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• Do you care about your Oracle System Support experience?

  - by user12244613

  It has been a while since I blogged about Systems Support within Oracle. I want to take this opportunity to raise awareness of how Oracle is communicating out to its systems customers. Previously every item to be communicated was sent independently via an email message however, not all messages appear to be being getting the attention they require. In an effort to ensure Oracle is reaching all of our Sun and Oracle System customers, we have created the Oracle Systems Support Newsletter. This monthly newsletter will have a summary of customer support relevant information for you to use and will cover topics that impact your support experience. For example: 1. Did you know that sending explorer content to email addresses with @sun.com is going away soon? For more information, review the Document 1362484.1 2. Are you an Auto Service Request (ASR) user? If yes, here are the latest changes: · ASR Manager accepts My Oracle Support User Name (email address) and password. [Doc ID 1345484.1] · ASR IP Address for secure file transfer has changed [Doc ID 1338575.1] · ASR No Heartbeat Status - Find out how to resolve [Doc ID 1346328.1] 3. Did you notice we have changed the Service Request options for Hardware and introduced a new problem category called “Automated Diagnosis”? This service streamlines the data you send in and then automatically provides an update of known issues found in your My Oracle Support Service Request. This feature also fast tracks hardware failures by sending parts as soon as the data is analyzed. Have you used this new feature? If yes tell us about it – take the 5minute survey 4. Are you being proactive or are you still ‘fire fighting’ in the reactive mode? If you are being proactive for your Oracle System products you might have used Oracle Sun System Analysis. Did you finding this helpful? Can we improve it? You tell us, take the 5minute survey 5. Are you aware that if you attach files to your Service Request it enables the support engineer to start work straight away? For a summary of products and files review the Newsletter. 6. Are you struggling to find patches or firmware or product downloads? If yes, these types of issues are all addressed in the Newsletter. If this is the type of information you want to know about each month, then take time to read the Newsletter link and bookmark it in My Oracle Support so you can stay informed. Thanks for your time.

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• How To: Spell Check InfoPath web form in SharePoint 2010

  - by Jeremy Ramos

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/JeremyRamos/archive/2013/11/07/how-to-spell-check-infopath-web-form-in-sharepoint-2010.aspxThis is a sequel to my 2011 post about How To: Spell Check InfoPath Web Form in SharePoint. This time I will share how I managed to achieve Spell Checking in SharePoint 2010. This time round, we have changed our Online Forms strategy to use Custom lists instead of Form Libraries. I thought everything will be smooth sailing as we are using all OOTB features. So, we customised a Custom list form using InfoPath and added a few Rich Text Boxes (Spell Check is a requirement for this specific project). All is good in the InfoPath client including the Spell Checker so, happy days, I published straight away.Here comes the surprises now. I browsed to my Custom List and clicked Add New Item. This launched my Form in a modal dialog format. I went to my Rich Text Boxes to check the spell checker, and voila, it's disabled!I tried hacking the FormServer.aspx and the CustomSpellCheckEntirePage.js again but the new FormServer.aspx behaves differently than of MOSS 2007's. I searched for answers in many blogs to no avail. Often ending up being linked to my old blog post. I also tried placing the spell check javascript into a Content Editor Webpart of the Item's New Form and Edit form. It is launching the Spell Check dialog but it's not spellchecking the page correctly.At this point, I decided I needed to get my project across ASAP so enough with experimentations and logged a ticket with Microsoft Premier Support.On a call with the Support Engineer, I browsed through the Custom List and to the item to demonstrate my problem. Suddenly, the Spell Check tab in the toolbar is now Enabled! Surprised? Not much, it's Microsoft!Anyway, to cut my story short, here is a summary of my solution:Navigate to your Custom ListIn the Ribbon Toolbar, navigate to List > Customize List > Form Web Parts > Content Type Forms > (Item) New Form. This will display the newifs.aspx which is the page displayed when Add New Item is clicked. This page, just like any other SharePoint page, contains webparts. In this case, we have the InfoPath Form Web Part.Add a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) on top of the InfoPath Form Web Part. (A blank CEWP would do for this example)Navigate to Page and click Stop EditingClick Add New Item again and navigate to a Rich Text box. Tadah! The Spell Check tab is now enabled!Do the same steps for the (Item) Edit Form to enable Spell Checks when editing an item.This "no code" solution discovered purely by accident!

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• Apprentice Boot Camp in South Africa (Part 1)

  - by Tim Koekkoek

  By Maximilian Michel (DE), Jorge Garnacho (ES), Daniel Maull (UK), Adam Griffiths (UK), Guillermo De Las Nieves (ES), Catriona McGill (UK), Ed Dunlop (UK) The Boot Camp in South Africa was an amazing experience for all of us. The minute we landed, we were made to feel at home from our host Patrick Fitzgerald. The whole family who run the Guest House were also very friendly and always keen to help us. Since we had people from South Africa to show us all the amazing sights and their traditional ways to live their lives, the two weeks were very enjoyable for all of us and we came much closer together as a group. You can read this in the following parts of this report. Enjoy! The first group of Apprentices in Oracle (from left to right): Maximilian Michel (DE), Jorge Garnacho (ES), Daniel Maull (UK), Adam Griffiths (UK), Guillermo De Las Nieves (ES), Catriona McGill (UK), Ed Dunlop (UK) The Training Well, it’s time to talk about the main purpose of our trip to South Africa: the training. Two weeks, two courses. Servers and Storage. Two weeks to learn as much as possible and get the certificate. First week: Eben Pretorius with Servers Boot Camp. Learning about: • Machines: T1000, T2000, T3, T4, M series; • How to connect to the machines: serial and network connections; • Levels of software: ALOM, ILOM, OBP and of course the operating system, Solaris Combined with the practical part (screwdriver in one hand, and antistatic wristband on the other) makes quite a lot of stuff! But fortunately, Eben was able to tell us about everything without making our brains explode. For the second week: Storage Boot Camp with Deon Van Vuuren. Taking a look at the content: • Storage machines; • Connectors and protocols: SCSi, SAS, SATA Fiber Channel. Again, huge amounts of information, but Deon definitely did a great job and helped us learn it all. At the end, there was just one question left. Were we able to pass the exam and get the certificate? Well, what can we say? Just take a closer look at the picture above and make your conclusions! Our lovely Oracle office in Woodmead (near Johannesburg) We are all very proud to receive certification in “Server and Storage Support Fundamentals” together with our trainer Deon Van Vuuren. In summary, in case that you don't remember any of the above, the allies for a field engineer are: • System Handbook • EIS-DVD • A proper toolkit With these tools by our side, we’ll be unbeatable!  In the next article later this week, you can find part 2 of our experiences!

