forms[i][n]; for(i=0;!x&&d.layers&&i<d.layers.length;i++) x=MM_findObj(n,d.layers[i].document); if(!x && d.getElementById) x=d.getElementById(n); return x; } function MM_swapImage() { //v3.0 var i,j=0,x,a=MM_swapImage.arguments; document.MM_sr=new Array; for(i=0;i<(a.length-2);i+=3) if ((x=MM_findObj(a[i]))!=null){document.MM_sr[j++]=x; if(!x.oSrc) x.oSrc=x.src; x.src=a[i+2];} } </script> </head> <body onload="MM_preloadImages('../images/navigation/social-about-us-over.jpg','../images/navigation/social-about-us.jpg','../images/navigation/social-activities-over.jpg','../images/navigation/social-ourservices-over.jpg','../images/navigation/social-howwework-over.jpg','../images/navigation/social-fundraising-over.jpg','../images/navigation/social-howtohelp-over.jpg','../images/navigation/social-contactus-over.jpg')"> My website is http://www.clockhouse.org.uk/ I'm sure there is a better way i could have written this, but if anyone can help me fix this code I'd be very grateful Many thanks

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Split a binary file into chunks c++

- by L4nce0

I've been bashing my head against trying to first divide up a file into chunks, for the purpose of sending over sockets. I can read / write a file easily without splitting it into chunks. The code below runs, works, kinda. It will write a textfile and has a garbage character. Which if this was just for txt, no problem. Jpegs aren't working with said garbage. Been at it for a few days, so I've done my research, and it's time to get some help. I do want to stick strictly to binary readers, as this need to handle any file. I've seen a lot of slick examples out there. (none of them worked for me with jpgs) Mostly something along the lines of while(file)... I subscribe to the, if you know the size, use a for-loop, not a while-loop camp. Thank you for the help!! vector<char*> readFile(const char* fn){ vector<char*> v; ifstream::pos_type size; char * memblock; ifstream file; file.open(fn,ios::in|ios::binary|ios::ate); if (file.is_open()) { size = fileS(fn); file.seekg (0, ios::beg); int bs = size/3; // arbitrary. Actual program will use the socket send size int ws = 0; int i = 0; for(i = 0; i < size; i+=bs){ if(i+bs > size) ws = size%bs; else ws = bs; memblock = new char [ws]; file.read (memblock, ws); v.push_back(memblock); } } else{ exit(-4); } return v; } int main(int argc, char **argv) { vector<char*> v = readFile("foo.txt"); ofstream myFile ("bar.txt", ios::out | ios::binary); for(vector<char*>::iterator it = v.begin(); it!=v.end(); ++it ){ myFile.write(*it,strlen(*it)); } }

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Terminating a long-executing thread and then starting a new one in response to user changing parameters via UI in an applet

- by user1817170

I have an applet which creates music using the JFugue API and plays it for the user. It allows the user to input a music phrase which the piece will be based on, or lets them choose to have a phrase generated randomly. I had been using the following method (successfully) to simply stop and start the music, which runs in a thread using the Player class from JFugue. I generate the music using my classes and user input from the applet GUI...then... private playerThread pthread; private Thread threadPlyr; private Player player; (from variables declaration) public void startMusic(Pattern p) // pattern is a JFugue object which holds the generated music { if (pthread == null) { pthread = new playerThread(); } else { pthread = null; pthread = new playerThread(); } if (threadPlyr == null) { threadPlyr = new Thread(pthread); } else { threadPlyr = null; threadPlyr = new Thread(pthread); } pthread.setPattern(p); threadPlyr.start(); } class playerThread implements Runnable // plays midi using jfugue Player { private Pattern pt; public void setPattern(Pattern p) { pt = p; } @Override public void run() { try { player.play(pt); // takes a couple mins or more to execute resetGUI(); } catch (Exception exception) { } } } And the following to stop music when user presses the stop/start button while Player.isPlaying() is true: public void stopMusic() { threadPlyr.interrupt(); threadPlyr = null; pthread = null; player.stop(); } Now I want to implement a feature which will allow the user to change parameters while the music is playing, create an updated music pattern, and then play THAT pattern. Basically, the idea is to make it simulate "real time" adjustments to the generated music for the user. Well, I have been beating my head against the wall on this for a couple of weeks. I've read all the standard java documentation, researched, read, and searched forums, and I have tried many different ideas, none of which have succeeded. The problem I've run into with all approaches I've tried is that when I start the new thread with the new, updated musical pattern, all the old threads ALSO start, and there is a cacophony of unintelligible noise instead of my desired output. From what I've gathered, the issue seems to be that all the methods I've come across require that the thread is able to periodically check the value of a "flag" variable and then shut itself down from within its "run" block in response to that variable. However, since my thread makes a call that takes several minutes minimum to execute (playing the music), and I need to terminate it WHILE it is executing this, there is really no safe way to do so. So, I'm wondering if there is something I'm missing when it comes to threads, or if perhaps I can accomplish my goal using a totally different approach. Any ideas or guidance is greatly appreciated! Thank you!

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Registration form validation not validating

- by jgray

I am a noob when it comes to web development. I am trying to validate a registration form and to me it looks right but it will not validate.. This is what i have so far and i am validating through a repository or database. Any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks <?php session_start(); $title = "User Registration"; $keywords = "Name, contact, phone, e-mail, registration"; $description = "user registration becoming a member."; require "partials/_html_header.php"; //require "partials/_header.php"; require "partials/_menu.php"; require "DataRepository.php"; // if all validation passed save user $db = new DataRepository(); // form validation goes here $first_nameErr = $emailErr = $passwordErr = $passwordConfirmErr = ""; $first_name = $last_name = $email = $password = $passwordConfirm = ""; if(isset($_POST['submit'])) { $valid = TRUE; // check if all fields are valid { if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") { if (empty($_POST["first_name"])) {$first_nameErr = "Name is required";} else { // $first_name = test_input($_POST["first_name"]); // check if name only contains letters and whitespace if (!preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z ]*$/",$first_name)) { $first_nameErr = "Only letters and white space allowed"; } } if (empty($_POST["email"])) {$emailErr = "Email is required";} else { // $email = test_input($_POST["email"]); // check if e-mail address syntax is valid if (!preg_match("/([\w\-]+\@[\w\-]+\.[\w\-]+)/",$email)) { $emailErr = "Invalid email format"; } } if (!preg_match("/(......)/",$password)) { $passwordErr = "Subject must contain THREE or more characters!"; } if ($_POST['password']!= $_POST['passwordConfirm']) { echo("Oops! Password did not match! Try again. "); } function test_input($data) { $data = trim($data); $data = stripslashes($data); $data = htmlspecialchars($data); return $data; } } } if(!$db->isEmailUnique($_POST['email'])) { $valid = FALSE; //display errors in the correct places } // if still valid save the user if($valid) { $new_user = array( 'first_name' => $_POST['first_name'], 'last_name' => $_POST['last_name'], 'email' => $_POST['email'], 'password' => $_POST['password'] ); $results = $db->saveUser($new_user); if($results == TRUE) { header("Location: login.php"); } else { echo "WTF!"; exit; } } } ?> <head> <style> .error {color: #FF0000;} </style> </head> <h1 class="center"> World Wide Web Creations' User Registration </h1> <p><span class="error"></span><p> <form method="POST" action="<?php echo htmlspecialchars($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]);?>" onsubmit="return validate_form()" > First Name: <input type="text" name="first_name" id="first_name" value="<?php echo $first_name;?>" /> <span class="error"> <?php echo $first_nameErr;?></span> <br /> <br /> Last Name(Optional): <input type="text" name="last_name" id="last_name" value="<?php echo $last_name;?>" /> <br /> <br /> E-mail: <input type="email" name="email" id="email" value="<?php echo $email;?>" /> <span class="error"> <?php echo $emailErr;?></span> <br /> <br /> Password: <input type="password" name="password" id="password" value="" /> <span class="error"> <?php echo $passwordErr;?></span> <br /> <br /> Confirmation Password: <input type="password" name="passwordConfirm" id="passwordConfirm" value="" /> <span class="error"> <?php echo $passwordConfirmErr;?></span> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Submit Data" /> <input type="reset" name="reset" id="reset" value="Reset Form" /> </form> </body> </html> <?php require "partials/_footer.php"; require "partials/_html_footer.php"; ?> class DataRepository { // version number private $version = "1.0.3"; // turn on and off debugging private static $debug = FALSE; // flag to (re)initialize db on each call private static $initialize_db = FALSE; // insert test data on initialization private static $load_default_data = TRUE; const DATAFILE = "203data.txt"; private $data = NULL; private $errors = array(); private $user_fields = array( 'id' => array('required' => 0), 'created_at' => array('required' => 0), 'updated_at' => array('required' => 0), 'first_name' => array('required' => 1), 'last_name' => array('required' => 0), 'email' => array('required' => 1), 'password' => array('required' => 1), 'level' => array('required' => 0, 'default' => 2), ); private $post_fields = array( 'id' => array('required' => 0), 'created_at' => array('required' => 0), 'updated_at' => array('required' => 0), 'user_id' => array('required' => 1), 'title' => array('required' => 1), 'message' => array('required' => 1), 'private' => array('required' => 0, 'default' => 0), ); private $default_user = array( 'id' => 1, 'created_at' => '2013-01-01 00:00:00', 'updated_at' => '2013-01-01 00:00:00', 'first_name' => 'Admin Joe', 'last_name' => 'Tester', 'email' => '[email protected]', 'password' => 'a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3', 'level' => 1, ); private $default_post = array( 'id' => 1, 'created_at' => '2013-01-01 00:00:00', 'updated_at' => '2013-01-01 00:00:00', 'user_id' => 1, 'title' => 'My First Post', 'message' => 'This is the message of the first post.', 'private' => 0, ); // constructor will load existing data into memory // if it does not exist it will create it and initialize if desired public function __construct() { // check if need to reset if(DataRepository::$initialize_db AND file_exists(DataRepository::DATAFILE)) { unlink(DataRepository::DATAFILE); } // if file doesn't exist, create the initial datafile if(!file_exists(DataRepository::DATAFILE)) { $this->log("Data file does not exist. Attempting to create it... (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); // create initial file $this->data = array( 'users' => array( ), 'posts' => array() ); // load default data if needed if(DataRepository::$load_default_data) { $this->data['users'][1] = $this->default_user; $this->data['posts'][1] = $this->default_post; } $this->writeTheData(); } // load the data into memory for use $this->loadTheData(); } private function showErrors($break = TRUE, $type = NULL) { if(count($this->errors) > 0) { echo "<div style=\"color:red;font-weight: bold;font-size: 1.3em\":<h3>$type Errors</h3><ol>"; foreach($this->errors AS $error) { echo "<li>$error</li>"; } echo "</ol></div>"; if($break) { "</br></br></br>Exiting because of errors!"; exit; } } } private function writeTheData() { $this->log("Attempting to write the datafile: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); file_put_contents(DataRepository::DATAFILE, json_encode($this->data)); $this->log("Datafile written: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (line: ".__LINE__.")"); } private function loadTheData() { $this->log("Attempting to load the datafile: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); $this->data = json_decode(file_get_contents(DataRepository::DATAFILE), true); $this->log("Datafile loaded: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $this->data); } private function validateFields(&$info, $fields, $pre_errors = NULL) { // merge in any pre_errors if($pre_errors != NULL) { $this->errors = array_merge($this->errors, $pre_errors); } // check all required fields foreach($fields AS $field => $reqs) { if(isset($reqs['required']) AND $reqs['required'] == 1) { if(!isset($info[$field]) OR strlen($info[$field]) == 0) { $this->errors[] = "$field is a REQUIRED field"; } } // set any default values if not present if(isset($reqs['default']) AND (!isset($info[$field]) OR $info[$field] == "")) { $info[$field] = $reqs['default']; } } $this->showErrors(); if(count($this->errors) == 0) { return TRUE; } else { return FALSE; } } private function validateUser(&$user_info) { // check if the email is already in use $this->log("About to check pre_errors: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $user_info); $pre_errors = NULL; if(isset($user_info['email'])) { if(!$this->isEmailUnique($user_info['email'])) { $pre_errors = array('The email: '.$user_info['email'].' is already used in our system'); } } $this->log("After pre_error check: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $pre_errors); return $this->validateFields($user_info, $this->user_fields, $pre_errors); } private function validatePost(&$post_info) { // check if the user_id in the post actually exists $this->log("About to check pre_errors: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $post_info); $pre_errors = NULL; if(isset($post_info['user_id'])) { if(!isset($this->data['users'][$post_info['user_id']])) { $pre_errors = array('The posts must belong to a valid user. (User '.$post_info['user_id'].' does not exist in the data'); } } $this->log("After pre_error check: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $pre_errors); return $this->validateFields($post_info, $this->post_fields, $pre_errors); } private function log($message, $data = NULL) { $style = "background-color: #F8F8F8; border: 1px solid #DDDDDD; border-radius: 3px; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; overflow: auto; padding: 6px 10px;"; if(DataRepository::$debug) { if($data != NULL) { $dump = "<div style=\"$style\"><pre>".json_encode($data, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT)."</pre></div>"; } else { $dump = NULL; } echo "<code><b>Debug:</b> $message</code>$dump<br />"; } } public function saveUser($user_info) { $this->log("Entering saveUser: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $user_info); $mydata = array(); $update = FALSE; // check for existing data if(isset($user_info['id']) AND $this->data['users'][$user_info['id']]) { $mydata = $this->data['users'][$user_info['id']]; $this->log("Loaded prior user: ".print_r($mydata, TRUE)." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } // copy over existing values $this->log("Before copying over existing values: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $mydata); foreach($user_info AS $k => $v) { $mydata[$k] = $user_info[$k]; } $this->log("After copying over existing values: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $mydata); // check required fields if($this->validateUser($mydata)) { // hash password if new if(isset($mydata['password'])) { $mydata['password'] = sha1($mydata['password']); } // if no id, add the next available one if(!isset($mydata['id']) OR (int)$mydata['id'] < 1) { $this->log("No id set: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); if(count($this->data['users']) == 0) { $mydata['id'] = 1; $this->log("Setting id to 1: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } else { $mydata['id'] = max(array_keys($this->data['users']))+1; $this->log("Found max id and added 1 [".$mydata['id']."]: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } } // set created date if null if(!isset($mydata['created_at'])) { $mydata['created_at'] = date ("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()); } // update modified time $mydata['modified_at'] = date ("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()); // copy into data and save $this->log("Before data save: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $this->data); $this->data['users'][$mydata['id']] = $mydata; $this->writeTheData(); } return TRUE; } public function getUserById($id) { if(isset($this->data['users'][$id])) { return $this->data['users'][$id]; } else { return array(); } } public function isEmailUnique($email) { // find the user that has the right username/password foreach($this->data['users'] AS $k => $v) { $this->log("Checking unique email: {$v['email']} == $email (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", NULL); if($v['email'] == $email) { $this->log("FOUND NOT unique email: {$v['email']} == $email (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", NULL); return FALSE; break; } } $this->log("Email IS unique: $email (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", NULL); return TRUE; } public function login($username, $password) { // hash password for validation $password = sha1($password); $this->log("Attempting to login with $username / $password: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", NULL); $user = NULL; // find the user that has the right username/password foreach($this->data['users'] AS $k => $v) { if($v['email'] == $username AND $v['password'] == $password) { $user = $v; break; } } $this->log("Exiting login: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $user); return $user; } public function savePost($post_info) { $this->log("Entering savePost: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $post_info); $mydata = array(); // check for existing data if(isset($post_info['id']) AND $this->data['posts'][$post_info['id']]) { $mydata = $this->data['posts'][$post_info['id']]; $this->log("Loaded prior posts: ".print_r($mydata, TRUE)." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } $this->log("Before copying over existing values: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $mydata); foreach($post_info AS $k => $v) { $mydata[$k] = $post_info[$k]; } $this->log("After copying over existing values: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $mydata); // check required fields if($this->validatePost($mydata)) { // if no id, add the next available one if(!isset($mydata['id']) OR (int)$mydata['id'] < 1) { $this->log("No id set: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); if(count($this->data['posts']) == 0) { $mydata['id'] = 1; $this->log("Setting id to 1: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } else { $mydata['id'] = max(array_keys($this->data['posts']))+1; $this->log("Found max id and added 1 [".$mydata['id']."]: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } } // set created date if null if(!isset($mydata['created_at'])) { $mydata['created_at'] = date ("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()); } // update modified time $mydata['modified_at'] = date ("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()); // copy into data and save $this->data['posts'][$mydata['id']] = $mydata; $this->log("Before data save: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $this->data); $this->writeTheData(); } return TRUE; } public function getAllPosts() { return $this->loadPostsUsers($this->data['posts']); } public function loadPostsUsers($posts) { foreach($posts AS $id => $post) { $posts[$id]['user'] = $this->getUserById($post['user_id']); } return $posts; } public function dump($line_number, $temp = 'NO') { // if(DataRepository::$debug) { if($temp == 'NO') { $temp = $this->data; } echo "<pre>Dumping from line: $line_number\n"; echo json_encode($temp, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT); echo "</pre>"; } } } /* * Change Log * * 1.0.0 * - first version * 1.0.1 * - Added isEmailUnique() function for form validation and precheck on user save * 1.0.2 * - Fixed getAllPosts() to include the post's user info * - Added loadPostsUsers() to load one or more posts with their user info * 1.0.3 * - Added autoload to always add admin Joe. */

