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• Microsoft MVP Award Nomination

  - by Mark A. Wilson

  I am extremely honored to announce that I have been nominated to receive the Microsoft MVP Award for my contributions in C#! Hold on; I have not won the award yet. But to be nominated is really humbling. Thank you very much! For those of you who may not know, here is a high-level summary of the MVP award: The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program recognizes and thanks outstanding members of technical communities for their community participation and willingness to help others. The program celebrates the most active community members from around the world who provide invaluable online and offline expertise that enriches the community experience and makes a difference in technical communities featuring Microsoft products. MVPs are credible, technology experts from around the world who inspire others to learn and grow through active technical community participation. While MVPs come from many backgrounds and a wide range of technical communities, they share a passion for technology and a demonstrated willingness to help others. MVPs do this through the books and articles they author, the Web sites they manage, the blogs they maintain, the user groups they participate in, the chats they host or contribute to, the events and training sessions where they present, as well as through the questions they answer in technical newsgroups or message boards. - Microsoft MVP Award Nomination Email I guess I should start my nomination acceptance speech by profusely thanking Microsoft as well as everyone who nominated me. Unfortunately, I’m not completely certain who those people are. While I could guess (in no particular order: Bill J., Brian H., Glen G., and/or Rob Z.), I would much rather update this post accordingly after I know for certain who to properly thank. I certainly don’t want to leave anyone out! Please Help My next task is to provide the MVP Award committee with information and descriptions of my contributions during the past 12 months. For someone who has difficulty remembering what they did just last week, trying to remember something that I did 12 months ago is going to be a real challenge. (Yes, I should do a better job blogging about my activities. I’m just so busy!) Since this is an award about community, I invite and encourage you to participate. Please leave a comment below or send me an email. Help jog my memory by listing anything and everything that you can think of that would apply and/or be important to include in my reply back to the committee. I welcome advice on what to say and how to say it from previous award winners. Again, I greatly appreciate the nomination and welcome any assistance you can provide. Thanks for visiting and till next time, Mark A. Wilson      Mark's Geekswithblogs Blog Enterprise Developers Guild Technorati Tags: Community,Way Off Topic

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• SQLAuthority News – New Book Released – SQL Server Interview Questions And Answers

  - by pinaldave

  Two days ago, on birthday of my blog – I asked simple question – Guess! What is in this box? I have received lots of interesting comments on the blog about what is in it. Many of you got it absolutely incorrect and many got it close to the right answer but no one got it 100% correct. Well, no issue at all, I am going to give away the price to whoever has the closest answer first in personal email. Here is the answer to the question about what is in the box? Here it is – the box has my new book. In fact, I should say our new book as I co-authored this book with my very good friend Vinod Kumar. We had real blast writing this book together and had lots of interesting conversation when we were writing this book. This book has one simple goal – “master the basics.” This book is not only for people who are preparing for interview. This book is for every one who wants to revisit the basics and wants to prepare themselves to the technology. One always needs to have practical knowledge to do their duty efficiently. This book talks about more than basics. There are multiple ways to present learning – either we can create simple book or make it interesting. We have decided the learning should be interactive and have opted for Interview Questions and Answer format. Here is quick interview which we have done together. Details of the books are here The core concept of this book will continue to evolve over time. I am sure many of you will come along with us on this journey and submit your suggestions to us to make this book a key reference for anybody who wants to start with SQL server. Today we want to acknowledge the fact that you will help us keep this book alive forever with the latest updates. We want to thank everyone who participates in this journey with us. You can get the books from [Amazon] | [Flipkart]. Read Vinod‘s blog post. Do not forget to wish him happy birthday as today is his birthday and also book release day – two reason to wish him congratulations. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Data Warehousing, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Are You In The Know About Knowledge?

  - by [email protected]

  "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it." To me, this simple and elegant quote from the great English author Samuel Johnson is a reflection of Oracle's knowledge base strategy. The knowledge base in the My Oracle Support portal (https://support.oracle.com) hosts nearly a half million documents, including how-to instructions, problem-solution descriptions, code samples, FAQs, critical alerts, technical whitepapers, and so on. AutoVue's footprint in the Oracle knowledge base - although relatively small at just around 400 documents - is a steadily-expanding assortment of valuable info. This information is designed to complement what you have already learned from the AutoVue documentation, or in some cases, to examine topics not yet covered in the documentation. Similar to the documentation, the knowledge base is one of the highest-value self-service avenues, since it delivers answers in real-time and is driven by the topics most relevant to customers. There are many different ways to leverage the AutoVue knowledge content, or what Oracle often refers to as "KM Notes": 1. Knowledge Browser: To browse the knowledge hierarchy, click on the 'Knowledge' tab at the top of the My Oracle Support webpage. In the list of product areas at the left, click on 'More Applications', then on 'Oracle AutoVue'. From here, you can either view the full set of KM Notes under the AutoVue product family (AutoVue, VueLink, Web Services, Document Print Services, etc) by clicking on 'All of Oracle AutoVue', or you can drill down further by clicking on 'Enterprise Visualization'. 2. Search: To execute simple keyword searches, use the Search bar at the top-right of the My Oracle Support webpage: 3. Advanced Search: Beside the same Search bar at the top-right of the My Oracle Support webpage, click on the 'Advanced' link in order to increase your control over the search string as well as the product to search against: 4. In your Dashboard: By clicking on the 'Customize' link at the top-right of the Dashboard page in My Oracle Support, you can drag & drop multiple "Knowledge Articles" widgets onto your dashboard. Then, click on the pencil icon at the top-right of the widget to customize it by product. This allows you to keep an active monitor on the most recently updated KM Notes across any product: 5. During SR Creation: As you submit a new Service Request, after entering the product information, SR title, and SR description, you will be presented with a frame at the left containing KM Note suggestions based on the information entered: Let Oracle know what you think! If you like or dislike an article, or would like to comment on how easy/difficult it was to find the article, click on the "Rate this document" link at the bottom of the KM Note. Similarly, during SR creation if one of the suggested KM Notes resolves your question/issue, you can click the "This article solved my problem" link at the bottom of the page. I hope these approaches improve your ability find knowledge content within the My Oracle Support portal, and I encourage you to continue to build your knowledge to further your success with the AutoVue product family.

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• VLC will sometimes have issues displaying video in fullscreen. What could cause this? How would I troubleshoot the issue?

