Search Results

Search found 8250 results on 330 pages for 'dunn less'.

Page 271/330 | < Previous Page | 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278  | Next Page >

• Windows Phone–A beautiful phone which I admire but I don’t recommend to friends and family

  - by Gopinath

  Microsoft’s Windows Phones are the most beautiful phones I’ve seen. Look at the photo which Microsoft shared on their Facebook page today. It’s gorgeous. Windows Phones come in vibrant colors and the user interface is very lively. When you keep an iPhone, Android Phone & a Windows Phone on a table, Windows Phone definitely stands out. Android and iOS interfaces are routine – a bunch of apps icons arranged in rows and multiple screens. Windows Phone is very different, the live tiles concept mesmerizes us. I love Windows Phone, but neither I buy one nor I recommend to family/friends! Why? Because it does not have all the Apps I need. Microsoft advertises that Windows Phone has 100K apps on its Windows Market Place. It’s true, there are 100K+ apps available for Windows Phone but not many of them are really useful and most of the popular Apps I use on Android are not available. When I say this to my friends at Microsoft, they don’t agree and one of them asked me list the apps that are not available. For him today I spent an hour quickly scanning through the apps installed on my Google Nexus and searched for same apps on Windows Market Place. As expected many of them are not available. Here is the list of my favorite Android apps that are not available for Windows Phone Mint – I use this app more than any of the Banking Apps I’ve installed on my mobile. It’s one app to keep a tab on all the expenses and income, the best money management and tracking app. Google Chrome – Web without Google Chrome is too boring, either on Desktop or on mobile. IE is too heavy and Firefox is loosing its grip. Chrome is the new darling of web. Pulse, Flipboard – Flipboard and Pulse are one of the best apps for reading news and following content of favorite blogs. Dropbox – Sync content across devices and provides access to your content on any device.It really does not matter what is your gadget – mobile, tablet or computer; Dropbox lets you access your content. GMail, Google Maps – Should I say how important are these two apps in our day to day life!! Vonage Extension – For around 30 bucks a month, Vonage provide landline service in USA + unlimited calls to India and many other countries + Vonage Extension App that lets Android/iOS mobile to make unlimited international calls for free. Without Vonage Extension app, I’m almost cutoff from my family and friends back home in India. Instagram – The most popular camera app used from a common man to celebrities. Raaga, Dhingana  – Music is part and parcel of life and these two apps are the most like popular apps to listen to Indian music. Quora – Quora is the place where most of the sensible discussions happen on web. Google Analytics, Google Adsense – I’m a blogger and these two apps mean a lot to me The list goes on and on! There are many useful apps that are not available on Windows Phone – TuneIn, MyTWC, Chrome To Phone, Google Voice, etc. Without all these apps, Windows Phone is just another old Nokia phone. Even though Windows Phone is the most beautiful phone, it needs Apps to attract customers. Without apps a smartphone is more or less a dumb feature phone which we loved to use before release of iPhone. Wish in an year or two the beautiful Windows Phone may have all the missing Apps. When it happens I’ll buy a phone for myself and recommend it to my family & friends. But till then I prefer to stay away.

  Read the article

• Principles of Big Data By Jules J Berman, O&rsquo;Reilly Media Book Review

  - by Compudicted

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/11/04/principles-of-big-data-by-jules-j-berman-orsquoreilly-media.aspx A fantastic book! Must be part, if not yet, of the fundamentals of the Big Data as a field of science. Highly recommend to those who are into the Big Data practice. Yet, I confess this book is one of my best reads this year and for a number of reasons: The book is full of wisdom, intimate insight, historical facts and real life examples to how Big Data projects get conceived, operate and sadly, yes, sometimes die. But not only that, the book is most importantly is filled with valuable advice, accurate and even overwhelming amount of reference (from the positive side), and the author does not event stop there: there are numerous technical excerpts, links and examples allowing to quickly accomplish many daunting tasks or make you aware of what one needs to perform as a data practitioner (excuse my use of the word practitioner, I just did not find a better substitute to it to trying to reference all who face Big Data). Be aware that Jules Berman’s background is in medicine, naturally, this book discusses this subject a lot as it is very dear to the author’s heart I believe, this does not make this book any less significant however, quite the opposite, I trust if there is an area in science or practice where the biggest benefits can be ripped from Big Data projects it is indeed the medical science, let’s make Cancer history! On a personal note, for me as a database, BI professional it has helped to understand better the motives behind Big Data initiatives, their underwater rivers and high altitude winds that divert or propel them forward. Additionally, I was impressed by the depth and number of mining algorithms covered in it. I must tell this made me very curious and tempting to find out more about these indispensable attributes of Big Data so sure I will be trying stretching my wallet to acquire several books that go more in depth on several most popular of them. My favorite parts of the book, well, all of them actually, but especially chapter 9: Analysis, it is just very close to my heart. But the real reason is it let me see what I do with data from a different angle. And then the next - “Special Considerations”, they are just two logical parts. The writing language is of this book is very acceptable for all levels, I had no technical problem reading it in ebook format on my 8” tablet or a large screen monitor. If I would be asked to say at least something negative I have to state I had a feeling initially that the book’s first part reads like an academic material relaxing the reader as the book progresses forward. I admit I am impressed with Jules’ abilities to use several programming languages and OSS tools, bravo! And I agree, it is not too, too hard to grasp at least the principals of a modern programming language, which seems becomes a defacto knowledge standard item for any modern human being. So grab a copy of this book, read it end to end and make yourself shielded from making mistakes at any stage of your Big Data initiative, by the way this book also helps build better future Big Data projects. Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Program.

  Read the article

• My ASP.NET news sources

  - by Jon Galloway

  I just posted about the ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight. I was going to list a bunch of my news sources at the end, but figured this deserves a separate post. I've been following a lot of development blogs for a long time - for a while I subscribed to over 1500 feeds and read them all. That doesn't scale very well, though, and it's really time consuming. Since the community spotlight requires an interesting ASP.NET post every day of the year, I've come up with a few sources of ASP.NET news. Top Link Blogs Chris Alcock's The Morning Brew is a must-read blog which highlights each day's best blog posts across the .NET community. He covers the entire Microsoft development, but generally any of the top ASP.NET posts I see either have already been listed on The Morning Brew or will be there soon. Elijah Manor posts a lot of great content, which is available in his Twitter feed at @elijahmanor, on his Delicious feed, and on a dedicated website - Web Dev Tweets. While not 100% ASP.NET focused, I've been appreciating Joe Stagner's Weekly Links series, partly since he includes a lot of links that don't show up on my other lists. Twitter Over the past few years, I've been getting more and more of my information from my Twitter network (as opposed to RSS or other means). Twitter is as good as your network, so if getting good information off Twitter sounds crazy, you're probably not following the right people. I already mentioned Elijah Manor (@elijahmanor). I follow over a thousand people on Twitter, so I'm not going to try to pick and choose a list, but one good way to get started building out a Twitter network is to follow active Twitter users on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft: @scottgu (well, not on the ASP.NET team, but their great grand boss, and always a great source of ASP.NET info) @shanselman @haacked @bradwilson @davidfowl @InfinitiesLoop @davidebbo @marcind @DamianEdwards @stevensanderson @bleroy @humancompiler @osbornm @anurse I'm sure I'm missing a few, and I'll update the list. Building a Twitter network that follows topics you're interested in allows you to use other tools like Cadmus to automatically summarize top content by leveraging the collective input of many users. Twitter Search with Topsy You can search Twitter for hashtags (like #aspnet, #aspnetmvc, and #webmatrix) to get a raw view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Twitter's search is pretty poor; I prefer Topsy. Here's an example search for the #aspnetmvc hashtag: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc You can also do combined queries for several tags: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc+OR+%23aspnet+OR+%23webmatrix Paper.li Paper.li is a handy service that builds a custom daily newspaper based on your social network. They've turned a lot of people off by automatically tweeting "The SuperDevFoo Daily is out!!!" messages (which can be turned off), but if you're ignoring them because of those message, you're missing out on a handy, free service. My paper.li page includes content across a lot of interests, including ASP.NET: http://paper.li/jongalloway When I want to drill into a specific tag, though, I'll just look at the Paper.li post for that hashtag. For example, here's the #aspnetmvc paper.li page: http://paper.li/tag/aspnetmvc Delicious I mentioned previously that I use Delicious for managing site links. I also use their network and search features. The tag based search is pretty good: Even better, though, is that I can see who's bookmarked these links, and add them to my Delicious network. After having built out a network, I can optimize by doing less searching and more leaching leveraging of collective intelligence. Community Sites I scan DotNetKicks, the weblogs.asp.net combined feed, and the ASP.NET Community page, CodeBetter, Los Techies,  CodeProject,  and DotNetSlackers from time to time. They're hit and miss, but they do offer more of an opportunity for finding original content which others may have missed. Terms of Enrampagement When someone's on a tear, I just manually check their sites more often. I could use RSS for that, but it changes pretty often. I just keep a mental note of people who are cranking out a lot of good content and check their sites more often. What works for you?