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Ajax posting to PHP

- by JQonfused

Hi guys, I'm testing a jQuery ajax post method on a local Apache 2.2 server with PHP 5.3 (totally new at this). Here are the files, all in the same folder. html body (jQuery library included in head): <form id="postForm" method="post"> <label for="name">Input Name</label> <input type="text" name="name" id="name" /><br /> <label for="age">Input Age</label> <input type="text" name="age" id="age" /><br /> <input type="submit" value="Submit" id="submitBtn" /> </form> <div id="resultDisplay"></div> <script src="queryRequest.js"></script> queryRequest.js $(document).ready(function(){ $('#s').focus(); $('#postForm').submit(function(){ var name = $('#name').val(); var age = $('#age').val(); var URL = "post.php"; $.ajax({ type:'POST', url: URL, datatype:'json', data:{'name': name ,'age': age}, success: function(data){ $('#resultDisplay').append("Value returned.<br />name: "+data.name+" age: "+data.age); }, error: function() { $('resultDisplay').append("ERROR!") } }); }); }); post.php <?php $name = $_POST['name']; $age = $_POST['age']; $return = array('name' => $name, 'age' => $age); echo json_encode($return); ?> After inputting the two fields and pressing 'Submit', the success method is called, text appended, but the values returned from ajax post are undefined. And then after less than a second, the text fields are emptied, and the text appended to the div is gone. Doesn't seem like it's a page refresh, though, since there's no empty page flash. What's going on here? I'm sure it's a silly mistake but Firebug isn't telling me anything.

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How to detect invalid image URL with JAVA?

- by Cataclysm

I have a method to download image from URL. As like below.. public static byte[] downloadImageFromURL(final String strUrl) { InputStream in; ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); try { URL url = new URL(strUrl); in = new BufferedInputStream(url.openStream()); byte[] buf = new byte[2048]; int n = 0; while (-1 != (n = in.read(buf))) { out.write(buf, 0, n); } out.close(); in.close(); } catch (IOException e) { return null; } return out.toByteArray(); } I have an image url and it is valid. for example. https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTxfYM-hnD-Z80tgWdIgQKchKe-MXVUfTpCw1R5KkfJlbRbgr3Zcg My problem is I don't want to download if image is really not exists.Like .... https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTxfYM-hnD-Z80tgWdIgQKchKe-MXVUfTpCw1R5KkfJlbRbgr3Zcgaaaaabbbbdddddddddddddddddddddddddddd This image shouldn't be download by my method. So , how can I know the giving image URL is not really exists. I don't want to validate my URL (I think that may not my solution ). So, I googled for that. From this article ... How to check if a URL exists or returns 404 with Java? and Java check if file exists on remote server using its url But this con.getResponseCode() will always return status code "200". This mean my method will also download invalid image urls. So , I output my bufferStream as like... System.out.println(in.read(buf)); Invalid image URL produces "43". So , I add these lines of codes in my method. if (in.read(buf) == 43) { return null; } It is ok. But I don't think that will always satisfy. Has another way to get it ? am I right? I would really appreciate any suggestions. This problem may struct my head. Thanks for reading my question.

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Javascript .removeChild() only deletes even nodes?

- by user1476297

first posting. I am trying dynamically add children DIV under a DIV with ID="prnt". Addition of nodes work fine no problem. However strange enough when it comes to deleted nodes its only deleting the even numbered nodes including 0. Why is this, I could be something stupid but it seem more like a bug. I could be very wrong. Please help Thank you in advance. <script type="text/javascript"> function displayNodes() { var prnt = document.getElementById("prnt"); var chlds = prnt.childNodes; var cont = document.getElementById("content"); for(i = 0; i < chlds.length; i++) { if(chlds[i].nodeType == 1) { cont.innerHTML +="<br />"; cont.innerHTML +="Node # " + (i+1); cont.innerHTML +="<br />"; cont.innerHTML +=chlds[i].nodeName; cont.innerHTML +="<br />"; } } } function deleteENodes() { var prnt = document.getElementById("prnt"); var chlds = prnt.childNodes; for(i = 0; i < chlds.length; i++) { if(!(chlds[i].nodeType == 3)) { prnt.removeChild(chlds[i]); } } } function AddENodes() { var prnt = document.getElementById("prnt"); //Only even nodes are deletable PROBLEM for(i = 0; i < 10; i++) { var newDIV = document.createElement('div'); newDIV.setAttribute("id", "c"+(i)); var text = document.createTextNode("New Inserted Child "+(i)); newDIV.appendChild(text); prnt.appendChild(newDIV); } } </script> <title>Checking Div Nodes</title> </head> <body> <div id="prnt"> Parent 1 </div> <br /> <br /> <br /> <button type="button" onclick="displayNodes()">Show Node Info</button> <button type="button" onclick="deleteENodes()">Remove All Element Nodes Under Parent 1</button> <button type="button" onclick="AddENodes()">Add 5 New DIV Nodes</button> <div id="content"> </div> </body>

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How To Start Your Own Professional Blog with WordPress

- by Matthew Guay

Would you like to start your own blog or website? With a free WordPress account, it’s free and easy to get started creating your own professional quality blog site. This is the first part in a series on how to create your own professional quality blog site. No, we’re not talking about some cheapo looking blog from Blogger or something on Facebook, but creating a quality blog you can be proud of and present to millions of readers online. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms, powering hundreds of high-profile websites and blogs around the world. It’s both powerful and easy to use, which makes it great whether you’re just starting out or are a blogging pro. To start out with your blogging project WordPress is completely free, and you can use the online interface or install the WordPress software on your own server and blog from there. Getting Started You can start a blog in just a few minutes. Head over to WordPress.com and click Sign up now on the right-hand side of the main page. Enter a username and password, check that you agree with the legal terms, select the “Gimme a blog” bullet, and click Next. WordPress may inform you that your username is already taken, simply choose a new one and try again. Next, choose a domain for your blog. This will be the address for your site, and cannot be changed, so be sure to choose exactly what you want. If you’d prefer your address to be yourname.com instead of yourname.wordpress.com, you can add your own domain for a fee after your blog is setup…but we’ll cover that later. Once you click signup, you will be sent a confirmation email. While you wait for the email to arrive you can go ahead and enter in your name and a short bio about yourself. When you receive your confirmation email, click the link. Congratulations; you now have your own blog! You can view your new blog immediately, though the default theme isn’t very interesting without your content and pictures. Back on the page you opened from the email, click Login to access your blog’s administration page and to start adding stuff to your blog. You can also access your blog’s admin page anytime by from yourname.wordpress.com/admin, substituting your own blog name for yourname. Enter your username and password, then click Log in to get started. Adding Content to your WordPress.com Blog When you sign in to your WordPress blog, you’ll first see the WordPress Admin page. Here you can see recent posts and comments, and you can see stats of how many people have visited your site. You can also access all of your blog tools and settings right from this page. To add a new post to your blog, click the Posts link on the left, then click “Add New” either on the left menu or on the top of the Edit Posts page. Or, if you want to edit the default first post, hover over it and select Edit. Or click the New Posts button on the top of the page. This menu bar is always visible whenever you’re logged in, so it’s an easy way to add a post. The editor lets you easily write anything you want in a Microsoft Word-style editor. You can format your text, add lists, links, quotes, and more. When you’re ready to share your content with the world, click Publish on the right side. To add pictures or other files, click the picture icon beside “Upload/Insert”. Your free blog account can store up to 3Gb of pictures and documents which will definitely give you a good start. Click Select Files, and then choose the pictures or documents you want to add to your post. When the pictures have uploaded, you can add a caption and choose how to position the picture. When you’re finished, select “Insert into Post”. Or, if you want to add a video, click the video button. You have to add a paid upgrade to upload videos directly, but you can add YouTube and other online videos for free. Click the “From URL” tab, and then paste the link to the YouTube video and click Insert into post. If you’re a code geek, click the HTML tab in the editor and edit the HTML of your blog post the geeky way. Once you’ve added all your content and edited it the way you want, click the Publish button on the right of the editor. Or, you can click Preview to make sure it looks right, and then click Publish. Here’s our blog with the new blog post containing a picture and video. While you’re getting to know you’re way around the controls in WordPress, the Preview feature will be your best friend while you try to organize the content to your liking. Conclusion It only takes a couple minutes to get started blogging at WordPress.com. Whether you want to write about your daily life, share pictures of your children, or review the latest books and gadgets, WordPress.com is a great place to get started for free. But we’ve only covered a small portion of the WordPress features…but this should get you started. Check back for more WordPress and blogging coverage coming up soon! Links Signup for a free WordPress.com account Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow-To Geek SoftwareProtecting Your WordPress Admin Panel From Hackers With .htaccessMake a Backup Copy of your Production Wordpress Blog on UbuntuLinux QuickTip: Downloading and Un-tarring in One Step TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle !

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From Binary to Data Structures

- by Cédric Menzi

Table of Contents Introduction PE file format and COFF header COFF file header BaseCoffReader Byte4ByteCoffReader UnsafeCoffReader ManagedCoffReader Conclusion History This article is also available on CodeProject Introduction Sometimes, you want to parse well-formed binary data and bring it into your objects to do some dirty stuff with it. In the Windows world most data structures are stored in special binary format. Either we call a WinApi function or we want to read from special files like images, spool files, executables or may be the previously announced Outlook Personal Folders File. Most specifications for these files can be found on the MSDN Libarary: Open Specification In my example, we are going to get the COFF (Common Object File Format) file header from a PE (Portable Executable). The exact specification can be found here: PECOFF PE file format and COFF header Before we start we need to know how this file is formatted. The following figure shows an overview of the Microsoft PE executable format. Source: Microsoft Our goal is to get the PE header. As we can see, the image starts with a MS-DOS 2.0 header with is not important for us. From the documentation we can read "...After the MS DOS stub, at the file offset specified at offset 0x3c, is a 4-byte...". With this information we know our reader has to jump to location 0x3c and read the offset to the signature. The signature is always 4 bytes that ensures that the image is a PE file. The signature is: PE\0\0. To prove this we first seek to the offset 0x3c, read if the file consist the signature. So we need to declare some constants, because we do not want magic numbers. private const int PeSignatureOffsetLocation = 0x3c; private const int PeSignatureSize = 4; private const string PeSignatureContent = "PE"; Then a method for moving the reader to the correct location to read the offset of signature. With this method we always move the underlining Stream of the BinaryReader to the start location of the PE signature. private void SeekToPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // seek to the offset for the PE signagure br.BaseStream.Seek(PeSignatureOffsetLocation, SeekOrigin.Begin); // read the offset int offsetToPeSig = br.ReadInt32(); // seek to the start of the PE signature br.BaseStream.Seek(offsetToPeSig, SeekOrigin.Begin); } Now, we can check if it is a valid PE image by reading of the next 4 byte contains the content PE. private bool IsValidPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // read 4 bytes to get the PE signature byte[] peSigBytes = br.ReadBytes(PeSignatureSize); // convert it to a string and trim \0 at the end of the content string peContent = Encoding.Default.GetString(peSigBytes).TrimEnd('\0'); // check if PE is in the content return peContent.Equals(PeSignatureContent); } With this basic functionality we have a good base reader class to try the different methods of parsing the COFF file header. COFF file header The COFF header has the following structure: Offset Size Field 0 2 Machine 2 2 NumberOfSections 4 4 TimeDateStamp 8 4 PointerToSymbolTable 12 4 NumberOfSymbols 16 2 SizeOfOptionalHeader 18 2 Characteristics If we translate this table to code, we get something like this: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public MachineType Machine; public ushort NumberOfSections; public uint TimeDateStamp; public uint PointerToSymbolTable; public uint NumberOfSymbols; public ushort SizeOfOptionalHeader; public Characteristic Characteristics; } BaseCoffReader All readers do the same thing, so we go to the patterns library in our head and see that Strategy pattern or Template method pattern is sticked out in the bookshelf. I have decided to take the template method pattern in this case, because the Parse() should handle the IO for all implementations and the concrete parsing should done in its derived classes. public CoffHeader Parse() { using (var br = new BinaryReader(File.Open(_fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))) { SeekToPeSignature(br); if (!IsValidPeSignature(br)) { throw new BadImageFormatException(); } return ParseInternal(br); } } protected abstract CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br); First we open the BinaryReader, seek to the PE signature then we check if it contains a valid PE signature and rest is done by the derived implementations. Byte4ByteCoffReader The first solution is using the BinaryReader. It is the general way to get the data. We only need to know which order, which data-type and its size. If we read byte for byte we could comment out the first line in the CoffHeader structure, because we have control about the order of the member assignment. protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { CoffHeader coff = new CoffHeader(); coff.Machine = (MachineType)br.ReadInt16(); coff.NumberOfSections = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.TimeDateStamp = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.PointerToSymbolTable = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.NumberOfSymbols = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.SizeOfOptionalHeader = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.Characteristics = (Characteristic)br.ReadInt16(); return coff; } If the structure is as short as the COFF header here and the specification will never changed, there is probably no reason to change the strategy. But if a data-type will be changed, a new member will be added or ordering of member will be changed the maintenance costs of this method are very high. UnsafeCoffReader Another way to bring the data into this structure is using a "magically" unsafe trick. As above, we know the layout and order of the data structure. Now, we need the StructLayout attribute, because we have to ensure that the .NET Runtime allocates the structure in the same order as it is specified in the source code. We also need to enable "Allow unsafe code (/unsafe)" in the project's build properties. Then we need to add the following constructor to the CoffHeader structure. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { unsafe { fixed (byte* packet = &data[0]) { this = *(CoffHeader*)packet; } } } } The "magic" trick is in the statement: this = *(CoffHeader*)packet;. What happens here? We have a fixed size of data somewhere in the memory and because a struct in C# is a value-type, the assignment operator = copies the whole data of the structure and not only the reference. To fill the structure with data, we need to pass the data as bytes into the CoffHeader structure. This can be achieved by reading the exact size of the structure from the PE file. protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { return new CoffHeader(br.ReadBytes(Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)))); } This solution is the fastest way to parse the data and bring it into the structure, but it is unsafe and it could introduce some security and stability risks. ManagedCoffReader In this solution we are using the same approach of the structure assignment as above. But we need to replace the unsafe part in the constructor with the following managed part: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { IntPtr coffPtr = IntPtr.Zero; try { int size = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)); coffPtr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(size); Marshal.Copy(data, 0, coffPtr, size); this = (CoffHeader)Marshal.PtrToStructure(coffPtr, typeof(CoffHeader)); } finally { Marshal.FreeHGlobal(coffPtr); } } } Conclusion We saw that we can parse well-formed binary data to our data structures using different approaches. The first is probably the clearest way, because we know each member and its size and ordering and we have control about the reading the data for each member. But if add member or the structure is going change by some reason, we need to change the reader. The two other solutions use the approach of the structure assignment. In the unsafe implementation we need to compile the project with the /unsafe option. We increase the performance, but we get some security risks.

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Consume WCF Service InProcess using Agatha and WCF

- by REA_ANDREW

I have been looking into this lately for a specific reason. Some integration tests I want to write I want to control the types of instances which are used inside the service layer but I want that control from the test class instance. One of the problems with just referencing the service is that a lot of the time this will by default be done inside a different process. I am using StructureMap as my DI of choice and one of the tools which I am using inline with RhinoMocks is StructureMap.AutoMocking. With StructureMap the main entry point is the ObjectFactory. This will be process specific so if I decide that the I want a certain instance of a type to be used inside the ServiceLayer I cannot configure the ObjectFactory from my test class as that will only apply to the process which it belongs to. This is were I started thinking about two things: Running a WCF in process Being able to share mocked instances across processes A colleague in work pointed me to a project which is for the latter but I thought that it would be a better solution if I could run the WCF Service in process. One of the projects which I use when I think about WCF Services is AGATHA, and the one which I have to used to try and get my head around doing this. Another asset I have is a book called Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy and if you have not heard of it or read it I would definately recommend it. One of the many topics that is inside this book is the type of configuration you need to communicate with a service in the same process, and it turns out to be quite simple from a config point of view. <system.serviceModel> <services> <service name="Agatha.ServiceLayer.WCF.WcfRequestProcessor"> <endpoint address ="net.pipe://localhost/MyPipe" binding="netNamedPipeBinding" contract="Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor"/> </service> </services> <client> <endpoint name="MyEndpoint" address="net.pipe://localhost/MyPipe" binding="netNamedPipeBinding" contract="Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor"/> </client> </system.serviceModel> You can see here that I am referencing the Agatha object and contract here, but also that my binding and the address is something called Named Pipes. THis is sort of the “Magic” which makes it happen in the same process. Next I need to open the service prior to calling the methods on a proxy which I also need. My initial attempt at the proxy did not use any Agatha specific coding and one of the pains I found was that you obviously need to give your proxy the known types which the serializer can be aware of. So we need to add to the known types of the proxy programmatically. I came across the following blog post which showed me how easy it was http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/vagif/archive/2009/05/18/how-to-programmatically-define-known-types-in-wcf.aspx. First Pass So with this in mind, and inside a console app this was my first pass at consuming a service in process. First here is the proxy which I made making use of the Agatha IWcfRequestProcessor contract. public class InProcProxy : ClientBase<Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor>, Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor { public InProcProxy() { } public InProcProxy(string configurationName) : base(configurationName) { } public Agatha.Common.Response[] Process(params Agatha.Common.Request[] requests) { return Channel.Process(requests); } public void ProcessOneWayRequests(params Agatha.Common.OneWayRequest[] requests) { Channel.ProcessOneWayRequests(requests); } } So with the proxy in place I could then use this after opening the service so here is the code which I use inside the console app make the request. static void Main(string[] args) { ComponentRegistration.Register(); ServiceHost serviceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(Agatha.ServiceLayer.WCF.WcfRequestProcessor)); serviceHost.Open(); Console.WriteLine("Service is running...."); using (var proxy = new InProcProxy()) { foreach (var operation in proxy.Endpoint.Contract.Operations) { foreach (var t in KnownTypeProvider.GetKnownTypes(null)) { operation.KnownTypes.Add(t); } } var request = new GetProductsRequest(); var responses = proxy.Process(new[] { request }); var response = (GetProductsResponse)responses[0]; Console.WriteLine("{0} Products have been retrieved", response.Products.Count); } serviceHost.Close(); Console.WriteLine("Finished"); Console.ReadLine(); } So what I used here is the KnownTypeProvider of Agatha to easily get all the types I need for the service/proxy and add them to the proxy. My Request handler for this was just a test one which always returned 2 products. public class GetProductsHandler : RequestHandler<GetProductsRequest,GetProductsResponse> { public override Agatha.Common.Response Handle(GetProductsRequest request) { return new GetProductsResponse { Products = new List<ProductDto> { new ProductDto{}, new ProductDto{} } }; } } Second Pass Now after I did this I started reading up some more on some resources including more by Davy Brion and others on Agatha. Now it turns out that the work I did above to create a derived class of the ClientBase implementing Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor was not necessary due to a nice class which is present inside the Agatha code base, RequestProcessorProxy which takes care of this for you! :-) So disregarding that class I made for the proxy and changing my code to use it I am now left with the following: static void Main(string[] args) { ComponentRegistration.Register(); ServiceHost serviceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(Agatha.ServiceLayer.WCF.WcfRequestProcessor)); serviceHost.Open(); Console.WriteLine("Service is running...."); using (var proxy = new RequestProcessorProxy()) { var request = new GetProductsRequest(); var responses = proxy.Process(new[] { request }); var response = (GetProductsResponse)responses[0]; Console.WriteLine("{0} Products have been retrieved", response.Products.Count); } serviceHost.Close(); Console.WriteLine("Finished"); Console.ReadLine(); } Cheers for now, Andy References Agatha WCF InProcess Without WCF StructureMap.AutoMocking Cross Process Mocking Agatha Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy

