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• Single page not appearing in Google Search

  - by Dan

  Description I have a static franchise website which has various sub pages each dedicated to an individual franchisee. For each franchisee the page, the only thing slightly similar between all of them are the page titles, they follow this structure: <title> Welcome to THE_COMPANY - PRODUCT_DESCRIPTION Services, THE_LOCATION </title> THE_COMPANY and PRODUCT_DESCRIPTION are the same across all franchisees, however THE_LOCATION changes depeding on where they are located in the UK. Each franchisee page has the following <meta /> tags: <meta name="DC.creator" content="user"/> <meta name="DC.format" content="text/html"/> <meta name="DC.language" content="en"/> <meta name="DC.date.modified" content="2014-01-23T11:22:31+00:00"/> <meta name="DC.date.created" content="2014-01-23T11:22:09+00:00"/> <meta name="DC.type" content="Page"/> <meta name="DC.distribution" content="Global"/> <meta name="robots" content="ALL"/> <meta name="distribution" content="Global"/> The main content on each franchisee page is completely different. The Problem There is one particular franchisee page, located in Area A.. Which will not appear in Google Search results at all. However every single other franchisee (if you Google Search for "THE_COMPANY, THE_LOCATION" is number 1). And if I do the same search on Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, the Area A franchisee is the first result on all of them. Has Google for some reason black listed one page on the site? What I Have Tried Ensuring the page is referenced in my sitemap.xml file 'Fetching as Google Bot' the link www.the_company.co.uk/areaa When that came back as OK I would submit to index Resubmitting the sitemap.xml file in Webmaster Tools Linking to the Area A page from another pages content For this I also waited about 3 weeks before checking again to give Google time to re-index Making a change to the page content and waiting another 2 / 3 weeks Removing the page completely and recreating it with an alternative URL The closest thing I have found to this issue is this StackOverflow question but this particular franchisee has existed for almost a year, it used to appear on Google searches however no longer does. I'm guessing the Panda update wasn't too happy with something on the page, but it hasn't effected anything else on the site and I am at a loss for things to try. I would greatly appreciate any information or thoughts as to what could have caused this Thanks. Update In line with Daniel Fukudas answer below, I have followed some of his steps but everything seems to check out alright: HTTP Headers HTTP/1.1 200 OK => Date => Tue, 25 Feb 2014 16:31:29 GMT Server => Zope/(2.12.16, python 2.6.6, linux2) ZServer/1.1 Content-Length => 40078 Expires => Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT Content-Type => text/html;charset=utf-8 Content-Language => en Vary => Accept-Encoding Connection => close Robots <meta /> tag: <meta name="robots" content="ALL"/> I have updated this <meta /> tag to read content="INDEX" instead now. robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*sendto_form$ Disallow: /*folder_factories$ Using site:THE_COMPANY.co.uk: Searching for 'AREA A site:THE_COMPANY.co.uk' does not return the page, but regardless of that searching just for site:THE_COMPANY.co.uk will not necessarily return every indexed page, or so I understand... Update It appears Google likes to drop pages every now and then from the index, despite my steps above, I left the site alone and the page appeared back in the SERPs by itself.

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• Know Your Service Request Status

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document To monitor a Service Request or not to monitor a Service Request... That should never be the question Monitoring the Service Requests you create is an essential part of the process to resolve your issue when you work with a Support Engineer. If you monitor your Service Request, you know at all times where it is in the process, or to be more specific, you know at all times what action the Support Engineer has taken on your request and what the next step is. When you think about it, it is rather simple... Oracle Support is working the issue, Oracle Development is working the issue, or you are. When you check on the status, you may find that the Support Engineer has a question for you or the engineer is waiting for more information to resolve the issue. If you monitor the Service Request, and respond quickly, the process keeps moving, and you’ll get your answer more quickly. Monitoring a Service Request is easy. All you need to do is check the status codes that the Support Engineer or the system assigns to your Service Request. These status codes are not static. You will see that during the life of your Service request, it will go through a variety of status codes. The best advice I can offer you when you monitor your Service Request is to watch the codes. If the status is not changing, or if you are not getting responses back within the agreed timeframes, you should review the action plan the Support Engineer has outlined or talk about a new action plan. Here are the most common status codes: Work in Progress indicates that your Support Engineer is researching and working the issue. Development Working means that you have a code related issue and Oracle Support has submitted a bug to Development. Please pay a particular attention to the following statuses; they indicate that the Support Engineer is waiting for a response from you: Customer Working usually means that your Support Engineer needs you to collect additional information, needs you to try something or to apply a patch, or has more questions for you. Solution Offered indicates that the Support Engineer has identified the problem and has provided you with a solution. Auto-Close or Close Initiated are statuses you don’t want to see. Monitoring your Service Request helps prevent your issues from reaching these statuses. They usually indicate that the Support Engineer did not receive the requested information or action from you. This is important. If you fail to respond, the Support Engineer will attempt to contact you three times over a two-week period. If these attempts are unsuccessful, he or she will initiate the Auto-Close process. At the end of this additional two-week period, if you have not updated the Service Request, your Service Request is considered abandoned and the Support Engineer will assign a Customer Abandoned status. A Support Engineer doesn’t like to see this status, since he or she has been working to solve your issue, but we know our customers dislike it even more, since it means their issue is not moving forward. You can avoid delays in resolving your issue by monitoring your Service Request and acting quickly when you see the status change. Respond to the request from the engineer to answer questions, collect information, or to try the offered solution. Then the Support Engineer can continue working the issue and the Service Request keeps moving forward towards resolution. Keep in mind that if you take an extended period of time to respond to a request or to provide the information requested, the Support Engineer cannot take the next step. You may inadvertently send an implicit message about the problem’s urgency that may not match the Service Request priority, and your need for an answer. Help us help you. We want to get you the answer as quickly as possible so you can stay focused on your company’s objectives. Now, back to our initial question. To monitor Service Requests or not to monitor Service Requests? I think the answer is clear: yes, monitor your Service Request to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

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• SQL SERVER – Unable to DELETE Project in Data Quality Projects (DQS)

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the email which made me write this blog post. When I write a blog post I write keeping in mind that if the developer is not familiar with the concept he will attempt this on the development server. If due to any reason you attempt it on any other server than your personal server, developer should make sure to have complete confidence on his own expertise and understand the risk behind it.  Well, let us read the email which I received. I have modified it a bit to remove information related to organizational and individual. “I just read your blog post on Beginning DQS. I went ahead and followed every single screenshot and it worked fine. I was able to execute the DQS project successfully. However, the same blog post got me in trouble – a serious trouble. After first successful deployment I went ahead and created a few of my own knowledge base and projects. I played around a bit and then decided to get back to real work. Now we had deployed DQS on production server only, so experiment on production server. Now, when I got back to my work, I forgot to close all the windows. My manager found the window open and have seen my test projects. He has asked me to delete my experiments immediately and have said words which I cannot write to you. Here is the problem. I am not able to delete the project which I have created earlier. I am able to open it and play with it but the delete option is disabled and grayed out (see attached image). Now I believe there is nothing wrong with this project as it was just a test project. Would you please write to my manager that it is not harmful to leave that project there as it is? It is also not using any resources. I think he will believe you.” As I said this kind of email makes me uncomfortable. I do not want someone to execute anything on production server. I often write notes and disclaimer on my post when something is dangerous to execute on production server. However, if someone is not expert with SQL Server and attempts something new on production server, I think the major issue is here with the person (admin) who gave new developer permission to production server. This has to be carefully avoided. Here was my response to the individual. “I cannot write to your manager anything as he has not asked me anything. Honestly I believe he is correct in his behavior as you should have not executed anything on the production server without prior approval and testing on the development server. Any R&D must be done on local box or development box. I suggest you request your manager to prevent access to users who does not need access. If he is a good manager, he might have already implemented by now recent event. I also see your screenshot. Here is the issue: While you were playing with project, you might have closed the project half the way, without completing it. Due to the same reason it is locked. You can open and continue from the same place where you have left the project. If you do not need the project any more. Right click on it, click on unlock the project. This will enable the DELETE option and now you can delete the project. Next time, be safe out there. It may be dangerous to have admin access to production server when not needed.“ I have yet not heard from him but I believe he will take my words positively. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Data Quality Services, DQS

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• Development Quirk From ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation

