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• Using the “Settings.settings” functionalities in VB.NET can be tricky…

  - by Vincent Grondin

  Sometime you’re searching for something forever and when you find it, you realize it was right under your nose.  Maybe you were distracted by other things around… or maybe that thing right under your nose was so well hidden that it deserves a blog post…   That happened to me a few days ago while using the “Settings.settings” functionalities in my VB.NET application…  I thought it was a cool feature and I decided to use it…  So there I am adding new settings with “USER” scope and StringCollection as the data type, testing my application and everything works perfectly fine...  That was before I decided to modify the “Value” of one of my settings…  After changing the value of one of my settings, I start my application again and, to my surprise, my new values aren’t showing!  Hmmm… That’s odd…  My setting was a pretty long list of strings so I was rather angry at myself for not saving my work after I was done…  So I open up the Settings.setting in the designer and click the ellipsis symbol to enter my string collection again, but to my great pleasure (and disbelief) my strings are there!!!  Alright, you rock VB.NET!  You’ve just save me a bunch of typing time and I’m thinking it’s just a simple Visual Studio glitch…  I hit “Save” then “Save All” (just in case) and finally I rebuild everything and fire up my app once again.  Huh?  Where are my darn strings????????  Ok there’s a bug there…  I open up the app.config and my new strings are there!!!  Alright, let’s recap…  My new strings are in the app.config, they show correctly in the Settings.settings designer UI but they aren’t showing at runtime…  Hmmmm?  Let’s try something else…  Let’s start the application but outside Visual Studio this time… I fire up the exe and BAM!  My strings where there!  I “alt-tab” and hit “F5” and BOOM, no strings!  So it’s a bug in the Visual Studio environment… or could it be a FEATURE?  I must admit that I’m a little confused over what’s a bug and what’s a feature in Visual Studio… lol!   Finally I found out there’s a “cache” for your Visual Studio located here:  C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\<your app name and a very weird temp ID>\<your app version>\user.config When using the “Settings.settings” with a setting of scope “user”, this file is out of sync with your app.config until you manually decide to update it… The button is right there… under your nose… at the top left corner of your screen in the settings designer…  See the big “Synchronize” button there?  Yep…  Now that’s user friendly isn’t it?  Oh, and wait until you see what it does when you click it…  It prompts you and basically says:  “Would you like your settings to start working inside Visual Studio now that you found out that I exist?” and of course the right answer is yes… or rather “OK”…  Unfortunately, you have to do this every time you edit a value… On the other hand, adding and removing settings seem to work flawlessly without having to click this magical button… go figure!  Oh and I almost forgot… this great “feature” is only available for VB.NET…  A project in C# using Settings.settings will work perfectly EVEN when editing values… Here’s a screenshot that shows this important button: Button Using other data types appears to work perfectly well…   Maybe it’s simply related to the StringCollection data type?  If you are a VB.NET programmer, you should pay attention to this when you plan on using the settings functionalities and your scope is “user” and your data type is StringCollection… Happy coding all!

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• What’s Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Tax Transfer Pricing Process!

  - by tobyehatch

  Does your business operate in multiple countries? Well, whether you like it or not, many local and international tax authorities inspect your tax strategy.  Legal, effective tax planning is perceived as a “moral” issue. CEOs are being asked to testify on their process of tax transfer pricing between multinational legal entities.  Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for EPM Applications specializing in all tax subjects and Product Manager for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provisioning, and Bart Stoehr, Senior Director of Product Strategy for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management joined me for a discussion/podcast on this interesting subject.  So what exactly is “tax transfer pricing”? Marc defined it this way. “Tax transfer pricing is a profit allocation methodology required to be used by multinational corporations. Specifically, the ultimate goal of the transfer pricing is to ensure that the global multinational pays their fair share of income tax in each of their local markets. Specifically, it prevents companies from unfairly moving profit from ‘high tax’ countries to ‘low tax’ countries.” According to Marc, in today’s global economy, profitability can be significantly impacted by goods and services exchanged between the related divisions within a single multinational company.  To ensure that these cost allocations are done fairly, there are rules that govern the process. These rules ensure that intercompany allocations fairly represent the actual nature of the businesses activity- as if two divisions were unrelated - and provide a clear audit trail of how the costs have been allocated to prove that allocations fall within reasonable ranges.  What are the repercussions of improper tax transfer pricing? How important is it? Tax transfer pricing allocations can materially impact the amount of overall corporate income taxes paid by a company worldwide, in some cases by hundreds of millions of dollars!  Since so much tax revenue is at stake, revenue agencies like the IRS, and international regulatory bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are pushing to reform and clarify reporting for tax transfer pricing. Most recently the OECD announced an “Action Plan for Base Erosion and Profit Shifting”. As Marc explained, the times are changing and companies need to be responsive to this issue. “It feels like every other week there is another company being accused of avoiding taxes,” said Marc. Most recently, Caterpillar was accused of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes. In the last couple of years, Apple, GE, Ikea, and Starbucks, have all been accused of tax avoidance. It’s imperative that companies like these have a clear and auditable tax transfer process that enables them to justify tax transfer pricing allocations and avoid steep penalties and bad publicity. Transparency and efficiency are what is needed when it comes to the tax transfer pricing process. Bart explained that tax transfer pricing is driving a deeper inspection of profit recognition specifically focused on the tax element of profit.  However, allocations needed to support tax profitability are nearly identical in process to allocations taking place in other parts of the finance organization. For example, the methods and processes necessary to arrive at tax profitability by legal entity are no different than those used to arrive at fully loaded profitability for a product line. In fact, there is a great opportunity for alignment across these two different functions.So it seems that tax transfer pricing should be reflected in profitability in general. Bart agreed and told us more about some of the critical sub-processes of an overall tax transfer pricing process within the Oracle solution for tax transfer pricing.  “First, there is a ton of data preparation, enrichment and pre-allocation data analysis that is managed in the Oracle Hyperion solution. This serves as the “data staging” to the next, critical sub-processes.  From here, we leverage the Oracle EPM platform’s ability to re-use dimensions and legal entity driver data and financial data with Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM).  Within HPCM, we manage the driver data, define the legal entity to legal entity allocation rules (like cost plus), and have the option to test out multiple, simultaneous tax transfer pricing what-if scenarios.  Once processed, a tax expert can evaluate the effectiveness of any one scenario result versus another via a variance analysis configured with HPCM’s pre-packaged reporting capability known as Oracle Hyperion SmartView for Office.”   Further, Bart explained that the ability to visibly demonstrate how a cost or revenue has been allocated is really helpful and auditable.  “HPCM’s Traceability Maps are that visual representation of all allocation flows that have been executed and is the tax transfer analyst’s best friend in maintaining clear documentation for tax transfer pricing audits. Simply click and drill as you inspect the chain of allocation definitions and results. Once final, the post-allocated tax data can be compared to the GL to create invoices and journal entries for posting to your GL system of choice.  Of course, there is a framework for overall governance of the journal entries, allocation percentages, and reporting to include necessary approvals.” Lastly, Marc explained that the key value in using the Oracle Hyperion solution for tax transfer pricing is that it keeps everything in alignment in one single place. Specifically, Oracle Hyperion effectively becomes the single book of record for the GAAP, management, and the tax set of books. There are many benefits to having one source of the truth. These include EFFICIENCY, CONTROLS and TRANSPARENCY.So, what’s your tax strategy? Why not automate the tax transfer pricing process!To listen to the entire podcast, click here.To learn more about Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM), click here.

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• WP7 “Phantom Data” Source Possibly Revealed?