  - by George Marian

  Recently VLC has been having issues displaying video in fullscreen mode. AFAIK, nothing has changed with the video card drivers and it's certainly the same version of VLC. (/me shakes a fist at the repository maintainers) This has worked without issue in the past. In fact, I've had as many as 6 instances of VLC running, each playing a video. One was always fullscreen on my second monitor, while the others were tiled on my primary monitor. I was able to toggle any of the other 5 into fullscreen mode and the video displayed without issue. Lately, I've been having trouble running 2 instances in fullscreen mode. (Sometimes, even a single instance will not display the video in fullscreen.) VLC will continue to play the video, but in fullscreen mode I see nothing but a black screen. Sometimes, the video will display if I maximize the VLC window. Other times, I have to settle for a smaller sized window. I don't know if this is pertinent, but sometimes changing the min/max state of a Firefox window (Minefield, specifically) seemed to allow the troublesome instance to display the video in fullscreen mode. However, that did not prove to be a consistent workaround. Sometimes, it seemed that closing a Firefox window did the trick, though that isn't consistently successful either. (I futzed with Firefox, because with the crazy number of windows and tabs that I normally have open, it regularly hogs about 1 GB of RAM.) Another bit of funkiness that comes to mind is the fact that my secondary monitor is considered the primary on boot-up. I use xrandr to designate the real 1st monitor as primary after boot-up, as suggested by someone in a question I asked on the Unix & Linux SE site. Specs: Ubuntu 10.10 w/ Gnome and Compiz 8GB RAM AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition Asus M4A79 Deluxe mobo XFX ATI Radeon HD 5750 w/ 1GB RAM VLC is configured to use the hardware overlay for video (as per the default setting) Does anyone have an idea what may cause this issue or how I may go about troubleshooting it? Update: Right now I have 2 instances of VLC playing, each in fullscreen mode on a separate monitor. This is what I see:

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• C# Domain-Driven Design Sample Released

  - by Artur Trosin

  In the post I want to declare that NDDD Sample application(s) is released and share the work with you. You can access it here: http://code.google.com/p/ndddsample. NDDDSample from functionality perspective matches DDDSample 1.1.0 which is based Java and on joint effort by Eric Evans' company Domain Language and the Swedish software consulting company Citerus. But because NDDDSample is based on .NET technologies those two implementations could not be matched directly. However concepts, practices, values, patterns, especially DDD, are cross-language and cross-platform :). Implementation of .NET version of the application was an interesting journey because now as .NET developer I better understand the differences positive and negative between these two platforms. Even there are those differences they can be overtaken, in many cases it was not so hard to match a java libs\framework with .NET during the implementation. Here is a list of technology stack: 1. .net 3.5 - framework 2. VS.NET 2008 - IDE 3. ASP.NET MVC2.0 - for administration and tracking UI 4. WCF - communication mechanism 5. NHibernate - ORM 6. Rhino Commons - Nhibernate session management, base classes for in memory unit tests 7. SqlLite - database 8. Windsor - inversion of control container 9. Windsor WCF facility - for better integration with NHibernate 10. MvcContrib - and in particular its Castle WindsorControllerFactory in order to enable IoC for controllers 11. WPF - for incident logging application 12. Moq - mocking lib used for unit tests 13. NUnit - unit testing framework 14. Log4net - logging framework 15. Cloud based on Azure SDK These are not the latest technologies, tools and libs for the moment but if there are someone thinks that it would be useful to migrate the sample to latest current technologies and versions please comment. Cloud version of the application is based on Azure emulated environment provided by the SDK, so it hasn't been tested on ‘real' Azure scenario (we just do not have access to it). Thanks to participants, Eugen Gorgan who was involved directly in development, Ruslan Rusu and Victor Lungu spend their free time to discuss .NET specific decisions, Eugen Navitaniuc helped with Java related questions. Also, big thank to Cornel Cretu, he designed a nice logo and helped with some browser incompatibility issues. Any review and feedback are welcome! Thank you, Artur Trosin

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• Silverlight Cream for April 08, 2010 -- #834

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Phil Middlemiss, Yochay Kiriaty, Giorgetti Alessandro, Mike Snow, John Papa, SilverLaw, smartyP, and Pete Brown. Shoutouts: Steve Wortham sent me a link to his RegEx tool that is written in Silverlight... definitely worth a look: Introducing Code Hinting for Regular Expressions Joshua Blake posted his MIX10 materials: MIX10 NUI session sample code From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight MVVM: An (Overly) Simplified Explanation Michael Washington has a tutorial up for getting your arms (and head) around MVVM and Silverlight, and Blend too. A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 3 Phil Middlemiss has part 3 up of his tutorial series on building an awesome theme for Silverlight... he's styling the textbox and checkbox this time around, and improving the button too Automatic Rotation Support or Automatic Multi-Orientation Layout Support for Windows Phone Yochay Kiriaty is giving up some WP7 goodness with his post on Multi-Orientation Layout Support ... yeah I had to say it twice myself :) good links and all the code in addition to the good blog post Silverlight Navigation Framework: resolve the pages using an IoC container Giorgetti Alessandro has some pretty cool code up as a proof of concept of using an IoC container with the Navigation Framework of Silverlight 4. Silverlight Tip of the Day No. 109 – Attach to Process Debugging Mike Snow is back doing Tips of the Day... and number 109 is showing how to attach the debugger to a running Silverlight app. Silverlight TV 20: Community Driven Development with WCF RIA Services In his latest Silverlight TV episode, John Papa talks with Jeff Handley about RIA Services, and how feedback from the community helped shape the product. ChildWindowMouseScrollResizeBehavior - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a new Behavior up at the Expression Gallery that gives you resizing on a ChildWindow using the Mouse Wheel. Creating a Windows Phone 7 Metro Style Pivot Application [Part 3] smartyP has the 3rd and final episode for his WP7 Pivot up, and this one includes not only the source but a video tutorial. Layout Rounding Pete Brown talks about Layout Rounding and it has nothing to do with rounding corners... it has to do with rounding off where your objects get placed pixel-wise ... I've blogged about this seemingly-anti-aliasing more than once... Pete has the real answer Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SQL SERVER – Order By Numeric Values Formatted as String