  - by jkauffman

  The Problem I got a compilation error in my ASP.NET MVC3 project that tested my sanity today. (As always, names are changed to protect the innocent) The type or namespace name 'FishViewModel' does not exist in the namespace 'Company.Product.Application.Models' (are you missing an assembly reference?) Sure looks easy! There must be something in the project referring to a FishViewModel. The Confusing Part The first thing I noticed was the that error was occuring in a folder clearly not in my project and in files that I definitely had not created: %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\(versionNumber)\Temporary ASP.NET Files\ App_Web_mezpfjae.1.cs I also ascertained these facts, each of which made me more confused than the last: Rebuild and Clean had no effect. No controllers in the project ever returned a ViewResult using FishViewModel. No views in the project defined that they use FishViewModel. Searching across all files included in the project for “FishViewModel” provided no results. The build server did not report a problem. The Solution The problem stemmed from a file that was not included in the project but still present on the file system: (By the way, if you don’t know this trick already, there is a toolbar button in the Solution Explorer window to “Show All Files” which allows you to see files all files in the file system) In my situation, I was working on the mission-critical Fish view before abandoning the feature. Instead of deleting the file, I excluded it from the project. However, this was a bad move. It caused the build failure, and in order to fix the error, this file must be deleted. By the way, this file was not in source control, so the build server did not have it. This explains why my build server did not report a problem for me. The Explanation So, what’s going on? This file isn’t even a part of the project, so why is it failing the build? This is a behavior of the ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation. This is the same process that occurs when deploying a webpage; ASP.NET compiles the web application’s code. When this occurs on a production server, it has to do so without the .csproj file (which isn’t usually deployed, if you’ve taken your time to do a deployment cleanly). This process has merely the file system available to identify what to compile. So, back in the world of developing the webpage in visual studio on my developer box, I run into the situation because the same process is occuring there. This is true even though I have more files on my machine than will actually get deployed. I can’t help but think that this error could be attributed back to the real culprit file (Fish.cshtml, rather than the temporary files) with some work, but at least the error had enough information in it to narrow it down. The Conclusion I had previously been accustomed to the idea that for c# projects, the .csproj file always “defines” the build behavior. This investigation has taught me that I’ll need to shift my thinking a bit to remember that the file system has the final say when it comes to web applications, even on the developer’s machine!

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• SQL Server Optimizer Malfunction?

  - by Tony Davis

  There was a sharp intake of breath from the audience when Adam Machanic declared the SQL Server optimizer to be essentially "stuck in 1997". It was during his fascinating "Query Tuning Mastery: Manhandling Parallelism" session at the recent PASS SQL Summit. Paraphrasing somewhat, Adam (blog | @AdamMachanic) offered a convincing argument that the optimizer often delivers flawed plans based on assumptions that are no longer valid with today’s hardware. In 1997, when Microsoft engineers re-designed the database engine for SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server got its initial implementation of a cost-based optimizer. Up to SQL Server 2000, the developer often had to deploy a steady stream of hints in SQL statements to combat the occasionally wilful plan choices made by the optimizer. However, with each successive release, the optimizer has evolved and improved in its decision-making. It is still prone to the occasional stumble when we tackle difficult problems, join large numbers of tables, perform complex aggregations, and so on, but for most of us, most of the time, the optimizer purrs along efficiently in the background. Adam, however, challenged further any assumption that the current optimizer is competent at providing the most efficient plans for our more complex analytical queries, and in particular of offering up correctly parallelized plans. He painted a picture of a present where complex analytical queries have become ever more prevalent; where disk IO is ever faster so that reads from disk come into buffer cache faster than ever; where the improving RAM-to-data ratio means that we have a better chance of finding our data in cache. Most importantly, we have more CPUs at our disposal than ever before. To get these queries to perform, we not only need to have the right indexes, but also to be able to split the data up into subsets and spread its processing evenly across all these available CPUs. Improvements such as support for ColumnStore indexes are taking things in the right direction, but, unfortunately, deficiencies in the current Optimizer mean that SQL Server is yet to be able to exploit properly all those extra CPUs. Adam’s contention was that the current optimizer uses essentially the same costing model for many of its core operations as it did back in the days of SQL Server 7, based on assumptions that are no longer valid. One example he gave was a "slow disk" bias that may have been valid back in 1997 but certainly is not on modern disk systems. Essentially, the optimizer assesses the relative cost of serial versus parallel plans based on the assumption that there is no IO cost benefit from parallelization, only CPU. It assumes that a single request will saturate the IO channel, and so a query would not run any faster if we parallelized IO because the disk system simply wouldn’t be able to handle the extra pressure. As such, the optimizer often decides that a serial plan is lower cost, often in cases where a parallel plan would improve performance dramatically. It was challenging and thought provoking stuff, as were his techniques for driving parallelism through query logic based on subsets of rows that define the "grain" of the query. I highly recommend you catch the session if you missed it. I’m interested to hear though, when and how often people feel the force of the optimizer’s shortcomings. Barring mistakes, such as stale statistics, how often do you feel the Optimizer fails to find the plan you think it should, and what are the most common causes? Is it fighting to induce it toward parallelism? Combating unexpected plans, arising from table partitioning? Something altogether more prosaic? Cheers, Tony.

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• User password rejected on login screen but accepted on text console login

  - by MadsirR

  I had to force shutdown my Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, after which I restarted and tried to log in as a normal user, which was rejected several times. I then logged in as guest and tty to my regular account with use of my normal password, which succeeded. (So the password is still valid.) How can I gain access again via the normal login procedure (welcome screen)? Update: When I tried to log on with my new password, it again was denied. When I deliberately tried to log on with a faulty password, an error message came back, saying: Access denied - wrong password. I suppose, the first time the password was not rejected, but the procedure was aborted for some reason. Some additional info after trying to find a solution: I am conviced it is a Compiz-issue. Why? before this happened, all sessions came to a grinding halt, regardless of being logged on in a 2D or 3d environment. I found a link saying that I should remove Compiz and proceed in a 2D environment, which initiall worked without a glitch, until my system went into a state of total obivium. Only after that, the above mentioned troubles appeared. In the meantime I have happened to find a thread with reference 17381, describing exactly what I have experienced. For now, I will try to cure this situation (later this week) and revert with the results, hopefully to close this post. In the meantime I cordially thank you all, even if you didn't kill the problem; you gave me the inspiration to look further and find a possible cure. Update2: After 15 hrs of trial-and-error I callled it quits (When I decided to tackle this problem, I've given myself 12 hrs, to avoid massive loss of time.) I decided to re-install Precise, since the "point 1" version has become availabe. Log-in is back to normal, as is the graphic environment. Response to mouse input is stil appalling, especially when I have a series of screens open as "children"of a "parent" screen. It still completely locks up. I have installed Enlightenment, Gnome classic, Gnome 3, Cinnamon and they all behave in a similar fashion. FOR THOSE WHO NEED A WAY-OUT IN SITUATIONS OF THE LIKE: Open a terminal with [Ctrl+Alt+F2]. Type [sudo killall Firefox] (or whatever application you wish to terminate). Key in your password. Return to your graphical screen with [Ctrl+Alt+F7], and Bob's your uncle. Just re-open Firefox like nothing happened. Next time you are stuck: [Ctrl+Alt+F2], upward arrow till you meet the command of your desire, [Ctrl+Alt+F7], etcetera. Hope this is of help. My next move will be to upgrade the kernel to 3.4 from the repositories for 12.10. However, since this entails a totally new situation, I will start a new thread on this site to avoid topic pollution I will keep you posted. Still.