  Read the article

• Ubuntu 10.04 & IBM DS3524 with FC multipath, inactive path is [failed][faulty] instead of [active][ghost]

  - by Graeme Donaldson

  OK, this is my setup: FC Switches IBM/Brocade, Switch1 and Switch2, independent fabrics. Server IBM x3650 M2, 2x QLogic QLE2460, 1 connected to each FC Switch. Storage IBM DS3524, 2x controllers with 4x FC ports each, but only 2x connected on each. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | HBA1 Server HBA2 | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | +-----------------------------+ +------------------------------+ | Switch1 | | Switch2 | +-----------------------------+ +------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | Contr A, port 3 | Contr A, port 4 | Contr B, port 3 | Contr B, port 4 | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | Storage | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ My /etc/multipath.conf is from the IBM redbook for the DS3500, except I use a different setting for prio_callout, IBM uses /sbin/mpath_prio_tpc, but according to http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/m/multipath-tools/multipath-tools_0.4.8-7ubuntu2/changelog, this was renamed to /sbin/mpath_prio_rdac, which I'm using. devices { device { #ds3500 vendor "IBM" product "1746 FAStT" hardware_handler "1 rdac" path_checker rdac failback 0 path_grouping_policy multibus prio_callout "/sbin/mpath_prio_rdac /dev/%n" } } multipaths { multipath { wwid xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx alias array07 path_grouping_policy multibus path_checker readsector0 path_selector "round-robin 0" failback "5" rr_weight priorities no_path_retry "5" } } The output of multipath -ll with controller A as the preferred path: root@db06:~# multipath -ll sdg: checker msg is "directio checker reports path is down" sdh: checker msg is "directio checker reports path is down" array07 (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) dm-2 IBM ,1746 FASt [size=4.9T][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0] \_ round-robin 0 [prio=2][active] \_ 5:0:1:0 sdd 8:48 [active][ready] \_ 5:0:2:0 sde 8:64 [active][ready] \_ 6:0:1:0 sdg 8:96 [failed][faulty] \_ 6:0:2:0 sdh 8:112 [failed][faulty] If I change the preferred path using IBM DS Storage Manager to Controller B, the output swaps accordingly: root@db06:~# multipath -ll sdd: checker msg is "directio checker reports path is down" sde: checker msg is "directio checker reports path is down" array07 (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) dm-2 IBM ,1746 FASt [size=4.9T][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0] \_ round-robin 0 [prio=2][active] \_ 5:0:1:0 sdd 8:48 [failed][faulty] \_ 5:0:2:0 sde 8:64 [failed][faulty] \_ 6:0:1:0 sdg 8:96 [active][ready] \_ 6:0:2:0 sdh 8:112 [active][ready] According to IBM, the inactive path should be "[active][ghost]", not "[failed][faulty]". Despite this, I don't seem to have any I/O issues, but my syslog is being spammed with this every 5 seconds: Jun 1 15:30:09 db06 multipathd: sdg: directio checker reports path is down Jun 1 15:30:09 db06 kernel: [ 2350.282065] sd 6:0:2:0: [sdh] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Jun 1 15:30:09 db06 kernel: [ 2350.282071] sd 6:0:2:0: [sdh] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] Jun 1 15:30:09 db06 kernel: [ 2350.282076] sd 6:0:2:0: [sdh] <<vendor>> ASC=0x94 ASCQ=0x1ASC=0x94 ASCQ=0x1 Jun 1 15:30:09 db06 kernel: [ 2350.282083] sd 6:0:2:0: [sdh] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 Jun 1 15:30:09 db06 kernel: [ 2350.282092] end_request: I/O error, dev sdh, sector 0 Jun 1 15:30:10 db06 multipathd: sdh: directio checker reports path is down Jun 1 15:30:14 db06 kernel: [ 2355.312270] sd 6:0:1:0: [sdg] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Jun 1 15:30:14 db06 kernel: [ 2355.312277] sd 6:0:1:0: [sdg] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] Jun 1 15:30:14 db06 kernel: [ 2355.312282] sd 6:0:1:0: [sdg] <<vendor>> ASC=0x94 ASCQ=0x1ASC=0x94 ASCQ=0x1 Jun 1 15:30:14 db06 kernel: [ 2355.312290] sd 6:0:1:0: [sdg] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 Jun 1 15:30:14 db06 kernel: [ 2355.312299] end_request: I/O error, dev sdg, sector 0 Does anyone know how I can get the inactive path to show "[active][ghost]" instead of "[failed][faulty]"? I assume that once I can get that right then the spam in my syslog will end as well. One final thing worth mentioning is that the IBM redbook doc targets SLES 11 so I'm assuming there's something a little different under Ubuntu that I just haven't figured out yet. Update: As suggested by Mitch, I've tried removing /etc/multipath.conf, and now the output of multipath -ll looks like this: root@db06:~# multipath -ll sdg: checker msg is "directio checker reports path is down" sdh: checker msg is "directio checker reports path is down" xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxdm-1 IBM ,1746 FASt [size=4.9T][features=0][hwhandler=0] \_ round-robin 0 [prio=1][active] \_ 5:0:2:0 sde 8:64 [active][ready] \_ round-robin 0 [prio=1][enabled] \_ 5:0:1:0 sdd 8:48 [active][ready] \_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][enabled] \_ 6:0:1:0 sdg 8:96 [failed][faulty] \_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][enabled] \_ 6:0:2:0 sdh 8:112 [failed][faulty] So its more or less the same, with the same message in the syslog every 5 minutes as before, but the grouping has changed.

  Read the article

• New Communications Industry Data Model with "Factory Installed" Predictive Analytics using Oracle Da

  - by charlie.berger

  Oracle Introduces Oracle Communications Data Model to Provide Actionable Insight for Communications Service Providers   We've integrated pre-installed analytical methodologies with the new Oracle Communications Data Model to deliver automated, simple, yet powerful predictive analytics solutions for customers.  Churn, sentiment analysis, identifying customer segments - all things that can be anticipated and hence, preconcieved and implemented inside an applications.  Read on for more information! TM Forum Management World, Nice, France - 18 May 2010 News Facts To help communications service providers (CSPs) manage and analyze rapidly growing data volumes cost effectively, Oracle today introduced the Oracle Communications Data Model. With the Oracle Communications Data Model, CSPs can achieve rapid time to value by quickly implementing a standards-based enterprise data warehouse that features communications industry-specific reporting, analytics and data mining. The combination of the Oracle Communications Data Model, Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Foundation represents the most comprehensive data warehouse and BI solution for the communications industry. Also announced today, Hong Kong Broadband Network enhanced their data warehouse system, going live on Oracle Communications Data Model in three months. The leading provider increased its subscriber base by 37 percent in six months and reduced customer churn to less than one percent. Product Details Oracle Communications Data Model provides industry-specific schema and embedded analytics that address key areas such as customer management, marketing segmentation, product development and network health. CSPs can efficiently capture and monitor critical data and transform it into actionable information to support development and delivery of next-generation services using: More than 1,300 industry-specific measurements and key performance indicators (KPIs) such as network reliability statistics, provisioning metrics and customer churn propensity. Embedded OLAP cubes for extremely fast dimensional analysis of business information. Embedded data mining models for sophisticated trending and predictive analysis. Support for multiple lines of business, such as cable, mobile, wireline and Internet, which can be easily extended to support future requirements. With Oracle Communications Data Model, CSPs can jump start the implementation of a communications data warehouse in line with communications-industry standards including the TM Forum Information Framework (SID), formerly known as the Shared Information Model. Oracle Communications Data Model is optimized for any Oracle Database 11g platform, including Oracle Exadata, which can improve call data record query performance by 10x or more. Supporting Quotes "Oracle Communications Data Model covers a wide range of business areas that are relevant to modern communications service providers and is a comprehensive solution - with its data model and pre-packaged templates including BI dashboards, KPIs, OLAP cubes and mining models. It helps us save a great deal of time in building and implementing a customized data warehouse and enables us to leverage the advanced analytics quickly and more effectively," said Yasuki Hayashi, executive manager, NTT Comware Corporation. "Data volumes will only continue to grow as communications service providers expand next-generation networks, deploy new services and adopt new business models. They will increasingly need efficient, reliable data warehouses to capture key insights on data such as customer value, network value and churn probability. With the Oracle Communications Data Model, Oracle has demonstrated its commitment to meeting these needs by delivering data warehouse tools designed to fill communications industry-specific needs," said Elisabeth Rainge, program director, Network Software, IDC. "The TM Forum Conformance Mark provides reassurance to customers seeking standards-based, and therefore, cost-effective and flexible solutions. TM Forum is extremely pleased to work with Oracle to certify its Oracle Communications Data Model solution. Upon successful completion, this certification will represent the broadest and most complete implementation of the TM Forum Information Framework to date, with more than 130 aggregate business entities," said Keith Willetts, chairman and chief executive officer, TM Forum. Supporting Resources Oracle Communications Oracle Communications Data Model Data Sheet Oracle Communications Data Model Podcast Oracle Data Warehousing Oracle Communications on YouTube Oracle Communications on Delicious Oracle Communications on Facebook Oracle Communications on Twitter Oracle Communications on LinkedIn Oracle Database on Twitter The Data Warehouse Insider Blog