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How To Activate Your Free Office 2007 to 2010 Tech Guarantee Upgrade

- by Matthew Guay

Have you purchased Office 2007 since March 5th, 2010? If so, here’s how you can activate and download your free upgrade to Office 2010! Microsoft Office 2010 has just been released, and today you can purchase upgrades from most retail stores or directly from Microsoft via download. But if you’ve purchased a new copy of Office 2007 or a new computer that came with Office 2007 since March 5th, 2010, then you’re entitled to an absolutely free upgrade to Office 2010. You’ll need enter information about your Office 2007 and then download the upgrade, so we’ll step you through the process. Getting Started First, if you’ve recently purchased Office 2007 but haven’t installed it, you’ll need to go ahead and install it before you can get your free Office 2010 upgrade. Install it as normal. Once Office 2007 is installed, run any of the Office programs. You’ll be prompted to activate Office. Make sure you’re connected to the internet, and then click Next to activate. Get your Free Upgrade to Office 2010 Now you’re ready to download your upgrade to Office 2010. Head to the Office Tech Guarantee site (link below), and click Upgrade now. You’ll need to enter some information about your Office 2007. Check that you purchased your copy of Office 2007 after March 5th, select your computer manufacturer, and check that you agree to the terms. Now you’re going to need the Product ID number from Office 2007. To find this, open Word or any other Office 2007 application. Click the Office Orb, and select Options on the bottom. Select the Resources button on the left, and then click About. Near the bottom of this dialog, you’ll see your Product ID. This should be a number like: 12345-123-1234567-12345 Go back to the Office Tech Guarantee signup page in your browser, and enter this Product ID. Select the language of your edition of Office 2007, enter the verification code, and then click Submit. It may take a few moments to validate your Product ID. When it is finished, you’ll be taken to an order page that shows the edition of Office 2010 you’re eligible to receive. The upgrade download is free, but if you’d like to purchase a backup DVD of Office 2010, you can add it to your order for $13.99. Otherwise, simply click Continue to accept. Do note that the edition of Office 2010 you receive may be different that the edition of Office 2007 you purchased, as the number of editions has been streamlined in the Office 2010 release. Here’s a chart you can check to see what edition you’ll receive. Note that you’ll still be allowed to install Office on the same number of computers; for example, Office 2007 Home and Student allows you to install it on up to 3 computers in the same house, and your Office 2010 upgrade will allow the same. Office 2007 Edition Office 2010 Upgrade You’ll Receive Office 2007 Home and Student Office Home and Student 2010 Office Basic 2007Office Standard 2007 Office Home and Business 2010 Office Small Business 2007Office Professional 2007Office Ultimate 2007 Office Professional 2010 Office Professional 2007 AcademicOffice Ultimate 2007 Academic Office Professional Academic 2010 Sign in with your Windows Live ID, or create a new one if you don’t already have one. Enter your name, select your country, and click Create My Account. Note that Office will send Office 2010 tips to your email address; if you don’t wish to receive them, you can unsubscribe from the emails later. Finally, you’re ready to download Office 2010! Click the Download Now link to start downloading Office 2010. Your Product Key will appear directly above the Download link, so you can copy it and then paste it in the installer when your download is finished. You will additionally receive an email with the download links and product key, so if your download fails you can always restart it from that link. If your edition of Office 2007 included the Office Business Contact Manager, you will be able to download it from the second Download link. And, of course, even if you didn’t order a backup DVD, you can always burn the installers to a DVD for a backup. Install Office 2010 Once you’re finished downloading Office 2010, run the installer to get it installed on your computer. Enter your Product Key from the Tech Guarantee website as above, and click Continue. Accept the license agreement, and then click Upgrade to upgrade to the latest version of Office. The installer will remove all of your Office 2007 applications, and then install their 2010 counterparts. If you wish to keep some of your Office 2007 applications instead, click Customize and then select to either keep all previous versions or simply keep specific applications. By default, Office 2010 will try to activate online automatically. If it doesn’t activate during the install, you’ll need to activate it when you first run any of the Office 2010 apps. Conclusion The Tech Guarantee makes it easy to get the latest version of Office if you recently purchased Office 2007. The Tech Guarantee program is open through the end of September, so make sure to grab your upgrade during this time. Actually, if you find a great deal on Office 2007 from a major retailer between now and then, you could also take advantage of this program to get Office 2010 cheaper. And if you need help getting started with Office 2010, check out our articles that can help you get situated in your new version of Office! Link Activate and Download Your free Office 2010 Tech Guarantee Upgrade Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Remove Office 2010 Beta and Reinstall Office 2007Upgrade Office 2003 to 2010 on XP or Run them Side by SideCenter Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010Change the Default Color Scheme in Office 2010Show Two Time Zones in Your Outlook 2007 Calendar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer XPS file format & XPS Viewer Explained Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide

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WinInet Apps failing when Internet Explorer is set to Offline Mode

- by Rick Strahl

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

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DropDownList and SelectListItem Array Item Updates in MVC

- by Rick Strahl

So I ran into an interesting behavior today as I deployed my first MVC 4 app tonight. I have a list form that has a filter drop down that allows selection of categories. This list is static and rarely changes so rather than loading these items from the database each time I load the items once and then cache the actual SelectListItem[] array in a static property. However, when we put the site online tonight we immediately noticed that the drop down list was coming up with pre-set values that randomly changed. Didn't take me long to trace this back to the cached list of SelectListItem[]. Clearly the list was getting updated - apparently through the model binding process in the selection postback. To clarify the scenario here's the drop down list definition in the Razor View:@Html.DropDownListFor(mod => mod.QueryParameters.Category, Model.CategoryList, "All Categories") where Model.CategoryList gets set with:[HttpPost] [CompressContent] public ActionResult List(MessageListViewModel model) { InitializeViewModel(model); busEntry entryBus = new busEntry(); var entries = entryBus.GetEntryList(model.QueryParameters); model.Entries = entries; model.DisplayMode = ApplicationDisplayModes.Standard; model.CategoryList = AppUtils.GetCachedCategoryList(); return View(model); } The AppUtils.GetCachedCategoryList() method gets the cached list or loads the list on the first access. The code to load up the list is housed in a Web utility class. The method looks like this:/// <summary> /// Returns a static category list that is cached /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static SelectListItem[] GetCachedCategoryList() { if (_CategoryList != null) return _CategoryList; lock (_SyncLock) { if (_CategoryList != null) return _CategoryList; var catBus = new busCategory(); var categories = catBus.GetCategories().ToList(); // Turn list into a SelectItem list var catList= categories .Select(cat => new SelectListItem() { Text = cat.Name, Value = cat.Id.ToString() }) .ToList(); catList.Insert(0, new SelectListItem() { Value = ((int)SpecialCategories.AllCategoriesButRealEstate).ToString(), Text = "All Categories except Real Estate" }); catList.Insert(1, new SelectListItem() { Value = "-1", Text = "--------------------------------" }); _CategoryList = catList.ToArray(); } return _CategoryList; } private static SelectListItem[] _CategoryList ; This seemed normal enough to me - I've been doing stuff like this forever caching smallish lists in memory to avoid an extra trip to the database. This list is used in various places throughout the application - for the list display and also when adding new items and setting up for notifications etc.. Watch that ModelBinder! However, it turns out that this code is clearly causing a problem. It appears that the model binder on the [HttpPost] method is actually updating the list that's bound to and changing the actual entry item in the list and setting its selected value. If you look at the code above I'm not setting the SelectListItem.Selected value anywhere - the only place this value can get set is through ModelBinding. Sure enough when stepping through the code I see that when an item is selected the actual model - model.CategoryList[x].Selected - reflects that. This is bad on several levels: First it's obviously affecting the application behavior - nobody wants to see their drop down list values jump all over the place randomly. But it's also a problem because the array is getting updated by multiple ASP.NET threads which likely would lead to odd crashes from time to time. Not good! In retrospect the modelbinding behavior makes perfect sense. The actual items and the Selected property is the ModelBinder's way of keeping track of one or more selected values. So while I assumed the list to be read-only, the ModelBinder is actually updating it on a post back producing the rather surprising results. Totally missed this during testing and is another one of those little - "Did you know?" moments. So, is there a way around this? Yes but it's maybe not quite obvious. I can't change the behavior of the ModelBinder, but I can certainly change the way that the list is generated. Rather than returning the cached list, I can return a brand new cloned list from the cached items like this:/// <summary> /// Returns a static category list that is cached /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static SelectListItem[] GetCachedCategoryList() { if (_CategoryList != null) { // Have to create new instances via projection // to avoid ModelBinding updates to affect this // globally return _CategoryList .Select(cat => new SelectListItem() { Value = cat.Value, Text = cat.Text }) .ToArray(); } …} The key is that newly created instances of SelectListItems are returned not just filtered instances of the original list. The key here is 'new instances' so that the ModelBinding updates do not update the actual static instance. The code above uses LINQ and a projection into new SelectListItem instances to create this array of fresh instances. And this code works correctly - no more cross-talk between users. Unfortunately this code is also less efficient - it has to reselect the items and uses extra memory for the new array. Knowing what I know now I probably would have not cached the list and just take the hit to read from the database. If there is even a possibility of thread clashes I'm very wary of creating code like this. But since the method already exists and handles this load in one place this fix was easy enough to put in. Live and learn. It's little things like this that can cause some interesting head scratchers sometimes…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC ASP.NET .NET Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Top 10 Reasons SQL Developer is Perfect for Oracle Beginners

- by thatjeffsmith

Learning new technologies can be daunting. If you’ve never used a Mac before, you’ll probably be a bit baffled at first. But, you’re probably at least coming from a desktop computing background (Windows), so you common frame of reference. But what if you’re just now learning to use a relational database? Yes, you’ve played with Access a bit, but now your employer or college instructor has charged you with becoming proficient with Oracle database. Here’s 10 reasons why I think Oracle SQL Developer is the perfect vehicle to help get you started. 1. It’s free No need to break into one of these… No start-up costs, no need to wrangle budget dollars from your company. Students don’t have any money after books and lab fees anyway. And most employees don’t like having to ask for ‘special’ software anyway. So avoid all of that and make sure the free stuff doesn’t suit your needs first. Upgrades are available on a regular base, also at no cost, and support is freely available via our public forums. 2. It will run pretty much anywhere Windows – check. OSX (Apple) – check. Unix – check. Linux – check. No need to start up a windows VM to run your Windows-only software in your lab machine. 3. Anyone can install it There’s no installer, no registry to be updated, no admin privs to be obtained. If you can download and extract files to your machine or USB storage device, you can run it. You can be up and running with SQL Developer in under 5 minutes. Here’s a video tutorial to see how to get started. 4. It’s ubiquitous I admit it, I learned a new word yesterday and I wanted an excuse to use it. SQL Developer’s everywhere. It’s had over 2,500,000 downloads in the past year, and is the one of the most downloaded items from OTN. This means if you need help, there’s someone sitting nearby you that can assist, and since they’re in the same tool as you, they’ll be speaking the same language. 5. Simple User Interface Up-up-down-down-Left-right-left-right-A-B-A-B-START will get you 30 lives, but you already knew that, right? You connect, you see your objects, you click on your objects. Or, you can use the worksheet to write your queries and programs in. There’s only one toolbar, and just a few buttons. If you’re like me, video games became less fun when each button had 6 action items mapped to it. I just want the good ole ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘SELECT’, and ‘START’ controls. If you’re new to Oracle, you shouldn’t have the double-workload of learning a new complicated tool as well. 6. It’s not a ‘black box’ Click through your objects, but also get the SQL that drives the GUI As you use the wizards to accomplish tasks for you, you can view the SQL statement being generated on your behalf. Just because you have a GUI, doesn’t mean you’re ceding your responsibility to learn the underlying code that makes the database work. 7. It’s four tools in one It’s not just a query tool. Maybe you need to design a data model first? Or maybe you need to migrate your Sybase ASE database to Oracle for a new project? Or maybe you need to create some reports? SQL Developer does all of that. So once you get comfortable with one part of the tool, the others will be much easier to pick up as your needs change. 8. Great learning resources available Videos, blogs, hands-on learning labs – you name it, we got it. Why wait for someone to train you, when you can train yourself at your own pace? 9. You can use it to teach yourself SQL Instead of being faced with the white-screen-of-panic, you can visually build your queries by dragging and dropping tables and views into the Query Builder. Yes, ‘just like Access’ – only better. And as you build your query, toggle to the Worksheet panel and see the SQL statement. Again, SQL Developer is not a black box. If you prefer to learn by trial and error, the worksheet will attempt to suggest the next bit of your SQL statement with it’s completion insight feature. And if you have syntax errors, those will be highlighted – just like your misspelled words in your favorite word processor. 10. It scales to match your experience level You won’t be a n00b forever. In 6-8 months, when you’re ready to tackle something a bit more complicated, like XML DB or Oracle Spatial, the tool is already there waiting on you. No need to go out and find the ‘advanced’ tool. 11. Wait, you said this was a ‘Top 10′ list? Yes. Yes, I did. I’m using this ‘trick’ to get you to continue reading because I’m going to say something you might not want to hear. Are you ready? Tools won’t replace experience, failure, hard work, and training. Just because you have the keys to the car, doesn’t mean you’re ready to head out on the race track. While SQL Developer reduces the barriers to entry, it does not completely remove them. Many experienced folks simply do not like tools. Rather, they don’t like the people that pick up tools without the know-how to properly use them. If you don’t understand what ‘TRUNCATE’ means, don’t try it out. Try picking up a book first. Of course, it’s very nice to have your own sandbox to play in, so you don’t upset the other children. That’s why I really like our Dev Days Database Virtual Box image. It’s your own database to learn and experiment with.