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• Deploying Oracle ADF Essentials Applications to Glassfish

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  With the new Oracle ADF Essentials offering you can now deploy applications that leverage Oracle ADF on the open source Glassfish 3.1 server. Deployment is documented in the official JDeveloper and ADF documentation (here) but below is a summary of the steps and a video of the steps you'll need to take to get a basic Oracle ADF Essentials application to work on GlassFish. Note - to make starting/stopping GlassFish easier for my demo I used my GlassFish extension that you can get here. First we'll install some ADF Runtime libraries on GlassFish Download and install Glassfish (Note - if you also have an Oracle DB on the same machine, you'll want to switch GlassFish's HTTP port to something else instead of 8080). Download the Oracle ADF Essentials packaging - this will get you an adf_essentials.zip file. Copy the adf_essentials.zip to the lib directory of your Glassfish domain - on a default windows install this would be: C:\glassfish3\glassfish\domains\domain1\lib Go the the above lib directory and issue a unzip -j adf_essentials.zip This will extract the ADF libraries to the directory. Now you can start the Glassfish server. Now let's configure Glassfish to handle applications of the ADF type: Invoke the admin console of glassfish (http://localhost:4848) and log into your admin account. Go to Configurations->Server-config->JVM Settings and choose the JVM Options tab Add the following entries: -XX:MaxPermSize=512m (note this entry should already exist so just make sure it has a big enough value) -Doracle.mds.cache=simple While we are in the admin console, we can also define JDBC connections that will be used by our application. Go into Resources->JDBC->JDBC Connection Pools and click to create a New one Give it a name and choose the resource type to be javax.sql.XADataSource and choose Oracle as the Database Driver vendor. Click Next Scroll down to the Additional Properties section and start filling in the information for your database. The values for an Oracle XE will be (user=hr, databaseName = XE, Password=hr, ServerName=localhost, DriverType=thin, PortNumber=1521) Click Finish Click Ping to check your connection works. Now define a new JDBC Resource that will use the pool you just defined. In my example I called the resource jdbc/HRDS You will need this name to match the name in your Application Module connection configuraiton.Now you can re-start the Glassfish server for the changes to take effect. Get an ADF application going (you can use the regular Fusion Application template for this) Go into the project properties of your viewController project, under the deployment section click to edit the deployment profile that is defined there. Go to Platform and choose Glassfish 3.1 from the drop down list. Click ok to go back to your project. Go to Application -> Application Properties-> Deployment Go to Platform and choose Glassfish 3.1 from the drop down list. Click ok to go back to your project. This step will make sure that JDeveloper will autoamtically add the necessary ADF libraries to the EAR file that is being generated for deployment on Glassfish  Go to your Application->Deploy and deploy either to an EAR file or directly to a Glassfish server connection that you created. Things should just work, but if they don't then look up the server.log in the log directory and check out what error is in there. Here is a video demo of the various steps: Note - right now the deployment of an ADF application takes about 2 minutes on my machine we are hoping to be able to improve this timing in the future. People who are more familiar with Glassfish might want to explore using exploded directory deployment and see if they can get it to work.

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• Virtualized data centre&ndash;Part three: Architecture

  - by marc dekeyser

  Having the basics (like discussed in the previous articles) is all good and well, but how do we get started on this?! It can be quite daunting after all!   From my own point of view I can absolutely confirm your worries and concerns, but also tell you that it is not as hard as it seems! Deciding on what kind of motherboard to buy, processor and how much memory is an activity you will spend quite some time doing research on. And that is not even mentioning storage! All in all it comes down to setting you expectations and your budget. Probably adjusting your expectations according to your budget :). Processors As a rule of thumb you want VT-D (virtualization) technology built in to the processor allowing you to have 64 bit machines running on your host. Memory The more the better! If you are building a home lab don’t bother with ECC unless you are going to run machines that absolutely should be on all the time and your comfort depends on it! Motherboard Depends on what you are going to do with storage: If you are going the NAS way then the number of SATA port/RAID capabilities do not really matter. If you decide to have a single server with lots of dedicated storage it obviously matters how much SATA ports you will have, alternatively you could use a RAID controller (but these set you back a pretty penny if you want one. DELL 6i’s are usually available for a good bargain if you can find one!). Easiest is to get one with a built-in graphics card (on-board) as you are just adding more heat, power usage and possible points of failure. Networking Just like your choice of motherboard the networking side tends to depend on how you want to go. A single virtualization  host with local storage can usually get away with having a single network card, a cluster or server which uses iSCSI storage tends to have more than one teamed up :). Storage The dreaded beast from the dark! The horror which lives in the forest! The most difficult decision you are going to make in the building of your lab. Why you might ask? Simple my friend, having the right choice of storage can make or break your virtualization solution. The performance of you storage choice will have an important impact on the responsiveness of your virtual machines and the deployment of new machines. It also makes a run with your budget! If you decide to go the NAS route you will be dropping a lot more money than if you would be having just a bunch of disks sitting in a server and manually distributing the virtual machines over the disks. Platform I’m a Microsoftee so Hyper-V is a dead giveaway for me. If you are interested in using VMware I won’t stop you but the rest of my posts will be oriented on Server 2012 Hyper-V (aka 3.0)! What did I use? Before someone asks me this in the comments I’ll give you a quick run down of what I am using. - Intel 2.4 quad core processors (i something something) - 24 GB DDR3 Memory - Single disk in each server (might look at this as I move the servers to 2012) - Synology DS1812+ NAS - 3 network interfaces where possible - HP1800 procurve managed switch I decided to spring for the NAS as I will also be using it for backups and media storage (which is working out quite nicely with my Xbox 360 I must say). At the time of building my 2 boxes (over a year and a half ago) these set me back about 900 euros each so I can image you can build the same or better for a lower price. Next article will be diagramming what I want to achieve and starting a build on the Hyper V 3.0 cluster!

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• Move on and look elsewhere, or confront the boss?

  - by Meister

  Background: I have my Associates in Applied Science (Comp/Info Tech) with a strong focus in programming, and I'm taking University classes to get my Bachelors. I was recently hired at a local company to be a Software Engineer I on a team of about 8, and I've been told they're looking to hire more. This is my first job, and I was offered what I feel to be an extremely generous starting salary ($30/hr essentially + benefits and yearly bonus). What got me hired was my passion for programming and a strong set of personal projects. Problem: I had no prior experience when I interviewed, so I didn't know exactly what to ask them about the company when I was hired. I've spotted a number of warning signs and annoyances since then, such as: Four developers when I started, with everyone talking about "Ben" or "Ryan" leaving. One engineer hired thirty days before me, one hired two weeks after me. Most of the department has been hiring a large number of people since I started. Extremely limited internet access. I understand the idea from an IT point of view, but not only is Facebook blocked, but so it Youtube, Twitter, and Pandora. I've also figured out that they block all access to non-DNS websites (http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/) and strangely enough Miranda-IM. Low cubicles. Which is fine because I like my immediate coworkers, but they put the developers with the customer service, customer training, and QA department in a huge open room. Noise, noise, noise, and people stop to chitchat all day long. Headphones only go so far. Several emails have been sent out by my boss since I started telling us programmers to not talk about non-work-related-things like Video Games at our cubicles, despite us only spending maybe five minutes every few hours doing so. Further digging tells me that this is because someone keeps complaining that the programmers are "slacking off". People are looking over my shoulder all day. I was in the Freenode webchat to get help with a programming issue, and within minutes I had an email from my boss (to all the developers) telling us that we should NOT be connected to any outside chat servers at work. Version control system from 2005 that we must access with IE and keep the Java 1.4 JRE installed to be able to use. I accidentally updated to Java 6 one day and spent the next two days fighting with my PC to undo this "problem". No source control, no comments on anything, no standards, no code review, no unit testing, no common sense. I literally found a problem in how they handle string resource translations that stems from the simple fact that they don't trim excess white spaces, leading to developers doing: getResource("Date: ") instead of: getResource("Date") + ": ", and I was told to just add the excess white spaces back to the database instead of dealing with the issue directly. Some of these things I'd like to try to understand, but I like having IRC open to talk in a few different rooms during the day and keep in touch with friends/family over IM. They don't break my concentration (not NEARLY as much as the lady from QA stopping by to talk about her son), but because people are looking over my shoulder all day as they walk by they complain when they see something that's not "programmer-looking work". I've been told by my boss and QA that I do good, fast work. I should be judged on my work output and quality, not what I have up on my screen for the five seconds you're walking by So, my question is, even though I'm just barely at my 90 days: How do you decide to move on from a job and looking elsewhere, or when you should start working with your boss to resolve these issues? Is it even possible to get the boss to work with me in many of these things? This is the only place I heard back from even though I sent out several resume's a day for several months, and this place does pay well for putting up with their many flaws, but I'm just starting to get so miserable working here already. Should I just put up with it?

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• SR Activity Summaries Via Direct Email? You Bet!