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• Games at Work Part 2: Gamification and Enterprise Applications

  - by ultan o'broin

  Gamification and Enterprise Applications In part 1 of this article, we explored why people are motivated to play games so much. Now, let's think about what that means for Oracle applications user experience. (Even the coffee is gamified. Acknowledgement @noelruane. Check out the Guardian article Dublin's Frothing with Tech Fever. Game development is big business in Ireland too.) Applying game dynamics (gamification) effectively in the enterprise applications space to reflect business objectives is now a hot user experience topic. Consider, for example, how such dynamics could solve applications users’ problems such as: Becoming familiar or expert with an application or process Building loyalty, customer satisfaction, and branding relationships Collaborating effectively and populating content in the community Completing tasks or solving problems on time Encouraging teamwork to achieve goals Improving data accuracy and completeness of entry Locating and managing the correct resources or information Managing changes and exceptions Setting and reaching targets, quotas, or objectives Games’ Incentives, Motivation, and Behavior I asked Julian Orr, Senior Usability Engineer, in the Oracle Fusion Applications CRM User Experience (UX) team for his thoughts on what potential gamification might offer Oracle Fusion Applications. Julian pointed to the powerful incentives offered by games as the starting place: “The biggest potential for gamification in enterprise apps is as an intrinsic motivator. Mechanisms include fun, social interaction, teamwork, primal wiring, adrenaline, financial, closed-loop feedback, locus of control, flow state, and so on. But we need to know what works best for a given work situation.” For example, in CRM service applications, we might look at the motivations of typical service applications users (see figure 1) and then determine how we can 'gamify' these motivations with techniques to optimize the desired work behavior for the role (see figure 2). Description of Figure 1 Description of Figure 2 Involving Our Users Online game players are skilled collaborators as well as problem solvers. Erika Webb (@erikanollwebb), Oracle Fusion Applications UX Manager, has run gamification events for Oracle, including one on collaboration and gamification in Oracle online communities that involved Oracle customers and partners. Read more... However, let’s be clear: gamifying a user interface that’s poorly designed is merely putting the lipstick of gamification on the pig of work. Gamification cannot replace good design and killer content based on understanding how applications users really work and what motivates them. So, Let the Games Begin! Gamification has tremendous potential for the enterprise application user experience. The Oracle Fusion Applications UX team is innovating fast and hard in this area, researching with our users how gamification can make work more satisfying and enterprises more productive. If you’re interested in knowing more about our gamification research, sign up for more information or check out how your company can get involved through the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Your thoughts? Find those comments.

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• Where Are You on the Visualization Maturity Curve?

  - by Celine Beck

  The old phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” is as true now as ever. Providing the right users with access to the right product data, at the right time, can provide significant benefits to a business. This is especially evident with increasing technical and product complexities, elongated supply chains, and growing pressure to bring innovative products to market faster. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why visualization is an integral part of any successful product lifecycle management (PLM) strategy. At a bare minimum, knowledge workers use multiple individual documents of different formats and structure, and leverage visualization solutions to access information; but the real value of visualization can be fully reaped when it is connected to enterprise applications like PLM and tied to the appropriate business context. The picture below illustrates this visualization maturity curve, as we presented during the last Oracle Open World and the transformational effect that visualization can have on PLM processes and performance (check out the post about AutoVue Key Highlights from Oracle Open World 2012 for more information). Organizations are likely to see greater positive impact on business performance when visualization is connected to enterprise systems, allowing access to information coming from multiple sources, such as PLM, supply chain management (SCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). This allows organizations to reach higher levels of collaboration and optimize decision-making capacity as users can benefit from in-context access to visual information. For instance, within a PLM system, a design engineer can access a product assembly and review digital annotations added by other users specific to the engineering change request he is reviewing rather than all historical annotations. The last stage on the curve is what we call augmented business visualization (ABV).  ABV is an innovative framework which lets structured data (from Oracle’s Agile PLM for instance) interact with unstructured data (documents, design, 3D models, etc). With this new level of integration, information coming from multiple sources can be presented in a highly visual fashion; color displays can be used in order to identify parts with specific characteristics (for example pending quality issues) and you can take actions directly from within the context of documents and designs, maximizing user productivity. Those who had the chance to attend our PLM session during Oracle Open World already got a sneak peek of our latest augmented business visualization for Oracle’s Agile PLM. The solution generated a lot of wows. Stephen Porter, CEO at Zero Wait State, indicated in a post entitled “The PLM State: the Manhattan Project-Oracle’s Next Big Secret Weapon” that “this kind of synergy between visualization and PLM could qualify as a powerful weapon differentiating Agile PLM from other solutions.” If you are interested in learning more about ABV for Oracle’s Agile PLM and hear about real examples of usage of visualization at all stages of the visualization maturity curve, don’t miss our Visual Decision Making to Optimize New Product Development and Introduction session during the Oracle Value Chain Summit (Feb. 4-6, 2013, San Francisco). We look forward to seeing you there!