  - by Bil Simser

  Recently there’s been rumours floating around regarding “phantom” Windows Phone 7 data being magically sent and received on the latest WP7 phones. The news has mostly been floating around twitter so I didn’t pay it much attention. The BBC Technology News picked it up so I thought I would look more into it myself seeing that we have WP7 phones and maybe there was some truth to all this (and more importantly what was the cause). Full disclosure. I don’t have a lot of data points around this. This is from looking at a few phone logs, changing the configuration and looking back again after the change. I haven’t done a clean baseline test nor have I done testing with hundreds of phones. I leave the experience up to the reader to decide. So I went spelunking into the phone logs to see what was up. Most providers will show you data usage, at least on a daily basis. I lucked out with the provider and plan in that they provide hourly breakdowns. Here’s a snapshot from my usage throughout one night. Timestamp Data Usage 12:38:30 AM 2098 Kilobytes 1:30:30 AM 2 Kilobytes 2:38:30 AM 7118 Kilobytes 3:38:30 AM 6622 Kilobytes 4:38:30 AM 76 Kilobytes 5:38:30 AM 29 Kilobytes 6:38:30 AM 19 Kilobytes 7:38:30 AM 20 Kilobytes So a few observations from this data: Data seems to be collected on a regular basis. Looking at some other people phone logs, the times vary but it’s always hourly. There’s not a tremendous amount of data here (about 16 megabytes) but it seems like a lot for 7 hours The phone was connected to my home Wifi during this period Nothing was running and the phone was in a locked state Like I said, not a lot of data but it adds up. 16MB for 7 hours = about 50MB in a 24 hour period. That’s just plain old data being collected (somewhere, somehow) and not actual usage (Marketplace, Email, Browsing, etc.). Besides, when connected to a WiFi network you shouldn’t be charged data usage from your phone company (in theory, YMMV). After reviewing the logs I made a theory that the only thing that could possibly be sending data is the Feedback feature. With no other apps running under lock, what else could it be? In Windows 7 under your Settings the last option is Feedback. This sends feedback to Microsoft to “help improve Windows Phone”. On this page you have three options: Send feedback and use my cellular data connection Send feedback and (presumably) use my WiFi connection Don’t send feedback Knowing what I know about Microsoft, they do use the feedback data. For example some of the placement and inclusion of features in Office 2007 was based on that Feedback data that Office sends (assuming you had opted in). However in the Privacy Statement (it’s long but a good read at least once in your life), the Phone manual, and every other source I could look at there is no information about how much data it’s planning to send, just that it’s sending some data and that “some data charges with your carrier may apply”. Looking back at the logs, I have to wonder. 6MB at 3:30 and *then* 7MB the next hour. That’s a lot of information. And it adds up. 50MB in a 24 hour period X 30 days puts most people over a normal 1GB plan. And frankly why am I paying for a data plan only to have 80% of it chewed up by Microsoft, with no real benefit to me. If they included porn in the 50mb daily transfer I’d be okay with this, but I don’t see any new movies on my phone. So I turned it off. Set Feedback to disabled and wait. I waited. And waited. And generally didn’t use the phone if I could. The next day I went back to look at the data usage logs from the time period after turning the feedback mechanism off. Here are the results. Timestamp Data Usage 1:19:48 PM 0 Kilobytes 2:19:48 PM 0 Kilobytes 3:19:48 PM 0 Kilobytes 4:19:48 PM 678 Kilobytes (took a phone call) 5:19:48 PM 82 Kilobytes 6:19:48 PM 88 Kilobytes 7:20:30 PM 86 Kilobytes (guess they changed their reporting time) 8:20:30 PM 86 Kilobytes 9:20:30 PM 66 Kilobytes 10:20:30 PM 67 Kilobytes 11:20:30 PM 49 Kilobytes 12:20:30 AM 32 Kilobytes 1:20:30 AM 38 Kilobytes 2:20:31 AM 18 Kilobytes 3:20:31 AM 27 Kilobytes 4:20:31 AM 86 Kilobytes 5:20:31 AM 53 Kilobytes 6:20:31 AM 22 Kilobytes 7:22:15 AM 30 Kilobytes (another reporting time change) 8:22:15 AM 29 Kilobytes 9:22:15 AM 74 Kilobytes 10:22:15 AM 154 Kilobytes (phone call) 11:22:15 AM 12 Kilobytes 12:13:27 PM 49 Kilobytes 1:13:27 PM 197 Kilobytes (phone call) Quite a *drastic* change from what Feedback was turned on. I mean for a 24 hour period (sans 3 phone calls) I consumed about 1MB. Still quite a bit of transfer going on but at least it amounts to 30MB per month, not 30MB per day! Like I said this observation is neither scientific or conclusive. You decide what to do but frankly until Microsoft makes this data transfer exempt from your data plan (like that will happen) I would just turn Feedback off. YMMV.

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• LLBLGen Pro v3.5 has been released!

  - by FransBouma

  Last weekend we released LLBLGen Pro v3.5! Below the list of what's new in this release. Of course, not everything is on this list, like the large amount of work we put in refactoring the runtime framework. The refactoring was necessary because our framework has two paradigms which are added to the framework at a different time, and from a design perspective in the wrong order (the paradigm we added first, SelfServicing, should have been built on top of Adapter, the other paradigm, which was added more than a year after the first released version). The refactoring made sure the framework re-uses more code across the two paradigms (they already shared a lot of code) and is better prepared for the future. We're not done yet, but refactoring a massive framework like ours without breaking interfaces and existing applications is ... a bit of a challenge ;) To celebrate the release of v3.5, we give every customer a 30% discount! Use the coupon code NR1ORM with your order :) The full list of what's new: Designer Rule based .NET Attribute definitions. It's now possible to specify a rule using fine-grained expressions with an attribute definition to define which elements of a given type will receive the attribute definition. Rules can be assigned to attribute definitions on the project level, to make it even easier to define attribute definitions in bulk for many elements in the project. More information... Revamped Project Settings dialog. Multiple project related properties and settings dialogs have been merged into a single dialog called Project Settings, which makes it easier to configure the various settings related to project elements. It also makes it easier to find features previously not used  by many (e.g. type conversions) More information... Home tab with Quick Start Guides. To make new users feel right at home, we added a home tab with quick start guides which guide you through four main use cases of the designer. System Type Converters. Many common conversions have been implemented by default in system type converters so users don't have to develop their own type converters anymore for these type conversions. Bulk Element Setting Manipulator. To change setting values for multiple project elements, it was a little cumbersome to do that without a lot of clicking and opening various editors. This dialog makes changing settings for multiple elements very easy. EDMX Importer. It's now possible to import entity model data information from an existing Entity Framework EDMX file. Other changes and fixes See for the full list of changes and fixes the online documentation. LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework WCF Data Services (OData) support has been added. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF Data Services application using the VS.NET tools for WCF Data Services. WCF Data Services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 to expose your domain model using OData. More information... New query specification and execution API: QuerySpec. QuerySpec is our new query specification and execution API as an alternative to Linq and our more low-level API. It's build, like our Linq provider, on top of our lower-level API. More information... SQL Server 2012 support. The SQL Server DQE allows paging using the new SQL Server 2012 style. More information... System Type converters. For a common set of types the LLBLGen Pro runtime framework contains built-in type conversions so you don't need to write your own type converters anymore. Public/NonPublic property support. It's now possible to mark a field / navigator as non-public which is reflected in the runtime framework as an internal/friend property instead of a public property. This way you can hide properties from the public interface of a generated class and still access it through code added to the generated code base. FULL JOIN support. It's now possible to perform FULL JOIN joins using the native query api and QuerySpec. It's left to the developer to check whether the used target database supports FULL (OUTER) JOINs. Using a FULL JOIN with entity fetches is not recommended, and should only be used when both participants in the join aren't the target of the fetch. Dependency Injection Tracing. It's now possible to enable tracing on dependency injection. Enable tracing at level '4' on the traceswitch 'ORMGeneral'. This will emit trace information about which instance of which type got an instance of type T injected into property P. Entity Instances in projections in Linq. It's now possible to return an entity instance in a custom Linq projection. It's now also possible to pass this instance to a method inside the query projection. Inheritance fully supported in this construct. Entity Framework support The Entity Framework has been updated in the recent year with code-first support and a new simpler context api: DbContext (with DbSet). The amount of code to generate is smaller and the context simpler. LLBLGen Pro v3.5 comes with support for DbContext and DbSet and generates code which utilizes these new classes. NHibernate support NHibernate v3.2+ built-in proxy factory factory support. By default the built-in ProxyFactoryFactory is selected. FluentNHibernate Session Manager uses 1.2 syntax. Fluent NHibernate mappings generate a SessionManager which uses the v1.2 syntax for the ProxyFactoryFactory location Optionally emit schema / catalog name in mappings Two settings have been added which allow the user to control whether the catalog name and/or schema name as known in the project in the designer is emitted into the mappings.