  - by PCat

  Courtesy of Ken Walker. I’m a “bottom line” kind of guy.  My friends and co-workers will tell you that I’m a “Direct Communicator” when it comes to work or my social life.  For example, if I were to come up with a fantastic new recipe for a low-fat pan fried chicken, I’d Tweet, email, or find a way to blast the recipe directly to you so that you could enjoy it immediately.  My friends would see the subject, “Awesome New Fried Chicken” and they’d click and see the recipe there before them.Others are “Indirect Communicators.”  My friend Joel is like this.  He would post the recipe in his blog, and then Tweet or email a link back to his blog with a subject, “Fried Chicken.”  Then Joel would sit back and expect his friends to read the email, AND click the link to his blog, and then read the recipe.  As a fan of the “Direct” method, I wish there was a way for me to “Opt-in” for immediate updates from Joel so I could see the recipe without having to click over to his blog to search for it.The same is true for MOS.  If you’ve ever opened a Service Request through My Oracle Support (MOS), you know that most of the communication between you and the Oracle Support Engineer with respect to the issue in the SR, is done via email.  Which type of email would you rather receive in your email account? Example1:Your SR has been updated.  Click HERE to see the update. Or Example2:Your SR has been updated.  Here is the update:  “Hi John, Oracle Development has completed the patch we’ve been waiting for!  Here’s a direct “LINK” to the patch that should resolve your issue.  Please download and install the patch via the instructions (included with the link) and let me know if it does, in fact, resolve your issue!”Example2 is available to you!  All you need to do is to “Opt-In” for the direct email updates.  The default is for the indirect update as seen in Example1.  To turn on “Service Request Details in Email” simply follow these instructions (aided by the screenshot below):1.    Log into MOS, and click on your name in the upper right corner.  Select “My Account.”2.    Make sure “My Account” is highlighted in bold on the left.3.    Turn ON, “Service Request Details in Email” That’s it!  You will now receive the SR Updates, directly in your email account without having to log into MOS, click the SR, scroll down to the updates, etc.  That’s better than Fried Chicken!  (Well; almost better....).

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• What 5 things should SQL Server get rid of?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been “tagged” by my friend Paul Randal. It’s a high-tech way of making someone else do what you want, but since it’s Paul, well, I guess I’m OK with that. He’s asked in his recent blog entry “What five things would you get rid of in SQL Server if you were in charge?” This is, of course, a delicate issue. After all, I work at Microsoft, so anything I say here might be taken as a criticism that would require action – but of course it really doesn’t. Interestingly, you may have more to do with what goes in to SQL Server than I did even as a Program Manager where I “owned” a feature. Unlike many places I’ve worked, Microsoft really does drive its products by what its users want – not every time, and not every user request, mind you, but overall I think we hit the mark pretty well. So, with all of that said, and of course the obligatory statement of “these are my own opinions, and have nothing to do with any official Microsoft position in any way, and do not reflect the opinions of other Microsoft employees or management”, here goes. 1. Get rid of SQL Server Management Studio Does that surprise you? After all, when I was a Program Manager, I actually owned the general architecture for SSMS. But those on my team probably would have been able to guess this one for you. I think that SSMS is a fine development tool. But I think that it does less of a good job for managing a system. It’s based on Visual Studio, probably one of the best development IDE’s around. And when I develop code, I really like it. But for a monitoring/management tool, I prefer a snap-in to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). I know, the old one (prior to 3.0) was kludgy, difficult to use and program in. But that’s changed. Of course, when I bring this up, you’ll probably immediately say “But I don’t have that in XP.” And that’s one of the reasons we didn’t go there. (But I still don’t like SSMS for management.) 2. ShrinkDB I think this discussion has been done to death, so I’ll leave it at that. 3. SQL Server Agent Does that one surprise you as well? In my mind, since we ALWAYS ride on Windows, just use the task scheduler there, along with PowerShell. You could log the results in Windows logs, files, back into SQL Server, whatever. It’s just a complexity we don’t need in SQL Server. 4. SQL Server Error Logs We have a full logging setup in Windows. They’re well done, easy to understand and ubiquitous. We should just use that. 5. Several SKU’s I won’t say which, but we have a few SKU’s of SQL Server that need to go. And we need to figure out how to help you understand clearly where you need to go to Enterprise or Data Center.  Most folks are trying to push Standard edition to do things it isn’t designed to do, and then they think SQL Server won’t scale. I think we can do a better job of showing you where Standard Edition will hit the wall, and I think with fewer choices it would be pretty simple for you to pick the right one. Well, once again I’ve probably puzzled some folks and angered others. I think my work here is done. :) Back to you, Paul. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Need help partitioning when reinstalling Ubuntu 14.04

  - by Chris M.

  I upgraded to 14.04 about a month ago on my HP Mini netbook (about 16 GB hard disk). A few days ago the system crashed (I don't know why but I was using internet at the time). When I restarted the computer, Ubuntu would not load. Instead, I got a message from the BIOS saying Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key I took this to mean that I needed to reinstall 14.04. When I try to reinstall Ubuntu from the USB stick, I choose "Erase disk and install Ubuntu" but then I get a message: Some of the partitions you created are too small. Please make the following partitions at least this large: / 3.3 GB If you do not go back to the partitioner and increase the size of these partitions, the installation may fail. At first I hit Continue to see if it would install anyway, and it gave the message: The attempt to mount a file system with type ext4 in SCSI1 (0,0,0), partition # 1 (sda) at / failed. You may resume partitioning from the partitioning menu. The second time I hit Go Back, and it took me to the following partitioning table: Device Type Mount Point Format Size Used System /dev/sda /dev/sda1 ext4 (checked) 3228 MB Unknown /dev/sda5 swap (not checked) 1063 MB Unknown + - Change New Partition Table... Revert Device for boot loader installation: /dev/sda ATA JM Loader 001 (4.3 GB) At this point I'm not sure what to do. I've never partitioned my hard drive before and I don't want to screw things up. (I'm not particularly tech savvy.) Can you instruct me what I should do. (P.S. I'm afraid the table might not appear as I typed it in.) Results from fdisk: ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 4294 MB, 4294967296 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 522 cylinders, total 8388608 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sdb: 7860 MB, 7860125696 bytes 155 heads, 31 sectors/track, 3194 cylinders, total 15351808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0009a565 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2768 15351807 7674520 b W95 FAT32 ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ Here is what it displays when I open the Disks utility (I tried the screenshot terminal command you suggested but it didn't seem to do anything): 4.3 GB Hard Disk /dev/sda Model: JM Loader 001 (01000001) Size: 4.3 GB (4,294,967,296 bytes) Serial Number: 01234123412341234 Assessment: SMART is not supported Volumes Size: 4.3 GB (4,294,967,296 bytes) Device: /dev/sda Contents: Unknown (There is a button in the utility that when you click it gives the following options: Format... Create Disk Image... Restore Disk Image... Benchmark but SMART Data & Self-Tests... is dimmed out) When I hit F9 Change Boot Device Order, it shows the hard drive as: SATA:PM-JM Loader 001 When I hit F10 to get me into the BIOS Setup Utility, under Diagnostic it shows: Primary Hard Disk Self Test Not Support NetworkManager Tool State: disconnected Device: eth0 Type: Wired Driver: atl1c State: unavailable Default: no HW Address: 00:26:55:B0:7F:0C Capabilities: Carrier Detect: yes Wired Properties Carrier: off When I run command lshw -C network, I get: WARNING: you should run this program as super-user. *-network description: Network controller product: BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 01 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=b43-pci-bridge latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:feafc000-feafffff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: AR8132 Fast Ethernet vendor: Qualcomm Atheros physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: c0 serial: 00:26:55:b0:7f:0c capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=atl1c driverversion=1.0.1.1-NAPI latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair resources: irq:43 memory:febc0000-febfffff ioport:ec80(size=128) WARNING: output may be incomplete or inaccurate, you should run this program as super-user.