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-08-29

  - by Bob Rhubart

  ORCLville: OOW 2012 - Crystal BallOracle ACE Director Floyd Teter cooks up some tongue-in-cheek predictions for news and announcements that might come out of Oracle OpenWorld 2012. What's your prediction? Oracle Optimized Solutions at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 | Oracle Hardware Hardware matters, too! The people behind the Oracle Hardware blog have put together a list of Oracle Openworld 2012 sessions focused Oracle Optimized Solutions, "designed, pre-tested, tuned and fully documented architectures for optimal performance and availability." Just plug the session ID numbers into Schedule Builder and you're good to go. AIX Checklist for stable OBIEE deployment | Dick Dunbar "OBIEE is a complicated system with many moving parts and connection points," according to Oracle Business Inteligence escalation engineer Dick Dunbar. "The purpose of this article is to provide a checklist to discuss OBIEE deployment with your systems administrators." Demo for OPN: Coherence Management with EM Cloud Control 12c Oracle Partner Network members can check out a new Coherence Management demo that showcases some of the key capabilities of Management Pack for Oracle Coherence and JVM Diagnostics. "The demo flow showcases the key enhancements made in Enterprise Manager 12c release which includes new customizable performance summary, cache data management and configuration management," according to the WebLogic Partner Community EMEA blog. The Pragmatic Architect: To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before | Frank Buschmann "Many architects have technical knowledge that's both impressive and sound, which is indeed an inevitable basis for design success," says Frank Buschmann. "Yet, a lot of software projects fail or suffer due to severe challenges in their architecture. The key to mastery is how architects approach design, what they value, and where they focus their attention and work." As retail dies, whom will be the winners? | Peter Evans-Greenwood "The problem for many retailers is that how consumers shop has changed but the the retailers haven't adapted, " says Peter Evans-Greenwood. "Their sole virtue was to be the last step in a supply chain delivering somebody else's products to the consumer. However, being the last step in the supply chain is no longer a virtue when consumers skip across channels and can reach around the globe, no longer dependant on or limited to what they can find locally." Thought for the Day "Brains require stimulation. If you're locked into a pattern of work, work, and more work, your brain soon habituates - the same way that it lets you stop hearing a clock ticking. So, if you want to be more effective at work, you must, paradoxically, be less single-minded in your devotion to work. Anything you do—anything—that stimulates new segments of your brain will make you a more effective programmer or analyst. I promise, with a money-back guarantee." — Gerald M. Weinberg Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• best way to "introduce" OOP/OOD to team of experienced C++ engineers

  - by DXM

  I am looking for an efficient way, that also doesn't come off as an insult, to introduce OOP concepts to existing team members? My teammates are not new to OO languages. We've been doing C++/C# for a long time so technology itself is familiar. However, I look around and without major infusion of effort (mostly in the form of code reviews), it seems what we are producing is C code that happens to be inside classes. There's almost no use of single responsibility principle, abstractions or attempts to minimize coupling, just to name a few. I've seen classes that don't have a constructor but get memset to 0 every time they are instantiated. But every time I bring up OOP, everyone always nods and makes it seem like they know exactly what I'm talking about. Knowing the concepts is good, but we (some more than others) seem to have very hard time applying them when it comes to delivering actual work. Code reviews have been very helpful but the problem with code reviews is that they only occur after the fact so to some it seems we end up rewriting (it's mostly refactoring, but still takes lots of time) code that was just written. Also code reviews only give feedback to an individual engineer, not the entire team. I am toying with the idea of doing a presentation (or a series) and try to bring up OOP again along with some examples of existing code that could've been written better and could be refactored. I could use some really old projects that no one owns anymore so at least that part shouldn't be a sensitive issue. However, will this work? As I said most people have done C++ for a long time so my guess is that a) they'll sit there thinking why I'm telling them stuff they already know or b) they might actually take it as an insult because I'm telling them they don't know how to do the job they've been doing for years if not decades. Is there another approach which would reach broader audience than a code review would, but at the same time wouldn't feel like a punishment lecture? I'm not a fresh kid out of college who has utopian ideals of perfectly designed code and I don't expect that from anyone. The reason I'm writing this is because I just did a review of a person who actually had decent high-level design on paper. However if you picture classes: A - B - C - D, in the code B, C and D all implement almost the same public interface and B/C have one liner functions so that top-most class A is doing absolutely all the work (down to memory management, string parsing, setup negotiations...) primarily in 4 mongo methods and, for all intents and purposes, calls almost directly into D. Update: I'm a tech lead(6 months in this role) and do have full support of the group manager. We are working on a very mature product and maintenance costs are definitely letting themselves be known.

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• My co-worker has not been doing such a good job for the past decade. What do I do? [closed]