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• Edit ePub eBooks with Your Favorite HTML Editor

  - by Matthew Guay

  ePub eBooks are increasingly popular today, but often they’ve been made by converting other file formats. Here’s how you can edit ePub books to remove irregularities and make them better for reading on your devices. ePub’s are actually a zip file containing images, XHTML files with your text, and more with the .epub extension. You can make them better by editing the XHTML files directly.  Code gurus can edit the code directly, but even if you’ve never edited HTML, you can still quickly make changes with a WYSIWYG editor. Extract the Files from your ePub eBook As mentioned before, ePub files are actually renamed zip files.  So first let’s get all of the files in your ePub eBook accessible.  Find an eBook you want to edit and then change the file extension to .zip. If you don’t see the file extensions, click Organize in the menu bar and select Folder and search options. Select the View tab, and then uncheck the box beside Hide extensions for known file types.  Click Ok, and then change the file type as above. Windows will warn you about changing the file type; click Yes to proceed. Now you can browse the files of the ePub file.  Notice that it contains mostly HTML or XHTML files and images.  Click Extract all files to save them all in a folder so you can easily edit them. Alternately, you can open the ePub file directly in your favorite file archival program such as 7-zip.  Browse to the location of your ePub file, double-click it, and it’ll automatically open even if you don’t change the file extension to zip.  Now you can extract the folder, or extract individual files as before.   Edit Your eBook in KompoZer The actual ebook contents are stored in HTML or XHTML files.  These may be stored on the top folder of you ePub file’s directory, or they may be stored in \OEBPS\text in the file. To change the contents of your eBook, you’ll want to edit these files.  Often there may be separate files for each chapter, so you may have to use trial and error to find the one you need to edit.  You could edit them by hand in Windows using Notepad if you don’t have an HTML editor installed. A better option would be to use an HTML editor.  Here we’ll use the free KompoZer program to edit the files just like we’d edit a document in Word. Download KompoZer (link below), and unzip the files.  Then open the new folder and launch kompozer.exe; you don’t even need to install it.  In fact, you could even store KompoZer on a flash drive so you could edit HTML files from any computer. In KompoZer, open the HTML or XHTML file from your eBook that you want to edit. Now you can edit the file just like you would edit a document in Word.  Remove extra and unneeded text, make titles stand out, correct misspellings … anything you want!  This is especially helpful if your ePub file was created by converting a PDF as these often have many small errors. Or, if you’d rather edit the code itself, select the Source tab and edit as you wish. When you’re done making the changes, make sure to save the file in the same location with the same file name. Recreate Your Edited ePub eBook Once you’ve made all the changes you wanted, it’s time to turn this folder of files back into ePub.  Make sure you change the name of the folder if it still has the same name as the original ePub or zip file so you don’t mix them up or have trouble with overwriting the old files. Zip the folder using Windows Explorer or your favorite archival utility.  If you are using another archival program, make sure to compress it as a zip folder; other compression methods will render the ePub unreadable by your eReader app. Now change the file extension again, this time back to .epub. Now you can read your eBook with your changes in your favorite reader program or app on your mobile device. Conclusion Whether you need to remove an odd, misplaced character or need to do fine editing, using an HTML editor is a great way to make your ePub eBooks look just like you want.  Also, with an editor like KompoZer it’s not even difficult. Download KompoZer Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxConvert a PDF eBook to ePub Format for Your iPad, iPhone, or eReaderRead Mobi eBooks on Kindle for PCEdit Your Firefox Bookmarks Easier with Flat Bookmark EditorChange the Default Editor for Batch Files in Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server XPS file format & XPS Viewer Explained Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter

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• Clean Up the New Ubuntu Grub2 Boot Menu

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Ubuntu adopted the new version of the Grub boot manager in version 9.10, getting rid of the old problematic menu.lst. Today we look at how to change the boot menu options in Grub2. Grub2 is a step forward in a lot of ways, and most of the annoying menu.lst issues from the past are gone. Still, if you’re not vigilant with removing old versions of the kernel, the boot list can still end up being longer than it needs to be. Note: You may have to hold the SHIFT button on your keyboard while booting up to get this menu to show. If only one operating system is installed on your computer, it may load it automatically without displaying this menu. Remove Old Kernel Entries The most common clean up task for the boot menu is to remove old kernel versions lying around on your machine. In our case we want to remove the 2.6.32-21-generic boot menu entries. In the past, this meant opening up /boot/grub/menu.lst…but with Grub2, if we remove the kernel package from our computer, Grub automatically removes those options. To remove old kernel versions, open up Synaptic Package Manager, found in the System > Administration menu. When it opens up, type the kernel version that you want to remove in the Quick search text field. The first few numbers should suffice. For each of the entries associated with the old kernel (e.g. linux-headers-2.6.32-21 and linux-image-2.6.32-21-generic), right-click and choose Mark for Complete Removal. Click the Apply button in the toolbar and then Apply in the summary window that pops up. Close Synaptic Package Manager. The next time you boot up your computer, the Grub menu will not contain the entries associated with the removed kernel version. Remove Any Option by Editing /etc/grub.d If you need more fine-grained control, or want to remove entries that are not kernel versions, you must change the files located in /etc/grub.d. /etc/grub.d contains files that hold the menu entries that used to be contained in /boot/grub/menu.lst. If you want to add new boot menu entries, you would create a new file in this folder, making sure to mark it as executable. If you want to remove boot menu entries, as we do, you would edit files in this folder. If we wanted to remove all of the memtest86+ entries, we could just make the 20_memtest86+ file non-executable, with the terminal command sudo chmod –x 20_memtest86+ Followed by the terminal command sudo update-grub Note that memtest86+ was not found by update-grub because it will only consider executable files. However, instead, we’re going to remove the Serial console 115200 entry for memtest86+… Open a terminal window Applications > Accessories > Terminal. In the terminal window, type in the command: sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ The menu entries are found at the bottom of this file. Comment out the menu entry for serial console 115200 by adding a “#” to the start of each line. Save and close this file. In the terminal window you opened, enter in the command sudo update-grub Note: If you don’t run update-grub, the boot menu options will not change! Now, the next time you boot up, that strange entry will be gone, and you’re left with a simple and clean boot menu. Conclusion While changing Grub2’s boot menu may seem overly complicated to legacy Grub masters, for normal users, Grub2 means that you won’t have to change the boot menu that often. Fortunately, if you do have to do it, the process is still pretty easy. For more detailed information about how to change entries in Grub2, this Ubuntu forum thread is a great resource. If you’re using an older version of Ubuntu, check out our article on how to clean up Ubuntu grub boot menu after upgrades. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Clean Up Ubuntu Grub Boot Menu After UpgradesReinstall Ubuntu Grub Bootloader After Windows Wipes it OutChange the GRUB Menu Timeout on UbuntuHow To Switch to Console Mode for Ubuntu VMware GuestSet Windows as Default OS when Dual Booting Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Daily Motivator (Firefox) FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation"

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• How to Add a Business Card, or vCard (.vcf) File, to a Signature in Outlook 2013 Without Displaying an Image

  - by Lori Kaufman

  Whenever you add a Business Card to your signature in Outlook 2013, the Signature Editor automatically generates a picture of it and includes that in the signature as well as attaching the .vcf file. However, there is a way to leave out the image. To remove the business card image from your signature but maintain the attached .vcf file, you must make a change to the registry. NOTE: Before making changes to the registry, be sure you back it up. We also recommend creating a restore point you can use to restore your system if something goes wrong. Before changing the registry, we must add the Business Card to the signature and save it so a .vcf file of the contact is created in the Signatures folder. To do this, click the File tab. Click Options in the menu list on the left side of the Account Information screen. On the Outlook Options dialog box, click Mail in the list of options on the left side of the dialog box. On the Mail screen, click Signatures in the Compose messages section. For this example, we will create a new signature to include the .vcf file for your business card without the image. Click New below the Select signature to edit box. Enter a name for the new signature, such as Business Card, and click OK. Enter text in the signature editor and format it the way you want or insert a different image or logo. Click Business Card above the signature editor. Select the contact you want to include in the signature on the Insert Business Card dialog box and click OK. Click Save below the Select signature to edit box. This creates a .vcf file for the business card in the Signatures folder. Click on the business card image in the signature and delete it. You should only see your formatted text or other image or logo in the signature editor. Click OK to save your new signature and close the signature editor. Close Outlook as well. Now, we will open the Registry Editor to add a key and value to indicate where to find the .vcf to include in the signature we just created. If you’re running Windows 8, press the Windows Key + X to open the command menu and select Run. You can also press the Windows Key + R to directly access the Run dialog box. NOTE: In Windows 7, select Run from the Start menu. In the Open edit box on the Run dialog box, enter “regedit” (without the quotes) and click OK. If the User Account Control dialog box displays, click Yes to continue. NOTE: You may not see this dialog box, depending on your User Account Control settings. Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Signatures Make sure the Signatures key is selected. Select New | String Value from the Edit menu. NOTE: You can also right-click in the empty space in the right pane and select New | String Value from the popup menu. Rename the new value to the name of the Signature you created. For this example, we named the value Business Card. Double-click on the new value. In the Value data edit box on the Edit String dialog box, enter the value indicating the location of the .vcf file to include in the signature. The format is: <signature name>_files\<name of .vcf file> For our example, the Value data should be as follows: Business Card_files\Lori Kaufman The name of the .vcf file is generally the contact name. If you’re not sure of what to enter for the Value data for the new key value, you can check the location and name of the .vcf file. To do this, open the Outlook Options dialog box and access the Mail screen as instructed earlier in this article. However, press and hold the Ctrl key while clicking the Signatures button. The Signatures folder opens in Windows Explorer. There should be a folder in the Signatures folder named after the signature you created with “_files” added to the end. For our example, the folder is named Business Card_files. Open this folder. In this folder, you should see a .vcf file with the name of your contact as the name of the file. For our contact, the file is named Lori Kaufman.vcf. The path to the .vcf file should be the name of the folder for the signature (Business Card_files), followed by a “\”, and the name of the .vcf file without the extension (Lori Kaufman). Putting these names together, you get the path that should be entered as the Value data in the new key you created in the Registry Editor. Business Card_files\Lori Kaufman Once you’ve entered the Value data for the new key, select Exit from the File menu to close the Registry Editor. Open Outlook and click New Email on the Home tab. Click Signature in the Include section of the New Mail Message tab and select your new signature from the drop-down menu. NOTE: If you made the new signature the default signature, it will be automatically inserted into the new mail message. The .vcf file is attached to the email message, but the business card image is not included. All you will see in the body of the email message is the text or other image you included in the signature. You can also choose to include an image of your business card in a signature with no .vcf file attached.     