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Thursday Community Keynote: "By the Community, For the Community"

- by Janice J. Heiss

Sharat Chander, JavaOne Community Chairperson, began Thursday's Community Keynote. As part of the morning’s theme of "By the Community, For the Community," Chander noted that 60% of the material at the 2012 JavaOne conference was presented by Java Community members. "So next year, when the call for papers starts, put-in your submissions," he urged.From there, Gary Frost, Principal Member of Technical Staff, AMD, expanded upon Sunday's Strategy Keynote exploration of Project Sumatra, an OpenJDK project targeted at bringing Java to heterogeneous computing platforms (which combine the CPU and the parallel processor of the GPU into a single piece of silicon). Sumatra entails enhancing the JVM to make maximum use of these advanced platforms. Within this development space, AMD created the Aparapi API, which converts Java bytecode into OpenCL for execution on such GPU devices. The Aparapi API was open sourced in September 2011.Whether it was zooming-in on a Mandelbrot set, "the game of life," or a swarm of 10,000 Dukes in a space-bound gravitational dance, Frost's demos, using an Aparapi/OpenCL implementation, produced stunningly faster display results. He indicated that the Java 9 timeframe is where they see Project Sumatra coming to ultimate fruition, employing the Lamdas of Java 8.Returning to the theme of the keynote, Donald Smith, Director, Java Product Management, Oracle, explored a mind map graphic demonstrating the importance of Community in terms of fostering innovation. "It's the sharing and mixing of culture, the diversity, and the rapid prototyping," he said. Within this topic, Smith, brought up a panel of representatives from Cloudera, Eclipse, Eucalyptus, Perrone Robotics, and Twitter--ideal manifestations of community and innovation in the world of Java.Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems, explored his company's open source cloud software platform, written in Java, and used by gaming companies, technology companies, media companies, and more. Chris Aniszczyk, Operations Engineering,Twitter, noted the importance of the JVM in terms of their multiple-language development environment. Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera, described his company's Apache Hadoop-based software, support, and training. Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation, noted that they have about 270 tools projects at Eclipse, with 267 of them written in Java. Milinkovich added that Eclipse will even be going into space in 2013, as part of the control software on various experiments aboard the International Space Station. Lastly, Paul Perrone, CEO, Perrone Robotics, detailed his company's robotics and automation software platform built 100% on Java, including Java SE and Java ME--"on rat, to cat, to elephant-sized systems." Milinkovic noted that communities are by nature so good at innovation because of their very openness--"The more open you make your innovation process, the more ideas are challenged, and the more developers are focused on justifying their choices all the way through the process."From there, Georges Saab, VP Development Java SE OpenJDK, continued the topic of innovation and helping the Java Community to "Make the Future Java." Martijn Verburg, representing the London Java Community (winner of a Duke's Choice Award 2012 for their activity in OpenJDK and JCP), soon joined Saab onstage. Verburg detailed the LJC's "Adopt a JSR" program--"to get day-to-day developers more involved in the innovation that's happening around them." From its London launching pad, the innovative program has spread to Brazil, Morocco, Latvia, India, and more.Other active participants in the program joined Verburg onstage--Ben Evans, London Java Community; James Gough, Stackthread; Bruno Souza, SOUJava; Richard Warburton, jClarity; and Cecelia Borg, Oracle--OpenJDK Onboarding. Together, the group explored the goals and tasks inherent in the Adopt a JSR program--from organizing hack days (testing prototype implementations), to managing mailing lists and forums, to triaging issues, to evangelism—all with the goal of fostering greater community/developer involvement, but equally importantly, building better open standards. “Come join us, and make your ecosystem better!" urged Verburg.Paul Perrone returned to profile the latest in his company's robotics work around Java--including the AARDBOTS family of smaller robotic vehicles, running the Perrone MAX platform on top of the Java JVM. Perrone took his "Rumbles" four-wheeled robot out for a spin onstage--a roaming, ARM-based security-bot vehicle, complete with IR, ultrasonic, and "cliff" sensors (the latter, for the raised stage at JavaOne). As an ultimate window into the future of robotics, Perrone displayed a "head-set" controller--a sensor directed at the forehead to monitor brainwaves, for the someday-implementation of brain-to-robot control.Then, just when it seemed this might be the end of the day's futuristic offerings, a mystery voice from offstage pronounced "I've got some toys"--proving to be guest-visitor James Gosling, there to explore his cutting-edge work with Liquid Robotics. While most think of robots as something with wheels or arms or lasers, Gosling explained, the Liquid Robotics vehicle is an entirely new and innovative ocean-going 'bot. Looking like a floating surfboard, with an attached set of underwater wings, the autonomous devices roam the oceans using only the energy of ocean waves to propel them, and a single actuated rudder to steer. "We have to accomplish all guidance just by wiggling the rudder," Gosling said. The devices offer applications from self-installing weather buoy, to pollution monitoring station, to marine mammal monitoring device, to climate change data gathering, to even ocean life genomic sampling. The early versions of the vehicle used C code on very tiny industrial micro controllers, where they had to "count the bytes one at a time." But the latest generation vehicles, which just hit the water a week or so ago, employ an ARM processor running Linux and the ARM version of JDK 7. Gosling explained that vehicle communication from remote locations is achieved via the Iridium satellite network. But because of the costs of this communication path, the data must be sent in very small bursts--using SBD short burst data. "It costs $1/kb, so that rules everything in the software design,” said Gosling. “If you were trying to stream a Netflix video over this, it would cost a million dollars a movie. …We don't have a 'big data' problem," he quipped. There are currently about 150 Liquid Robotics vehicles out traversing the oceans. Gosling demonstrated real time satellite tracking of several vehicles currently at sea, noting that Java is actually particularly good at AI applications--due to the language having garbage collection, which facilitates complex data structures. To close-out his time onstage, Gosling of course participated in the ceremonial Java tee-shirt toss out to the audience…In parting, Chander passed the JavaOne Community Chairperson baton to Stephen Chin, Java Technology Evangelist, Oracle. Onstage in full motorcycle gear, Chin noted that he'll soon be touring Europe by motorcycle, meeting Java Community Members and streaming live via UStream--the ultimate manifestation of community and technology! He also reminded attendees of the upcoming JavaOne Latin America 2012, São Paulo, Brazil (December 4-6, 2012), and stated that the CFP (call for papers) at the conference has been extended for one more week. "Remember, December is summer in Brazil!" Chin said.

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SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 2 of 2

- by pinaldave

This is the second part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Please read the first part of this series over here. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik. Personal Learning Schedule After these three sessions it was 6:30 am and time to do my own blog. But for the rest of the day, I kept thinking about the course, and wanted to go back and finish. I was wishing that I had woken up at 3 am so I could finish all at one go. All day long I was digesting what I had learned. At 10 pm, after my daughter had gone to bed, I sighed on again. I was not disappointed by the long wait. As I mentioned before, Stephen has started four to six companies, and all of them are very successful today. Here is the video I promised yesterday – it discusses the importance of Right Sizing Your Startup. The Heartbeat of Startup – Technology Stephen has combined all technology knowledge into one 30 minute session. He discussed how to start your project, how to deal with opinions, and how to deal with multiple ideas – every start up has multiple directions it can go. He spent a lot of time emphasized deciding which direction to go and how to decide which will be the best for you. He called it a continuous development cycle. One of the biggest hazards for a start-up company is one person deciding the direction the company will go, until down the road another team member announces that there is a glitch in their part of the work and that everyone will have to start over. Even though a team of two or five people can move quickly, often the decision has gone too long and cannot be easily fixed. Stephen used an example from his own life: he was biased for one type of technology, and his teammate for another. In the end they opted for his teammate’s choice , and in the end it was a good decision, even though he was unfamiliar with that particular program. He argues that technology should not be a barrier to progress, that you cannot rely on your experience only. This really spoke to me because I am a big fan of SQL, but I know there is more out there, and I should be more open to it. I give my thanks to Stephen, I learned something in this module besides startups. Money, Success and Epic Win! The longest, but most interesting, the module was funding your start-up. You need to fund the start-up right at the very beginning, if not done right you will run into trouble. The good news is that a few years ago start-ups required a lot more money – think millions of dollars – but now start-ups can get off the ground for thousands. Stephen used an example of a company that years ago would have needed a million dollars, but today could be started for $600. It is true that things have changed, but you still need money. For $600 you can start small and add dynamically, as needed. But the truth is that if you have $600, $6000, or $6 million, it will be spent. Don’t think of it as trying to save money, think of it as investing in your future. You will need money, and you will need to (quickly) decide what you do with the money: shares, stakeholders, investing in a team, hiring a CEO. This is so important because once you have money and start the company, the company IS your money. It is your biggest currency – having a percentage of ownership in the company. Investors will want percentages as repayment for their investment, and they will want a say in the business as well. You will have to decide how far you will dilute your shares, and how the company will be divided, if at all. If you don’t plan in advance, you will find that after gaining three or four investors, suddenly you are the minority owner in your own dream. You need to understand funding carefully. This single module is worth all the money you would have spent on the whole course alone. I encourage everyone to listen to this single module even if they don’t watch any of the others. Press End to Start the Game – Exists! The final module is exit strategies. You did all this work, dealt with all political and legal issues. What are you going to get out of it? The answer is simple: money. Maybe you want your company to be bought out, for you talent to bring you a profit. You can sell the company to someone and still head it. Many options are available. You could sell and still work as an employee but no longer own the company. There are many exit strategies. This is where all your hard work comes into play. It is important not to feel fooled at any step. There are so many good ideas that end up in the garbage because of poor planning, so that if you find yourself successful, you don’t want to blow it at this step! The exit is important. I thought that this aspect of the course was completely unique, and I loved Stephen’s point of view. I was lost deep in thought after this module ended. I actually took two hours worth of notes on this section alone – and it was only a three hour course. I am planning on attending this course one more time next week, just to catch up on all the small bits of wisdom I’m sure I missed. Thank you Stephen for bringing your real world experience with us! I recommend that everyone attends this course, even if they don’t want to begin their own start-up company. It was indeed a long day for me. Do not forget to read part 1 of this story and attend course Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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The Incremental Architect´s Napkin - #1 - It´s about the money, stupid