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• Passed: Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3

  First off: Mission accomplished successfully. And it was fun! Using the resources listed in my previous article about Learning Content, I'd like to thank Microsoft Technical Evangelists Jeremy Foster and Michael Palermo for their excellent jump start videos on Channel 9, and the various authors at Pluralsight. Local Prometric testing centre Back in November I chose a local testing centre which was the easiest to access from my office despite the horrible traffic you might experience here on the island. Actually, it was not the closest one. But due to their website, their awards as Microsoft Learning Center, and my general curiosity about the premises, I gave FRCI my priority. Boy, how should I regret this decision this morning... The official Prometric exam guide asks any attendee to show up at least 30 minutes prior to the scheduled time of the test. Well, this should have been the easier part but unfortunately due to heavier traffic than usual I arrived only 20 minutes before time. Not too bad but more to come. The building called 'le Hub' is nicely renovated and provides the right environment for an IT group of companies like FRCI. I think they have currently 5 independent IT departments over there. Even the handling at the reception was straight forward, welcoming and at my ease. But then... first shock: "We don't have any exam registration for today." - Hm, that's nice... Here's my mail confirmation from Prometric. First attack successfully handled and the lady went off again to check their records. Next shock: A couple of minutes later, another guy tries to explain me that "the staff of the testing centre is already on vacation and the centre is officially closed." - Are you kidding me? Here's the official confirmation by Prometric, and I don't find it funny that I take a day off today only to hear this kind of blubbering nonsense. I thought that I'll be on the safe side choosing a company with a good reputation here on the island. Another 40 (!) minutes later, they finally come back to the waiting area with a pre-filled form about the test appointment. And finally, after an hour of waiting, discussing, restarting the testing PC, and lots of talk, I am allowed to sit down and take the exam. Exam details Well, you know the rules. Signing an NDA doesn't allow me to provide you any details about the questions or topics that have been covered. Please check out the official exam description, and you're on the right way. Sorry, guys... ;-) The result "Congratulations! You have passed this Microsoft Certification exam." - In general, I have to admit that the parts on HTML5 and CSS3 were the easiest after all, and that I have to get myself a little bit more familiar with certain Javascript features like class definitions, inheritance and data security. Anyway, exam passed - who cares about the details? Next goal Of course, the journey to Microsoft Certifications continues and my next goal is to pass exams 70-481 - Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using HTML5 and JavaScript and 70-482 - Advanced Windows Store App Development using HTML5 and JavaScript. This would allow me to achieve the certification of MCSD: Windows Store Apps using HTML5. I guess, during 2013 I'll be busy with various learning and teaching lessons.

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• How do you update live web sites with code changes?

  - by Aaron Anodide

  I know this is a very basic question. If someone could humor me and tell me how they would handle this, I'd be greatful. I decided to post this because I am about to install SynchToy to remedy the issue below, and I feel a bit unprofessional using a "Toy" but I can't think of a better way. Many times I find when I am in this situation, I am missing some painfully obvious way to do things - this comes from being the only developer in the company. ASP.NET web application developed on my computer at work Solution has 2 projects: Website (files) WebsiteLib (C#/dll) Using a Git repository Deployed on a GoGrid 2008R2 web server Deployment: Make code changes. Push to Git. Remote desktop to server. Pull from Git. Overwrite the live files by dragging/dropping with windows explorer. In Step 5 I delete all the files from the website root.. this can't be a good thing to do. That's why I am about to install SynchToy... UPDATE: THANKS for all the useful responses. I can't pick which one to mark answer - between using a web deployment - it looks like I have several useful suggesitons: Web Project = whole site packaged into a single DLL - downside for me I can't push simple updates - being a lone developer in a company of 50, this remains something that is simpler at times. Pulling straight from SCM into web root of site - i originally didn't do this out of fear that my SCM hidden directory might end up being exposed, but the answers here helped me get over that (although i still don't like having one more thing to worry about forgetting to make sure is still true over time) Using a web farm, and systematically deploying to nodes - this is the ideal solution for zero downtime, which is actually something I care about since the site is essentially a real time revenue source for my company - i might have a hard time convincing them to double the cost of the servers though. -- finally, the re-enforcement of the basic principal that there needs to be a single click deployment for the site OR ELSE THERE SOMETHING WRONG is probably the most useful thing I got out of the answers. UPDATE 2: I thought I come back to this and update with the actual solution that's been in place for many months now and is working perfectly (for my single web server solution). The process I use is: Make code changes Push to Git Remote desktop to server Pull from Git Run the following batch script: cd C:\Users\Administrator %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe stop site "/site.name:Default Web Site" robocopy Documents\code\da\1\work\Tree\LendingTreeWebSite1 c:\inetpub\wwwroot /E /XF connectionsconfig Web.config %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe start site "/site.name:Default Web Site" As you can see this brings the site down, uses robocopy to intelligently copy the files that have changed then brings the site back up. It typically runs in less than 2 seconds. Since peak traffic on this site is about 2 requests per second, missing 4 requests per site update is acceptable. Sine I've gotten more proficient with Git I've found that the first four steps above being a "manual process" is also acceptable, although I'm sure I could roll the whole thing into a single click if I wanted to. The documentation for AppCmd.exe is here. The documentation for Robocopy is here.

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• Converting .docx to pdf (or .doc to pdf, or .doc to odt, etc.) with libreoffice on a webserver on the fly using php

  - by robertphyatt

  Ok, so I needed to convert .docx files to .pdf files on the fly, but none of the free php libraries that were available let me do it on my server (a webservice was not good enough). Basically either I needed to pay for a library (and have it maybe suck) or just deal with the free ones that didn't convert the formatting well enough. Not good enough! I found that LibreOffice (OpenOffice's successor) allows command line conversion using the LibreOffice conversion engine (which DID preserve the formatting like I wanted and generally worked great). I loaded the latest version of Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download) onto my Virtual Box (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) on my computer and found that I was able to easily convert files using the commandline like this: libreoffice --headless -convert-to pdf fileToConvert.docx -outdir output/path/for/pdf I thought: sweet...but I don't have admin rights on my host's web server. I tried to use a "portable" version of LibreOffice that I obtained from http://portablelinuxapps.org/ but I was unable to get it to work on my host's webserver, because my host's webserver didn't have all the dependencies (Dependency Hell! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell) I was at a loss of how to make it work, until I ran across a cool project made by a Ph.D. student (Philip J. Guo) at Stanford called CDE: http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/cde.html I will let you look at his explanations of how it works (I followed what he did in http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6XdwHo1BWwY, starting at about 32:00 as well as the directions on his site), but in short, it allows one to avoid dependency hell by copying all the files used when you run certain commands, recreating the linux environment where the command worked. I was able to use this to run LibreOffice without having to resort to someone's portable version of it, and it worked just like it did when I did it on Ubuntu with the command above, with a tweak: I needed to run the wrapper of LibreOffice the CDE generated. So, below is my PHP code that calls it. In this code snippet, the filename to be copied is passed in as $_POST["filename"]. I copy the file to the same spot where I originally converted the file, convert it, copy it back and then delete all the files (so that it doesn't start growing exponentially). I did it this way because I wasn't able to make it work otherwise on the webserver. If there is a linux + webserver ninja out there that can figure out how to make it work without doing this, I would be interested to know what you did. Please post a comment or something if you did that. <?php //first copy the file to the magic place where we can convert it to a pdf on the fly copy($time.$_POST["filename"], "../LibreOffice/cde-package/cde-root/home/robert/Desktop/".$_POST["filename"]); //change to that directory chdir('../LibreOffice/cde-package/cde-root/home/robert'); //the magic command that does the conversion $myCommand = "./libreoffice.cde --headless -convert-to pdf Desktop/".$_POST["filename"]." -outdir Desktop/"; exec ($myCommand); //copy the file back copy("Desktop/".str_replace(".docx", ".pdf", $_POST["filename"]), "../../../../../documents/".str_replace(".docx", ".pdf", $_POST["filename"])); //delete all the files out of the magic place where we can convert it to a pdf on the fly $files1 = scandir('Desktop'); //my files that I generated all happened to start with a number. $pattern = '/^[0-9]/'; foreach ($files1 as $value) { preg_match($pattern, $value, $matches); if(count($matches) ?> 0) { unlink("Desktop/".$value); } } //changing the header to the location of the file makes it work well on androids header( 'Location: '.str_replace(".docx", ".pdf", $_POST["filename"]) ); ?> And here is the tar.gz file I generated I generated with CDE. To duplicate what I did exactly, put the tar.gz file in a folder somewhere. I will call that folder the "root". Make a new folder called "documents" in the "root" folder. Unpack the tar.gz and run the php script above from the "documents" folder. Success! I made a truly portable version of LibreOffice that can convert files on the fly on a webserver using 100% free, open source software!