  - by stijn

  Possible Duplicate: How do I approach a coworker about his or her code quality? I started working with him almost a decade ago and back then I had never really programmed before, being a young hardware engineer. Right now however I have made quite some progress in all areas being part of software design and i am much, much more skilled than my co-worker who is 15 years older and has been programming more than twice as long. He is super nice and definitely smart enough, but lately his lack of skill and performance are starting to drag me down because we're more and more working on the same codebase. And soon we are going to do a quite ambitious start from scratch creating a whole new hard/software system. I feel it is time to address all issues now, but i do not know how to start. Here are some of the things that I would like to see him improve on: no consistent usage of style, spaces nor tabs (eg if(something ) a =b ) adds newlines around pieces of code to make it easier to read, then commits those with messages like 'no changes made' overall commit messages are useless and so are most of the comments, if there are any (eg 'remove solves for bug Rik' if Rik reported a bug). There is no function/class documentation. lots of spelling errors, in both English and native language, which sometimes are mixed 6/7/8 level deep deep nesting is no exception, a lot of functions start with one level already like if(ptr!=Null){ even when ptr is the result of allocation via new in the constructor numerous source files have over 10k lines of those lines, a major part is simply a result of copy-pasting functionality instead of using a function. This includes copying comments so we end up with 50 occurrences of var=NULL; //TODO TEST this!!!!!!! another part is hundreds of lines of dead code knows what versioning does, yet comments out old code and places new code underneath it when making changes coding skills are below par, especially for the type of rather high precision applications we do. Yet somehow, after a lot of trying and testing, stuff starts to work. But then breaks again some time later because every change casues a waterfall effect. violates every single item in the C++ FAQ lite, practices every bad practice I can think of still doesn't know how to properly use the debugger, but spends hours inspecting messy logfiles in notepad on a tiny laptop screen. Does not make any adjustments to the settings of the software he uses. Never uses keyboard shortcuts. does not seem to progress or learn new things at all. Work rather slow, mostly due to the lack of planning and incorrect usage of tools. How does one deal with this? For starters, how do I make him aware of all these problems? Should I tell the staff about it? And the next step, how to get him to learn new things and adopt another way of working?

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• How employable am I as a programmer?

  - by dsimcha

  I'm currently a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering with a concentration in computational biology and am starting to think about what I want to do after graduate school. I feel like I've accumulated a lot of programming skills while in grad school, but taken a very non-traditional path to learning all this stuff. I'm wondering whether I would have an easy time getting hired as a programmer and could fall back on that if I can't find a good job directly in my field, and if so whether I would qualify for a more prestigious position than "code monkey". Things I Have Going For Me Approximately 4 years of experience programming as part of my research. I believe I have a solid enough grasp of the fundamentals that I could pick up new languages and technologies pretty fast, and could demonstrate this in an interview. Good math and statistics skills. An extensive portfolio of open source work (and the knowledge that working on these projects implies): I wrote a statistics library in D, mostly from scratch. I wrote a parallelism library (parallel map, reduce, foreach, task parallelism, pipelining, etc.) that is currently in review for adoption by the D standard library. I wrote a 2D plotting library for D against the GTK Cairo backend. I currently use it for most of the figures I make for my research. I've contributed several major performance optimizations to the D garbage collector. (Most of these were low-hanging fruit, but it still shows my knowledge of low-level issues like memory management, pointers and bit twiddling.) I've contributed lots of miscellaneous bug fixes to the D standard library and could show the change logs to prove it. (This demonstrates my ability read other people's code.) Things I Have Going Against Me Most of my programming experience is in D and Python. I have very little to virtually no experience in the more established, "enterprise-y" languages like Java, C# and C++, though I have learned a decent amount about these languages from small, one-off projects and discussions about language design in the D community. In general I have absolutely no knowledge of "enterprise-y" technlogies. I've never used a framework before, possibly because most reusable code for scientific work and for D tends to call itself a "library" instead. I have virtually no formal computer science/software engineering training. Almost all of my knowledge comes from talking to programming geek friends, reading blogs, forums, StackOverflow, etc. I have zero professional experience with the official title of "developer", "software engineer", or something similar.

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• Do other developers feel that as they get better, it becomes harder to get jobs?

  - by nbv4

  When I was starting out, it seemed I had a much better time getting interviews and passing them. But now that I'm more experienced, I'm finding that its harder and harder to find a job. Do other developers out there feel the same way? I'll give you an example. I did an interview last Wednesday. It was a small start-up with only one other engineer and the CEO. They flew me in from Ohio (they are SF based). When I got there, they had me write them a link shortener, which took me about 10 minutes to write. I was supposed to be there all day working on this. When I finished it early, the interviewer seemed kind of shocked. After that, we were talking, and I asked him what they use to store data. He told me Mongo. I ask why he decided to use mongo. He then stammered and mumbled his answer, which basically boiled down to "We're using it because Mongo is a the trendy database technology and we don't want to be left out", which I've found is pretty much most common reason people use NoSQL these days. The interviewer quickly ended the interview and pretty much shoved me out the door. I was supposed to have lunch with the CEO, but I he kicked me out before I had a chance. The intervier wasn't mean or rude, (and neither was I). After I got back to Ohio, I got an email from them saying "I wasn't a fit". This sot of thing happens to me all the time. I'm starting to think "not a fit" can sometimes mean "are too high of a skill level that we are". Is this all in my head, or do other experienced developers notice the same thing happening? Back when I used to struggle with coding problems, I would work with the interviewer and it would be a positive thing and I'd get hired. But now I usually blow through the coding part, and the interviewer being left speechless is working against me. Should I feign struggling with coding problems?

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• Cloud Infrastructure has a new standard