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• The Winds of Change are a Blowin&rsquo;

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now.  Not the fan part, but the paying customer part.  I’m still a huge fan.  I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often).  I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books.  I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do.  But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team.  I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools.  Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more.  (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it.  Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools.  They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum).  I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video).  I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime.  Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited.  I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up.  So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool.  This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with.  When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to.  The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route.  Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford:  Team Foundation Server.  And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now.  So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools.  I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny).  Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction.  As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching.  So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant.  It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry).  As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company.  This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with.  We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now.  This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time.  We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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• Internet Explorer and Cookie Domains

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been bitten by some nasty issues today in regards to using a domain cookie as part of my FormsAuthentication operations. In the app I'm currently working on we need to have single sign-on that spans multiple sub-domains (www.domain.com, store.domain.com, mail.domain.com etc.). That's what a domain cookie is meant for - when you set the cookie with a Domain value of the base domain the cookie stays valid for all sub-domains. I've been testing the app for quite a while and everything is working great. Finally I get around to checking the app with Internet Explorer and I start discovering some problems - specifically on my local machine using localhost. It appears that Internet Explorer (all versions) doesn't allow you to specify a domain of localhost, a local IP address or machine name. When you do, Internet Explorer simply ignores the cookie. In my last post I talked about some generic code I created to basically parse out the base domain from the current URL so a domain cookie would automatically used using this code:private void IssueAuthTicket(UserState userState, bool rememberMe) { FormsAuthenticationTicket ticket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket(1, userState.UserId, DateTime.Now, DateTime.Now.AddDays(10), rememberMe, userState.ToString()); string ticketString = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(ticket); HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName, ticketString); cookie.HttpOnly = true; if (rememberMe) cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(10); var domain = Request.Url.GetBaseDomain(); if (domain != Request.Url.DnsSafeHost) cookie.Domain = domain; HttpContext.Response.Cookies.Add(cookie); } This code works fine on all browsers but Internet Explorer both locally and on full domains. And it also works fine for Internet Explorer with actual 'real' domains. However, this code fails silently for IE when the domain is localhost or any other local address. In that case Internet Explorer simply refuses to accept the cookie and fails to log in. Argh! The end result is that the solution above trying to automatically parse the base domain won't work as local addresses end up failing. Configuration Setting Given this screwed up state of affairs, the best solution to handle this is a configuration setting. Forms Authentication actually has a domain key that can be set for FormsAuthentication so that's natural choice for the storing the domain name: <authentication mode="Forms"> <forms loginUrl="~/Account/Login" name="gnc" domain="mydomain.com" slidingExpiration="true" timeout="30" xdt:Transform="Replace"/> </authentication> Although I'm not actually letting FormsAuth set my cookie directly I can still access the domain name from the static FormsAuthentication.CookieDomain property, by changing the domain assignment code to:if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(FormsAuthentication.CookieDomain)) cookie.Domain = FormsAuthentication.CookieDomain; The key is to only set the domain when actually running on a full authority, and leaving the domain key blank on the local machine to avoid the local address debacle. Note if you want to see this fail with IE, set the domain to domain="localhost" and watch in Fiddler what happens. Logging Out When specifying a domain key for a login it's also vitally important that that same domain key is used when logging out. Forms Authentication will do this automatically for you when the domain is set and you use FormsAuthentication.SignOut(). If you use an explicit Cookie to manage your logins or other persistant value, make sure that when you log out you also specify the domain. IOW, the expiring cookie you set for a 'logout' should match the same settings - name, path, domain - as the cookie you used to set the value.HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie("gne", ""); cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-5); // make sure we use the same logic to release cookie var domain = Request.Url.GetBaseDomain(); if (domain != Request.Url.DnsSafeHost) cookie.Domain = domain; HttpContext.Response.Cookies.Add(cookie); I managed to get my code to do what I needed it to, but man I'm getting so sick and tired of fixing IE only bugs. I spent most of the day today fixing a number of small IE layout bugs along with this issue which took a bit of time to trace down.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Using the new CSS Analyzer in JavaFX Scene Builder

  - by Jerome Cambon

  As you know, JavaFX provides from the API many properties that you can set to customize or make your components to behave as you want. For instance, for a Button, you can set its font, or its max size.Using Scene Builder, these properties can be explored and modified using the inspector. However, JavaFX also provides many other properties to have a fine grained customization of your components : the css properties. These properties are typically set from a css stylesheet. For instance, you can set a background image on a Button, change the Button corners, etc... Using Scene Builder, until now, you could set a css property using the inspector Style and Stylesheet editors. But you had to go to the JavaFX css documentation to know the css properties that can be applied to a given component. Hopefully, Scene Builder 1.1 added recently a very interesting new feature : the CSS Analyzer.It allows you to explore all the css properties available for a JavaFX component, and helps you to build your css rules. A very simple example : make a Button rounded Let’s take a very simple example:you would like to customize your Buttons to make them rounded. First, enable the CSS Analyzer, using the ‘View->Show CSS Analyzer’ menu. Grow the main window, and the CSS Analyzer to get more room: Then, drop a Button from the Library to the ContentView: the CSS Analyzer is now showing the Button css properties: As you can see, there is a ‘-fx-background-radius’ css property that allow to define the radius of the background (note that you can get the associated css documentation by clicking on the property name). You can then experiment this by setting the Button style property from the inspector: As you can see in the css doc, one can set the same radius for the 4 corners by a simple number. Once the style value is applied, the Button is now rounded, as expected.Look at the CSS Analyzer: the ‘-fx-background-radius’ property has now 2 entries: the default one, and the one we just entered from the Style property. The new value “win”: it overrides the default one, and become the actual value (to highlight this, the cell background becomes blue). Now, you will certainly prefer to apply this new style to all the Buttons of your FXML document, and have a css rule for this.To do this, save you document first, and create a css file in the same directory than the new document.Create an empty css file (e.g. test.css), and attach it the the root AnchorPane, by first selecting the AnchorPane, then using the Stylesheets editor from the inspector: Add the corresponding css rule to your new test.css file, from your preferred editor (Netbeans for me ;-) and save it. .button { -fx-background-radius: 10px;} Now, select your Button and have a look at the CSS Analyzer. As you can see, the Button is inheriting the css rule (since the Button is a child of the AnchorPane), and still have its inline Style. The Inline style “win”, since it has precedence on the stylesheet. The CSS Analyzer columns are displayed by precedence order.Note the small right-arrow icons, that allow to jump to the source of the value (either test.css, or the inspector in this case).Of course, unless you want to set a specific background radius for this particular Button, you can remove the inline Style from the inspector. Changing the color of a TitledPane arrow In some cases, it can be useful to be able to select the inner element you want to style directly from the Content View . Drop a TitledPane to the Content View. Then select from the CSS Analyzer the CSS cursor (the other cursor on the left allow you to come back to ‘standard’ selection), that will allow to select an inner element: height: 62px;" align="LEFT" border="0"> … and select the TitledPane arrow, that will get a yellow background: … and the Styleable Path is updated: To define a new css rule, you can first copy the Styleable path : .. then paste it in your test.css file. Then, add an entry to set the -fx-background-color to red. You should have something like: .titled-pane:expanded .title .arrow-button .arrow { -fx-background-color : red;} As soon as the test.css is saved, the change is taken into account in Scene Builder. You can also use the Styleable Path to discover all the inner elements of TitledPane, by clicking on the arrow icon: More details You can see the CSS Analyzer in action (and many other features) from the Java One BOF: BOF4279 - In-Depth Layout and Styling with the JavaFX Scene Builder presented by my colleague Jean-Francois Denise. On the right hand, click on the Media link to go to the video (streaming) of the presa. The Scene Builder support of CSS starts at 9:20 The CSS Analyzer presentation starts at 12:50