  Read the article

• The “Customer” Experience Revolution is Here

  - 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-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 Anthony Lye, SVP, Oracle Development The Experience Revolution is here, and we are going to explore and celebrate our new customer experience ventures and strategy in an extraordinary way. In true Oracle fashion, we are hosting an exceptional event, bringing together customer experience advocates, visionaries and practitioners to discover and define Oracle’s Customer Experience vision. The Experience Revolution is best described as today’s era of the empowered consumer. For those of us who work with customers on a daily basis, we know that the modern consumer demands fast, accurate, consistent information across all communication channels. And if they don’t like the services received can easily take to social channels to voice disapproval. For this reason, organizations today operate in an environment where traditional methods of differentiation are less effective and customer experience has become the primary driver of business value. Here’s some food for thought, according to the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report, a full 89 percent of consumers will switch brands for a better customer experience. In short, in today’s era of the empowered consumer, delivering excellent customer experiences is what will, and is, defining the next great brands. At The Experience Revolution, Oracle President Mark Hurd will detail the vision of where customer experience is going and how Oracle will help you get there. He will introduce for the first time Oracle Customer Experience, a cross stack suite of customer experience products that enable organizations to: Engage customers with a consistent, connected and personalized brand experience across all channels and devices Deliver exceptional cross-channel order fulfillment and customer service through web, call centers and social networks Connect and analyze data from all interactions to better personalize experiences and identify hidden opportunities The Experience Revolution will also include an interactive gallery of customer experience interactions, featuring videos, touch screens and near field communication technology that will guide each attendee through an individualized event experience. We hope you will join us for an incredible evening on June 25, from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. at Gotham Hall in New York City. You can register for The Experience Revolution here. And if you haven’t already joined the conversation on Twitter, please do: #OracleCX, #ExperienceRevolution

  Read the article

• Java Script – Content delivery networks (CDN) can bit you in the butt.

  - by Ryan Ternier

  As much as I love the new CDN’s that Google, Microsoft and a few others have publically released, there are some strong gotchas that could come up and bite you in the ass if you’re not careful. But before we jump into that, for those that are not 100% sure what a CDN is (besides Canadian).   Content Delivery Network. A way of distributing your static content across various servers in different physical locations.  Because this static content is stored on many servers around the world, whenever a user needs to access this content, they are given the closest server to their location for this data. Already you can probably see the immediate bonuses to a system like this: Lower bandwidth Even small script files downloaded thousands of times will start to take a noticeable hit on your bandwidth meter. Less connections/hits to your web server which gives better latency If you manage many servers, you don’t need to manually update each server with scripts. A user will download a script for each website they visit. If a user is redirected to many domains/sub-domains within your web site, they might download many copies of the same file. When a system sees multiple requests from the same  domain, they will ignore the download   Those are just a handful of the many bonuses a CDN will give you. And for the average website, a CDN is great choice. Check out the following CDN links for their solutions: Google AJAX Library: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/ Microsoft Ajax library: http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx The Gotcha There is always a catch. Here are some issues I found with using CDN’s that hopefully can help you make your decision. HTTP / HTTPS If you are running a website behind SSL, make sure that when you reference your CDN data that you use https:// vs. http://. If you forget this users will get a very nice message telling them that their secure connection is trying to access unsecure data. For a developer this is fairly simple, but general users will get a bit anxious when seeing this. Trusted Sites Internet Explorer has this really nifty feature that allows users to specify what sites they trust, and by some defaults IE7 only allows trusted sites to be viewed.  No problem, they set your website as trusted. But what about your CDN? If a user sets your websites to trusted, but not the CDN, they will not download those static files. This has the potential to totally break your web site. Pedantic Network Admins This alone is sometimes the killer of projects. However, always be careful when you are going to use a CDN for a professional project. If a network / security admin sees that you’re referencing an outside source, or that a call from a website might hit an outside domain.. panties will be bunched, emails will be spewed out and well, no one wants that.

  Read the article

• Outlook 2010 – My Top 9 features

  - by Daniel Moth

  Office 2010 has reached RTM. Here are my favorite Outlook features. Speed. It is faster than previous versions and hangs much less… Ignore Conversation (Ctrl+Del). Not interested in a conversation? Click this button on the new ribbon and you'll never receive another message on that thread (they all go to your Deleted folder). Calendar Preview. When receiving a Meeting Request, before deciding to accept or not you get to see a preview of your calendar for that day and where the new meeting would fit in. See full description on outlook team blog post. Quick Steps. See full description on outlook team blog post. I have created my own quick steps for filing conversations to folders, various pre-populated reply templates, creating calendar invites and creating TODOs from received emails. Search Interface. Many of us knew the magic keywords for making smart searches (e.g. from:Name), but it is great to learn many more through the search tools contextual ribbon tab. Next 7 days. Out of the many enhancements to the Calendar view, my favorite is to be able with  single click to view the next 7 days – that is now my default view. MailTips. See full description on outlook team blog post. The ones I particularly like are when composing a mail to someone that has their Out Of Office reply set, you get to read it before sending the mail (and hence can decide to postpone sending). when composing a mail to a distribution list, a message informs you of the number of recipients. Hopefully, senders will use that as a clue for narrowing down the recipient list or at least verifying that their mail should indeed be sent to so many people. "You are not responding to the latest message in this conversation. Click here to open it.". When composing a reply to a conversation and you have not picked the last message to reply to (don't you hate it when people split threads like that?), this is the inline message you see (under the MailTips area) and if you click on the message it opens the last mail in the conversation so you can reply to that. Rich "Conversation Settings" and in particular "Show Messages from Other Folders". For example, you can see in your inbox not only the message you received but also the reply you sent (it gets pulled in from the Sent folder). Another example: a conversation has been taking place on a distribution list (so your rules filed it to a folder) and they add you on the TO or CC line, so it appears in a different folder; regardless of which folder you open, you are able to see the entire conversation. Note that messages from other folders than the one you are browsing, appear in grey text so you can easily spot them. Reading them in one folder, obviously marks them as read in the other folder… If you haven't yet, when are you making the move to Outlook 2010? Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

  Read the article

• Collaborate10 &ndash; THEconference

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  After spending a few days in Mandalay Bay's THEHotel, I guess I now call everything THE... Seriously, they even tag their toilet paper with THEtp... I guess the brand builders in Vegas thought that once you are on to something you keep on doing it, and granted it is a nice hotel with nice rooms. THEanalytics Most of my collab10 experience was in a room called Reef C, where the BIWA bootcamp was held. Two solid days of BI, Warehousing and Analytics organized by the BIWA SIG at IOUG. Didn't get to see all sessions, but what struck me was the high interest in Analytics. Marty Gubar's OLAP session was full and he did some very nice things with the OLAP option. The cool bit was that he actually gets all the advanced calculations in OLAP to show up in OBI EE without any effort. It was nice to see that the idea from OWB where you generate an RPD is now also in AWM. I think it makes life so much simpler to generate these RPD's from your data model. Even if the end RPD needs some tweaking, it is all a lot less effort to get something going. You can see this stuff for yourself in this demo (click here). OBI EE uses just SQL to get to the calculations, and so, if you prefer APEX, you can build you application there and get the same nice calculations in an APEX application. Marty also showed the Simba MDX driver used with Excel. I guess we should call that THEcoolone... and it is very slick and wonderfully useful for all of you who actually know Excel. The nice thing is that you leverage pure Excel for all operations (no plug-ins). That means no new tools to learn, no new controls, all just pure Excel. THEdatabasemachine Got some very good questions in my "what makes Exadata fast" session and overall, the interest in Exadata is overwhelming. One of the things that I did try to do in my session is to get people to think in new patterns rather than in patterns based on Oracle 9i running on some random hardware configuration. We talked a little bit about the often over-indexing and how everyone has to unlearn all of that on Exadata. The main thing however is that everyone needs to get used to the shear size of some of the components in a Database machine V2. 5TB of flash cache is a lot of very fast data storage, half a TB of memory gets quite interesting as well. So what I did there was really focus on some of the content in these earlier posts on Upward ILM and In-Memory processing. In short, I do believe the these newer media point out a trend. In-memory and other fast media will get cheaper and will see more use. Some of that we do automatically by adding new functionality, but in some cases I think the end user of the system needs to start thinking about how to leverage all this new hardware. I think most people got very excited about these new capabilities and opportunities. THEcoolkids One of the cool things about the BIWA track was the hand-on track. Very cool to see big crowds for both OLAP and OWB hands-on. Also quite nice to see that the folks at RittmanMead spent so much time on preparing for that session. While all of them put down cool stuff, none was more cool that seeing Data Mining on an Apple iPAD... it all just looks great on an iPAD! Very disappointing to see that Mark Rittman still wasn't showing OWB on his iPAD ;-) THEend All in all this was a great set of sessions in the BIWA track. Lots of value to our guests (we hope) and we hope they all come again next year!