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• Get Fanatical About Your Followers

  - by Mike Stiles

  In the fourth of our series of discussions with Aberdeen’s Trip Kucera, we touch on what fans of your brand have come to expect in exchange for their fandom. Spotlight: Around the Oracle Social office, we live for football. So when we think of a true “fan” of a brand, something on the level of a football fan is what comes to mind. But are brands trying to invest fans on that same level? Trip: Yeah, if you’re a football fan, this is definitely your time of year. And if you’ve been to any NFL games recently, especially if you hadn’t been for a few years previously, you may have noticed that from the cup holders to in-stadium Wi-Fi, there’s an increasing emphasis being placed on “fan-focused” accommodations. That’s what they’re known as in the stadium business. Spotlight: How are brands doing in that fan-focused arena? Trip: Remember fan is short for “fanatical.” Brands can definitely learn from the way teams have become fanatical about their fans, or in the social media world, their followers. Many companies consider a segment of their addressable social audience as true fans; I’ve even heard the term “super-fans” used. So just as fans know and can tell you nearly everything about their favorite team, our research shows that there’s a lot value from getting to know your social audience—your followers—at a deeper level. Spotlight: So did your research show there’s a lot to be gained by making fandom a two-way street? Trip: Aberdeen’s new social relationship management research suggests that companies should develop capabilities to better analyze their social audience at a more granular level. Countless “ripped from the headlines” examples, from “United Breaks Guitars” to the most recent British Airways social fiasco we talked about a few weeks ago show how social can magnify the impact of a single customer voice. Spotlight: So how do the companies who are executing social most successfully do that? Trip: Leaders, which are the top-performing companies in Aberdeen’s study, are showing the value of identifying and categorizing your social audience. You should certainly treat every customer as if they have 10,000 followers, because they just might, but you can also proactively engage with high-value customer and high-value influencers. Getting back to the football analogy, it’s like how teams strive to give every guest a great experience, but they really roll out the red carpet for those season ticket and luxury box holders. Spotlight: I’m not allowed in luxury boxes, so you’ll have to tell me what that’s like. But what is the brand equivalent of rolling out the red carpet? Trip: Leaders are nearly three times more likely than Followers to have a process in place that identifies key social influencers for engagement, and more than twice as likely to identify customer advocates for social outreach. This is the kind of knowledge that gives companies the ability to better target social messaging and promotions like we talked about in our last discussion, as well as a basis for understanding how to measure the impact of their social media programs. I’ll give you an example. I hosted an event at one of my favorite restaurants recently. I had mentioned them in a Tweet several weeks before the event, and on the day of the event, they Tweeted out that they were looking forward to seeing me that evening for the event. It’s a small thing, but it had a big impact and I’d certainly go back as a result. Spotlight: So what specifically can brands use and look at to determine where their potential super-fans are? Trip: Social graph analysis, which looks at both the demographic/psychographic trends as well as the behavioral connections, can surface important brand value. Aberdeen’s PR and Brand Management research indicated that top-performing companies are more than three times more likely than Followers to both determine demographic trends through social listening (44% vs. 13%), and to identify meaningful customer segments through social (44% vs. 12%). This kind of brand-level insight can complement and enrich traditional market research. But perhaps even more importantly, it can serve as an early warning system for customer experience failures. @mikestilesPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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• Notes - Part II - Play with JavaFX

  - by Silviu Turuga

  Open the project from last lesson Double click on NotesUI.fmxl, this will open the JavaFX Scene Builder On the left side you have a area called Hierarchy, from there press Del or Shift+Backspace on Mac to delete the Button and the Label. You'll receive a warning, that some components have been assigned an fx:id, click Delete as we don't need them anymore. Resize the AnchorPane to have enough room for our design, eg. 820x550px From the top left pick the Container called Accordion and drag over the AnchorPane design Chose then from Controls a List View and drag inside the Accordion. You'll notice that by default the Accordion has 2 TitledPane, and you can switch between them by clicking on their name. I'll let you the pleasure to do the rest in order to get the following result  Here is the list of objects used Save it and then return to NetBeans Run the application and it should be run without any issue. If you click on buttons they all are functional, but nothing happens as we didn't link them with any action. We'll see this in the next episode. Now, let's play a little bit with the application and try to resize it… Have you notice the behavior? If the form is too small, some objects aren't visible, if it is too large there is too much space . That's for sure something that your users won't like and you as a programmer have to care about this. From NetBeans double click NotesUI.fmxl so to return back to JavaFX Scene Builder Select the TextField from bottom left of Notes, the one where I put the text Category and then from the right part of JavaFX Scene Builder you'll notice a panel called Inspector. Chose Layout and then click on the dotted lines from left and bottom of the square, like you see in the below image This will make the textfield to have always the same distance from left and bottom no matter the size of the form. Save and run the application. Note that whenever the form is changing the Height, the Category TextField has the same distance from the bottom. Select Accordion and do the same steps but also check the top dotted line, because we want the Accordion to have the same height as the main form has. I'll let you the pleasure to do the same for the rest of components. It's very important to design an application that can be resize by user and in the same time, all the buttons are on place. Last step is to make sure our application is not getting smaller then a certain size, as this will hide parts of our layout. So select the AnchorPane and from Inspector go to Layout and note down the Width and Height. Go back to NetBeans and open the file Main.java and add the following code just after stage.setScene(scene); (around line 26) stage.setMinWidth(820); stage.setMinHeight(550); Use your own width and height. This will prevent user to reduce the width or height of your application to a value that will hide parts of your layout. So now you should have done most of the design part and next time we'll see how can we enter some data into our newly created application… Note: in case you miss something, here are the source files of the project till this point. 

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• Perfect End to a Bad Day

  - by TehGrumpyCoder

  Yesterday's post about A Bad Day at Work actually had an addendum to it. There were apparently a bunch of guys on ice skates last night competing in some sport way the hell and gone over on the other side of the valley, and enough people couldn't live without seeing them that they had all major arteries heading west honked. I mean honked... the traffic guy reported the 101 had 16 miles of backup... yikes. Since I worked downtown for a number of years, my fallback is to cut across the city on surface streets to get to one of my old 'haunts' and just drive it home from there. Of course with the 101 backed up, then I17 would logically be as well, so I kept the news on rather than my Zune and heard where the bad stuff was going North. I popped out on the freeway about 7 miles south of my exit. Got to the exit which is about a mile from the house without killing or maiming me or anyone else. Waited patiently at the light in the inside lane to make a left and go under the freeway proceeding West. The light changed, I had full green, I started through and whoa... I've got someone in a little rat car crossing my bow! A little explanation... I drive a 3/4 ton pickup with a V-10, extended cab and shell on the back. It's not jacked up, but it sits up pretty good and is longer than any parking place I've ever tried to put it into. I consider this truck to be the consolation prize for paying uninsured motorist coverage for 45 years and having Pilar Martinez totally destroy a 3/4 ton Silverado on March 1, 2007 by plowing into me at traffic speed while I was stopped at a light. If you pay for uninsured motorist coverage, ask your insurance agent *exactly* what that means... I bet it's different than what you think it means. But I digress, sorry... So here I am with a car that is shorter from top to road than the hood on my truck, and the driver thought it would be safe to run a red light and see if they could get past me before I got into the lane. The right side of my front bumper was almost into the driver's window when I hit the brakes and wheeled it left. Fortunately for all involved, I saw it soon enough, and pulled into the 2nd lane for making a left to go back South. I looked in my mirror, signalled a move, then moved over behind the yuck in the rat car. I then punched it, and the future hood ornament and I both made it through the next light. I pulled alongside to let her know that she was DEFINITELY Number 1 in my book, and it's a middle-age woman looking at me with a "sorry, it was an accident" show of pouty face and arms held up. Tough $hit lady... that may have worked when you were 18, but it's not working anymore, and it wasn't an accident... you ran a freakin' red light and almost got yourself killed. That just about put a bow on the day... I was home later than usual, pissed off about work stuff, pissed off at traffic, and now that. I ate dinner, watched a little TV, and was asleep about 9:30 exhausted. Hope today is better.

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• Why Are We Here?