  - by pinaldave

  When I was writing this blog post I had a hard time to come up with the title of the blog post so I did my best to come up with one. Here is the reason why? I wrote a blog post earlier SQL SERVER – Find First Non-Numeric Character from String. One of the questions was that how that blog can be useful in real life scenario. This blog post is the answer to that question. Let us first see a problem. We have a table which has a column containing alphanumeric data. The data always has first as an integer and later part as a string. The business need is to order the data based on the first part of the alphanumeric data which is an integer. Now the problem is that no matter how we use ORDER BY the result is not produced as expected. Let us understand this with example. Prepare a sample data: -- How to find first non numberic character USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE MyTable (ID INT, Col1 VARCHAR(100)) GO INSERT INTO MyTable (ID, Col1) SELECT 1, '1one' UNION ALL SELECT 2, '11eleven' UNION ALL SELECT 3, '2two' UNION ALL SELECT 4, '22twentytwo' UNION ALL SELECT 5, '111oneeleven' GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable GO The above query will give following result set. Now let us use ORDER BY COL1 and observe the result along with Original SELECT. -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable ORDER BY Col1 GO The result of the table is not as per expected. We need the result in following format. Here is the good example of how we can use PATINDEX. -- Use of PATINDEX SELECT ID, LEFT(Col1,PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%',Col1)-1) 'Numeric Character', Col1 'Original Character' FROM MyTable ORDER BY LEFT(Col1,PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%',Col1)-1) GO We can use PATINDEX to identify the length of the digit part in the alphanumeric string (Remember: Our string has a first part as an int always. It will not work in any other scenario). Now you can use the LEFT function to extract the INT portion from the alphanumeric string and order the data according to it. You can easily clean up the script by dropping following table. DROP TABLE MyTable GO Here is the complete script so you can easily refer it. -- How to find first non numberic character USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE MyTable (ID INT, Col1 VARCHAR(100)) GO INSERT INTO MyTable (ID, Col1) SELECT 1, '1one' UNION ALL SELECT 2, '11eleven' UNION ALL SELECT 3, '2two' UNION ALL SELECT 4, '22twentytwo' UNION ALL SELECT 5, '111oneeleven' GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM MyTable ORDER BY Col1 GO -- Use of PATINDEX SELECT ID, Col1 'Original Character' FROM MyTable ORDER BY LEFT(Col1,PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%',Col1)-1) GO DROP TABLE MyTable GO Well, isn’t it an interesting solution. Any suggestion for better solution? Additionally any suggestion for changing the title of this blog post? Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL String, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• More details on America's Cup use of Oracle Data Mining

  - by charlie.berger

  BMW Oracle Racing's America's Cup: A Victory for Database Technology BMW Oracle Racing's victory in the 33rd America's Cup yacht race in February showcased the crew's extraordinary sailing expertise. But to hear them talk, the real stars weren't actually human. "The story of this race is in the technology," says Ian Burns, design coordinator for BMW Oracle Racing. Gathering and Mining Sailing DataFrom the drag-resistant hull to its 23-story wing sail, the BMW Oracle USA trimaran is a technological marvel. But to learn to sail it well, the crew needed to review enormous amounts of reliable data every time they took the boat for a test run. Burns and his team collected performance data from 250 sensors throughout the trimaran at the rate of 10 times per second. An hour of sailing alone generates 90 million data points.BMW Oracle Racing turned to Oracle Data Mining in Oracle Database 11g to extract maximum value from the data. Burns and his team reviewed and shared raw data with crew members daily using a Web application built in Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX). "Someone would say, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could look at some new combination of numbers?' We could quickly build an Oracle Application Express application and share the information during the same meeting," says Burns. Analyzing Wind and Other Environmental ConditionsBurns then streamed the data to the Oracle Austin Data Center, where a dedicated team tackled deeper analysis. Because the data was collected in an Oracle Database, the Data Center team could dive straight into the analytics problems without having to do any extract, transform, and load processes or data conversion. And the many advanced data mining algorithms in Oracle Data Mining allowed the analytics team to build vital performance analytics. For example, the technology team could remove masking elements such as environmental conditions to give accurate data on the best mast rotation for certain wind conditions. Without the data mining, Burns says the boat wouldn't have run as fast. "The design of the boat was important, but once you've got it designed, the whole race is down to how the guys can use it," he says. "With Oracle database technology we could compare the incremental improvements in our performance from the first day of sailing to the very last day. With data mining we could check data against the things we saw, and we could find things that weren't otherwise easily observable and findable."

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• Event Processed

  - by Antony Reynolds

  Installing Oracle Event Processing 11g Earlier this month I was involved in organizing the Monument Family History Day.  It was certainly a complex event, with dozens of presenters, guides and 100s of visitors.  So with that experience of a complex event under my belt I decided to refresh my acquaintance with Oracle Event Processing (CEP). CEP has a developer side based on Eclipse and a runtime environment. Developer Install The developer install requires several steps (documentation) Download required software Eclipse  (Linux) – It is recommended to use version 3.6.2 (Helios) Install Eclipse Unzip the download into the desired directory Start Eclipse Add Oracle CEP Repository in Eclipse http://download.oracle.com/technology/software/cep-ide/11/ Install Oracle CEP Tools for Eclipse 3.6 You may need to set the proxy if behind a firewall. Modify eclipse.ini If using Windows edit with wordpad rather than notepad Point to 1.6 JVM Insert following lines before –vmargs -vm \PATH_TO_1.6_JDK\jre\bin\javaw.exe Increase PermGen Memory Insert following line at end of file -XX:MaxPermSize=256M Restart eclipse and verify that everything is installed as expected. Server install The server install is very straightforward (documentation).  It is recommended to use the JRockit JDK with CEP so the steps to set up a working CEP server environment are: Download required software JRockit – I used Oracle “JRockit 6 - R28.2.5” which includes “JRockit Mission Control 4.1” and “JRockit Real Time 4.1”. Oracle Event Processor – I used “Complex Event Processing Release 11gR1 (11.1.1.6.0)” Install JRockit Run the JRockit installer, the download is an executable binary that just needs to be marked as executable. Install CEP Unzip the downloaded file Run the CEP installer,  the unzipped file is an executable binary that may need to be marked as executable. Choose a custom install and add the examples if needed. It is not recommended to add the examples to a production environment but they can be helpful in development. Voila The Deed Is Done With CEP installed you are now ready to start a server, if you didn’t install the demoes then you will need to create a domain before starting the server. Once the server is up and running (using startwlevs.sh) you can verify that the visualizer is available on http://hostname:port/wlevs, the default port for the demo domain is 9002. With the server running you can test the IDE by creating a new “Oracle CEP Application Project” and creating a new target environment pointing at your CEP installation. Much easier than organizing a Family History Day!