  - by macoracle

  I have been working for more than two years now in the DMTF working group tasked with creating a Cloud Management standard. That work has culminated in the release today of the Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) version 1.0 by the DMTF. CIMI is a single interface that a cloud consumer can use to manage their cloud infrastructure in multiple clouds. As CIMI is adopted by the cloud vendors, no more will you need to adapt client code to each of the proprietary interfaces from these multiple vendors. Unlike a de facto standard where typically one vendor has change control over the interface, and everyone else has to reverse engineer the inner workings of it, CIMI is a de jure standard that is under change control of a standards body. One reason the standard took two years to create is that we factored in use cases, requirements and contributed APIs from multiple vendors. These vendors have products shipping today and as a result CIMI has a strong foundation in real world experience. What does CIMI allow? CIMI is both a model for the resources (computing, storage networking) in the cloud as well as a RESTful protocol binding to HTTP. This means that to create a Machine (guest VM) for example, the client creates a “document” that represents the Machine resource and sends it to the server using HTTP. CIMI allows the resources to be encoded in either JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or the eXentsible Markup Language (XML). CIMI provides a model for the resources that can be mapped to any existing cloud infrastructure offering on the market. There are some features in CIMI that may not be supported by every cloud, but CIMI also supports the discovery of which features are implemented. This means that you can still have a client that works across multiple clouds and is able to take full advantage of the features in each of them. Isn’t it too early for a standard? A key feature of a successful standard is that it allows for compatible extensions to occur within the core framework of the interface itself. CIMI’s feature discovery (through metadata) is used to convey to the client that additional features that may be vendor specific have been implemented. As multiple vendors implement such features, they become candidates to add the future versions of CIMI. Thus innovation can continue in the cloud space without being slowed down by a lowest common denominator type of specification. Since CIMI was developed in the open by dozens of stakeholders who are already implementing infrastructure clouds, I expect to CIMI being adopted by these same companies and others over the next year or two. Cloud Customers who can see the benefit of this standard should start to ask their cloud vendors to show a CIMI implementation in their roadmap.  For more information on CIMI and the DMTF's other cloud efforts, go to: http://dmtf.org/cloud

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• Our own Daily WTF

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dvroegop/archive/2014/08/20/our-own-daily-wtf.aspxIf you're a developer, you've probably heard of the website the DailyWTF. If you haven't, head on over to http://www.thedailywtf.com and read. And laugh. I'll wait. Read it? Good. If you're a bit like me probably you've been wondering how on earth some people ever get hired as a software engineer. Most of the stories there seem to weird to be true: no developer would write software like that right? And then you run into a little nugget of code one of your co-workers wrote. And then you realize: "Hey, it happens everywhere!" Look at this piece of art I found in our codebase recently: public static decimal ToDecimal(this string input) {     System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture;     var numberFormatInfo = (System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo)cultureInfo.NumberFormat.Clone();     int dotIndex = input.IndexOf(".");     int commaIndex = input.IndexOf(",");     if (dotIndex > commaIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ".";     else if (commaIndex > dotIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ",";     decimal result;     if (decimal.TryParse(input, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Float, numberFormatInfo, out result))         return result;     else         throw new Exception(string.Format("Invalid input for decimal parsing: {0}. Decimal separator: {1}.", input, numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator)); }  Me and a collegue have been looking long and hard at this and what we concluded was the following: Apparently, we don't trust our users to be able to correctly set the culture in Windows. Users aren't able to determine if they should tell Windows to use a decimal point or a comma to display numbers. So what we've done here is make sure that whatever the user enters, we'll translate that into whatever the user WANTS to enter instead of what he actually did. So if you set your locale to US, since you're a US citizen, but you want to enter the number 12.34 in the Dutch style (because, you know, the Dutch are way cooler with numbers) so you enter 12,34 we will understand this and respect your wishes! Of course, if you change your mind and in the next input field you decide to use the decimal dot again, that's fine with us as well. We will do the hard work. Now, I am all for smart software. Software that can handle all sorts of input the user can think of. But this feels a little uhm, I don't know.. wrong.. Or am I too old fashioned?

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• How to appear very professional on my first freelance project?

  - by iamserious

  I need some help on appearing very professional on my first freelance project. How / What should you do to achieve this? Background: I started as a full time web developer 18 months ago, two promotions later I am now a senior software engineer. I've never had any problems with designing / developing / coding a complicated system. I thought I could use some help for Christmas and I started bidding for a project and now I have one - from a very reputable lawyers association in London. I have no problem dealing with the actual implementation of the system, but I have no idea how to appear professional throughout the whole process. About the project: This lawyers association are starting a distant training courses and in addition to having a website to show off all their clients etc, they want a students area where their students would log in, download course materials allocated to them etc.. and an admin section where they assign courses to students / create new ones / upload materials etc.. Questions breakdown: 1) How should I start with the requirement gathering? Is using scrum a good idea, or should I use something like Volere Template - and what should I do with it? should I submit a copy to the client etc.. 2) How often should I meet the client? Would once a fortnight would be good? 3) What are the processes / protocols that I need to follow so that they would be satisfied with me and think that I am very professional 4) How much should I charge for the product? 5) How should I get a quote / contract / receipt for the whole project? 6) What are the steps that professional freelancers go through, during the life cycle of a project? My Research so far Looking at How much should I charge doesn't help.. I live in London, zone 1, though I have no idea how much a project of this size would cost. Help on this would be appreciated. How to be professional articles talks about the work / time management etc and not the actual process, what would real people do etc.. it's like academia theory, but not practical. If this needs revising, please let me know, do not close it because of whatever reason, I will edit the question or details to fit the needs. Thanks for reading a lengthy question.

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• TechEd 2010 Day Three: The Database Designer (Isn't)