  Read the article

• Home Energy Management & Automation with Windows Phone 7

  A number of people at Clarity are personally interested in home energy conservation and home automation. We feel that a mobile device is a great fit for bringing this idea to fruition. While this project is merely a concept and not directly associated with Microsofts Hohm web service, it provides a great model for communicating the concept. I wanted to take the idea a step further and combine saving energy in your home with the ability to track water usage and control your home devices. I designed an application that focuses on total home control and not just energy usage. Application Overview By monitoring home consumption in real time and with yearly projections users can pinpoint vampire devices, times of high or low consumption, and wasteful patterns of energy use. Energy usage meters indicate total current consumption as well as individual device consumption. Users can then use the information to take action, make adjustments, and change their consumption behaviors. The app can be used to automate certain systems like lighting, temperature, or alarms. Other features can be turned on an off at the touch of a toggle switch on your phone, away from home. Forget to turn off the TV or shut the garage door? No problem, you can do it from your phone. Through settings you can enable and disable features of the phone that apply to your home making it a completely customized and convenient experience. To be clear, this equates to more security, big environmental impact, and even bigger savings.   Design and User Interface  Since this panorama application is designed for win phone 7 devices, it complies with the UI Design and Interaction Guide for wp7. I developed the frame and page hierarchy from existing examples. The interface takes advantage of the interactive nature of touch screens with slider controls, pivot control views, and toggle switches to turn on and off devices (not shown in mockup). I followed recommendations for text based elements and adapted the tile notifications to display the most recent user activity. For example, the mockup indicates upon launching the app that the last thing you did was program the thermostat. This model is great for quick launching common user actions. One last design feature to point out is the technical reasons for supplying both light and dark themes for the app. Since this application is targeting energy consumption it only makes sense to consider the effect of the apps background color or image on the phones energy use. When displaying darker colors like black the OLED display may use less power, extending battery life. Other Considerations For now I left out options of wind and solar powered energy options because they are not available to everyone. Renewable energy sources and new technologies associated with them are definitely ideas to keep in mind for a next iteration. Another idea to explore for such an application would be to include a savings model similar to mint.com. In addition to general energy-saving recommendations the application could recommend customized ways to save based on your current utility providers and available options in your area. If your television or refrigerator is guilty of sucking a lot of energy then you may see recommendations for energy star products that could save you even more money! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Oracle BI and XS Energy Drinks – Don’t Miss the Amway Presentation!

  - by Maria Forney

  Amway is a global leader in the direct sales industry with $10.9B in annual sales in more than 100 countries and territories. The company has implemented a global BI framework that provides accurate, consistent, and timely insights to support global, regional and local analytical research, business planning, performance measurement and assessment. Oracle BI EE is used by 1500 employees across Amway sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain business units as well as Amway affiliates in Europe, Russia, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Latin America, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Last week, I spoke with Lead Data Analyst with Amway Global Sales, Dan Arganbright, and IT Manager with Amway BI Competency Center, Mike Olson, about their upcoming presentation at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Scheduled during a prime speaking slot on Monday, October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007, Dan and Mike will discuss their experience building Amway’s Distributor Consulting solution, powered by Oracle BI EE. You can find more information here. As background, Amway offers people an opportunity to own their own businesses and consumers exclusive products in health and wellness, beauty and home care.  The Amway internal Sales organization is charged with consulting leadership-level Distributors to help them with data insights and ultimately grow their business. Until recently, this was a resource-intense process of gathering and formatting data. In some markets, it took over 40 hours to collect the data and produce the analysis needed for one consultation session. Amway began its global BI journey in 2006 and since then the company has migrated from having multiple technology providers and integration points to an integrated strategic vendor approach. Today, the company has standardized on Oracle technology for BI.  Amway has achieved cost savings through the retirement of redundant technology platforms. In addition, Mike’s organization has led the charge to align disparate BI organizations into a BI Competency Center.  The following diagram highlights the simplicity of the standardized architecture of Amway today. Dubbed Distributor Consulting, Amway has developed a BI solution using the Oracle technology stack to help Distributor leaders grow their businesses. The Distributor Consulting solution provides over 40 metrics for Sales staff to provide data-driven insights on the Distributors and organizations they support.  Using Oracle BI EE, Exadata, and Oracle Data Integrator, Amway provides customized and personalized business intelligence, and the Oracle BI EE dashboards were developed by the Amway Sales organization, which demonstrates business empowerment of the technology. Amway is also leveraging the power of BI to drive business growth in all of its markets.  A new set of Distributor Segmentation metrics are enabling a better understanding of distributor behaviors. A Global Scorecard that Amway developed provides key metrics at a market and global level for executive-level discussions. Product Analysis teams can now highlight repeat purchase rates, product penetration and the success of CRM campaigns. In the words of Dan and Mike, the addition of Exadata 11 months ago has been “a game changer.”  Amway has been able to dramatically reduce complexity, improve performance and increase business productivity and cost savings. For example, the number of indexes on the global data warehouse was reduced from more than 1,000 to less than 20.  Pulling data for the highest level distributors or the largest markets in the company now can be done in minutes instead of hours.  As a result, IT has shifted from performance tuning and keeping the system operational to higher-value business-focused activities. •       “The distributors that have been introduced to the BI reports have found them extremely helpful. Because they have never had this kind of information before, when they were presented with the reports, they wanted to take action immediately!”  -     Sales Development Manager in Latin America Without giving away more, the Amway case study presentation will be one of the unique customer sessions at OpenWorld this year. Speakers Dan Arganbright and Mike Olson have planned an interactive and entertaining session on Monday October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007. I’ll see you there!

  Read the article

• Oracle BI and XS Energy Drinks – Don’t Miss the Amway Presentation!

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  By Maria Forney Amway is a global leader in the direct sales industry with $10.9B in annual sales in more than 100 countries and territories. The company has implemented a global BI framework that provides accurate, consistent, and timely insights to support global, regional and local analytical research, business planning, performance measurement and assessment. Oracle BI EE is used by 1500 employees across Amway sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain business units as well as Amway affiliates in Europe, Russia, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Latin America, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Last week, I spoke with Lead Data Analyst with Amway Global Sales, Dan Arganbright, and IT Manager with Amway BI Competency Center, Mike Olson, about their upcoming presentation at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Scheduled during a prime speaking slot on Monday, October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007, Dan and Mike will discuss their experience building Amway’s Distributor Consulting solution, powered by Oracle BI EE. You can find more information here. As background, Amway offers people an opportunity to own their own businesses and consumers exclusive products in health and wellness, beauty and home care.  The Amway internal Sales organization is charged with consulting leadership-level Distributors to help them with data insights and ultimately grow their business. Until recently, this was a resource-intense process of gathering and formatting data. In some markets, it took over 40 hours to collect the data and produce the analysis needed for one consultation session. Amway began its global BI journey in 2006 and since then the company has migrated from having multiple technology providers and integration points to an integrated strategic vendor approach. Today, the company has standardized on Oracle technology for BI.  Amway has achieved cost savings through the retirement of redundant technology platforms. In addition, Mike’s organization has led the charge to align disparate BI organizations into a BI Competency Center.  The following diagram highlights the simplicity of the standardized architecture of Amway today. Dubbed Distributor Consulting, Amway has developed a BI solution using the Oracle technology stack to help Distributor leaders grow their businesses. The Distributor Consulting solution provides over 40 metrics for Sales staff to provide data-driven insights on the Distributors and organizations they support.  Using Oracle BI EE, Exadata, and Oracle Data Integrator, Amway provides customized and personalized business intelligence, and the Oracle BI EE dashboards were developed by the Amway Sales organization, which demonstrates business empowerment of the technology. Amway is also leveraging the power of BI to drive business growth in all of its markets.  A new set of Distributor Segmentation metrics are enabling a better understanding of distributor behaviors. A Global Scorecard that Amway developed provides key metrics at a market and global level for executive-level discussions. Product Analysis teams can now highlight repeat purchase rates, product penetration and the success of CRM campaigns. In the words of Dan and Mike, the addition of Exadata 11 months ago has been “a game changer.”  Amway has been able to dramatically reduce complexity, improve performance and increase business productivity and cost savings. For example, the number of indexes on the global data warehouse was reduced from more than 1,000 to less than 20.  Pulling data for the highest level distributors or the largest markets in the company now can be done in minutes instead of hours.  As a result, IT has shifted from performance tuning and keeping the system operational to higher-value business-focused activities. •       “The distributors that have been introduced to the BI reports have found them extremely helpful. Because they have never had this kind of information before, when they were presented with the reports, they wanted to take action immediately!”  -     Sales Development Manager in Latin America Without giving away more, the Amway case study presentation will be one of the unique customer sessions at OpenWorld this year. Speakers Dan Arganbright and Mike Olson have planned an interactive and entertaining session on Monday October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007. I’ll see you there!