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• FAT Volume and CE

  - by Kate Moss' Open Space

  Whenever we format a disk volume, it is a good idea to name the label so it will be easier to categorize. To label a volume, we can use LABEL command or UI depends on your preference. Windows CE does provide FAT driver and support various format (FAT12, FAT16,FAT32, ExFAT and TFAT - transaction-safe FAT) and many feature to let you scan and even defrag the volume but not labeling. At any time you format a volume in CE and then mount it on PC, the label is always empty! Of course, you can always label the volume on PC, even it is formatted in CE. So looks like CE does not care about the volume label at all, neither report the label to OS nor changing the label on FAT.So how can we set the volume label in CE? To Answer this question, we need to know how does FAT stores the volume label. Here are some on-line resources are handy for parsing FAT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/ide/fat32.html http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/fatgen.mspx You can refer to PUBLIC\COMMON\OAK\DRIVERS\FSD\FATUTIL\MAIN\bootsec.h and dosbpb.h or the above links for the fields we discuss here. The first sector of a FAT Volume (it is not necessary to be the first sector of a disk.) is a FAT boot sector and BPB (BIOS Parameter Block). And at offset 43, bgbsVolumeLabel (or bsVolumeLabel on FAT16) is for storing the volume lable, but note in the spec also indicates "FAT file system drivers should make sure that they update this field when the volume label file in the root directory has its name changed or created.". So we can't just simply update the bgbsVolumeLabel but also need to create a volume lable file in root directory. The volume lable file is not a real file but just a file entry in root directory with zero file lenth and a very special file attribute, ATTR_VOLUME_ID. (defined in public\common\oak\drivers\fsd\fatutil\MAIN\fatutilp.h) Locating and accessing bootsector is quite straight forward, as long as we know the starting sector of a FAT volume, that's it. But where is the root directory? The layout of a typical FAT is like this Boot sector (Volume ID in the figure) followed by Reserved Sectors (1 on FAT12/16 and 32 on FAT32), then FAT chain table(s) (can be 1 or 2), after that is the root directory (FAT12/16 and not shows in the figure) then begining of the File and Directories. In FAT12/16, the root directory is placed right after FAT so it is not hard to caculate the offset in the volume. But in FAT32, this rule is no longer true: the first cluster of the root directory is determined by BGBPB_RootDirStrtClus (or offset 44 in boot sector). Although this field is usually 0x00000002 (it is how CE initial the root directory after formating a volume. Note we should never assume it is always true) which means the first cluster contains data but not like the root directory is contiguous in FAT12/16, it is just like a regular file can be fragmented. So we need to access the root directory (of FAT32) hopping one cluster to another by traversing FAT table. Let's trace the code now. Although the source of FAT driver is not available in CE Shared Source program, but the formatter, Fatutil.dll, is available in public\common\oak\drivers\fsd\fatutil\MAIN\formatdisk.cpp. Be aware the public code only provides formatter for FAT12/16/32 for ExFAT it is still not available. FormatVolumeInternal is the main worker function. With the knowledge here, you should be able the trace the code easily. But I would like to discuss the following code pieces     dwReservedSectors = (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) ? 32 : 1;     dwRootEntries = (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) ? 0 : fo.dwRootEntries; Note the dwReservedSectors is 32 in FAT32 and 1 in FAT12/16. Root Entries is another different mentioned in previous paragraph, 0 for FAT32 (dynamic allocated) and fixed size (usually 512, defined in DEFAULT_ROOT_ENTRIES in public\common\sdk\inc\fatutil.h) And then here   memset(pBootSec->bsVolumeLabel, 0x20, sizeof(pBootSec->bsVolumeLabel)); It sets the Volume Label as empty string. Now let's carry on to the next section - write the root directory.     if (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) {         if (!(fo.dwFlags & FATUTIL_FORMAT_TFAT)) {             dwRootSectors = dwSectorsPerCluster;         }         else {             DIRENTRY    dirEntry;             DWORD       offset;             int               iVolumeNo;             memset(pbBlock, 0, pdi->di_bytes_per_sect);             memset(&dirEntry, 0, sizeof(DIRENTRY));                         dirEntry.de_attr = ATTR_VOLUME_ID;             // the first one is volume label             memcpy(dirEntry.de_name, "TFAT       ", sizeof (dirEntry.de_name));             memcpy(pbBlock, &dirEntry, sizeof(dirEntry));              ...             // Skip the next step of zeroing out clusters             dwCurrentSec += dwSectorsPerCluster;             dwRootSectors = 0;         }     }     // Each new root directory sector needs to be zeroed.     memset(pbBlock, 0, cbSizeBlk);     iRootSec=0;     while ( iRootSec < dwRootSectors) { Basically, the code zero out the each entry in root directory depends on dwRootSectors. In FAT12/16, the dwRootSectors is calculated as the sectors we need for the root entries (512 for most of the case) and in FAT32 it just zero out the one cluster. Please note that, if it is a TFAT volume, it initialize the root directory with special volume label entries for some special purpose. Despite to its unusual initialization process for TFAT, it does provide a example for how to create a volume entry. With some minor modification, we can assign the volume label in FAT formatter and also remember to sync the volume label with bsVolumeLabel or bgbsVolumeLabel in boot sector.

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• PHP OCI8 and Oracle 11g DRCP Connection Pooling in Pictures

  - by christopher.jones

  Here is a screen shot from a PHP OCI8 connection pooling demo that I like to run. It graphically shows how little database host memory is needed when using DRCP connection pooling with Oracle Database 11g. Migrating to DRCP can be as simple as starting the pool and changing the connection string in your PHP application. The script that generated the data for this graph was a simple "Parts" query application being run under various simulated user loads. I was running the database on a small Oracle Linux server with just 2G of memory. I used PHP OCI8 1.4. Apache is in pre-fork mode, as needed for PHP. Each graph has time on the horizontal access in arbitrary 'tick' time units. Click the image to see it full sized. Pooled connections Beginning with the top left graph, At tick time 65 I used Apache's 'ab' tool to start 100 concurrent 'users' running the application. These users connected to the database using DRCP: $c = oci_pconnect('phpdemo', 'welcome', 'myhost/orcl:pooled'); A second hundred DRCP users were added to the system at tick 80 and a final hundred users added at tick 100. At about tick 110 I stopped the test and restarted Apache. This closed all the connections. The bottom left graph shows the number of statements being executed by the database per second, with some spikes for background database activity and some variability for this small test. Each extra batch of users adds another 'step' of load to the system. Looking at the top right Server Process graph shows the database server processes doing the query work for each web user. As user load is added, the DRCP server pool increases (in green). The pool is initially at its default size 4 and quickly ramps up to about (I'm guessing) 35. At tick time 100 the pool increases to my configured maximum of 40 processes. Those 40 processes are doing the query work for all 300 web users. When I stopped the test at tick 110, the pooled processes remained open waiting for more users to connect. If I had left the test quiet for the DRCP 'inactivity_timeout' period (300 seconds by default), the pool would have shrunk back to 4 processes. Looking at the bottom right, you can see the amount of memory being consumed by the database. During the initial quiet period about 500M of memory was in use. The absolute number is just an indication of my particular DB configuration. As the number of pooled processes increases, each process needs more memory. You can see the shape of the memory graph echoes the Server Process graph above it. Each of the 300 web users will also need a few kilobytes but this is almost too small to see on the graph. Non-pooled connections Compare the DRCP case with using 'dedicated server' processes. At tick 140 I started 100 web users who did not use pooled connections: $c = oci_pconnect('phpdemo', 'welcome', 'myhost/orcl'); This connection string change is the only difference between the two tests. At ticks 155 and 165 I started two more batches of 100 simulated users each. At about tick 195 I stopped the user load but left Apache running. Apache then gradually returned to its quiescent state, killing idle httpd processes and producing the downward slope at the right of the graphs as the persistent database connection in each Apache process was closed. The Executions per Second graph on the bottom left shows the same step increases as for the earlier DRCP case. The database is handling this load. But look at the number of Server processes on the top right graph. There is now a one-to-one correspondence between Apache/PHP processes and DB server processes. Each PHP processes has one DB server processes dedicated to it. Hence the term 'dedicated server'. The memory required on the database is proportional to all those database server processes started. Almost all my system's memory was consumed. I doubt it would have coped with any more user load. Summary Oracle Database 11g DRCP connection pooling significantly reduces database host memory requirements allow more system memory to be allocated for the SGA and allowing the system to scale to handled thousands of concurrent PHP users. Even for small systems, using DRCP allows more web users to be active. More information about PHP and DRCP can be found in the PHP Scalability and High Availability chapter of The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual.