  - by BuckWoody

  Yesterday at TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans I worked the front-booth, answering general SQL Server questions for the masses. I was actually a little surprised to find most of the questions I got were from folks that wanted to know more about Stream Insight and Master Data Services. In past conferences I've been asked a lot of "free consulting" questions, about problems folks have had from older products. I don't mind that a bit - in fact, I'm always happy to help in any way I can. But this time people are really interested in the new features in the product, and I like that they are thinking ahead, not just having to solve problems in production. My presentation was on "Database Design in an Hour". We had the usual fun, and SideShow Bob made an appearance - I kid you not. The guy in the back of the room looked just like Sideshow Bob, so I quickly held a "bes thair" contest, and he won. Duing the presentation, I explain the tools you can use to design databases. I also explain that the "Database Designer" tool in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) isn't truly a desinger - it uses non-standard notation, doesn't have a meta-data dictionary, and worst of all, it works at the physical level. In other words, whatever you do in SSMS will automatically change the field/table/relationship structures in the database. We fixed this in SSMS 2008 and higher by adding an option to block that, but the tool is not a good design function nonetheless. To be fair, no one I know of at Microsoft recommends that it is - but I was shocked to hear so many developers in the room defending it as a good tool. I think the main issue for someone who doesn't have to work with Relational Systems a great deal is that it can be difficult to figure out Foreign Keys. The syntax makes them look "backwards", so it's just easier to grab a field and place it on the table you want to point to. There are options. You can download a couple of free tools (CA has a community edition of ER-WIN, Quest has one, and Embarcadero also has one) and if you design more than one or two databases a year, it may be worth buying a true design tool. For years I used Visio, but we changed it so that it doesn't forward-engineer (create the DDL) any more, so it isn't a true design tool either. So investigate those free and not-so-free tools. You'll find they help you in your job - but stay away from the Database Designer in SSMS. Or I'll send Sideshow Bob over there to straighten you out. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• 3 Monitors, Ubuntu 12.04, Gnome 3, 2 nvidia cards, WITH xrandr or xinerama?

  - by Josh

  Ok. I have been banging my head against the wall for over a week now trying to get 3 monitors to work. I have: 1 - Nvidia 8600 GT 512MB PCIEx16 1 - Nvidia GT 240 1GB PCIEx16 They are not running in SLI (obviously). I have tried to use everything from tutorials to a few templates, all the way up to nvidia-settings, etc etc etc.. From what I hear, Xinerama doesnt like gnome 3 because of the compositing, although I have read a lot about using Xrandr instead, and getting the compositing working, but alas, I cannot. It always either crashes X and I have to replace the xorg.conf with my backup, or it defaults to the gnome-classic desktop, and on top of that, when it does default, it keeps adding more and more panels. Basically, I want to be able to use all 3 monitors (yes, just like in windows) to drag and drop from different windows. I have xorg-edit, but I am still not too sure on how to set this up? Is there any way to: A Get compositing working with 3 monitors, 2 nvidia cards, xinerama, and gnome 3? or BUse twinview with 3 monitors (I have heard it can be done by manually editing xorg.conf) or CSet up Xrandr to draw all 3 monitors with compositing. or DUse separate X for each monitor, and be able to use gnome with compositing, as well as drag between all 3 or EANYTHING. lol. I just want this to work. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated. BTW, I am running an ubuntu mini install with gnome. Everything works great but this. I can run it fine with 2 monitors and compositing, but not with 3. Also, what is the best GUI tool for editing xorg.conf? Im not finding anything that is up to date at all, and also is understandable by humans. haha. Im actually an engineer by trade, and have been working with computers a LONG time, but this xorg.conf stuff is really confusing the crap out of me. lol Thanks!

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• The type of programmer I want to be [closed]

  - by Aventinus_

  I'm an undergraduate Software Engineer student, although I've decided that pure programming is what I want to do for the rest of my life. The thing is that programming is a vast field and although most of its aspects are extremely interesting, soon or later I'll have to choose one (?) to focus on. I have several ideas on small projects I'd like to develop this summer, having in mind that this will gain me some experience and, in the best scenario, some cash. But the most important reason I'd like to develop something close to “professional” is to give myself direction on what I want to do as a programmer. One path is that of the Web Programmer. I enjoy PHP and MySQL, as well as HTML and CSS, although I don't really like ASP.NET. I can see myself writing web apps, using the above technologies, as well as XML and Javascript. I also have a neat idea on a Facebook app. The other path is that of the Desktop Programmer. This is a little more complicated cause I really-really enjoy high level languages such as Java and Python but not the low level ones, such as C. I use both Linux and Windows for the last 6 years and I like their latest DEs (meaning Gnome Shell and Metro). I can see myself writing desktop applications for both OSs as long as it means high level programming. Ideally I'd like being able to help the development of GNOME. The last path that interests me is the path of the Smartphone Programmer. I have created some sample applications on Android and due to Java I found it a quite interesting experience. I can also see myself as an independent smartphone developer. These 3 paths seem equally interesting at the moment due to the shallowness of my experience, I guess. I know that I should spend time with all of them and then choose the right one for me but I'd like to know what are the pros and cons in terms of learning curve, fun, job finding and of course financial rewards with each of these paths. I have fair or basic understanding of the languages/technologies I described earlier and this question will help me choose where to focus, at least for now.

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• Trying to find resources to learn how to test software [closed]

  - by Davek804

  First off, yes this is a general question, and I'd be perfectly happy to move this to another portion of SE, but I didn't see a more fitting sub. Basically, I am hoping a more experienced QA tester can come along and really fill in some basics for me. So far, websites seem to be sparse in terms of explaining languages involved, basic practices, etc. So, I'm sorry in advance if this is too general, but towards the end of this post I ask some specific questions if it's just absolutely unacceptable to speak in general terms. I just landed a position as Junior Systems and QA Engineer with a social media startup. Their QA and testing is almost nonexistent, so if I do a good job, I imagine I'll find a lot of bugs and have a secure role in the business. I'm pretty good with the systems aspect of my role, but I need to learn more about the QA and testing aspects. We run hardware that's touchscreen based - the user can use and interact with the devices. So, in terms of my QA role, in the short term, I need to build scripts to test the hardware/software as a 'user' to try to uncover bugs. First off, what language should these scripts be written in? Does anyone have some examples? What about the longer term 'automated testing'? I'm familiar with regression testing as the developer adds in new features, sure, but the 50,000 other types of testing, not so much. Most of our hardware runs dotnet/C# code, with some of the servers running Java - but I don't expect to need to run tests on the Java side at this point. I hope to meet with one developer today and try to get a good idea of the output from the hardware so that I can 'mock' this data that gets sent to servers, to try to bugtest. Eventually, we will be moving the hardware to be closer to where I live and work, so that I can test virtually and on real hardware. So a lot of the bugs we're dealing with now are like this: the Local Server, which kiosks report their data to gets updated from the kiosks, but the remote server does not. Or, vis versa when the user registers on a kiosk, the remote server updates but the local server does not. But yeah, without much more detail, I imagine a lot of this info isn't helpful. I've bought a book "How Google Tests Software", but it's really a book more about 'how their software testing is different from Microsoft'. It doesn't teach how to test so much as why their methods are better. Does anyone have a good book that I can buy? An ebook maybe? My local Barnes and Noble kinda had a terrible selection. I also figure a book from 2005 is not necessarily that good either.