  Read the article

• What's new in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012 - part 2

  - by nikolaosk

  This is the second post in a series of posts titled "What's new in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012".You can have a look at the first post in this series, here. Please find all my posts regarding VS 2012, here. In this post I will be looking into the various new features available in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012.I will be looking into the enhancements in the HTML Editor,CSS Editor and Javascript Editor.In order to follow along this post you must have Visual Studio 2012 and .Net Framework 4.5 installed in your machine.Download and install VS 2012 using this link.My machine runs on Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 works just fine.I will work fine in Windows 7 as well so do not worry if you do not have the latest Microsoft operating system.1) Launch VS 2012 and create a new Web Forms application by going to File - >New Web Site - > ASP.Net Web Forms Site.2) Choose an appropriate name for your web site.3) I would like to point out the new enhancements in the CSS editor in VS 2012. In the Solution Explorer in the Content folder and open the Site.cssThen when I try to change the background-color property of the html element, I get a brand new handy color-picker. Have a look at the picture below  Please note that the color-picker shows all the colors that have been used in this website. Then you can expand the color-picker by clicking on the arrows. Opacity is also supported. Have a look at the picture below4) There are also mobile styles in the Site.css .These are based on media queries.Please have a look at another post of mine on CSS3 media queries. Have a look at the picture below In this case when the maximum width of the screen is less than 850px there will be a new layout that will be dictated by these new rules. Also CSS snippets are supported. Have a look at the picture below I am writing a new CSS rule for an image element. I write the property transform and hit tab and then I have cross-browser CSS handling all of the major vendors.Then I simply add the value rotate and it is applied to all the cross browser options.Have a look at the picture below.  I am sure you realise how productive you can become with all these CSS snippets. 5) Now let's have a look at the new HTML editor enhancements in VS 2012You can drag and drop a GridView web server control from the Toolbox in the Site.master file.You will see a smart tag (that was only available in the Design View) that you can expand and add fields, format the web server control.Have a look at the picture below 6) We also have available code snippets. I type <video and then press tab twice.By doing that I have the rest of the HTML 5 markup completed.Have a look at the picture below 7) I have new support for the input tag including all the HTML 5 types and all the new accessibility features.Have a look at the picture below   8) Another interesting feature is the new Intellisense capabilities. When I change the DocType to 4.01 and the type <audio>,<video> HTML 5 tags, Intellisense does not recognise them and add squiggly lines.Have a look at the picture below All these features support ASP.Net Web forms, ASP.Net MVC applications and Web Pages. 9) Finally I would like to show you the enhanced support that we have for Javascript in VS 2012. I have full Intellisense support and code snippets support.I create a sample javascript file. I type If and press tab. I type while and press tab.I type for and press tab.In all three cases code snippet support kicks in and completes the code stack. Have a look at the picture below We also have full Intellisense support.Have a look at the picture below I am creating a simple function and then type some sort of XML like comments for the input parameters. Have a look at the picture below. Then when I call this function, Intellisense has picked up the XML comments and shows the variables data types.Have a look at the picture below Hope it helps!!!

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – Public Training Classes In Hyderabad 12-14 May – Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008

  - by pinaldave

  After successfully delivering many corporate trainings as well as the private training Solid Quality Mentors, India is launching the Public Training in Hyderabad for SQL Server 2008 and SharePoint 2010. This is going to be one of the most unique and one-of-a-kind events in India where Solid Quality Mentors are offering public classes. I will be leading the training on Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Query Optimization & Performance Tuning. This intensive, 3-day course intends to give attendees an in-depth look at Query Optimization and Performance Tuning in SQL Server 2005 and 2008. Designed to prepare SQL Server developers and administrators for a transition into SQL Server 2005 or 2008, the course covers the best practices for a variety of essential tasks in order to maximize the performance. At the end of the course, there would be daily discussions about your real-world problems and find appropriate solutions. Note: Scroll down for course fees, discount, dates and location. Do not forget to take advantage of Discount code ‘SQLAuthority‘. The training premises are very well-equipped as they will be having 1:1 computers. Every participant will be provided with printed course materials. I will pick up your entire lunch tab and we will have lots of SQL talk together. The best participant will receive a special gift at the end of the course. Even though the quality of the material to be delivered together with the course will be of extremely high standard, the course fees are set at a very moderate rate. The fee for the course is INR 14,000/person for the whole 3-day convention. At the rate of 1 USD = 44 INR, this fee converts to less than USD 300. At this rate, it is totally possible to fly from anywhere from the world to India and take the training and still save handsome pocket money. It would be even better if you register using the discount code “SQLAuthority“, for you will instantly get an INR 3000 discount, reducing the total cost of the training to INR 11,000/person for whole 3 days course. This is a onetime offer and will not be available in the future. Please note that there will be a 10.3% service tax on course fees. To register, either send an email to [email protected] or call +91 95940 43399. Feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] for any additional information and clarification. Training Date and Time: May 12-14, 2010 10 AM- 6 PM. Training Venue: Abridge Solutions, #90/B/C/3/1, Ganesh GHR & MSY Plaza, Vittalrao Nagar, Near Image Hospital, Madhapur, Hyderabad – 500 081. The details of the course is as listed below. Day 1 : Strengthen the basics along with SQL Server 2005/2008 New Features Module 01: Subqueries, Ranking Functions, Joins and Set Operations Module 02: Table Expressions Module 03: TOP and APPLY Module 04: SQL Server 2008 Enhancements Day 2: Query Optimization & Performance Tuning 1 Module 05: Logical Query Processing Module 06: Query Tuning Module 07:  Introduction to the Query Processor Module 08:  Review of common query coding which causes poor performance Day 3: Query Optimization & Performance Tuning 2 Module 09:  SQL Server Indexing and index maintenance Module 10:  Plan Guides, query hints, UDFs, and Computed Columns Module 11:  Understanding SQL Server Execution Plans Module 12: Real World Index and Optimization Tips Download the complete PDF brochure. We are also going to have SharePoint 2010 training by Joy Rathnayake on 10-11 May. All the details for discount applies to the same as well. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• HTML Presence Controls for Communications Server 14 CodePlex Project

  Showing Presence on the Web If youre running Office Communicator Server 2007 R2, you know that your only out-of-the-box option for showing presence on the web is to use the NameControl ActiveX control that ships as part of Office.  Being an ActiveX control, this obviously means that youre limited to Internet Explorer.  Also, nobody likes ActiveX controls What if you want to show the presence of users in a pure ASP.NET or HTML application and cant assume that the user has Communicator installed you need anASP.NET or HTML presence control.  HTML Presence Controls for Microsoft Communications Server 14 We recently worked with the UC team at Microsoft on a keynote demo for TechEd 2010 in New Orleans.  The demo was for a fictitious airline Fabrikam Airlines that wanted to show the presence of customer service and reservations agents on its website.  Customers could also start an instant message conversation with the agents using a Silverlight web chat window that used WCF to communicate with the backend UCMA application. We built HTML Presence Controls that use AJAX to poll a REST-based WCF service running in IIS and hosting a UCMA 3.0 presence subscription application.   Microsoft has graciously allowed us to publish these on CodePlex so that the development community can benefit from them:  http://htmlpresencecontrols.codeplex.com/ We will be maintaining the CodePlex project as new builds of UCMA 3.0 become available.  Check out the project home page on CodePlex for some more in-depth details on how the controls are implemented. ASP.NET Server Control Implementation Were providing an ASP.NET Server Control implementation that you can use stand-alone or in a GridView or Repeater (or other layout control).  The control has properties that allow you to control its appearance, e.g. you can choose whether or not to show the contacts name or availability text. You can also use the server control in a layout control such as a GridView by putting it in a TemplateColumn and binding to the Sip Uri in the data source. Disclaimer Once we started working on these, we realized why Microsoft hasnt shipped such controls as part of the product.  There are some tradeoffs you have to be aware of when using these controls, heres the high level. Privacy The backend UCMA 3.0 application that subscribes to presence of contacts runs as a trusted application and can thus retrieve the presence of any user in the organization.  Theres currently no good way in UCMA to apply any privacy rules to ensure that the consumer of the presence controls has permission to see the presence of the contacts that the controls are bound to.  Just to be absolutely crystal clear These controls provide a way to query the presence of any user in the organization, regardless of the privacy relationship between the person consuming the controls and the contacts whose presence is being displayed. Were exploring options for a design pattern that would allow you to inject some privacy controls.  Keep in mind though that you would most likely be responsible for implementing this logic, as there is currently no functionality in UCMA that allows you to do that. Polling the WCF REST Service The controls poll the backend WCF service to retrieve the presence of contacts - you can control the refresh interval so that they poll less often. We implemented a caching layer so that the WCF service is always communicating with a presence cache it never communicates directly with Communications Server.  For example, if your web page is showing the presence of sip:[email protected] and 500 people have the page open, the presence cache only contains one instance of the subscription Communications Server is not being polled 500 times for the presence of that contact. Once the presence of a contact changes, it is updated in the cache.  There are some server-based push mechanisms that would work nicely here, such as the one that Outlook Web Access 2010 uses.  Unfortunately we didnt have time to explore these options. Community Contribution Take a look at the project Issue Tracker, there are a couple of things we can use some help with.  Shoot me a note if youre interested in contributing to the project. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Where’s my MD.050?