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• Change the User Interface Language in Vista or Windows 7

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to change the user interface language in any edition of Windows 7 or Vista on your computer?  Here’s a free app that can help you do this quickly and easily. If your native language is not the one most spoken in your area, you’ve likely purchased a PC with Windows preinstalled with a language that is difficult or impossible for you to use.  Windows 7 and Vista Ultimate include the ability to install multiple user interface languages and switch between them. However, all other editions are stuck with the language they shipped with.  With the free Vistalizator app, you can add several different interface languages to any edition of Vista or Windows 7 and easily switch between them. Note:  In this test, we used an US English copy of both Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows Vista Home Premium, and it works the same on any edition. The built-in language switching in the Ultimate Editions lets you set a user interface language for each user account, but this will only switch it for all users.  Add a User Interface Language to Windows To add an interface language to any edition of Windows 7 and Vista, first download Vistalizator (link below).  Then, from the same page, download the language pack of your choice.  The language packs are specific for each service pack of Windows, so make sure to choose the correct version and service pack you have installed. Once the downloads are finished, launch the Vistalizator program. You do not need to install it; simply run it and you’re ready to go.  Click the Add languages button to add a language to Windows. Select the user interface language pack you downloaded, and click Open. Depending on the language you selected, it may not automatically update with Windows Update when a service pack is released.  If so, you will have to remove the language pack and reinstall the new one for that service pack at that time.  Click Ok to continue. Make sure you’ve selected the correct language, and click Install language. Vistalizator will extract and install the language pack.  This took around 5 to 10 minutes in our test. Once the language pack is installed, click Yes to make it the default display language. Now, you have two languages installed in Windows.  You may be prompted to check for updates to the language pack; if so, click Update languages and Vistalizator will automatically check for and install any updates. When finished, exit Vistalizator to finish switching the language.  Click Yes to automatically reboot and apply the changes. When you computer reboots, it will show your new language, which in our test is Thai.  Here’s our Windows 7 Home Premium machine with the Thai language pack installed and running. You can even add a right to left language, such as Arabic, to Windows.  Simply repeat the steps to add another language pack.    Vistalizator was originally designed for Windows Vista, and works great with Windows 7 too.  The language packs for Vista are larger downloads than their Windows 7 counterparts.  Here’s our Vista Home Premium in English… And here’s how it looks after installing the Simplified Chinese language pack with Vistalizator. Revert to Your Original Language If you wish to return to the language that your computer shipped with, or want to switch to another language you’ve installed, run Vistalizator again.  Select the language you wish to use, and click Change language.   When you close Vistalizator, you will again be asked to reboot.  Once you’ve rebooted, you’ll see your new (or original) language ready to use.  Here’s our Windows 7 Home Premium desktop, back in it’s original English interface. Conclusion This is a great way to change your computer’s language into your own native language, and is especially useful for expatriates around the world.  Also, if you’d like to simply change or add an input language instead of changing the language throughout your computer, check out our tutorial on How to Add Keyboard Languages to XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Download Vistalizator Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Enable Military Time in Windows 7 or VistaWhy Does My Password Expire in Windows?Use Windows Vista Aero through Remote Desktop ConnectionDisable User Account Control (UAC) the Easy Way on Win 7 or VistaAdd keyboard languages to XP, Vista, and Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon

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• Minidlna Directory Issues

  - by Somnambulist

  I've done my searching and can't find an answer to THIS specific issue. I have my minidlna set up and running - but it's not really done properly. First off, when I open the server on my bluray player, all of my movies are listed twice - when they are certainly not saved on my external twice. Second, when I open the server - rather than reading "Movies" "TV" "Music", etc - It just mashes all of my movies, tv, and some other folders all together with no real organization. I never had this problem when I had my Windows set up, so I know it's something configured improperly more-so than my external drive giving me gruff. Here's my minidlna.conf file: # This is the configuration file for the MiniDLNA daemon, a DLNA/UPnP-AV media # server. # # Unless otherwise noted, the commented out options show their default value. # # On Debian, you can also refer to the minidlna.conf(5) man page for # documentation about this file. media_dir=/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You # This option can be specified more than once if you want multiple directories # scanned. # # If you want to restrict a media_dir to a specific content type, you can # prepend the directory name with a letter representing the type (A, P or V), # followed by a comma, as so: # * "A" for audio (eg. media_dir=A,/var/lib/minidlna/music) # * "P" for pictures (eg. media_dir=P,/var/lib/minidlna/pictures) # * "V" for video (eg. media_dir=V,/var/lib/minidlna/videos) # # WARNING: After changing this option, you need to rebuild the database. Either # run minidlna with the '-R' option, or delete the 'files.db' file # from the db_dir directory (see below). # On Debian, you can run, as root, 'service minidlna force-reload' instead. #media_dir=/var/lib/minidlna media_dir=V,/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies media_dir=V,/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/TV media_dir=P,/home/somnambulist/Pictures # Path to the directory that should hold the database and album art cache. db_dir=/home/somnambulist/serverart # Path to the directory that should hold the log file. log_dir=/home/somnambulist/serverlog # Minimum level of importance of messages to be logged. # Must be one of "off", "fatal", "error", "warn", "info" or "debug". # "off" turns of logging entirely, "fatal" is the highest level of importance # and "debug" the lowest. #log_level=warn # Use a different container as the root of the directory tree presented to # clients. The possible values are: # * "." - standard container # * "B" - "Browse Directory" # * "M" - "Music" # * "P" - "Pictures" # * "V" - "Video" # if you specify "B" and client device is audio-only then "Music/Folders" will be used as root root_container=B # Network interface(s) to bind to (e.g. eth0), comma delimited. #network_interface= # IPv4 address to listen on (e.g. 192.0.2.1). #listening_ip= # Port number for HTTP traffic (descriptions, SOAP, media transfer). port=8200 # URL presented to clients. # The default is the IP address of the server on port 80. #presentation_url=http://example.com:80 # Name that the DLNA server presents to clients. friendly_name=Somnambulist Media Server # Serial number the server reports to clients. serial=12345678 # Model name the server reports to clients. #model_name=Windows Media Connect compatible (MiniDLNA) # Model number the server reports to clients. model_number=1 # Automatic discovery of new files in the media_dir directory. #inotify=yes # List of file names to look for when searching for album art. Names should be # delimited with a forward slash ("/"). album_art_names=Cover.jpg/cover.jpg/AlbumArtSmall.jpg/albumartsmall.jpg/AlbumArt.jpg/albumart.jpg/Album.jpg/album.jpg/Folder.jpg/folder.jpg/Thumb.jpg/thumb.jpg # Strictly adhere to DLNA standards. # This allows server-side downscaling of very large JPEG images, which may # decrease JPEG serving performance on (at least) Sony DLNA products. #strict_dlna=no # Support for streaming .jpg and .mp3 files to a TiVo supporting HMO. #enable_tivo=no # Notify interval, in seconds. #notify_interval=895 # Path to the MiniSSDPd socket, for MiniSSDPd support. #minissdpdsocket=/run/minissdpd.sock` And here's the error I get in terminal when I run: sudo service minidlna restart sudo service minidlna force-reload Force restart error: Restarting DLNA/UPnP-AV media server minidlna [2013/08/12 21:19:27] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies" not accessible! [Permission denied] [2013/08/12 21:19:27] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/TV" not accessible! [Permission denied] Force-reload error: Restarting DLNA/UPnP-AV media server minidlna [2013/08/12 21:19:46] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies" not accessible! [Permission denied] [2013/08/12 21:19:46] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/TV" not accessible! [Permission denied] rm: cannot remove ‘/home/somnambulist/serverart/files.db’: Permission denied rm: cannot remove ‘/home/somnambulist/serverart/art_cache/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies/Slumdog Millionaire/Slumdog.Millionaire.Cover.jpg’: Permission denied rm: cannot remove ‘/home/somnambulist/serverart/art_cache/media/somnambulist/Ghost In You/Movies/Zack and Miri Make a Porno/ZackAndMiriMakeAPornoCover.jpg’: Permission denied [2013/08/12 21:19:46] minidlna.c:744: warn: Failed to clean old file cache. [ OK ] I've spent hours on this at this point, read through various files - and even had a friend who is relatively Ubuntu-savvy try to help me via chat - no such luck. Thanks in advance for any help.