  - by Jonathan Mills

  Back in the early 2000s, Toyota had a vision of building the number one best selling minivan in North America. Their current minivan, the Sienna, was small, underpowered, and badly needed help.  Yuji Yokoya was given the job of re-engineering the Sienna. There was just one problem, Yuji, lived in Japan. He did not know the people or places that he would be engineering for. Believe it or not, Japan is nothing like North America. So, what does a chief engineer do in a situation like that? He packed up his team and flew halfway around the world. He made a commitment to drive through every state in the US, every province in Canada, and Mexico. He met the people and drove the roads that the Sienna would be driving. And guess what, what he learned on that trip revolutionized the Sienna. The innovations he made, sent the Sienna to number one. Why? Because he knew who he was building his product for. He knew, why he was there.Let me ask you this, do you know why you are building what you are building? As a member of a product team, can you tell me how your product will be used in the real world? As you are writing code, building test plans, writing stories, or any of the other project tasks, can you picture the face of a person who will be using what you are building? All to often, the answer to those questions is, no. Why is it important? Because, every day, project team members make assumptions. Over a given project, it is safe to say project team members will make thousands of assumptions about what they are doing. And all to often, those assumptions are not quite right. Its not that they are not good at their job, its just that they don’t really know why they are there.So, what to do? First and foremost, stop doing what you are doing. Yes, really. Schedule some time to go visit the people who will be using your product. Don’t invite them to you, go to them. Watch them work. Interact with them. Ask them questions. Maybe even try it out yourself. This serves two purposes. One, It shows them that you care about them. They will be far more engaged in your project if they feel like you care. And nothing says you care more that spending some time. Second, if gives you the proper frame of reference for you work. It gives you something tangible to go back to as you are building your product. As you make the thousands of assumptions that you will make over the life of your project, it gives you something to see in your mind that makes it real to you.Ultimately, setting a proper frame of reference is critical to the overall success of a project. The funny thing is, it really does not even take that long. In most cases, a 2-3 hour session will give you most of what you need to get the right insight. For the project, it will be the best 2 hours you could spend.

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• Inside Red Gate - Exercising Externally

  - by simonc

  Over the next few weeks, we'll be performing experiments on SmartAssembly to confirm or refute various hypotheses we have about how people use the product, what is stopping them from using it to its full extent, and what we can change to make it more useful and easier to use. Some of these experiments can be done within the team, some within Red Gate, and some need to be done on external users. External testing Some external testing can be done by standard usability tests and surveys, however, there are some hypotheses that can only be tested by building a version of SmartAssembly with some things in the UI or implementation changed. We'll then be able to look at how the experimental build is used compared to the 'mainline' build, which forms our baseline or control group, and use this data to confirm or refute the relevant hypotheses. However, there are several issues we need to consider before running experiments using separate builds: Ideally, the user wouldn't know they're running an experimental SmartAssembly. We don't want users to use the experimental build like it's an experimental build, we want them to use it like it's the real mainline build. Only then will we get valid, useful, and informative data concerning our hypotheses. There's no point running the experiments if we can't find out what happens after the download. To confirm or refute some of our hypotheses, we need to find out how the tool is used once it is installed. Fortunately, we've applied feature usage reporting to the SmartAssembly codebase itself to provide us with that information. Of course, this then makes the experimental data conditional on the user agreeing to send that data back to us in the first place. Unfortunately, even though this does limit the amount of useful data we'll be getting back, and possibly skew the data, there's not much we can do about this; we don't collect feature usage data without the user's consent. Looks like we'll simply have to live with this. What if the user tries to buy the experiment? This is something that isn't really covered by the Lean Startup book; how do you support users who give you money for an experiment? If the experiment is a new feature, and the user buys a license for SmartAssembly based on that feature, then what do we do if we later decide to pivot & scrap that feature? We've either got to spend time and money bringing that feature up to production quality and into the mainline anyway, or we've got disgruntled customers. Either way is bad. Again, there's not really any good solution to this. Similarly, what if we've removed some features for an experiment and a potential new user downloads the experimental build? (As I said above, there's no indication the build is an experimental build, as we want to see what users really do with it). The crucial feature they need is missing, causing a bad trial experience, a lost potential customer, and a lost chance to help the customer with their problem. Again, this is something not really covered by the Lean Startup book, and something that doesn't have a good solution. So, some tricky issues there, not all of them with nice easy answers. Turns out the practicalities of running Lean Startup experiments are more complicated than they first seem! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Framework for Everything - Where to begin? [Longer post]

  - by SquaredSoft

  Back story of this question, feel free to skip down for the specific question Hello, I've been very interested in the idea of abstract programming the last few years. I've made about 30 attempts at creating a piece of software that is capable of almost anything you throw at it. I've undertook some attempts at this that have taken upwards of a year, while getting close, never releasing it beyond my compiler. This has been something I've always tried wrapping my head around, and something is always missing. With the title, I'm sure you're assuming, "Yes of course you noob! You can't account for everything!" To which I have to reply, "Why not?" To give you some background into what I'm talking about, this all started with doing maybe a shade of gray hat SEO software. I found myself constantly having to create similar, but slightly different sets of code. I've gone through as many iterations of way to communicate on http as the universe has particles. "How many times am I going to have to write this multi-threaded class?" is something I found myself asking a lot. Sure, I could create a class library, and just work with that, but I always felt I could optimize what I had, which often was a large undertaking and typically involved frequent use of the CRTL+A keyboard shortcut, mixed with the delete button. It dawned on me that it was time to invest in a plugin system. This would allow me to simply add snippets of code. as time went on, and I could subversion stuff out, and distribute small chunks of code, rather than something that encompasses only a specific function or design. This comes with its own complexity, of course, and by the time I had finished the software scope for this addition, it hit me that I would want to add to everything in the software, not just a new http method, or automation code for a specific website. Great, we're getting more abstract. However, the software that I have in my mind comes down to a quite a few questions regarding its execution. I have to have some parameters to what I am going to do. After writing what the perfect software would do in my mind, I came up with this as a list of requirements: Should be able to use networking A "Macro" or "Expression system" which would allow people to do something like : =First(=ParseToList(=GetUrl("http://www.google.com?q=helloworld!"), Template.Google)) Multithreaded Able to add UI elements through some type of XML -- People can make their own addons etc. Can use third party API through the plugins, such as Microsoft CRM, Exchange, etc. This would allow the software to essentially be used for everything. Really, any task you wish to automate, in a simple way. Making the UI was as also extremely hard. How do you do all of this? Its very difficult. So my question: With so many attempts at this, I'm out of ideas how to successfully complete this. I have a very specific idea in my mind, but I keep failing to execute it. I'm a self taught programmer. I've been doing it for years, and work professionally in it, but I've never encountered something that would be as complex and in-depth as a system which essentially does everything. Where would you start? What are the best practices for design? How can I avoid constantly having to go back and optimize my software. What can I do to generalize this and draw everything out to completion. These are things I struggle with. P.s., I'm using c# as my main language. I feel like in this example, I might be hitting the outer limit of the language, although, I don't know if that is the case, or if I'm just a bad programmer. Thanks for your time.

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• Fun tips with Analytics

  - by user12620172

  If you read this blog, I am assuming you are at least familiar with the Analytic functions in the ZFSSA. They are basically amazing, very powerful and deep. However, you may not be aware of some great, hidden functions inside the Analytic screen. Once you open a metric, the toolbar looks like this: Now, I’m not going over every tool, as we have done that before, and you can hover your mouse over them and they will tell you what they do. But…. Check this out. Open a metric (CPU Percent Utilization works fine), and click on the “Hour” button, which is the 2nd clock icon. That’s easy, you are now looking at the last hour of data. Now, hold down your ‘Shift’ key, and click it again. Now you are looking at 2 hours of data. Hold down Shift and click it again, and you are looking at 3 hours of data. Are you catching on yet? You can do this with not only the ‘Hour’ button, but also with the ‘Minute’, ‘Day’, ‘Week’, and the ‘Month’ buttons. Very cool. It also works with the ‘Show Minimum’ and ‘Show Maximum’ buttons, allowing you to go to the next iteration of either of those. One last button you can Shift-click is the handy ‘Drill’ button. This button usually drills down on one specific aspect of your metric. If you Shift-click it, it will display a “Rainbow Highlight” of the current metric. This works best if this metric has many ‘Range Average’ items in the left-hand window. Give it a shot. Also, one will sometimes click on a certain second of data in the graph, like this:  In this case, I clicked 4:57 and 21 seconds, and the 'Range Average' on the left went away, and was replaced by the time stamp. It seems at this point to some people that you are now stuck, and can not get back to an average for the whole chart. However, you can actually click on the actual time stamp of "4:57:21" right above the chart. Even though your mouse does not change into the typical browser finger that most links look like, you can click it, and it will change your range back to the full metric. Another trick you may like is to save a certain view or look of a group of graphs. Most of you know you can save a worksheet, but did you know you could Sync them, Pause them, and then Save it? This will save the paused state, allowing you to view it forever the way you see it now.  Heatmaps. Heatmaps are cool, and look like this:  Some metrics use them and some don't. If you have one, and wish to zoom it vertically, try this. Open a heatmap metric like my example above (I believe every metric that deals with latency will show as a heatmap). Select one or two of the ranges on the left. Click the "Change Outlier Elimination" button. Click it again and check out what it does.  Enjoy. Perhaps my next blog entry will be the best Analytic metrics to keep your eyes on, and how you can use the Alerts feature to watch them for you. Steve 

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• Creating a voxel world with 3D arrays using threads

  - by Sean M.