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• At the Java DEMOgrounds - Oracle’s Java Embedded Suite 7.0

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  The Java Embedded Suite 7.0, a new, packaged offering that facilitates the creation of  applications across a wide range of  embedded systems including network appliances, healthcare devices, home gateways, and routers was demonstrated by Oleg Kostukovsky of  Oracle’s Java Embedded Global Business Unit. He presented a device-to-cloud application that relied upon a scan station connected to Java Demos throughout JavaOne. This application allows an NFC tag distributed on a handout given to attendees to be scanned to gather various kinds of data. “A raffle allows attendees to check in at six unique demos and qualify for a prize,” explained Kostukovsky. “At the same time, we are collecting data both from NFC tags and sensors. We have a sensor attached to the back of the skin page that collects temperature, humidity, light intensity, and motion data at each pod. So, all of this data is collected using an application running on a small device behind the scan station."“Analytics are performed on the network using Java Embedded Suite and technology from Oracle partners, SeeControl, Hitachi, and Globalscale,” Kostukovsky said. Next, he showed me a data visualization web site showing sensory, environmental, and scan data that is collected on the device and pushed into the cloud. The Oracle product that enabled all of this, Java Embedded Suite 7.0, was announced in late September. “You can see all kinds of data coming from the stations in real-time -- temperature, power consumption, light intensity and humidity,” explained Kostukovsky. “We can identify trends and look at sensory data and see all the trends of all the components. It uses a Java application written by a partner, SeeControl. So we are using a Java app server and web server and a database.” The Market for Java Embedded Suite 7.0 “It's mainly geared to mission-to-mission applications because the overall architecture applies across multiple industries – telematics, transportation, industrial automation, smart metering, etc. This architecture is one in which the network connects to sensory devices and then pre-analyzes the data from these devices, after which it pushes the data to the cloud for processing and visualization. So we are targeting all those industries with those combined solutions. There is a strong interest from Telcos, from carriers, who are now moving more and more to the space of providing full services for their interim applications. They are looking to deploy solutions that will provide a full service to those who are building M-to-M applications.”

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• Architecture strategies for a complex competition scoring system

  - by mikewassmer

  Competition description: There are about 10 teams competing against each other over a 6-week period. Each team's total score (out of a 1000 total available points) is based on the total of its scores in about 25,000 different scoring elements. Most scoring elements are worth a small fraction of a point and there will about 10 X 25,000 = 250,000 total raw input data points. The points for some scoring elements are awarded at frequent regular time intervals during the competition. The points for other scoring elements are awarded at either irregular time intervals or at just one moment in time. There are about 20 different types of scoring elements. Each of the 20 types of scoring elements has a different set of inputs, a different algorithm for calculating the earned score from the raw inputs, and a different number of total available points. The simplest algorithms require one input and one simple calculation. The most complex algorithms consist of hundreds or thousands of raw inputs and a more complicated calculation. Some types of raw inputs are automatically generated. Other types of raw inputs are manually entered. All raw inputs are subject to possible manual retroactive adjustments by competition officials. Primary requirements: The scoring system UI for competitors and other competition followers will show current and historical total team scores, team standings, team scores by scoring element, raw input data (at several levels of aggregation, e.g. daily, weekly, etc.), and other metrics. There will be charts, tables, and other widgets for displaying historical raw data inputs and scores. There will be a quasi-real-time dashboard that will show current scores and raw data inputs. Aggregate scores should be updated/refreshed whenever new raw data inputs arrive or existing raw data inputs are adjusted. There will be a "scorekeeper UI" for manually entering new inputs, manually adjusting existing inputs, and manually adjusting calculated scores. Decisions: Should the scoring calculations be performed on the database layer (T-SQL/SQL Server, in my case) or on the application layer (C#/ASP.NET MVC, in my case)? What are some recommended approaches for calculating updated total team scores whenever new raw inputs arrives? Calculating each of the teams' total scores from scratch every time a new input arrives will probably slow the system to a crawl. I've considered some kind of "diff" approach, but that approach may pose problems for ad-hoc queries and some aggegates. I'm trying draw some sports analogies, but it's tough because most games consist of no more than 20 or 30 scoring elements per game (I'm thinking of a high-scoring baseball game; football and soccer have fewer scoring events per game). Perhaps a financial balance sheet analogy makes more sense because financial "bottom line" calcs may be calculated from 250,000 or more transactions. Should I be making heavy use of caching for this application? Are there any obvious approaches or similar case studies that I may be overlooking?

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• Should we exclude code for the code coverage analysis?

  - by romaintaz

  I'm working on several applications, mainly legacy ones. Currently, their code coverage is quite low: generally between 10 and 50%. Since several weeks, we have recurrent discussions with the Bangalore teams (main part of the development is made offshore in India) regarding the exclusions of packages or classes for Cobertura (our code coverage tool, even if we are currently migrating to JaCoCo). Their point of view is the following: as they will not write any unit tests on some layers of the application (1), these layers should be simply excluded from the code coverage measure. In others words, they want to limit the code coverage measure to the code that is tested or should be tested. Also, when they work on unit test for a complex class, the benefits - purely in term of code coverage - will be unnoticed due in a large application. Reducing the scope of the code coverage will make this kind of effort more visible... The interest of this approach is that we will have a code coverage measure that indicates the current status of the part of the application we consider as testable. However, my point of view is that we are somehow faking the figures. This solution is an easy way to reach higher level of code coverage without any effort. Another point that bothers me is the following: if we show a coverage increase from one week to another, how can we tell if this good news is due to the good work of the developers, or simply due to new exclusions? In addition, we will not be able to know exactly what is considered in the code coverage measure. For example, if I have a 10,000 lines of code application with 40% of code coverage, I can deduct that 40% of my code base is tested (2). But what happen if we set exclusions? If the code coverage is now 60%, what can I deduct exactly? That 60% of my "important" code base is tested? How can I As far as I am concerned, I prefer to keep the "real" code coverage value, even if we can't be cheerful about it. In addition, thanks to Sonar, we can easily navigate in our code base and know, for any module / package / class, its own code coverage. But of course, the global code coverage will still be low. What is your opinion on that subject? How do you do on your projects? Thanks. (1) These layers are generally related to the UI / Java beans, etc. (2) I know that's not true. In fact, it only means that 40% of my code base

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• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Adam Bien

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Among the most celebrated developers in recent years, especially in the domain of Java EE and JavaFX, is consultant Adam Bien, who, in addition to being a JavaOne Rock Star for Java EE sessions given in 2009 and 20011, is a Java Champion, the winner of Oracle Magazine’s 2011 Top Java Developer of the Year Award, and recently won a 2012 JAX Innovation Award as a top Java Ambassador. Bien will be presenting the following sessions: TUT3907 - Java EE 6/7: The Lean Parts CON3906 - Stress-Testing Java EE 6 Applications Without Stress CON3908 - Building Serious JavaFX 2 Applications CON3896 - Interactive Onstage Java EE Overengineering I spoke with Bien to get his take on Java today. He expressed excitement that the smallest companies and startups are showing increasing interest in Java EE. “This is a very good sign,” said Bien. “Only a few years ago J2EE was mostly used by larger companies -- now it becomes interesting even for one-person shows. Enterprise Java events are also extremely popular. On the Java SE side, I'm really excited about Project Nashorn.” Nashorn is an upcoming JavaScript engine, developed fully in Java by Oracle, and based on the Da Vinci Machine (JSR 292) which is expected to be available for Java 8.   Bien expressed concern about a common misconception regarding Java's mediocre productivity. “The problem is not Java,” explained Bien, “but rather systems built with ancient patterns and approaches. Sometimes it really is ‘Cargo Cult Programming.’ Java SE/EE can be incredibly productive and lean without the unnecessary and hard-to-maintain bloat. The real problems are ‘Ivory Towers’ and not Java’s lack of productivity.” Bien remarked that if there is one thing he wanted Java developers to understand it is that, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Or at least of some evil. Modern JVMs and application servers are hard to optimize upfront. It is far easier to write simple code and measure the results continuously. Identify the hotspots first, then optimize.” He advised Java EE developers to, “Rethink everything you know about Enterprise Java. Before you implement anything, ask the question: ‘Why?’ If there is no clear answer -- just don't do it. Most well known best practices are outdated. Focus your efforts on the domain problem and not the technology.” Looking ahead, Bien said, “I would like to see open source application servers running directly on a hypervisor. Packaging the whole runtime in a single file would significantly simplify the deployment and operations.”Check out a recent Java Magazine interview with Bien about his Java EE 6 stress monitoring tool here. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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• Oracle Launches New Oracle Database 12c Administrator Certifications