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• The Top Ten Security Top Ten Lists

  - by Troy Kitch

  As a marketer, we're always putting together the top 3, or 5 best, or an assortment of top ten lists. So instead of going that route, I've put together my top ten security top ten lists. These are not only for security practitioners, but also for the average Joe/Jane; because who isn't concerned about security these days? Now, there might not be ten for each one of these lists, but the title works best that way. Starting with my number ten (in no particular order): 10. Top 10 Most Influential Security-Related Movies Amrit Williams pulls together a great collection of security-related movies. He asks for comments on which one made you want to get into the business. I would have to say that my most influential movie(s), that made me want to get into the business of "stopping the bad guys" would have to be the James Bond series. I grew up on James Bond movies: thwarting the bad guy and saving the world. I recall being both ecstatic and worried when Silicon Valley-themed "A View to A Kill" hit theaters: "An investigation of a horse-racing scam leads 007 to a mad industrialist who plans to create a worldwide microchip monopoly by destroying California's Silicon Valley." Yikes! 9. Top Ten Security Careers From movies that got you into the career, here’s a top 10 list of security-related careers. It starts with number then, Information Security Analyst and ends with number one, Malware Analyst. They point out the significant growth in security careers and indicate that "according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the field is expected to experience growth rates of 22% between 2010-2020. If you are interested in getting into the field, Oracle has many great opportunities all around the world.  8. Top 125 Network Security Tools A bit outside of the range of 10, the top 125 Network Security Tools is an important list because it includes a prioritized list of key security tools practitioners are using in the hacking community, regardless of whether they are vendor supplied or open source. The exhaustive list provides ratings, reviews, searching, and sorting. 7. Top 10 Security Practices I have to give a shout out to my alma mater, Cal Poly, SLO: Go Mustangs! They have compiled their list of top 10 practices for students and faculty to follow. Educational institutions are a common target of web based attacks and miscellaneous errors according to the 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.    6. (ISC)2 Top 10 Safe and Secure Online Tips for Parents This list is arguably the most important list on my list. The tips were "gathered from (ISC)2 member volunteers who participate in the organization’s Safe and Secure Online program, a worldwide initiative that brings top cyber security experts into schools to teach children ages 11-14 how to protect themselves in a cyber-connected world…If you are a parent, educator or organization that would like the Safe and Secure Online presentation delivered at your local school, or would like more information about the program, please visit here.” 5. Top Ten Data Breaches of the Past 12 Months This type of list is always changing, so it's nice to have a current one here from Techrader.com. They've compiled and commented on the top breaches. It is likely that most readers here were effected in some way or another. 4. Top Ten Security Comic Books Although mostly physical security controls, I threw this one in for fun. My vote for #1 (not on the list) would be Professor X. The guy can breach confidentiality, integrity, and availability just by messing with your thoughts. 3. The IOUG Data Security Survey's Top 10+ Threats to Organizations The Independent Oracle Users Group annual survey on enterprise data security, Leaders Vs. Laggards, highlights what Oracle Database users deem as the top 12 threats to their organization. You can find a nice graph on page 9; Figure 7: Greatest Threats to Data Security. 2. The Ten Most Common Database Security Vulnerabilities Though I don't necessarily agree with all of the vulnerabilities in this order...I like a list that focuses on where two-thirds of your sensitive and regulated data resides (Source: IDC).  1. OWASP Top Ten Project The Online Web Application Security Project puts together their annual list of the 10 most critical web application security risks that organizations should be including in their overall security, business risk and compliance plans. In particular, SQL injection risks continues to rear its ugly head each year. Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall can help prevent SQL injection attacks and monitor database and system activity as a detective security control. Did I miss any?

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• NoSQL Memcached API for MySQL: Latest Updates

  - by Mat Keep

  With data volumes exploding, it is vital to be able to ingest and query data at high speed. For this reason, MySQL has implemented NoSQL interfaces directly to the InnoDB and MySQL Cluster (NDB) storage engines, which bypass the SQL layer completely. Without SQL parsing and optimization, Key-Value data can be written directly to MySQL tables up to 9x faster, while maintaining ACID guarantees. In addition, users can continue to run complex queries with SQL across the same data set, providing real-time analytics to the business or anonymizing sensitive data before loading to big data platforms such as Hadoop, while still maintaining all of the advantages of their existing relational database infrastructure. This and more is discussed in the latest Guide to MySQL and NoSQL where you can learn more about using the APIs to scale new generations of web, cloud, mobile and social applications on the world's most widely deployed open source database The native Memcached API is part of the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate, and is already available in the GA release of MySQL Cluster. By using the ubiquitous Memcached API for writing and reading data, developers can preserve their investments in Memcached infrastructure by re-using existing Memcached clients, while also eliminating the need for application changes. Speed, when combined with flexibility, is essential in the world of growing data volumes and variability. Complementing NoSQL access, support for on-line DDL (Data Definition Language) operations in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster enables DevOps teams to dynamically update their database schema to accommodate rapidly changing requirements, such as the need to capture additional data generated by their applications. These changes can be made without database downtime. Using the Memcached interface, developers do not need to define a schema at all when using MySQL Cluster. Lets look a little more closely at the Memcached implementations for both InnoDB and MySQL Cluster. Memcached Implementation for InnoDB The Memcached API for InnoDB is previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate. As illustrated in the following figure, Memcached for InnoDB is implemented via a Memcached daemon plug-in to the mysqld process, with the Memcached protocol mapped to the native InnoDB API. Figure 1: Memcached API Implementation for InnoDB With the Memcached daemon running in the same process space, users get very low latency access to their data while also leveraging the scalability enhancements delivered with InnoDB and a simple deployment and management model. Multiple web / application servers can remotely access the Memcached / InnoDB server to get direct access to a shared data set. With simultaneous SQL access, users can maintain all the advanced functionality offered by InnoDB including support for Foreign Keys, XA transactions and complex JOIN operations. Benchmarks demonstrate that the NoSQL Memcached API for InnoDB delivers up to 9x higher performance than the SQL interface when inserting new key/value pairs, with a single low-end commodity server supporting nearly 70,000 Transactions per Second. Figure 2: Over 9x Faster INSERT Operations The delivered performance demonstrates MySQL with the native Memcached NoSQL interface is well suited for high-speed inserts with the added assurance of transactional guarantees. You can check out the latest Memcached / InnoDB developments and benchmarks here You can learn how to configure the Memcached API for InnoDB here Memcached Implementation for MySQL Cluster Memcached API support for MySQL Cluster was introduced with General Availability (GA) of the 7.2 release, and joins an extensive range of NoSQL interfaces that are already available for MySQL Cluster Like Memcached, MySQL Cluster provides a distributed hash table with in-memory performance. MySQL Cluster extends Memcached functionality by adding support for write-intensive workloads, a full relational model with ACID compliance (including persistence), rich query support, auto-sharding and 99.999% availability, with extensive management and monitoring capabilities. All writes are committed directly to MySQL Cluster, eliminating cache invalidation and the overhead of data consistency checking to ensure complete synchronization between the database and cache. Figure 3: Memcached API Implementation with MySQL Cluster Implementation is simple: 1. The application sends reads and writes to the Memcached process (using the standard Memcached API). 2. This invokes the Memcached Driver for NDB (which is part of the same process) 3. The NDB API is called, providing for very quick access to the data held in MySQL Cluster’s data nodes. The solution has been designed to be very flexible, allowing the application architect to find a configuration that best fits their needs. It is possible to co-locate the Memcached API in either the data nodes or application nodes, or alternatively within a dedicated Memcached layer. The benefit of this flexible approach to deployment is that users can configure behavior on a per-key-prefix basis (through tables in MySQL Cluster) and the application doesn’t have to care – it just uses the Memcached API and relies on the software to store data in the right place(s) and to keep everything synchronized. Using Memcached for Schema-less Data By default, every Key / Value is written to the same table with each Key / Value pair stored in a single row – thus allowing schema-less data storage. Alternatively, the developer can define a key-prefix so that each value is linked to a pre-defined column in a specific table. Of course if the application needs to access the same data through SQL then developers can map key prefixes to existing table columns, enabling Memcached access to schema-structured data already stored in MySQL Cluster. Conclusion Download the Guide to MySQL and NoSQL to learn more about NoSQL APIs and how you can use them to scale new generations of web, cloud, mobile and social applications on the world's most widely deployed open source database See how to build a social app with MySQL Cluster and the Memcached API from our on-demand webinar or take a look at the docs Don't hesitate to use the comments section below for any questions you may have 