  - by Dave Burke

  A question that I’m sometimes asked is “where’s my MD.050 in OUM?” For those not familiar with an MD.050, it serves the purpose of being a Functional Design Document (FDD) in one of Oracle’s legacy Methods. Functional Design Documents have existed for many years with their primary purpose being to describe the functional aspects of one or more components of an IT system, typically, a Custom Extension of some sort. So why don’t we have a direct replacement for the MD.050/FDD in OUM? In simple terms, the disadvantage of the MD.050/FDD approach is that it tends to lead practitioners into “Design mode” too early in the process. Whereas OUM encourages more emphasis on gathering, and describing the functional requirements of a system ahead of the formal Analysis and Design process. So that just means more work up front for the Business Analyst or Functional Consultants right? Well no…..the design of a solution, particularly when it involves a complex custom extension, does not necessarily take longer just because you put more thought into the functional requirements. In fact, one could argue the complete opposite, in that by putting more emphasis on clearly understanding the nuances of functionality requirements early in the process, then the overall time and cost incurred during the Analysis to Design process should be less. In short, as your understanding of requirements matures over time, it is far easier (and more cost effective) to update a document or a diagram, than to change lines of code. So how does that translate into Tasks and Work Products in OUM? Let us assume you have reached a point on a project where a Custom Extension is needed. One of the first things you should consider doing is creating a Use Case, and remember, a Use Case could be as simple as a few lines of text reflecting a “User Story”, or it could be what Cockburn1 describes a “fully dressed Use Case”. It is worth mentioned at this point the highly scalable nature of OUM in the sense that “documents” should not be produced just because that is the way we have always done things. Some projects may well be predicated upon a base of electronic documents, whilst other projects may take a much more Agile approach to describing functional requirements; through “User Stories” perhaps. In any event, it is quite common for a Custom Extension to involve the creation of several “components”, i.e. some new screens, an interface, a report etc. Therefore several Use Cases might be required, which in turn can then be assembled into a Use Case Package. Once you have the Use Cases attributed to an appropriate (fit-for-purpose) level of detail, and assembled into a Package, you can now create an Analysis Model for the Package. An Analysis Model is conceptual in nature, and depending on the solution being developing, would involve the creation of one or more diagrams (i.e. Sequence Diagrams, Collaboration Diagrams etc.) which collectively describe the Data, Behavior and Use Interface requirements of the solution. If required, the various elements of the Analysis Model may be indexed via an Analysis Specification. For Custom Extension projects that follow a pure Object Orientated approach, then the Analysis Model will naturally support the development of the Design Model without any further artifacts. However, for projects that are transitioning to this approach, then the various elements of the Analysis Model may be represented within the Analysis Specification. If we now return to the original question of “Where’s my MD.050”. The full answer would be: Capture the functional requirements within a Use Case Group related Use Cases into a Package Create an Analysis Model for each Package Consider creating an Analysis Specification (AN.100) as a index to each Analysis Model artifact An alternative answer for a relatively simple Custom Extension would be: Capture the functional requirements within a Use Case Optionally, group related Use Cases into a Package Create an Analysis Specification (AN.100) for each package 1 Cockburn, A, 2000, Writing Effective Use Case, Addison-Wesley Professional; Edition 1

  Read the article

• Install GIMP 2.7.1 on Lucid Lynx using PPA

  - by Vivek

  GIMP lovers are going to be disappointed to hear that GIMP is going away in the next release of much awaited Ubuntu 10.04. Today we take a look at installing in on Lucid Lynx using PPA. The reason for getting rid of it as cited by the GIMP developers, is that GIMP is too professional a software to be included in regular desktop version of Ubuntu. And it takes up too much of space on the disk. Also, the fact that it’s too complicated for regular users. If you can’t live without it…let’s see how to install GIMP 2.7.1 on Lucid Lynx (Currently in Alpha). The new version of GIMP supports single window mode and we will also see how to enable this feature as well. First we need to add the official GIMP 2.7.1 PPA in the software sources of Ubuntu 10.04, by opening the terminal window and typing the following command: sudo sh -c “echo ‘deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn/ubuntu lucid main’ >> /etc/apt/sources.list” Now that we have added the PPA we need to add the GPG key, so type the following in your Terminal window. sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 405A15CB Next up we have to update the software repository… sudo apt-get update All that is left is to install GIMP 2.7.1 by typing in the following… sudo apt-get install gimp Click ‘Y’ (for yes) to install GIMP Once GIMP is installed you can start it by going to Applications > Graphics > GNU Image Manipulation Program. You now have your favorite GIMP on your favorite Ubuntu 10.04. As you can see in the image below, GIMP still comes with default 3 windows, which could clog up your lower panel In Ubuntu 10.04. However, now you can run GIMP in single window mode by going to Windows > Single-Window mode. That’s all! Now you have your GIMP running in single window mode with less of hassle to manage 3 windows. It’s unfortunate that GIMP will not be included, but by following these instructions, you’ll be able to enjoy using it in Ubuntu 10.04. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Show the List of Installed Packages on Ubuntu or DebianHow to Install Windows Applications on Linux Using CrossoverInstall VMware Tools on Ubuntu Edgy EftInstall Adobe PDF Reader on Ubuntu EdgyInstall MySQL Server 4.1 on Ubuntu 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more Download Microsoft Office Help tab The Growth of Citibank Quickly Switch between Tabs in IE Windows Media Player 12: Tweak Video & Sound with Playback Enhancements

  Read the article

• SWFObject and IE6 causing hair-pulling agony

  - by Piet

  I recently used SWFObject to display a flash header on a website. I chose SWFObject because: Instead of displaying an annoying ‘Install flash now’ message, it claims to be able to show alternate content. In this case: the original header image. It claims to be compatible with more or less every browser out there. Implementation went fine, until someone tested it on IE6 and got the following error: Internet explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www….. Operation aborted Which basically means that the site just can’t be visited with IE6 (still used a lot in business environments), it even seems as if there’s something wrong with your internet connection. Now, since about 10% of visitors to this site are still using IE6 (why does everyone still use Internet Explorer ???? Do YOU know that these days most people do NOT use Internet Explorer anymore ?) Now after some googling, I found the suggestion to defer loading of the SWFObject.js as follows: <script type="text/javascript" defer=”defer” src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2.2/swfobject.js” </script> <script type=”text/javascript” defer=”defer” swfobject.registerObject(”myId”, “9″, “”); </script> What this does according to W3C: When set, this boolean attribute provides a hint to the user agent that the script is not going to generate any document content (e.g., no “document.write” in javascript) and thus, the user agent can continue parsing and rendering. I don’t know exactly why, but: HURRAY! It works now!!! Only… IE6 and IE7 (didn’t try IE8) now gave the following error: Line: 19 Char: 1 Error: ’swfobject’ is undefined Code: 0 URL: http://www… But the flash was still running fine. Still, such an error isn’t clean, especially since almost half of the site’s visitors are using one of these Internet Explorer versions. Now, wanting a quick fix I decided to do the following: <script type="text/javascript" defer="defer" if (typeof(swfobject) != "undefined") swfobject.registerObject("myId", "9", ""); </script> I admit this is a bit of a weird ‘fix’. You’d suspect the flash to stop working on IE6/IE7, which it doesn’t. Not planning on diving into it’s inner bowels, I regard this a ‘mission accomplished’ until someone somewhere posts a better solution (for which I setup some Google alerts). Do you have a better solution? What would be the impact on the webdev economy (or your life) if all browsers were compatible? Addendum Because the above turned out not to work with the new Firefox 3.5.3 (strangely, was OK with 3.5.2 when I tested it) I decided to cut the crap and use the ‘Dynamic Publishing’ way. Ok, so it won’t work for people who have javascript disabled, but who on earth would have flash installed AND javascript disabled? To avoid the IE6 error with the ‘Dynamic Publishing’ way, I call swfobject.embedSWF right after the div that will be replaced with the flash content. Calling swfobject.embedSWF in the <head> would otherwise give me the above error in IE6 again.