  - by Brandye Barrington

  Today Oracle University announces the release of new Oracle Database 12c Administrator certifications. The new Oracle Database 12c certifications emphasize the foundational and advanced skills needed by Database Administrators and will prepare DBAs to leverage powerful new management and consolidation capabilities, resulting in an even more valuable credential for customers and partners. ORACLE CERTIFIED ASSOCIATE (OCA)  The Oracle Certified Associate (OCA) for Oracle Database 12c objectives measure IT professionals' mastery of day-to-day administration skills and their ability to manage the challenges they're likely to encounter on the job. This credential focuses on SQL skills, operational administration of the Oracle Database including performance and space management, and installing, patching and upgrading the Oracle Database. Earning the OCA credential requires successful completion of two exams: 1Z0-061 - Oracle Database 12c: SQL Fundamentals and 1Z0-062 - Oracle Database 12c: Installation and Administration. The OCA certification track also allows for several alternate exams which can be substituted for 1Z0-061. ORACLE CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL (OCP) Building on the competencies in the Oracle Database 12c OCA certification, the Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) for Oracle Database 12c certification includes advanced knowledge and skills required of top-performing database administrators. The OCP credential focuses on developing and implementing backup and recovery strategies, designing consolidation strategies to exploit multitenant container and pluggable databases, and thorough understanding how CDB/PDBs fit into the DBaaS cloud-computing model. Today, Oracle is releasing 1Z0-060 - Upgrade to Oracle Database 12c, which allows Oracle Certified Professionals with credentials in Oracle 9i, Oracle Database 10g or Oracle Database 11g to upgrade to Oracle Database 12c with a single exam. The upgrade exam focuses on designing consolidation strategies to exploit multitenant container and pluggable databases, implementing Oracle 12c feature-rich ILM support, optimizing SQL execution using dynamic swapping of sub plans, implementing real-time data redaction within databases, as well as exploiting many additional performance, backup and recovery, security and partitioning enhancements. The exam also includes a thorough review of core DBA skills. Visit the OCP certification track for more details on the new upgrade exam as well as alternate certification paths. ORACLE CERTIFIED MASTER (OCM) The Oracle Certified Master (OCM) for Oracle Database 12c - a very challenging and elite top-level certification - certifies the most highly skilled and experienced database experts. Further information on the 12c OCM level will be announced as exam development concludes. To date, there have been more than 1.6 million Oracle certifications granted worldwide. Explore these certification tracks, exam requirements and objectives, and start toward earning your exciting new Oracle Database 12c certification credentials from Oracle.

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• Sony VAIO with Insyde H2O EFI bios will not boot into GRUB EFI

  - by Rohan Dhruva

  I bought a new Sony Vaio S series laptop. It uses Insyde H2O BIOS EFI, and trying to install Linux on it is driving me crazy. root@kubuntu:~# parted /dev/sda print Model: ATA Hitachi HTS72756 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 640GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 274MB 273MB fat32 EFI system partition hidden 2 274MB 20.8GB 20.6GB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag 3 20.8GB 21.1GB 273MB fat32 EFI system partition boot 4 21.1GB 21.3GB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres 5 21.3GB 342GB 320GB ntfs Basic data partition 6 342GB 358GB 16.1GB ext4 Basic data partition 7 358GB 374GB 16.1GB ntfs Basic data partition 8 374GB 640GB 266GB ntfs Basic data partition What is surprising is that there are 2 EFI system partitions on the disk. The sda2 partition is a 20gb recovery partition which loads windows with a basic recovery interface. This is accessible by pressing the "ASSIST" button as opposed to the normal power button. I presume that the sda1 EFI System Partition (ESP) loads into this recovery. The sda3 ESP has more fleshed out entries for Microsoft Windows, which actually goes into Windows 7 (as confirmed by bcdedit.exe on Windows). Ubuntu is installed on sda6, and while installation I chose sda3 as my boot partition. The installer correctly created a sda3/EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi application. The real problem: for the life of me, I can't set it to be the default! I tried creating a sda3/startup.nsh which called grubx64.efi, but it didn't help -- on rebooting, the system still boots into windows. I tried using efibootmgr, and that shows as it it worked: root@kubuntu:~# efibootmgr BootCurrent: 0000 BootOrder: 0000,0001 Boot0000* EFI USB Device Boot0001* Windows Boot Manager root@kubuntu:~# efibootmgr --create --gpt --disk /dev/sda --part 3 --write-signature --label "GRUB2" --loader "\\EFI\\ubuntu\\grubx64.efi" BootCurrent: 0000 BootOrder: 0002,0000,0001 Boot0000* EFI USB Device Boot0001* Windows Boot Manager Boot0002* GRUB2 root@kubuntu:~# efibootmgr BootCurrent: 0000 BootOrder: 0002,0000,0001 Boot0000* EFI USB Device Boot0001* Windows Boot Manager Boot0002* GRUB2 However, on rebooting, as you guessed, the machine rebooted directly back into Windows. The only things I can think of are: The sda1 partition is somehow being used Overwrite /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi and /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi with grubx64.efi [but this seems really radical]. Can anyone please help me out? Thanks -- any help is greatly appreciated, as this issue is driving me crazy!