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• Word 2007 crashes on Server 2008 R2 terminal services

  - by John Rennie

  We are finding that Word 2007 (with SP2) crashes when used on a Windows 2008 R2 terminal server. Typically it crashes when you click File/Open or File/Save, but not every time. Maybe one time in four, and just to be really confusing, on a test server in my office I can't make it crash. I have just today set up a brand new shiny 2k8 R2 terminal server with as simple a setup as possible, e.g. no anti-virus to confuse things, and we're still seeing crashes. My question is has anyone else seen this, and if so any clues on what's happening? We have a support case open with Microsoft, and the MS support engineer has conceded it's happening, but has so far been unable to find the reason. On possible factor is that all the 2k8 R2 terminal servers I've seen this on have been Hyper-V VMs (running on a 2k8 R2 host). I'm about to put in a physical 2k8 R2 terminal server at the customer where we're seeing the most crashes, in case this is relevant. More news soon. Sorry if this posting seems a bit vague, but this has just bitten us and is causing a lot of pain and sleepless nights :-( If anyone can help I'll be enormously grateful! Update: we've given up and gone back to 2008 pre-R2. Both Office 2003 and 2007 both work fine now. I think there are some problems with TS in R2. Googling doesn't find much, so I thought it was just me. It's reassuring to find that someone else has seen the same problem.

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• Performance analytics via DBMS "plugins", or other solution

  - by Polynomial

  I'm working on a systems monitoring product that currently focuses on performance at the system level. We're expanding out to monitoring database systems. Right now we can fetch simple performance information from a selection of DBMS, like connection count, disk IO rates, lock wait times, etc. However, we'd really like a way to measure the execution time of every query going into a DBMS, without requiring the client to implement monitoring in their application code. Some potential solutions might be: Some sort of proxy that sits between client and server. SSL might be an issue here, plus it requires us to reverse engineer and implement the network protocol for each DBMS. Plugin for each DBMS system that automatically records performance information when a query comes in. Other problems include "anonymising" the SQL, i.e. taking something like SELECT * FROM products WHERE price > 20 AND name LIKE "%disk%" and producing SELECT * FROM products WHERE price > ? AND name LIKE "%?%", though this shouldn't be too difficult with some clever parsing and regex. We're mainly focusing on: MySQL MSSQL Oracle Redis mongodb memcached Are there any plugin-style mechanisms we can utilise for any of these? Or is there a simpler solution?

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• RAID 5 Install on Ubuntu Server 12.04 [closed]

  - by tarabyte

  Environment: Ubuntu Server 12.04, installing from bootable flash drive Error: No root file system is defined. Please correct this from the partitioning menu. I'm trying to set up a personal file server with software RAID 5. I just got three hard drives for this, but haven't found any solid documentation. I'm unsure what the basic way to partition my hard drives is. Can someone upload a screenshot of their "partition disks" screen so that I can compare with mine (attached)? Should I set the bootable flag? Do I need a /home partition? A /boot partition? Should I "Use [my partition] as: Ext4 journaling file system"? Or make that field "physical volume for RAID"? I am an engineer, but I have only a cursory knowledge of all-things-linux. If you know of any good learning resources I'd be happy to hear about those too (that way I don't have to blindly follow deprecated tutorials online). well, image would be here but i don't have a high enough reputation yet (please vote up :)) Thank you, References I've looked into: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SoftwareRAID https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/advanced-installation.html http://forevergeeks.com/setup-ubuntu-server-with-raid-5/

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• Help setting up a secondary authoritative DNS server.

  - by GLB03

  We have three Authoritative DNS servers and three recursive/caching DNS servers on my campus. Authoritative servers DNS1- Windows 2003 DNS2- Old Red Hat ----- Replacing w/ newer version DNS3- Windows 2008 (I installed) Caching and Recursive resolvers servers Server1- Windows 2003 Server2- CentOS 5.2 (I installed) Server3- CentOS 5.3 (I installed) I am replacing DNS2 with a newer Red Hat version, but have no documentation on how it was implemented. I have setup caching and windows authoritative servers, but not a linux secondary authoritative server. I have a perl script from the original server that pulls data from our DNS1 server. We use DJBDNS and TinyDNS on our linux servers. Our Network Engineer says the DNS2 server I am replacing is an authoritative server that doesn't need to be caching, but the only instructions I see is for an Authoritative server that does caching as well. Can someone point me in the right directions. I thought I was on the right track with using these instructions but when I query my new dns server I get "No response from server", I have temporarily disabled iptables to eliminate it from being an issue. ps -aux | grep dns avahi 3493 0.0 0.2 2600 1272 ? Ss Apr24 0:05 avahi-daemon: running [newdns2.local] root 5254 0.0 0.1 3920 680 pts/0 R+ 09:56 0:00 grep dns root 6451 0.0 0.0 1528 308 ? S Apr29 0:00 supervise tinydns dnslog 6454 0.0 0.0 1540 308 ? S Apr29 0:00 multilog t ./main tinydns 9269 0.0 0.0 1652 308 ? S Apr29 0:00 /usr/local/bin/tinydns