  Read the article

• How SQL Server 2014 impacts Red Gate’s SQL Compare

  - by Michelle Taylor

  SQL Compare 10.7 successfully connects to SQL Server 2014, but it doesn’t yet cover the SQL Server 2014 features which would require us to make major changes to SQL Compare to support. In this post I’m going to talk about the SQL Server 2014 features we’ve already begun supporting, and which ones we’re working on for the next release of SQL Compare (v11). From SQL Compare’s perspective, the new memory-optimized table functionality (some might know it as ‘Hekaton’) has been the most important change. It can’t be described as its own object type, but the new functionality is split across two existing object types (three if you count indexes), as it also comes with native stored procedures and inline indexes. Along with connectivity support, the SQL Compare team has already implemented the first part of the puzzle – inline specification of indexes. These are essential for memory-optimized tables because it’s not possible to alter the memory optimized table’s structure, and so indexes can’t be added after the fact without dropping the table. Books Online  shows this in more detail in the table_index and column_index clauses of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174979(v=sql.120).aspx. SQL Compare 10.7 currently supports reading the new inline index specification from script folders and source control repositories, and will write out inline indexes where it’s necessary to do so (i.e. in UDDTs or when attempting to write projects compatible with the SSDT database project format). However, memory-optimized tables themselves are not yet supported in 10.7. The team is actively working on making them available in the v11 release with full support later in the year, and in a beta version before that. Fortunately, SQL Compare already has some ways of handling tables that have to be dropped and created rather than altered, which are being adapted to handle this new kind of table. Because it’s one of the largest new database engine features, there’s an equally large Books Online section on memory-optimized tables, but for us the most important parts of the documentation are the normal table features that are changed or unsupported and the new syntax found in the T-SQL reference pages. We are treating SQL Compare’s support of Natively Compiled Stored Procedures as a separate unit of work, which will be available in a subsequent beta and also feed into the v11 release. This new type of stored procedure is designed to work with memory-optimized tables to maintain the performance improvements gained by them – but you can still also access memory-optimized tables from normal stored procedures and ad-hoc queries. To us, they’re essentially a limited-syntax stored procedure with a few extra options in the create statement, embodied in the updated CREATE PROCEDURE documentation and with the detailed limitations. They should be easier to handle than memory-optimized tables simply because the handling of stored procedures is less sensitive to dropping the object than the handling of tables. However, both share an incompatibility with DDL triggers and Event Notifications which mean we’ll need to temporarily disable these during the specific deployment operations that involve them – don’t worry, we’ll supply a warning if this is the case so that you can check your auditing arrangements can handle the situation. There are also a handful of other improvements in SQL Server 2014 which affect SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare that are not connected to memory optimized tables. The largest of these are the improvements to columnstore indexes, with the capability to create clustered columnstore indexes and update columnstore tables through them – for more detail, take a look at the new syntax reference. There’s also a new index option for better compression of columnstores (COLUMNSTORE_ARCHIVE) and a new statistics option for incremental per-partition statistics, plus the 90 compatibility level is being retired. We’re planning to finish up these small clean-up features last, and be ready to release SQL Compare 11 with full SQL 2014 support early in Q3 this year. For a more thorough overview of what’s new in SQL Server 2014, Books Online’s What’s New section is a good place to start (although almost all the changes in this version are in the Database Engine).

  Read the article

• Dynamic Class Inheritance For PHP

  - by VirtuosiMedia

  I have a situation where I think I might need dynamic class inheritance in PHP 5.3, but the idea doesn't sit well and I'm looking for a different design pattern to solve my problem if it's possible. Use Case I have a set of DB abstraction layer classes that dynamically compiles SQL queries, with one DAL class for each DB type (MySQL, MsSQL, Oracle, etc.). Each table in the database has its own class that extends the appropriate DAL class. The idea is that you interact with the table classes, but never directly use the DAL class. If you want to support a different DB type for your app, you don't need to rewrite any queries or even any code, you simply change a setting that swaps one DAL class out for another...and that's it. To give you a better idea of how this is used, you can take a look at the DAL class, the table classes, and how they are used on this StackExchange Code Review page. To really understand what I'm trying to do, please take a look at my implementation first before suggesting a solution. Issues The strategy that I had used previously was to have all of the DAL classes share the same class name. This eliminated autoloading, so I had to manually load the appropriate DAL class in a switch statement. However, this approach presents some problems for testing and documentation purposes, so I'd like to find a different way to solve the problem of loading the correct DAL class more elegantly. Update to clarify the issue The problem basically boils down to inconsistencies in the class name (pre-PHP 5.3) or class namespace (PHP 5.3) and its location in the directory structure. At this point, all of my DAL classes have the same name, DBObject, but reside in different folders, MySQL, Oracle, etc. My table classes all extend DBObject, but which DBObject they extend varies depending on which one has been loaded. Basically, I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too. The table classes act as a stable API and extend a dynamic backend, the DAL (DBObject) classes. It works great, but I outsmarted myself and because of the inconsistencies with the class names and their locations, I can't autoload the DBObject, which makes running unit tests and generating API docs impossible for the DBObject classes because the tests and docs rely on auto-loading. Just loading the appropriate DBObject into memory using a factory method won't work because there will be times when I need to load multiple DBObjects for testing. Because the classes currently share a name, this causes a class is already defined error. I can make exceptions for the DBObjects in my test code, obviously, but I'm looking for something a little less hacky as there may future instances where something similar would need to be done. Solutions? Worst case scenario, I can continue my current strategy, but I don't like it very much, especially as I'll soon be converting my code to PHP 5.3. I suspect that I can use some sort of dynamic inheritance via either namespaces (preferred) or a dynamic class extension, but I haven't been able to find good examples of this implemented in the wild. In your answers, please suggest either an alternate pattern that would work for this use case or an example of dynamic inheritance done right. Please assume PHP 5.3 with namespaced code. Any code examples are greatly encouraged. The preferred constraints for the solution are: DAL class can be autoloaded. DAL classes don't share the same exact same namespace, but share the same class name. As an example, I would prefer to use classes named DbObject that use namespaces like Vm\Db\MySql and Vm\Db\Oracle. Table classes don't have to be rewritten with a change in DB type. The appropriate DB type is determined via a single setting only. That setting is the only thing that should need to change to interchange DB types. Ideally, the setting check should occur only once per page load, but I'm flexible on that.

  Read the article

• Oracle Fusion Procurement Designed for User Productivity

  - by Applications User Experience

  Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience Oracle Fusion Procurement Design Goals In Oracle Fusion Procurement, we set out to create a streamlined user experience based on the way users do their jobs. Oracle has spent hundreds of hours with customers to get to the heart of what users need to do their jobs. By designing a procurement application around user needs, Oracle has crafted a user experience that puts the tools that people need at their fingertips. In Oracle Fusion Procurement, the user experience is designed to provide the user with information that will drive navigation rather than requiring the user to find information. One of our design goals for Oracle Fusion Procurement was to reduce the number of screens and clicks that a user must go through to complete frequently performed tasks. The requisition process in Oracle Fusion Procurement (Figure 1) illustrates how we have streamlined workflows. Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement brings together billing metrics, descriptions of the order, justification for the order, a breakdown of the components of the order, and the amount—all in one place. Previous generations of procurement software required the user to navigate to several different pages to gather all of this information. With Oracle Fusion, everything is presented on one page. The result is that users can complete their tasks in less time. The focus is on completing the work, not finding the work. Figure 1. Creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Self-Service Procurement is a consumer-like shopping experience. Will Oracle Fusion Procurement Increase Productivity? To answer this question, Oracle sought to model how two experts working head to head—one in an existing enterprise application and another in Oracle Fusion Procurement—would perform the same task. We compared Oracle Fusion designs to corresponding existing applications using the keystroke-level modeling (KLM) method. This method is based on years of research at universities such as Carnegie Mellon and research labs like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The KLM method breaks tasks into a sequence of operations and uses standardized models to evaluate all of the physical and cognitive actions that a person must take to complete a task: what a user would have to click, how long each click would take (not only the physical action of the click or typing of a letter, but also how long someone would have to think about the page when taking the action), and user interface changes that result from the click. By applying standard time estimates for all of the operators in the task, an estimate of the overall task time is calculated. Task times from the model enable researchers to predict end-user productivity. For the study, we focused on modeling procurement business process task flows that were considered business or mission critical: high-frequency tasks and high-value tasks. The designs evaluated encompassed tasks that are currently performed by employees, professional buyers, suppliers, and sourcing professionals in advanced procurement applications. For each of these flows, we created detailed task scenarios that provided the context for each task, conducted task walk-throughs in both the Oracle Fusion design and the existing application, analyzed and documented the steps and actions required to complete each task, and applied standard time estimates to the operators in each task to estimate overall task completion times. The Results The KLM method predicted that the Oracle Fusion Procurement designs would result in productivity gains in each task, ranging from 13 percent to 38 percent, with an overall productivity gain of 22.5 percent. These performance gains can be attributed to a reduction in the number of clicks and screens needed to complete the tasks. For example, creating a requisition in Oracle Fusion Procurement takes a user through only two screens, while ordering the same item in a previous version requires six screens to complete the task. Modeling user productivity has resulted not only in advances in Oracle Fusion applications, but also in advances in other areas. We leveraged lessons learned from the KLM studies to establish products like Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). New user experience features in EBS 12.1.3, such as navigational improvements to the main menu, a Google-type search using auto-suggest, embedded analytics, and an in-context list of values tool help to reduce clicks and improve efficiency. For more information about KLM, refer to the Measuring User Productivity blog.

  Read the article

• What’s the use of code reuse?