- by Ralf Westphal

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/24/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---1---itacutes-about-the.aspx Software development is an economic endeavor. A customer is only willing to pay for value. What makes a software valuable is required to become a trait of the software. We as software developers thus need to understand and then find a way to implement requirements. Whether or in how far a customer really can know beforehand what´s going to be valuable for him/her in the end is a topic of constant debate. Some aspects of the requirements might be less foggy than others. Sometimes the customer does not know what he/she wants. Sometimes he/she´s certain to want something - but then is not happy when that´s delivered. Nevertheless requirements exist. And developers will only be paid if they deliver value. So we better focus on doing that. Although is might sound trivial I think it´s important to state the corollary: We need to be able to trace anything we do as developers back to some requirement. You decide to use Go as the implementation language? Well, what´s the customer´s requirement this decision is linked to? You decide to use WPF as the GUI technology? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide in favor of a layered architecture? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide to put code in three classes instead of just one? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? You decide to use MongoDB over MySql? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? etc. I´m not saying any of these decisions are wrong. I´m just saying whatever you decide be clear about the requirement that´s driving your decision. You have to be able to answer the question: Why do you think will X deliver more value to the customer than the alternatives? Customers are not interested in romantic ideals of hard working, good willing, quality focused craftsmen. They don´t care how and why you work - as long as what you deliver fulfills their needs. They want to trust you to recognize this as your top priority - and then deliver. That´s all. Fundamental aspects of requirements If you´re like me you´re probably not used to such scrutinization. You want to be trusted as a professional developer - and decide quite a few things following your gut feeling. Or by relying on “established practices”. That´s ok in general and most of the time - but still… I think we should be more conscious about our decisions. Which would make us more responsible, even more professional. But without further guidance it´s hard to reason about many of the myriad decisions we´ve to make over the course of a software project. What I found helpful in this situation is structuring requirements into fundamental aspects. Instead of one large heap of requirements then there are smaller blobs. With them it´s easier to check if a decisions falls in their scope. Sure, every project has it´s very own requirements. But all of them belong to just three different major categories, I think. Any requirement either pertains to functionality, non-functional aspects or sustainability. For short I call those aspects: Functionality, because such requirements describe which transformations a software should offer. For example: A calculator software should be able to add and multiply real numbers. An auction website should enable you to set up an auction anytime or to find auctions to bid for. Quality, because such requirements describe how functionality is supposed to work, e.g. fast or secure. For example: A calculator should be able to calculate the sinus of a value much faster than you could in your head. An auction website should accept bids from millions of users. Security of Investment, because functionality and quality need not just be delivered in any way. It´s important to the customer to get them quickly - and not only today but over the course of several years. This aspect introduces time into the “requrements equation”. Security of Investments (SoI) sure is a non-functional requirement. But I think it´s important to not subsume it under the Quality (Q) aspect. That´s because SoI has quite special properties. For one, SoI for software means something completely different from what it means for hardware. If you buy hardware (a car, a hair blower) you find that a worthwhile investment, if the hardware does not change it´s functionality or quality over time. A car still running smoothly with hardly any rust spots after 10 years of daily usage would be a very secure investment. So for hardware (or material products, if you like) “unchangeability” (in the face of usage) is desirable. With software you want the contrary. Software that cannot be changed is a waste. SoI for software means “changeability”. You want to be sure that the software you buy/order today can be changed, adapted, improved over an unforseeable number of years so as fit changes in its usage environment. But that´s not the only reason why the SoI aspect is special. On top of changeability[1] (or evolvability) comes immeasurability. Evolvability cannot readily be measured by counting something. Whether the changeability is as high as the customer wants it, cannot be determined by looking at metrics like Lines of Code or Cyclomatic Complexity or Afferent Coupling. They may give a hint… but they are far, far from precise. That´s because of the nature of changeability. It´s different from performance or scalability. Also it´s because a customer cannot tell upfront, “how much” evolvability he/she wants. Whether requirements regarding Functionality (F) and Q have been met, a customer can tell you very quickly and very precisely. A calculation is missing, the calculation takes too long, the calculation time degrades with increased load, the calculation is accessible to the wrong users etc. That´s all very or at least comparatively easy to determine. But changeability… That´s a whole different thing. Nevertheless over time the customer will develop a feedling if changeability is good enough or degrading. He/she just has to check the development of the frequency of “WTF”s from developers ;-) F and Q are “timeless” requirement categories. Customers want us to deliver on them now. Just focusing on the now, though, is rarely beneficial in the long run. So SoI adds a counterweight to the requirements picture. Customers want SoI - whether they know it or not, whether they state if explicitly or not. In closing A customer´s requirements are not monolithic. They are not all made the same. Rather they fall into different categories. We as developers need to recognize these categories when confronted with some requirement - and take them into account. Only then can we make true professional decisions, i.e. conscious and responsible ones. I call this fundamental trait of software “changeability” and not “flexibility” to distinguish to whom it´s a concern. “Flexibility” to me means, software as is can easily be adapted to a change in its environment, e.g. by tweaking some config data or adding a library which gets picked up by a plug-in engine. “Flexibiltiy” thus is a matter of some user. “Changeability”, on the other hand, to me means, software can easily be changed in its structure to adapt it to new requirements. That´s a matter of the software developer. ?

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Monitor your Hard Drive’s Health with Acronis Drive Monitor

- by Matthew Guay

Are you worried that your computer’s hard drive could die without any warning? Here’s how you can keep tabs on it and get the first warning signs of potential problems before you actually lose your critical data. Hard drive failures are one of the most common ways people lose important data from their computers. As more of our memories and important documents are stored digitally, a hard drive failure can mean the loss of years of work. Acronis Drive Monitor helps you avert these disasters by warning you at the first signs your hard drive may be having trouble. It monitors many indicators, including heat, read/write errors, total lifespan, and more. It then notifies you via a taskbar popup or email that problems have been detected. This early warning lets you know ahead of time that you may need to purchase a new hard drive and migrate your data before it’s too late. Getting Started Head over to the Acronis site to download Drive Monitor (link below). You’ll need to enter your name and email, and then you can download this free tool. Also, note that the download page may ask if you want to include a trial of their for-pay backup program. If you wish to simply install the Drive Monitor utility, click Continue without adding. Run the installer when the download is finished. Follow the prompts and install as normal. Once it’s installed, you can quickly get an overview of your hard drives’ health. Note that it shows 3 categories: Disk problems, Acronis backup, and Critical Events. On our computer, we had Seagate DiskWizard, an image backup utility based on Acronis Backup, installed, and Acronis detected it. Drive Monitor stays running in your tray even when the application window is closed. It will keep monitoring your hard drives, and will alert you if there’s a problem. Find Detailed Information About Your Hard Drives Acronis’ simple interface lets you quickly see an overview of how the drives on your computer are performing. If you’d like more information, click the link under the description. Here we see that one of our drives have overheated, so click Show disks to get more information. Now you can select each of your drives and see more information about them. From the Disk overview tab that opens by default, we see that our drive is being monitored, has been running for a total of 368 days, and that it’s health is good. However, it is running at 113F, which is over the recommended max of 107F. The S.M.A.R.T. parameters tab gives us more detailed information about our drive. Most users wouldn’t know what an accepted value would be, so it also shows the status. If the value is within the accepted parameters, it will report OK; otherwise, it will show that has a problem in this area. One very interesting piece of information we can see is the total number of Power-On Hours, Start/Stop Count, and Power Cycle Count. These could be useful indicators to check if you’re considering purchasing a second hand computer. Simply load this program, and you’ll get a better view of how long it’s been in use. Finally, the Events tab shows each time the program gave a warning. We can see that our drive, which had been acting flaky already, is routinely overheating even when our other hard drive was running in normal temperature ranges. Monitor Acronis Backups And Critical Errors In addition to monitoring critical stats of your hard drives, Acronis Drive Monitor also keeps up with the status of your backup software and critical events reported by Windows. You can access these from the front page, or via the links on the left hand sidebar. If you have any edition of any Acronis Backup product installed, it will show that it was detected. Note that it can only monitor the backup status of the newest versions of Acronis Backup and True Image. If no Acronis backup software was installed, it will show a warning that the drive may be unprotected and will give you a link to download Acronis backup software. If you have another backup utility installed that you wish to monitor yourself, click Configure backup monitoring, and then disable monitoring on the drives you’re monitoring yourself. Finally, you can view any detected Critical events from the Critical events tab on the left. Get Emailed When There’s a Problem One of Drive Monitor’s best features is the ability to send you an email whenever there’s a problem. Since this program can run on any version of Windows, including the Server and Home Server editions, you can use this feature to stay on top of your hard drives’ health even when you’re not nearby. To set this up, click Options in the top left corner. Select Alerts on the left, and then click the Change settings link to setup your email account. Enter the email address which you wish to receive alerts, and a name for the program. Then, enter the outgoing mail server settings for your email. If you have a Gmail account, enter the following information: Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com Port: 587 Username and Password: Your gmail address and password Check the Use encryption box, and then select TLS from the encryption options. It will now send a test message to your email account, so check and make sure it sent ok. Now you can choose to have the program automatically email you when warnings and critical alerts appear, and also to have it send regular disk status reports. Conclusion Whether you’ve got a brand new hard drive or one that’s seen better days, knowing the real health of your it is one of the best ways to be prepared before disaster strikes. It’s no substitute for regular backups, but can help you avert problems. Acronis Drive Monitor is a nice tool for this, and although we wish it wasn’t so centered around their backup offerings, we still found it a nice tool. Link Download Acronis Drive Monitor (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Change Monitor Timeout From Command LineAnalyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStatMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersDefrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In WindowsFind Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer

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How Oracle Data Integration Customers Differentiate Their Business in Competitive Markets

- by Irem Radzik

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 With data being a central force in driving innovation and competing effectively, data integration has become a key IT approach to remove silos and ensure working with consistent and trusted data. Especially with the release of 12c version, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate offer easy-to-use and high-performance solutions that help companies with their critical data initiatives, including big data analytics, moving to cloud architectures, modernizing and connecting transactional systems and more. In a recent press release we announced the great momentum and analyst recognition Oracle Data Integration products have achieved in the data integration and replication market. In this press release we described some of the key new features of Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c. In addition, a few from our 4500+ customers explained how Oracle’s data integration platform helped them achieve their business goals. In this blog post I would like to go over what these customers shared about their experience. Land O’Lakes is one of America’s premier member-owned cooperatives, and offers an extensive line of agricultural supplies, as well as production and business services. Rich Bellefeuille, manager, ETL & data warehouse for Land O’Lakes told us how GoldenGate helped them modernize their critical ERP system without impacting service and how they are moving to new projects with Oracle Data Integrator 12c: “With Oracle GoldenGate 11g, we've been able to migrate our enterprise-wide implementation of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, ERP system, to a new database and application server platform with minimal downtime to our business. Using Oracle GoldenGate 11g we reduced database migration time from nearly 30 hours to less than 30 minutes. Given our quick success, we are considering expansion of our Oracle GoldenGate 12c footprint. We are also in the midst of deploying a solution leveraging Oracle Data Integrator 12c to manage our pricing data to handle orders more effectively and provide a better relationship with our clients. We feel we are gaining higher productivity and flexibility with Oracle's data integration products." ICON, a global provider of outsourced development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries, highlighted the competitive advantage that a solid data integration foundation brings. Diarmaid O’Reilly, enterprise data warehouse manager, ICON plc said “Oracle Data Integrator enables us to align clinical trials intelligence with the information needs of our sponsors. It helps differentiate ICON’s services in an increasingly competitive drug-development industry." You can find more info on ICON's implementation here. A popular use case for Oracle GoldenGate’s real-time data integration is offloading operational reporting from critical transaction processing systems. SolarWorld, one of the world’s largest solar-technology producers and the largest U.S. solar panel manufacturer, implemented Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data integration of manufacturing data for fast analysis. Russ Toyama, U.S. senior database administrator for SolarWorld told us real-time data helps their operations and GoldenGate’s solution supports high performance of their manufacturing systems: “We use Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data integration into our decision support system, which performs real-time analysis for manufacturing operations to continuously improve product quality, yield and efficiency. With reliable and low-impact data movement capabilities, Oracle GoldenGate also helps ensure that our critical manufacturing systems are stable and operate with high performance." You can watch the full interview with SolarWorld's Russ Toyama here. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Starwood Hotels and Resorts is one of the many customers that found out how well Oracle Data Integration products work with Oracle Exadata. Gordon Light, senior director of information technology for StarWood Hotels, says they had notable performance gain in loading Oracle Exadata reporting environment: “We leverage Oracle GoldenGate to replicate data from our central reservations systems and other OLTP databases – significantly decreasing the overall ETL duration. Moving forward, we plan to use Oracle GoldenGate to help the company achieve near-real-time reporting.”You can listen about Starwood Hotels' implementation here. Many companies combine the power of Oracle GoldenGate with Oracle Data Integrator to have a single, integrated data integration platform for variety of use cases across the enterprise. Ufone is another good example of that. The leading mobile communications service provider of Pakistan has improved customer service using timely customer data in its data warehouse. Atif Aslam, head of management information systems for Ufone says: “Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate help us integrate information from various systems and provide up-to-date and real-time CRM data updates hourly, rather than daily. The applications have simplified data warehouse operations and allowed business users to make faster and better informed decisions to protect revenue in the fast-moving Pakistani telecommunications market.” You can read more about Ufone's use case here. In our Oracle Data Integration 12c launch webcast back in November we also heard from BT’s CTO Surren Parthab about their use of GoldenGate for moving to private cloud architecture. Surren also shared his perspectives on Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c releases. You can watch the video here. These are only a few examples of leading companies that have made data integration and real-time data access a key part of their data governance and IT modernization initiatives. They have seen real improvements in how their businesses operate and differentiate in today’s competitive markets. You can read about other customer examples in our Ebook: The Path to the Future and access resources including white papers, data sheets, podcasts and more via our Oracle Data Integration resource kit. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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Code Camp 2011 – Summary