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• really weird DNS problem in Ubuntu {after one month, seems like ISP problem}

  - by OmniWired

  Hello everyone. I been having this random dns problem, in Ubuntu 10.04 and in 10.10 it started about 2 weeks ago after (I believe) an update. Basically when I go to a website randomly I get that the website I'm visiting is not available ("Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to ..." & "This webpage is not available."). I tested with Chromium "7.0.515.0 (58587)" and Firefox minefield (4.0ish) and 3.6.9. I did these 4 things already: /etc/default/grub GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="ipv6.disable=1" and this: /etc/sysctl.conf net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1 net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1 net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1 *disabling Chromium DNS pre-fetching *using Google and OpenDNS servers as well as ISP DNS servers. But didn't improve, also no other computers in my network have the same problem. All computer wired to the same router. I'm a software engineer that run out of ideas, please help me. Thanks in advance. UPDATE: some programs (synaptic / firefox update/ vuze(azureus)) say connection refused for the error. Most of the time a second try will fix the "refusal". UPDATE2: I found out with Wireshark, that everytime I have this problem i've got this 192.168.0.10 8.8.8.8 ICMP Destination unreachable (Port unreachable) Confirmed an ISP error. ISP;Speedy Location: Argentina, Buenos Aires (capital Federal) Area.

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• How to have SSL on Amazon Elastic Load Balancer with a Gunicorn EC2 server?

  - by Riegie Godwin

  I'm a self taught back end engineer so I'm learning all of this stuff as I go along. For the longest time, I've been using basic authentication for my users. Many developers are advising against this approach since each request will contain the username & password in clear text. Anyone with the right skills can sniff on the connection between my iOS application and my Django/Gunicorn Server and obtain their password. I wouldn't want to put my user's credentials at risk so I would like to implement a more secure way of authentication. SSL seems to be the most viable option. My server doesn't serve any static content or anything crazy of that sort. All the server does is send and receive "json" responses from and to my iOS application. Here is my current topology. iOS application ------ Amazon Elastic Load Balancer ------- EC2 Instances running HTTP Gunicorn. Gunicorn runs on port 8000. I have a CNAME record from GoDaddy for the Amazon Elastic Load Balancer DNS. So instead of using the long DNS to make requests, I just use server.example.com. To interact with my servers I send and receive requests to server.example.com:8000/ This setup works and has been solid. However I need to have a more secure way. I would like to setup SSL between my iOS application and my Elastic Load Balancer. How can I go about doing this? Since I am only sending json responses to my application, do I really need to buy a certificate from a CA or can I create my own? (since browsers will not be interacting with my servers. My servers are only designed to send json responses to my iOS application).

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• Windows 7 task bar stuck in hiding, how to fix?

  - by Rainer Blome

  In Windows 7, I use the "Auto-hide the task bar" feature. Usually, it works fine: As soon as the pointer touches the screen bottom, the task bar pops up. However sometimes, it refuses to rise. Pressing the "Windows" key (or Ctrl-ESC) makes the start menu appear, forcing the task bar from hinding as well. Once I've done this, the task-bar auto-rises again. This is annoying, it interrupts flow. Has anyone else noticed this? How do I avoid this? Searching for "Windows 7 task bar auto-raise" shows that at least one other person experienced this problem: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-desktop/how-can-i-fix-the-taskbars-auto-hide/8cdf6369-7354-4d29-9249-b7096ed0e28b?msgId=6dac3361-9d0f-4a9e-8642-b91a72826ba4 To answer the question posed by the "helpful" support engineer on the above page, of course I am running some apps when this happens, usually Explorer, Firefox, Eclipse, Cygwin/X, Xterm, Emacs, Notes, VPN client, Firewall. If my memory serves correctly, I have seen this behavior on earlier versions of Windows as well, XP at least. To reproduce this behavior, I tried switching between apps, and bringing apps to open other windows. I am unable to reproduce this behavior so far. So far, it appears to happen out of the blue, sometimes multiple times a day. Looks like a bug to me. The task bar should raise no matter what.

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• Help setting up an secondary authoritative DNS server.

  - by GLB03

  We have three Authoritative DNS servers and three recursive/caching DNS servers on my campus. Authoritative servers DNS1- Windows 2003 DNS2- Old Red Hat ----- Replacing w/ newer version DNS3- Windows 2008 (I installed) Caching and Recursive resolvers servers Server1- Windows 2003 Server2- CentOS 5.2 (I installed) Server3- CentOS 5.3 (I installed) I am replacing DNS2 with a newer Red Hat version, but have no documentation on how it was implemented. I have setup caching and windows authoritative servers, but not a linux secondary authoritative server. I have a perl script from the original server that pulls data from our DNS1 server. We use DJBDNS and TinyDNS on our linux servers. Our Network Engineer says the DNS2 server I am replacing is an authoritative server that doesn't need to be caching, but the only instructions I see is for an Authoritative server that does caching as well. Can someone point me in the right directions. I thought I was on the right track with using these instructions but when I query my new dns server I get "No response from server", I have temporarily disabled iptables to eliminate it from being an issue. ps -aux | grep dns avahi 3493 0.0 0.2 2600 1272 ? Ss Apr24 0:05 avahi-daemon: running [newdns2.local] root 5254 0.0 0.1 3920 680 pts/0 R+ 09:56 0:00 grep dns root 6451 0.0 0.0 1528 308 ? S Apr29 0:00 supervise tinydns dnslog 6454 0.0 0.0 1540 308 ? S Apr29 0:00 multilog t ./main tinydns 9269 0.0 0.0 1652 308 ? S Apr29 0:00 /usr/local/bin/tinydns

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