  - by Tony Davis

  All great developers write reusable code, don’t they? Well, maybe, but as with all statements regarding what “great” developers do or don’t do, it’s probably an over-simplification. A novice programmer, in particular, will encounter in the literature a general assumption of the importance of code reusability. They spend time worrying about DRY (don’t repeat yourself), moving logic into specific “helper” modules that they can then reuse, agonizing about the minutiae of the class structure, inheritance and interface design that will promote easy reuse. Unfortunately, writing code specifically for reuse often leads to complicated object hierarchies and inheritance models that are anything but reusable. If, instead, one strives to write simple code units that are highly maintainable and perform a single function, in a concise, isolated fashion then the potential for reuse simply “drops out” as a natural by-product. Programmers, of course, care about these principles, about encapsulation and clean interfaces that don’t expose inner workings and allow easy pluggability. This is great when it helps with the maintenance and development of code but how often, in practice, do we actually reuse our code? Most DBAs and database developers are familiar with the practical reasons for the limited opportunities to reuse database code and its potential downsides. However, surely elsewhere in our code base, reuse happens often. After all, we can all name examples, such as date/time handling modules, which if we write with enough care we can plug in to many places. I spoke to a developer just yesterday who looked me in the eye and told me that in 30+ years as a developer (a successful one, I’d add), he’d never once reused his own code. As I sat blinking in disbelief, he explained that, of course, he always thought he would reuse it. He’d often agonized over its design, certain that he was creating code of great significance that he and other generations would reuse, with grateful tears misting their eyes. In fact, it never happened. He had in his head, most of the algorithms he needed and would simply write the code from scratch each time, refining the algorithms and tailoring the code to meet the specific requirements. It was, he said, simply quicker to do that than dig out the old code, check it, correct the mistakes, and adapt it. Is this a common experience, or just a strange anomaly? Viewed in a certain light, building code with a focus on reusability seems to hark to a past age where people built cars and music systems with the idea that someone else could and would replace and reuse the parts. Technology advances so rapidly that the next time you need the “same” code, it’s likely a new technique, or a whole new language, has emerged in the meantime, better equipped to tackle the task. Maybe we should be less fearful of the idea that we could write code well suited to the system requirements, but with little regard for reuse potential, and then rewrite a better version from scratch the next time.

  Read the article

• Is there a low carbon future for the retail industry?

  - by user801960

  Recently Oracle published a report in conjunction with The Future Laboratory and a global panel of experts to highlight the issue of energy use in modern industry and the serious need to reduce carbon emissions radically by 2050.  Emissions must be cut by 80-95% below the levels in 1990 – but what can the retail industry do to keep up with this? There are three key aspects to the retail industry where carbon emissions can be cut:  manufacturing, transport and IT.  Manufacturing Naturally, manufacturing is going to be a big area where businesses across all industries will be forced to make considerable savings in carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.  Many retailers of all sizes will use third party factories and will have little control over specific environmental impacts from the factory, but retailers can reduce environmental impact at the factories by managing orders more efficiently – better planning for stock requirements means economies of scale both in terms of finance and the environment. The John Lewis Partnership has made detailed commitments to reducing manufacturing and packaging waste on both its own-brand products and products it sources from third party suppliers. It aims to divert 95 percent of its operational waste from landfill by 2013, which is a huge logistics challenge.  The John Lewis Partnership’s website provides a large amount of information on its responsibilities towards the environment. Transport Similarly to manufacturing, tightening up on logistical planning for stock distribution will make savings on carbon emissions from haulage.  More accurate supply and demand analysis will mean less stock re-allocation after initial distribution, and better warehouse management will mean more efficient stock distribution.  UK grocery retailer Morrisons has introduced double-decked trailers to its haulage fleet and adjusted distribution logistics accordingly to reduce the number of kilometers travelled by the fleet.  Morrisons measures route planning efficiency in terms of cases moved per kilometre and has, over the last two years, increased the number of cases per kilometre by 12.7%.  See Morrisons Corporate Responsibility report for more information. IT IT infrastructure is often initially overlooked by businesses when considering environmental efficiency.  Datacentres and web servers often need to run 24/7 to handle both consumer orders and internal logistics, and this both requires a lot of energy and puts out a lot of heat.  Many businesses are lowering environmental impact by reducing IT system fragmentation in their offices, while an increasing number of businesses are outsourcing their datacenters to cloud-based services.  Using centralised datacenters reduces the power usage at smaller offices, while using cloud based services means the datacenters can be based in a more environmentally friendly location.  For example, Facebook is opening a massive datacentre in Sweden – close to the Arctic Circle – to reduce the need for artificial cooling methods.  In addition, moving to a cloud-based solution makes IT services more easily scaleable, reducing redundant IT systems that would still use energy.  In store, the UK’s Carbon Trust reports that on average, lighting accounts for 25% of a retailer’s electricity costs, and for grocery retailers, up to 50% of their electricity bill comes from refrigeration units.  On a smaller scale, retailers can invest in greener technologies in store and in their offices.  The report concludes that widely shared objectives of energy security, reduced emissions and continued economic growth are dependent on the development of a smart grid capable of delivering energy efficiency and demand response, as well as integrating renewable and variable sources of energy. The report is available to download from http://emeapressoffice.oracle.com/imagelibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=1766I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the report.   

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Sends backups to a Network Folder, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3

  - by pinaldave

  Let me tell you about one of the most useful SQL tools that every DBA should use – it is SQLBackupAndFTP. I have been using this tool since 2009 – and it is the first program I install on a SQL server. Download a free version, 1 minute configuration and your daily backups are safe in the cloud. In summary, SQLBackupAndFTP Creates SQL Server database and file backups on schedule Compresses and encrypts the backups Sends backups to a network folder, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3 Sends email notifications of job’s success or failure SQLBackupAndFTP comes in Free and Paid versions (starting from $29) – see version comparison. Free version is fully functional for unlimited ad hoc backups or for scheduled backups of up to two databases – it will be sufficient for many small customers. What has impressed me from the beginning – is that I understood how it works and was able to configure the job from a single form (see Image 1 – Main form above) Connect to you SQL server and select databases to be backed up Click “Add backup destination” to configure where backups should go to (network, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3) Enter your email to receive email confirmations Set the time to start daily full backups (or go to Settings if you need Differential or  Transaction Log backups on a flexible schedule) Press “Run Now” button to test You can get to this form if you click “Settings” buttons in the “Schedule section”. Select what types of backups and how often you want to run them and you will see the scheduled backups in the “Estimated backup plan” list A detailed tutorial is available on the developer’s website. Along with SQLBackupAndFTP setup gives you the option to install “One-Click SQL Restore” (you can install it stand-alone too) – a basic tool for restoring just Full backups. However basic, you can drag-and-drop on it the zip file created by SQLBackupAndFTP, it unzips the BAK file if necessary, connects to the SQL server on the start, selects the right database, it is smart enough to restart the server to drop open connections if necessary – very handy for developers who need to restore databases often. You may ask why is this tool is better than maintenance tasks available in SQL Server? While maintenance tasks are easy to set up, SQLBackupAndFTP is still way easier and integrates solution for compression, encryption, FTP, cloud storage and email which make it superior to maintenance tasks in every aspect. On a flip side SQLBackupAndFTP is not the fanciest tool to manage backups or check their health. It only works reliably on local SQL Server instances. In other words it has to be installed on the SQL server itself. For remote servers it uses scripting which is less reliable. This limitations is actually inherent in SQL server itself as BACKUP DATABASE command  creates backup not on the client, but on the server itself. This tool is compatible with almost all the known SQL Server versions. It works with SQL Server 2008 (all versions) and many of the previous versions. It is especially useful for SQL Server Express 2005 and SQL Server Express 2008, as they lack built in tools for backup. I strongly recommend this tool to all the DBAs. They must absolutely try it as it is free and does exactly what it promises. You can download your free copy of the tool from here. Please share your experience about using this tool. I am eager to receive your feedback regarding this article. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)   Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Clone a Hard Drive Using an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Whether you’re setting up multiple computers or doing a full backup, cloning hard drives is a common maintenance task. Don’t bother burning a new boot CD or paying for new software – you can do it easily with your Ubuntu Live CD. Not only can you do this with your Ubuntu Live CD, you can do it right out of the box – no additional software needed! The program we’ll use is called dd, and it’s included with pretty much all Linux distributions. dd is a utility used to do low-level copying – rather than working with files, it works directly on the raw data on a storage device. Note: dd gets a bad rap, because like many other Linux utilities, if misused it can be very destructive. If you’re not sure what you’re doing, you can easily wipe out an entire hard drive, in an unrecoverable way. Of course, the flip side of that is that dd is extremely powerful, and can do very complex tasks with little user effort. If you’re careful, and follow these instructions closely, you can clone your hard drive with one command. We’re going to take a small hard drive that we’ve been using and copy it to a new hard drive, which hasn’t been formatted yet. To make sure that we’re working with the right drives, we’ll open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and enter in the following command sudo fdisk –l We have two small drives, /dev/sda, which has two partitions, and /dev/sdc, which is completely unformatted. We want to copy the data from /dev/sda to /dev/sdc. Note: while you can copy a smaller drive to a larger one, you can’t copy a larger drive to a smaller one with the method described below. Now the fun part: using dd. The invocation we’ll use is: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc In this case, we’re telling dd that the input file (“if”) is /dev/sda, and the output file (“of”) is /dev/sdc. If your drives are quite large, this can take some time, but in our case it took just less than a minute. If we do sudo fdisk –l again, we can see that, despite not formatting /dev/sdc at all, it now has the same partitions as /dev/sda.  Additionally, if we mount all of the partitions, we can see that all of the data on /dev/sdc is now the same as on /dev/sda. Note: you may have to restart your computer to be able to mount the newly cloned drive. And that’s it…If you exercise caution and make sure that you’re using the right drives as the input file and output file, dd isn’t anything to be scared of. Unlike other utilities, dd copies absolutely everything from one drive to another – that means that you can even recover files deleted from the original drive in the clone! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDHow to Browse Without a Trace with an Ubuntu Live CDRecover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CDCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveWipe, Delete, and Securely Destroy Your Hard Drive’s Data the Easy Way 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278  | Next Page >