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• links for 2010-04-22

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Barry N. Perkins: Unique Business Value vs. Unique IT "Some solutions may look good today, solving a budget challenge by reducing cost, or solving a specific tactical challenge, but result in highly complex environments, that may be difficult to manage and maintain and limit the future potential of your business. Put differently, some solutions might push today's challenge into the future, resulting in a more complex and expensive solution." -- Barry N. Perkins, VP Oracle Modernization & Oracle Integrated Solutions (tags: oracle otn enterprisearchitecture modernization) Paul Homchick: The Information Driven Value Chain - Part 2 Paul Homchick continues his series with a look "at the way investments have been made in enterprise software in an effort to create and manage value, and how systems are moving from a controlled-process approach design towards gathering and using dynamically using information." (tags: oracle otn enterprisearchitecture) @vambenepe: The battle of the Cloud Frameworks: Application Servers redux? "The battle of the Cloud Frameworks has started," says William Vambenepe, "and it will look a lot like the battle of the Application Servers which played out over the last decade and a half." (tags: oracle otn cloud frameworks appserver) @ORACLENERD: COLLABORATE: Day 4 Wrap Up Oraclenerd feesses up: "The day started out with the realization that I pulled off the best (COLLABORATE - self annointed) prank ever. Twitter was...all atwitter about the fact that Mark Rittman was Oracle's Person of the Year. Of course it wasn't true. If you look at the picture, you'll realize that he's wearing exactly the same clothes in the magazine cover as he is in real life." (tags: collaborate2010 oracleace) Oracle's Hal Stern at Cloud Expo: "We've Moved from 'What' to 'How'" | Cloud Computing Journal "Hal also spoke a bit about building 'a sustainable IT model.' By this, he said he didn't mean the various Green IT and similar efforts that 'are all about data center efficiency. I think the operational model is just as important. Many enterprises are managing a tremendous amount of complexity, and it's hard to make this sustainable.'" -- Cloud News Desk (tags: oracle cloud cloudexpo halstern) @ORACLENERD: COLLABORATE: The Beach Party "Then tiki statues somehow were incorporated into various dances" -- Oracle ACE Chet "oraclenerd" Justice (tags: 0racle otn oracleace collaborate2010 oaug ioug lasvegas) David Andrews: Collaborate Day Two "Collaborate 2010 has focused on helping attendees understand what is already available and how to make more effective use of it. This does not sound exciting but it is extremely valuable. Most customers use only a small fraction of the capability of the products they already own. Helping them understand all the additional things they could be doing without buying anything more is very valuable." -- David Andrews (tags: oracle oaug collaborate2010 ioug)

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• ASP.Net 4.5 Garbage Collection Improvement

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/06/24/asp.net-4.5-garbage-collection-improvement.aspxI just read Five Great .NET Framework 4.5 Features on CodeProject by Shivprasad koirala. Feature 5 in his article mentions the GC background cleanup and has a good explanation of the work the GC has to do for ASP.Net on the server. “Garbage collector is one real heavy task in a .NET application. And it becomes heavier when it is an ASP.NET application. ASP.NET applications run on the server and a lot of clients send requests to the server thus creating loads of objects, making the GC really work hard for cleaning up unwanted objects.” “To overcome the above problem, server GC was introduced. In server GC there is one more thread created which runs in the background. This thread works in the background and keeps cleaning…objects thus minimizing the load on the main GC thread. Due to double GC threads running, the main application threads are less suspended, thus increasing application throughput. To enable server GC, we need to use the gcServer XML tag and enable it to true.” <configuration> <runtime> <gcServer enabled="true"/> </runtime> </configuration> This is not done by default. The MSDN information page says “There are only two garbage collection options, workstation or server. For single-processor computers, the default workstation garbage collection should be the fastest option. Either workstation or server can be used for two-processor computers. Server garbage collection should be the fastest option for more than two processors. Use the GCSettingsIsServerGC property to determine if server garbage collection is enabled.” “In the .NET Framework 4 and earlier versions, concurrent garbage collection is not available when server garbage collection is enabled. Starting with the .NET Framework 4.5, server garbage collection is concurrent. To use non-concurrent server garbage collection, set the <gcServer> element to true and the <gcConcurrent> element to false. “ So if you’re using ASP.Net 4.5 and have a multi-core server, you should try turning on the Server Garbage Collection and do some profiling to see if it improves the performance of your site.

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• Detecting if someone is in a room in your house and sending you an email.

  - by mbcrump

  Let me setup this scenario: You are selling your house. You have small children. (Possibly 2 rug rats or more) The real estate company calls and says they have a showing for your house between the hours of 3pm-6pm. You have to keep the children occupied. You realize this is the 5th time you have shown your house this week. What is a programmer to do?……Setup a webcam, find a motion detection software that has support to launch a program and of course, Visual Studio 2010. First, comes the tools Some sort of webcam, I chose the WinBook because a friend of mine loaned it to me. It is a basic USB2.0 camera that supports 640x480 without software.  Next up was find webcam software that supports launching a program. WebcamXP support this. VS 2010 Console Application. A cell phone that you can check your email. You may be asking, why write code to send the email when a lot of commercial software motion detection packages include that as base functionality. Well, first it cost money and second I don’t want the picture of the person as that probably invades privacy and as a future buyer, I don’t want someone recording me in their house. Now onto the show... First, the code part. We are going to create a VS2010 or whatever version you have installed and use the following code snippet. Code Snippet using System; using System.Net.Mail; using System.Net;     namespace MotionDetectionEmailer {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             try             {                 MailMessage m = new MailMessage                    ("[email protected]",                     "[email protected]",                     "Motion Detected at " + DateTime.Now,                     "Someone is in the downstairs basement.");                 SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("smtp.charter.net");                 client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("mbcrump", "NOTTELLINGYOU");                 client.Send(m);             }               catch (SmtpException ex)             {                 Console.WriteLine("Who cares?? " + ex.ToString());             }         }       } } Second, Download and install wecamxp and select the option to launch an external program and you are finished. Now, when you are at MCDonalds and can check your email on your phone, you will see when they entered the house and you can go back home without waiting the full 3 hours. --- NICE!

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• SQL SERVER – Preserve Leading Zero While Coping to Excel from SSMS

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I wrote two articles about how to efficiently copy data from SSMS to Excel. Since I wrote that post there are plenty of interest generated on this subject. There are a few questions I keep on getting over this subject. One of the question is how to get the leading zero preserved while copying the data from SSMS to Excel. Well it is almost the same way as my earlier post SQL SERVER – Excel Losing Decimal Values When Value Pasted from SSMS ResultSet. The key here is in EXCEL and not in SQL Server. The step here is to change the format of Excel Cell to Text from Numbers and that will preserve the value of the with leading or trailing Zeros in Excel. However, I assume this is done for display purpose only because once you convert column to Text you may find it difficult to do numeric operations over the column for example Aggregation, Average etc. If you need to do the same you should either convert the columns back to Numeric in Excel or do the process in Database and export the same value as along with it as well. However, I have seen in requirement in the real world where the user has to have a numeric value with leading Zero values in it for display purpose. Here is my suggestion, instead of manipulating numeric value in the database and converting it to character value the ideal thing to do is to store it as a numeric value only in the database. Whatever changes you want to do for display purpose should be handled at the time of the display using the format function of SQL or Application Language. Honestly, database is data layer and presentation is presentation layer – they are two different things and if possible they should not be mixed. If due to any reason you cannot follow above advise and you need is to have append leading zeros in the database only here are two of my previous articles I suggest you to refer them. I am open to learn new tricks as these articles are almost three years old. Please share your opinion and suggestions in the comments area. SQL SERVER – Pad Ride Side of Number with 0 – Fixed Width Number Display SQL SERVER – UDF – Pad Ride Side of Number with 0 – Fixed Width Number Display Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Excel