  I am making a voxel game (a bit like Minecraft) in C++(11), and I've come across an issue with creating a world efficiently. In my program, I have a World class, which holds a 3D array of Region class pointers. When I initialize the world, I give it a width, height, and depth so it knows how large of a world to create. Each Region is split up into a 32x32x32 area of blocks, so as you may guess, it takes a while to initialize the world once the world gets to be above 8x4x8 Regions. In order to alleviate this issue, I thought that using threads to generate different levels of the world concurrently would make it go faster. Having not used threads much before this, and being still relatively new to C++, I'm not entirely sure how to go about implementing one thread per level (level being a xz plane with a height of 1), when there is a variable number of levels. I tried this: for(int i = 0; i < height; i++) { std::thread th(std::bind(&World::load, this, width, height, depth)); th.join(); } Where load() just loads all Regions at height "height". But that executes the threads one at a time (which makes sense, looking back), and that of course takes as long as generating all Regions in one loop. I then tried: std::thread t1(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h1, h2 - 1, d)); std::thread t2(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h2, h3 - 1, d)); std::thread t3(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h3, h4 - 1, d)); std::thread t4(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h4, h - 1, d)); t1.join(); t2.join(); t3.join(); t4.join(); This works in that the world loads about 3-3.5 times faster, but this forces the height to be a multiple of 4, and it also gives the same exact VAO object to every single Region, which need individual VAOs in order to render properly. The VAO of each Region is set in the constructor, so I'm assuming that somehow the VAO number is not thread safe or something (again, unfamiliar with threads). So basically, my question is two one-part: How to I implement a variable number of threads that all execute at the same time, and force the main thread to wait for them using join() without stopping the other threads? How do I make the VAO objects thread safe, so when a bunch of Regions are being created at the same time across multiple threads, they don't all get the exact same VAO? Turns out it has to do with GL contexts not working across multiple threads. I moved the VAO/VBO creation back to the main thread. Fixed! Here is the code for block.h/.cpp, region.h/.cpp, and CVBObject.h/.cpp which controls VBOs and VAOs, in case you need it. If you need to see anything else just ask. EDIT: Also, I'd prefer not to have answers that are like "you should have used boost". I'm trying to do this without boost to get used to threads before moving onto other libraries.

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• Intermittent internet connectivity

  - by Rob Oplawar

  UPDATED: I recently built a new computer and set it up to dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.10. In Windows, using the same hardware, my LAN connectivity is solid. In Ubuntu, however, my network interface periodically dies and resets itself; I'll have a solid connection for 30 seconds, and then it will go out for 30 seconds. When I tail the log: tail -f /var/log/kern.log I see "eth0 link up" messages appear periodically, corresponding with the return of connectivity. I posted the original question months ago, and misinterpreted what was going on. With a working Internet connection in Windows, I ignored the problem for some months. See my answer below for the solution (drivers). ORIGINAL POST In Ubuntu, although I maintain a solid connection to my LAN (pinging the router IP address consistently returns a good result), my internet connectivity drops in and out. When I continuously ping 74.125.227.18 (a google.com server), I get responses for a while, then I start getting "Destination Host Unreachable" for a while, then I get responses again. This happens consistently, dropping the connection for about 30 seconds out of every minute or two. Whether I configure my network via the network manager or via /etc/network/interfaces seems to make no difference. I configure with the following settings: address 192.168.1.101 network 192.168.1.0 gateway 192.168.1.99 (my router's IP address) netmask 255.255.255.0 (confirmed as the right netmask for the router) broadcast 192.168.1.255 (also confirmed with the router). ifconfig confirms that these settings are working: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 50:e5:49:40:da:a6 inet addr:192.168.1.101 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::52e5:49ff:fe40:daa6/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:11557 errors:0 dropped:11557 overruns:0 frame:11557 TX packets:13117 errors:0 dropped:211 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:9551488 (9.5 MB) TX bytes:1930952 (1.9 MB) Interrupt:41 Base address:0xa000 I get the same issue when I use automatic DHCP address settings, although I did confirm that there is no other machine on the network with the static IP address I want to use. As I said, the connection to the local network stays solid - I never have any trouble pinging 192.168.1.* - it's internet addresses that I intermittently cannot reach. It's not a DNS issue because pinging known IP addresses directly shows the same behavior. Also, I don't think it's a hardware issue, as I never have any internet connectivity problems on the same machine in Windows. The network hardware is built into the motherboard: Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3P. I managed to bring the OS fully up to date, according to the update manager, but it didn't fix the issue, and with my limited understanding of network architecture I'm at my wit's end. The only clue I can see is that ifconfig is reporting a lot of dropped packets, but I'm not sure what to do about it. UPDATE: It seems my problem is a little more generic than I described; now when I try pinging my router and google simultaneously, they both go unreachable at the same time. Running ifdown eth0 and then ifup eth0 brings it back temporarily; if I just wait it comes back after a couple of minutes. I'll broaden my search through intermittent network connectivity problems.

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• Get More Value From Your Oracle Premier Support Investment

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document The Return on Investment in Support Training I’m a typical software user. I’ve been using spreadsheets almost daily for the past 10 years or so. I know how to enter simple formulas, format cells, import files, and I can sort and filter. Sometimes I even use a pivot table. I never attended training. I learnt everything I know on the fly. Sometimes it was intuitive and easy, other times I had to spend minutes and even hours searching for a solution. Yet when I see what some other people can do with their spreadsheets, I know I’m utilizing maybe 15% of the functionality. Pity, one day I really have to sign up for training. Why haven’t I done it yet? Ah, you know, I’m a busy person, I have work to do. And if I need to use a feature that I am unfamiliar with, I’ll spend time on it only when I really need it. Now wait. When I recall how much time I spent trying to figure how things work compared to time I spent doing the productive work, I realize it was not insignificant. I’m unable to sum up all the time I spent ‘learning’ on the fly, but I’m sure it’s been days or even weeks. And after all this time, I’ve mastered 15% of its features. If only I had attended training years ago. That investment would have paid back 10 times! Working with My Oracle Support is no different. Our customers typically use simple search, create service requests, and download patches. They think they know how to use My Oracle Support. And they’re right. They know something but often they’re utilizing only a fragment of My Oracle Support’s potential. For the investment that has been made, using only a small subset of the capabilities offered in My Oracle Support leaves value on the table. There is much more available in My Oracle Support. Dozens of diagnostic tools and proactive health checks will keep verifying your Oracle environments against best practices that Oracle gathers every day thanks to our comprehensive knowledge management process. Automated patch recommendations will help prevent known issues, and upgrade planning and more is included in My Oracle Support. Why are you not utilizing all of these best practices, capabilities and tools? Is it because you don’t have time to invest 2-3 hours of your time to learn about the features? Simply because you think you can learn on the fly like I thought I could? Does learning on the fly how to properly use the Service Request escalation process when you already have critical issue sound like a good idea? My advice is: Invest your time now to learn how My Oracle Support can help you prevent issues on your systems. Learn how to find answers faster and resolve problems more efficiently. Understand how to properly complete a service request. Invest in Support training, offered at no additional cost to Oracle Premier Support customers. It will pay back quicker than you think. It will bring you more value than you think. Discover your advantage with Oracle Premier Support's Proactive Portfolio.

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