- by hajan

Waiting whole twelve months to come this year’s Code Camp 2011 event was something which all Microsoft technologies (and even non-Microsoft techs.) developers were doing in the past year. Last year’s success was enough big to be heard and to influence everything around our developer community and beyond. Code Camp 2011 was nothing else but a invincible success which will remain in our memory for a long time from now. Darko Milevski (president of MKDOT.NET UG and SharePoint MVP) said something interesting at the event keynote that up to now we were looking at the past by saying what we did… now we will focus on the future and how to develop our community more and more in the future days, weeks, months and I hope so for many years… Even though it was held only two days ago (26th of November 2011), I already feel the nostalgia for everything that happened there and for the excellent time we have spent all together. ORGANIZED BY ENTHUSIASTS AND EXPERTS Code Camp 2011 was organized by number of community enthusiasts and experts who have unselfishly contributed with all their free time to make the best of this event. The event was organized by a known community group called MKDOT.NET User Group, name of a user group which is known not only in Macedonia, but also in many countries abroad. Organization mainly consists of software developers, technical leaders, team leaders in several known companies in Macedonia, as well as Microsoft MVPs. SPEAKERS There were 24 speakers at five parallel tracks. At Code Camp 2011 we had two groups of speakers: Professional Experts in various technologies and Student Speakers. The new interesting thing here is the Student Speakers, which draw attention a lot, especially to other students who were interested to see what their colleagues are going to speak about and how do they use Microsoft technologies in different coding scenarios and practices, in different topics. From the rest of the professional speakers, there were 7 Microsoft MVPs: Two ASP.NET/IIS MVPs, Two C# MVPs, and One MVP in SharePoint, SQL Server and Exchange Server. I must say that besides the MVP Speakers, who definitely did a great job as always… there were other excellent speakers as well, which were speaking on various technologies, such as: Web Development, Windows Phone Development, XNA, Windows 8, Games Development, Entity Framework, Event-driven programming, SOLID, SQLCLR, T-SQL, e.t.c. SESSIONS There were 25 sessions mainly all related to Microsoft technologies, but ranging from Windows 8, WP7, ASP.NET till Games Development, XNA and Event-driven programming. Sessions were going in five parallel tracks named as Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Student track. Five presentations in each track, each with level 300 or 400. More info MY SESSION (ASP.NET MVC Best Practices) I must say that from the big number of speaking engagements I have had, this was one of my best performances and definitely I have set new records of attendees at my sessions and probably overall. I spoke on topic ASP.NET MVC Best Practices, where I have shown tips, tricks, guidelines and best practices on what to use and what to avoid by developing with one of the best web development frameworks nowadays, ASP.NET MVC. I had approximately 350+ attendees, the hall was full so that there was no room for staying at feet. Besides .NET developers, there were a lot of other technology oriented developers, who has also received the presentation very well and I really hope I gave them reason to think about ASP.NET as one of the best options for web development nowadays (if you ask me, it’s the best one ;-)). I have included 10 tips in using ASP.NET MVC each of them followed by a demo. Besides these 10 tips, I have briefly introduced the concept of ASP.NET MVC for those that haven’t been working with the framework and at the end some bonus tips. I must say there was lot of laugh for some funny sentences I have stated, like “If you code ASP.NET MVC, girls will love you more” – same goes for girls, only replace girls with boys :). [LINK TO SESSION WILL GO HERE, ONCE SESSIONS ARE AVAILABLE ON MK CODECAMP WEBSITE] VOLUNTEERS Without strong organization, such events wouldn’t be able to gather hundreds of attendees at one place and still stay perfectly organized to the smallest details, without dedicated organization and volunteers. I would like to dedicate this space in my blog to them and to say one big THANK YOU for supporting us before the event and during the whole day in the event. With such young and dedicated volunteers, we couldn’t achieve anything but great results. THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION! NETWORKING One of the main reasons why we do such events is to gather all professionals in one place. Networking is what everyone wants because through this way of networking, we can meet incredible people in one place. It is amazing feeling to share your knowledge with others and exchange thoughts on various topics. Meet and talk to interesting people. I have had very special moments with many attendees especially after my presentation. Special Thank You to all of them who come to meet me in person, whether to ask a question, say congrats for my session or simply meet me and just smile :)… everything counts! Thank You! TWITTER During the event, twitter was one of the most useful event-wide communication tool where everyone could tweet with hash tag #mkcodecamp or #mkdotnet and say what he/she wants to say about the current state and happenings at that moment… In my next blog post I will list the top craziest tweets that were posted at this event… FUTURE OF MKDOT.NET Having such strong community around MKDOT.NET, the future seems very bright. The initial plans are to have sub-groups in several technologies, however all these sub-groups will belong to the MKDOT.NET UG which will be, somehow, the HEAD of these sub-groups. We are doing this to provide better divisions by technologies and organize ourselves better since our community is very big, around 500 members in MKDOT.NET.We will have five sub-groups:- Web User Group (Lead:Hajan Selmani - me)- Mobile User Group (Lead: Filip Kerazovski)- Visual C# User Group (Lead: Vekoslav Stefanovski)- SharePoint User Group (Lead: Darko Milevski)- Dynamics User Group (Lead: Vladimir Senih) SUMMARY Online registered attendees: ~1.200 Event attendees: ~800 Number of members in organization: 40+ Organized by: MKDOT.NET User Group Number of tracks: 5 Number of speakers: 24 Number of sessions: 25 Event official website: http://codecamp.mkdot.net Total number of sponsors: 20 Platinum Sponsors: Microsoft, INETA, Telerik Place held: FON University City and Country: Skopje, Macedonia THANK YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE BEST EVENT IN MACEDONIA, CODE CAMP 2011. Regards, Hajan

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Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

- by danx

Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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PeopleSoft Upgrades, Fusion, & BI for Leading European PeopleSoft Applications Customers

- by Mark Rosenberg

With so many industry-leading services firms around the globe managing their businesses with PeopleSoft, it’s always an adventure setting up times and meetings for us to keep in touch with them, especially those outside of North America who often do not get to join us at Oracle OpenWorld. Fortunately, during the first two weeks of May, Nigel Woodland (Oracle’s Service Industries Director for the EMEA region) and I successfully blocked off our calendars to visit seven different customers spanning four countries in Western Europe. We met executives and leaders at four Staffing industry firms, two Professional Services firms that engage in consulting and auditing, and a Financial Services firm. As we shared the latest information regarding product capabilities and plans, we also gained valuable insight into the hot technology topics facing these businesses. What we heard was both informative and inspiring, and I suspect other Oracle PeopleSoft applications customers can benefit from one or more of the following observations from our trip. Great IT Plans Get Executed When You Respect the Users Each of our visits followed roughly the same pattern. After introductions, Nigel outlined Oracle’s product and technology strategy, including a discussion of how we at Oracle invest in each layer of the “technology stack” to provide customers with unprecedented business management capabilities and choice. Then, I provided the specifics of the PeopleSoft product line’s investment strategy, detailing the dramatic number of rich usability and functionality enhancements added to release 9.1 since its general availability in 2009 and the game-changing capabilities slated for 9.2. What was most exciting about each of these discussions was that shortly after my talking about what customers can do with release 9.1 right now to drive up user productivity and satisfaction, I saw the wheels turning in the minds of our audiences. Business analyst and end user-configurable tools and technologies, such as WorkCenters and the Related Action Framework, that provide the ability to tailor a “central command center” to the exact needs of each recruiter, biller, and every other role in the organization were exactly what each of our customers had been looking for. Every one of our audiences agreed that these tools which demonstrate a respect for the user would finally help IT pole vault over the wall of resistance that users had often raised in the past. With these new user-focused capabilities, IT is positioned to definitively partner with the business, instead of drag the business along, to unlock the value of their investment in PeopleSoft. This topic of respecting the user emerged during our very first visit, which was at Vital Services Group at their Head Office “The Mill” in Manchester, England. (If you are a student of architecture and are ever in Manchester, you should stop in to see this amazingly renovated old mill building.) I had just finished explaining our PeopleSoft 9.2 roadmap, and Mike Code, PeopleSoft Systems Manager for this innovative staffing company, said, “Mark, the new features you’ve shown us in 9.1/9.2 are very relevant to our business. As we forge ahead with the 9.1 upgrade, the ability to configure a targeted user interface with WorkCenters, Related Actions, Pivot Grids, and Alerts will enable us to satisfy the business that this upgrade is for them and will deliver tangible benefits. In fact, you’ve highlighted that we need to start talking to the business to keep up the momentum to start reviewing the 9.2 upgrade after we get to 9.1, because as much as 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.52 offers, what you’ve shown us for 9.2 is what we’ve envisioned was ultimately possible with our investment in PeopleSoft applications.” We also received valuable feedback about our investment for the Staffing industry when we visited with Hans Wanders, CIO of Randstad (the second largest Staffing company in the world) in the Netherlands. After our visit, Hans noted, “It was very interesting to see how the PeopleSoft applications have developed. I was truly impressed by many of the new developments.” Hans and Mike, sincere thanks for the validation that our team’s hard work and dedication to “respecting the users” is worth the effort! Co-existence of PeopleSoft and Fusion Applications Just Makes Sense As a “product person,” one of the most rewarding things about visiting customers is that they actually want to talk to me. Sometimes, they want to discuss a product area that we need to enhance; other times, they are interested in learning how to extract more value from their applications; and still others, they want to tell me how they are using the applications to drive real value for the business. During this trip, I was very pleased to hear that several of our customers not only thought the co-existence of Fusion applications alongside PeopleSoft applications made sense in theory, but also that they were aggressively looking at how to deploy one or more Fusion applications alongside their PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM applications. The most common deployment plan in the works by three of the organizations is to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 or 9.2, and then adopt one of the new Fusion HCM applications, such as Fusion Performance Management or the full suite of Fusion Talent Management. For example, during an applications upgrade planning discussion with the staffing company Hays plc., Mark Thomas, who is Hays’ UK IT Director, commented, “We are very excited about where we can go with the latest versions of the PeopleSoft applications in conjunction with Fusion Talent Management.” Needless to say, this news was very encouraging, because it reiterated that our applications investment strategy makes good business sense for our customers. Next Generation Business Intelligence Is the Key to the Future The third, and perhaps most exciting, lesson I learned during this journey is that our audiences already know that the latest generation of Business Intelligence technologies will be the “secret sauce” for organizations to transform business in radical ways. While a number of the organizations we visited on the trip have deployed or are deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the associated analytics applications to provide dashboards of easy-to-understand, user-configurable metrics that help optimize business performance according to current operating procedures, what’s most exciting to them is being able to use Business Intelligence to change the way an organization does business, grows revenue, and makes a profit. In particular, several executives we met asked whether we can help them minimize the need to have perfectly structured data and at the same time generate analytics that improve order fulfillment decision-making. To them, the path to future growth lies in having the ability to analyze unstructured data rapidly and intuitively and leveraging technology’s ability to detect patterns that a human cannot reasonably be expected to see. For illustrative purposes, here is a good example of a business problem where analyzing a combination of structured and unstructured data can produce better results. If you have a resource manager trying to decide which person would be the best fit for an assignment in terms of ensuring (a) client satisfaction, (b) the individual’s satisfaction with the work, (c) least travel distance, and (d) highest margin, you traditionally compare resource qualifications to assignment needs, calculate margins on past work with the client, and measure distances. To perform these comparisons, you are likely to need the organization to have profiles setup, people ranked against profiles, margin targets setup, margins measured, distances setup, distances measured, and more. As you can imagine, this requires organizations to plan and implement data setup, capture, and quality management initiatives to ensure that dependable information is available to support resourcing analysis and decisions. In the fast-paced, tight-budget world in which most organizations operate today, the effort and discipline required to maintain high-quality, structured data like those described in the above example are certainly not desirable and in some cases are not feasible. You can imagine how intrigued our audiences were when I informed them that we are ready to help them analyze volumes of unstructured data, detect trends, and produce recommendations. Our discussions delved into examples of how the firms could leverage Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search and Endeca technologies to keyword search against, compare, and learn from unstructured resource and assignment data. We also considered examples of how they could employ Oracle Real-Time Decisions to generate statistically significant recommendations based on similar resourcing scenarios that have produced the desired satisfaction and profit margin results. --- Although I had almost no time for sight-seeing during this trip to Europe, I have to say that it may have been one of the most energizing and engaging trips of my career. Showing these dedicated customers how they can give every user a uniquely tailored set of tools and address business problems in ways that have to date been impossible made the journey across the Atlantic more than worth it. If any of these three topics intrigue you, I’d recommend you contact your Oracle applications representative to arrange for more detailed discussions with the appropriate members of our organization.