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• Installing Forms and Reports on a development system

  - by Duncan Mills

  By popular demand I've resurrected / updated one of the old blog postings from Jan Carlin's Blog on GroundSide here. A recent (lengthy) post on the Forms forums chronicles the problems some of you have had installing F&R on a development machine. See the link in the headline of this post for the main one. When installing, here are some points to bear in mind: Download and install Weblogic Server first. http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/middleware/index.htmlFind the Forms and Reports (and Disco and Portal) zip files here. Download them to the desktop (or some other temporary directory of your choosing). Unzip both of the two zip files into the same new directory (maybe called 'stage') and check that you have 4 directories in the stage dir when you are finished unzipping: 'Disk1', 'Disk2', 'Disk3' and 'Disk4'. These folders are specified in the zip file structure and must be preserved for the setup executable to work. If you use WinZip and have a right click menu option that say "Extract to here", use that by right click-dragging the zip file onto the newly created directory. Don't use the "Extract to folder %HOME%\Desktop\ofm_pfrd...disk_1of2" option. That will get you into the trouble that was reported early in this thread. Free up as much memory as you can. Stop services and background processes and virus scanners and databases (you don't need a DB to install Forms) and other things lurking about on your machine. You can restart them when the install is done. Around 1.5 GB free real memory should do it. If it doesn't, free up more if you can. Don't change the swap space unless you know what you are doing. Let Windows handle it. A 1 GB machine will likely not be enough. You will likely need at least 2GB of RAM.Start the install with setup.exe from the 'Disk1' directoryChoose the Install and Configure option unless you have a good reason not to.Choose a unique instance name even if you deinstalled and removed the last install. I suggest using 'asinst_20090722_1' (today's date in ISO format with a running incremented number at the end if you install more than two times on a particular day).Unselect Portal and Discoverer and select the Builders you want.Unselect WebCacheUnselect OHS.Unselect the single sign-on option Check for any failures and choose the retry option if any occur. If that doesn't fix the problem, call Oracle Customer Support .

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• Overview of getting and setting the URL and parts of the URL using angularjs and/or Javascript

  - by Sandy Good

  Getting and Setting the URL, and different parts of the URL are a basic part of Application Design. For Page Navigation Deep Linking Providing a link to the user Querying Data Passing information to other pages Both angularjs and javascript provide ways to get/set the URL and parts of the URL. I'm looking for the following information: Situation: Show a simple URL in the browser address bar to the user Provide a more detailed URL with string parameters to the page that the user will not see. In other words, two different URLs will be used, one simple one that the user sees in the browser, a more detailed one available to the page on load. Get URL info with PHP when then page intially loads, both don't reload the PHP page when the user needs more detailed info that is already loaded but not displayed yet. Set the URL with a more detailed URL for deep linking as the user drills down to more specific information. Get URL info in a controller or JavaSript when angularjs detects a change in the URL with routing. Hash or Query String or Both? Should I use a hash # in the URL, a string ?= or both? Here is what I currently know and what I want: A Query String HTTP:\\www.name.com?mykey=itemID will prevent angularjs from reloading the page. So, I can change the URL by adding/changing the string at the end, thereby providing new info to the page, and keep the page from reloading. I can change the URL and force a page reload with: window.location.href = "#Store/" + argUserPubId + "?itemID=home"; If home is the itemID string, I want code to simply load the page, and not display more detailed information. If there is a real itemID in the URL query string, I want the code to display the more detailed information. Code from angularjs will run either from the controller specified in the routing, or a controller specified in the HTML, or both. The angularjs code specified in the routing seems to run first, before the code specified in the HTML. A different URL for the page can be used in angularjs templateURL: than the URL that was sent to the browser address bar. when('/Store/:StoreId', { templateUrl: function(params){return 'Client_Pages/Stores.php?storeID=' + params.StoreId;}, controller: 'storeParseData' }). The above code detects http:\\www.name.com\Store\StoreID in the browser, but SENDS http:\\www.name.com\Client_Pages/Stores.php?storeID=StoreID to the page. In the above code, a function is used for the angularjs routing templateURL: to dynamically set the templateURL. So, when the user clicks something to see details of an item, how should I configure the URL? Should I use angularjs $location or window.location.href ? Should I use a longer URL with more parameters, a hash bang, or a query string? Should I use: http:\\www.name.com\Store\StoreID\ItemID or http:\\www.name.com\Store\StoreID#ItemID or http:\\www.name.com\Store\StoreID?ItemID or http:\\www.name.com\Store#StoreID?ItemID or Something else?

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• Problem booting Windows after failed installation Ubuntu 12.04 alongside Windows 7

  - by Tassos

  I tried to install in my laptop Ubuntu 12.04 so that I can dual-boot with Windows 7. I made some mistakes during this process and I didn't manage to install Ubuntu. But my real problem now is that I'm afraid that I also destroyed the installation of Windows 7. Your help would be precious for me. Here are the details of what I did: 1) I followed these instructions to dual boot Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/05/17/how-to-dual-boot-ubuntu-12-04-and-windows-7/ The only difference from what is described above, is that in my case the device names where: /dev/mapper/isw_fdjdhbadc_Volume0* instead of: /dev/sda* Note that I had created a bootable USB stick to do that. 2) The installation proceeded normally, but in the end I got a fatal error because the grub-install failed. 3) Then, after googling this problem, I runned ubuntu from the USB stick and run this command: sudo grub-install --root-directory=/home/ubuntu/temp /dev/mapper/isw_fdjdhbadc_Volume0p5 (/isw_fdjdhbadc_Volume0p5 was the partition that I had made for /boot) but this command also failed. 4) Then, I did something stupid (I think): I run the above command as: sudo grub-install --root-directory=/home/ubuntu/temp /dev/mapper/isw_fdjdhbadc_Volume0 namely I tried to install grub in the device isw_fdjdhbadc_Volume0 instead of the boot partition isw_fdjdhbadc_Volume0p5 The above command did not fail and was executed ok. 5) After that, I tried to boot my laptop, but it seemed that I had no operation system. Not even windows were detected. 6) I thought that I should uninstall grub from isw_fdjdhbadc_Volume0. So following some online instructions that I found, I booted again Ubuntu from the USB stick and run the following command (this was stupid since the instructions were for a totally different case than mine): sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/isw_fdjdhbadc_Volume0 bs=446 count=1 Afte that, I was still unable to boot Windows. I realize that I deleted something that I shouldn't, but I'm hope that this is not crucial and I can recover somehow. When I boot Ubuntu from the USB, I can see that the partition with Windows is still there, with all the directories, Windows files, my data etc. So, my question is: Is there a way to undo the mistakes that I desribed above and recover Windows 7? This is my major question. After solving that, I'd also like to know what I did wrong with the installation of Ubuntu. Thanks in advance for you valuable help!

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• PASS 13 Dispatches: moving to the cloud

  - by Tony Davis

  PASS Summit 13, Day 1 keynote by Quentin Clarke and we're hearing about “redefiniing mission critical in the cloud”. With a move to the Windows Azure cloud comes the promise of capacity on demand, automatic HA, backups, patching and so on, as well as passing responsibility to MS for managing hardware, upgrades and so on. However, for many databases and applications the best route to the cloud is not necessarily obvious. For most, the path of least resistance is IaaS – SQL Server in a Azure VM. It removes the hardware burden but you still have to manage your databases and implementing HA for SQL Server is your responsibility. Also, scaling up comes at quite a cost – the biggest VM (8 CPU cores, 56 GB RAM, 16 1TB drives with 500 IOPS each) weighs in at over over $4500 per month. With PaaS, in the form of Windows SQL Database, you get a “3-copies replica set” so HA comes out-of the box, and removes the majority of the administration burden, but you are moving your database into a very different environment. For a start, it's a shared environment, with other customers using the same compute nodes in the cluster, and potentially even sharing the same database (multi-tenancy). Unless you pay for SQL DB Premium edition, the resources available for your workload will depends on how nicely others “play” in the shared environment. You'll potentially need to do a lot of tuning, and application rewriting to avoid throttling issues, optimising application-database communication to deal with increased latency between the two, and so on. You'll need aggressive application caching. You'll also need retry logic and to deal with (expected) node failure and the need to reconnect. In Tuesday's PASS Summit pre-con from the SQLCAT team, they spent a lot of time covering some of the telemetric techniques (collect into Azure storage the necessary monitoring data) to perform capacity planning, work out the hotspots and bottlenecks in your cloud applications. Tools like WAD (Windows Azure Diagnostics), performance counters SQL Database DMVs, and others, will be essential. Of course, to truly exploit the vast horizontal scaling that is available from the existence of thousands of compute nodes, you'll also need to need to consider how to “shard” your data so Azure can move it between nodes at will. Finding the right path to the Cloud isn't easy, but it's coming. I spoke to people one year ago who saw no real benefit in trying to move their infrastructure and databases to the cloud, but now at their company, it's the conversation that won't go away. Tony.  

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• Before the Summit of 2012

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  Today, Monday, was the first day of the PASS Summit Preconference training events, but instead I spent the day at the free SQL in the City event put on by Red Gate. For me this was not a financial decision (pre-con sessions cost extra above the general Summit registration) but rather a matter of interest.  I had already included money for pre-cons in this year’s training budget, but none of them really stood out to me, so even if the Red-Gate event were not going on at the same time, I probably would not have gone to any pre-cons this year.  However, the topics being presented at the SQL in the City event were of great interest to me.  There promised to be good information on Continuous Integration and automated deployment of database changes, which lately has been a real hot topic at my work.  And indeed, Red-Gate announced the release of a new tool (still in Early Access Program…a.k.a. Beta) which is called the Deployment Manager.  Since we are in the middle of a TFS implementation project, it will be interesting to see how this plays out and compares to what we put together with the automated builds in TFS.  But, as I understand it, the primary focus of Deployment Manager is not to be the Build process (Red Gate uses JetBrains’ Team City for that in their shop) but rather to aid in the deployment of those build packages, as well as providing easy rollback and a good visualization of which versions of software are in which environments.  It looks promising and I’ve already downloaded the installer package to play with it later. Overall, I was quite impressed with the SQL in the City event.  Having heard many current and past members of the PASS Board of Directors describe the challenges of putting on a large conference, and the growing pains that the PASS Summit has gone through, I am even more impressed that the Red Gate event ran as smoothly as it did.  And it is quite impressive the amount of money that Red Gate must have spent given that this was a no-charge event to attend, they had a very nice hot lunch, and the after-event drinks celebration.  Well done, folks! Of course it was great to hear from a variety of speakers.  Today I listened to some folks from Red Gate like Grant Fritchey (blog | @GFritchey) and David Atkinson (Product Manager for SQL Source Control and now the Deployment Manager tool set); and also Brent Ozar (blog | @BrentO) and Buck Woody (blog | @BuckWoody).  By the way, if you have never seen either Brent or Buck speak, you really should.  Different styles, but both are very entertaining and educational at the same time.  I love Buck’s sense of humor (here’s a tip…don’t be late to Buck’s session or you’ll become part of the presentation) and I praise Brent’s slides.  Brent’s style very much reminds me of that espoused by Garr Reynolds on his Presentation Zen blog (and book) and I am impressed that he can make a technical presentation so engaging. It was a great day, a great way to kick off the week, and I am excited to get into the full Summit!

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• Freshen the RTS genre

  - by William Michael Thorley

  This isn't really a question, but a request for feedback. RPS (Rock, Paper, Scissors) RTS (Real Time Strategy) Demo version is out: The game is simple. It is an RTS. Why has it been made? Many if not most RTS’s are about economy and large numbers of unit types. The genre hasn’t actually developed the gameplay drastically from the very first RTS’s produced, some lesson have been learned, but the games are really very similar to how they have always been. RPS brings new gameplay to the RTS genre. Through three means: • New combat mechanics: RPS has two unique modes (as well as the old favourite) of resolving weapon fire. These change how combat happens, and make application of the correct units vital to success. From this comes the requirement to run Intel on your enemies. • Fixed Resource Economy: Each player has a fixed amount of energy, This means that there is a definite end to the game. You can attrition your enemy and try to outlast them, or try to outspend your opponent and destroy them. There is a limit to how fast ships can be built, through the generation of construction blocks, but energy is the fast limit on economy. • Game Modes: Game modes add victory conditions and new game pieces. The game is overseen by a controller which literally runs the game. Games are no longer line them up, gun them down. This means that new tactics must be played making skirmish games fresh with novel tactics without adding huge amounts of new game units to learn. I’ve produced RPS from the ground. I will be running a kickstarter in the near future, but right now I want feedback and input from the game developing community. Regarding the concepts, where RPS is going, the game modes, the combat mechanics. How it plays. RPS will give fresh gameplay to the genre so it must be right. It works over the internet or a LAN and supports single player games. Get it. Play it. Tell me about your games. Thank you Demo: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/51850113/RPS%20Playtest.zip Tutorials: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/51850113/RPSGamePlay.zip

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