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When OneTug Just Isn’t Enough…

- by onefloridacoder

I stole that from the back of a T-shirt I saw at the Orlando Code Camp 2010. This was my first code camp and my first time volunteering for an event like this as well. It was an awesome day. I cannot begin to count the “aaahh”, “I did-not-know I could do that”, in the crowds and for myself. I think it was a great day of learning for everyone at all levels. All of the presenters were different and provided great insights into the topics they were presenting. Here’s a list of the ones that I attended. KodeFuGuru, “Pirates vs. Ninjas” He touched on many good topics to relax some of the ways we think when we are writing out code, and still looks good, readable, etc. As he pointed out in all of his examples, we might not always realize everything that’s going on under the covers. He exposed a bug in his own code, and verbalized the mental gymnastics he went through when he knew there was something wrong with one of his IEnumerable implementations. For me, it was great to hear that someone else labors over these gut reactions to code quickly snapped together, to the point that we rush to the refactor stage to fix what’s bothering us – and learn. He has some content on extension methods that was very interesting. My “that is so cool” moment was when he swapped out AddEntity method on an entity class and used a With extension method instead. Some of the LINQ scales fell off my eyes at that moment, and I realized my own code could be a lot more powerful (and readable) if incorporate a few of these examples at the appropriate times. And he cautioned as well… “don’t go crazy with this stuff”, there’s a place and time for everything. One of his examples demo’d toward the end of the talk is on his sight where he’s chaining methods together, cool stuff. Quotes I liked: “Extension Methods - Extension methods to put features back on the model type, without impacting the type.” “Favor Declarative Code” – Check out the ? and ?? operators if you’re not already using them. “Favor Fluent Code” “Avoid Pirate Ninja Zombies! If you see one run!” I’m definitely going to be looking at “Extract Projection” when I get into VS2010. BDD 101 – Sean Chambers http://github.com/schambers This guy had a whole host of gremlins against him, final score Sean 5, Gremlins 1. He ran the code samples from his github repo in the code github code viewer since the PC they school gave him to use didn’t have VS installed. He did a great job of converting the grammar between BDD and TDD, and how this style of development can be used in integration tests as well as the different types of gated builds on a CI box – he didn’t go into a discussion around CI, but we could infer that it could work. Like when we use WSSF, it does cause a class explosion to happen however the amount of code per class it limit to just covering the concern at hand – no more, no less. As in “When I as a <Role>, expect {something} to happen, because {}” This keeps us (the developer) from gold plating our solutions and creating less waste. He basically keeps the code that prove out the requirement to two lines of code. Nice. He uses SpecUnit to merge this grammar into his .NET projects and gave an overview on how this ties into writing his own BDD tests. Some folks were familiar with Given / When / Then as story acceptance criteria and here’s how he mapped it: “Given <Context> When <Something Happens> Then <I expect...>” There are a few base classes and overrides in the SpecUnit framework that help with setting up the context for each test which looked very handy. Successfully Running Your Own Coding Business The speaker ran through a list of items that sounded like common sense stuff LLC, banking, separating expenses, etc. Then moved into role playing with business owners and an ISV. That was pretty good stuff, it pays to be a good listener all of the time even if your client is sitting on the other side of the phone tearing you head off for you – but that’s all it is, and get used to it its par for the course. Oh, yeah always answer the phone was one simple thing that you can do to move your business forward. But like Cory Foy tweeted this week, “If you owe me a lot of money, don’t have a message that says your away for five weeks skiing in Colorado.” Lots of food for thought that’s on my list of “todo’s and to-don’ts”. Speaker Idol Next, I had the pleasure of helping Russ Fustino tape this part of Code Camp as my primary volunteer opportunity that day. You remember Russ, “know the code” from the awesome Russ’ Tool Shed series. He did a great job orchestrating and capturing the Speaker Idol finals. So I didn’t actually miss any sessions, but was able to see three back to back in one setting. The idol finalists gave a 10 minute talk and very deep subjects, but different styles of talks. No one walked away empty handed for jobs very well done. Russ has details on his site. The pictures and video captured is supposed to be published on Channel 9 at a later date. It was also a valuable experience to see what makes technical speakers effective in their talks. I picked up quite a few speaking tips from what I heard from the judges and contestants. Design For Developers – Diane Leeper If you are a great developer, you’re probably a lousy designer. Diane didn’t come to poke holes in what we think we can do with UI layout and design, but she provided some tools we can use to figure out metaphors for visualizing data. If you need help with that check out Silverlight Pivot – that’s what she was getting at. I was first introduced to her at one of John Papa’s talks last year at a Lakeland User Group meeting and she’s very passionate about design. She was able to discuss different elements of Pivot, while to a developer is just looked cool. I believe she was providing the deck from her talk to folks after her talk, so send her an email if you’re interested. She says she can talk about design for hours and hours – we all left that session believing her. Rinse and Repeat Orlando Code Camp 2010 was awesome, and would totally do it again. There were lots of folks from my shop there, and some that have left my shop to go elsewhere. So it was a reunion of sorts and a great celebration for the simple fact that its great to be a developer and there’s a community that supports and recognizes it as well. The sponsors were generous and the organizers were very tired, namely Esteban Garcia and Will Strohl who were responsible for making a lot of this magic happen. And if you don’t believe me, check out the chatter on Twitter.

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Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

Back in February at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series (EKS) I spoke to various people at Emtel about their data centre here on the island. I was trying to see whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting over there for a selected group of our community members. Well, let's say it like this... My first approach wasn't that promising and far from successful but during the following months there were more and more occasions to get in touch with the "right" contact persons at Emtel to make it happen... Setting up an appointment and pre-requisites The major improvement came during a Boot Camp for Windows Phone 8.1 App development organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands in cooperation with Emtel at the Emtel World, Ebene. Apart from learning bits and pieces regarding Universal Apps I took the opportunity to get in touch with Arvin Lockee, Sales Executive - Data, during our lunch break. And this really kicked off the whole procedure. Prior to get access to the Emtel data centre it is requested that you provide full name and National ID of anyone going to visit. Also, it should be noted that there was only a limited amount of seats available. Anyways, packed with this information I posted through the usual social media channels. Responses came in very quickly and based on First-come, first-serve (FCFS) principle I noted down the details and forwarded them to Emtel in order to fix a date and time for the visit. In preparation on our side, all attendees exchanged contact details and we organised transport options to go to the data centre in Arsenal. The day before and on the day of our meeting, Arvin send me a reminder to check whether everything is still confirmed and ready to go... Of course, it was! Arriving at the Emtel Data Centre As I'm coming from Flic En Flac towards the North, we agreed that I'm going to pick up a couple of young fellows near the old post office in Port Louis. All went well, except that Sean eventually might be living in another time zone compared to the rest of us. Anyway, after some extended stop we were complete and arrived just in time in Arsenal to meet and greet with Ish and Veer. Again, Emtel is taking access procedures to their data centre very serious and the gate stayed close until all our IDs had been noted and compared to the list of registered attendees. Despite having a good laugh at the mixture of old and new ID cards it was a straight-forward processing. The ward was very helpful and guided us to the waiting area at the entrance section of the building. Shortly after we were welcomed by Kamlesh Bokhoree, the Data Centre Officer. He gave us brief introduction into the rules and regulations during our visit, like no photography allowed, not touching the buttons, and following his instructions through the whole visit. Of course! Inside the data centre Next, he explained us the multi-factor authentication system using a combination of bio-metric data, like finger print reader, and "classic" pin panel. The Emtel data centre provides multiple services and next to co-location for your own hardware they also offer storage options for your backup and archive data in their massive, fire-resistant vault. Very impressive to get to know about the considerations that have been done in choosing the right location and how to set up the whole premises. It should also be noted that there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance inside and outside the buildings. Strengths of the Emtel TIER 3 Data Centre, Mauritius Finally, we were guided into the first server room. And wow, the whole setup is cleverly planned and outlined in the architecture. From the false floor and ceilings in order to provide optimum air flow, over to the separation of cold and hot aisles between the full-size server racks, and of course the monitored air conditions in order to analyse and watch changes in temperature, smoke detection and other parameters. And not surprisingly everything has been implemented in two independent circuits. There is a standardised classification for the construction and operation of data centres world-wide, and the Emtel's one has been designed to be a TIER 4 building but due to the lack of an alternative power supplier on the island it is officially registered as a TIER 3 compliant data centre. Maybe in the long run there might be a second supplier of energy next to CEB... time will tell. Luckily, the data centre is integrated into the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and Emtel already connects internationally through diverse undersea cable routes like SAFE & LION/LION2 out of Mauritius and through several other providers for onwards connectivity. The data centre is part of the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and has redundant internet connectivity onwards. Meanwhile, Arvin managed to join our little group of geeks and he supported Kamlesh in answering our technical questions regarding the capacities and general operation of the data centre. Visiting the NOC and its dedicated team of IT professionals was surely one of the visual highlights. Seeing their wall of screens to monitor any kind of activities on the data lines, the managed servers and the activity in and around the building was great. Even though I'm using a multi-head setup since years I cannot keep it up with that setup... ;-) But I got a couple of ideas on how to improve my work spaces here at the office. Clear advantages of hosting your e-commerce and mobile backends locally After the completely isolated NOC area we continued our Q&A session with Kamlesh and Arvin in the second server room which is dedictated to shared environments. On first thought it should be well-noted that there is lots of space for full-sized racks and therefore co-location of your own hardware. Actually, given the feedback that there will be upcoming changes in prices the facilities at the Emtel data centre are getting more and more competitive and interesting for local companies, especially small and medium enterprises. After seeing this world-class infrastructure available on the island, I'm already considering of moving one of my root servers abroad to be co-located here on the island. This would provide an improved user experience in terms of site performance and latency. This would be a good improvement, especially for upcoming e-commerce solutions for two of my local clients. Later on, we actually started the conversation of additional services that could be a catalyst for the local market in order to attract more small and medium companies to take the data centre into their evaluations regarding online activities. Until today Emtel does not provide virtualised server environments but there might be ongoing plans in the future to cover this field as well. Emtel is a mobile operator and internet connectivity provider in the first place, entering a market of managed and virtualised server infrastructures including capacities in terms of cloud storage and computing are rather new and there is a continuous learning curve at Emtel, too. You cannot just jump into a new market and see how it works out... And I appreciate Emtel's approach towards a solid fundament and then building new services on top of that. Emtel as a future one-stop-shop service provider for all your internet and telecommunications needs. Emtel's promotional video about their TIER 3 data centre in Arsenal, Mauritius More details are thoroughly described in Emtel's brochure of their data centre. Check out their PDF document here. Thanks for this opportunity Visiting and walking through the Emtel data centre for more than 2 hours was a great experience. As representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) I would like to thank anyone at Emtel involved in the process of making it happen, and especially to Arvin Lockee and Kamlesh Bokhoree for their time and patience in explaining the infrastructure and answering all the endless questions from our members. Thank You!

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Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

- by Natalia Rachelson

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on this blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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