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• Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: The Insurance Industry’s Dream

  - by Jenna Danko

  On June 3rd, I saw the Gaylord Resort Centre in Washington D.C. become the hub of C level executives and managers of insurance carriers for the IASA 2013 Conference.  Insurance Accounting/Regulation and Technology sessions took the focus, but there were plenty of tertiary sessions for career development, which complemented the overall strong networking side of the conference.  As an exhibitor, Oracle, along with several hundred other product providers, welcomed the opportunity to display and demonstrate our solutions and we were encouraged by hustle and bustle of the exhibition floor.  The IASA organizers had pre-arranged fast track tours whereby interested conference delegates could sign up for a series of like-themed presentations from Vendors, giving them a level of 'Speed Dating' introductions to possible solutions and services.  Oracle participated in a number of these, which were very well subscribed.  Clearly, the conference had a strong business focus; however, attendees saw technology as a key enabler to get their processes done smarter, faster and cheaper.  As we navigated through the exhibition, it became clear from the inquiries that came to us that insurance carriers are gravitating to a number of focus areas: Navigating the maze of upcoming regulatory reporting changes. For US carriers with European holdings, Solvency II carries a myriad of rules and reporting requirements. Alignment across the globe of the Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) processes brings to the fore the National Insurance of Insurance commissioners' (NAIC) recent guidance manual publication. Doing more with less and to certainly expect more from technology for less dollars. The overall cost of IT, in particular hardware, has dropped in real terms (though the appetite for more has risen: more CPU, more RAM, more storage), but software has seen less change. Clearly, customers expect either to pay less or get a lot more from their software solutions for the same buck. Doing things smarter – A recognition that with the advance of technology to stand still no longer means you are technically going backwards. Technology and, in particular technology interactions with human business processes, has undergone incredible change over the past 5 years. Consumer usage (iPhones, etc.) has been at the forefront, but now at the Enterprise level ever more effective technology exploitation is beginning to take place. That data and, in particular gleaning knowledge from data, is refining and improving business processes.  Organizations are now consuming more data than ever before, and it is set to grow exponentially for some time to come.  Amassing large volumes of data is one thing, but effectively analyzing that data is another.  It is the results of such analysis that leads to improvements both in terms of insurance product offerings and the processes to support them. Regulatory Compliance, damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Clearly, around the globe at lot is changing from a regulatory perspective and it is evident that in terms of regulatory requirements, whilst there is a greater convergence across jurisdictions bringing uniformity, there is also a lot of work to be done in the next 5 years. Just like the big data, hidden behind effective regulatory compliance there often lies golden nuggets that can give competitive advantages. From Oracle's perspective, our Rating Engine, Billing, Document Management and Insurance Analytics solutions on display served to strike up good conversations and, as is always the case at conferences, it was a great opportunity to meet and speak with existing Oracle customers that we might not have otherwise caught up with for a while. Fortunately, I was able to catch up on a few sessions at the close of the Exhibition.  The speaker quality was high and the audience asked challenging, but pertinent, questions.  During Dr. Jackie Freiberg’s keynote “Bye Bye Business as Usual,” the author discussed 8 strategies to help leaders create a culture where teams consistently deliver innovative ideas by disrupting the status quo.  The very first strategy: Get wired for innovation.  Freiberg admitted that folks in the insurance and financial services industry understand and know innovation is important, but oftentimes they are slow adopters.  Today, technology and innovation go hand in hand. In speaking to delegates during and after the conference, a high degree of satisfaction could be measured from their positive comments of speaker sessions and the exhibitors. I suspect many will be back in 2014 with Indianapolis as the conference location. Did you attend the IASA Conference in Washington D.C.?  If so, I would love to hear your comments. Andrew Collins is the Director, Solvency II of Oracle Financial Services. He can be reached at andrew.collins AT oracle.com.

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• SOA, Empowerment and Continuous Improvement

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick will be hosting the IT Leader Editorial on a regular basis. I met my twin at Open World. We share backgrounds, experiences and even names. I hosted an invitation-only AppAdvantage Leadership Forum with an overcapacity 85 participants: 55 customers, 15 from the Oracle AppAdvantage team and 15 Partners. It was a lively, open and positive discussion of pace layered architectures and Oracle’s AppAdvantage approach to a unified view of Applications and Middleware. Rick Hassman from Pella was one of the customer panelists and during the pre event prep, Rick and I shared backgrounds and found that we had both been plant managers and led ERP deployments prior to leading IT itself. During the panel conversation I explored this with him, discussing the unique perspectives that this provides to CIO’s. He then hit on a point that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until a week later. First though, some background. The week after the Forum, one of the participants emailed me with the following thoughts: “I am 150% behind this concept……but we are struggling with the concept of web services and the potential use of the Oracle Service Bus technology let alone moving into using the full SOA/BPM/BAM software to extend our JD Edwards application to both integrate and support business processes”. After thinking a bit I responded this way: While I certainly appreciate the degree of change and effort involved, perhaps I could offer the following: One of the underlying principles behind Oracle AppAdvantage is that more often than not, the choice between changing a business process and invasively customizing ERP represents a Hobson's Choice: neither is acceptable. In this case the third option, moving the process out of ERP, is the only acceptable one. Providing this choice typically requires end to end, real time interoperability across applications and/or services. This real time interoperability, to be sustainable over time requires a service oriented architecture. There's just no way around this. SOA adaptation is admittedly tough at the beginning. New skills, new technology and new headaches. But, like any radically new technology, it has a learning curve that drives cost down rather dramatically over time. Tough choices to be sure, but not entirely different than we face with every major technology cycle. Good points of course, but I felt that something was missing. The points were convincing, perhaps even a bit insightful, but they didn’t get at the heart of what Oracle AppAdvantage is focused upon: how the optimization of technology, applications, processes and relationships can change the very way that organizations operate. And then I thought back to the panel discussion with Rick Hassman at Oracle OpenWorld. Rick stressed that Continuous Improvement is a fundamental business strategy at Pella. I remember Continuous Improvement well as I suspect does everyone who was in American manufacturing during the 80’s. Pioneered by W. Edwards Deming in Japan (and still known alternatively as Kaizen), Continuous Improvement sets in place the business culture that we must not become complacent with success and resistant to the ongoing need for change. Many believe that this single handedly drove the renaissance in American manufacturing through the last two decades, which had become complacent during the 70’s and early 80’s. But what exactly does this have to do with SOA? It was Rick’s next point. He drew the connection that moving those business processes that need to continually change over time out of ERP and into edge applications and services enables continuous improvement by empowering people to continually strive for better ways of doing things rather than be being bound by workflows that cannot change. A compelling connection: that SOA, and the overall Oracle AppAdvantage framework of which it is an integral part, can empower people towards continuous improvement in business processes and as a result drive business leadership and business excellence. What better a case for technology innovation?

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• Recent Innovations to ILOM

  - by B.Koch

  by Josh Rosen If you are wondering how Oracle can make some of the most advanced, reliable, and fault tolerant servers on the market, look no further than Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager or ILOM.  We build ILOM into every server we create, from Oracle x86 Systems such as X3-2 to the SPARC T-Series family. Oracle ILOM is an embedded service processor, but it's really more than that.  It's a computer within a computer.  It's smart, it's tightly integrated into all aspects of the server's operation, and it's a big reason why Oracle servers are used for some of the most mission-critical workloads out there. To understand the value of ILOM, there is no better place to start than its fault management capability.  We have taken the sophisticated fault management architecture from Solaris, developed and refined over a decade, and built it into each and every ILOM. ILOM detects a potential issue at its earliest stage, watching low-level sensors.   If the root cause of a problem is not clear from a single error reading, ILOM will look for other clues and combine multiple pieces of information to correctly identify a failing component. ILOM provides peace of mind. We tailor our fault management for each new server platform that we produce.  You can rest assured that it's always actively keeping the server healthy.  And if there is a problem, you can be confident it will let you know by sending you a notification by e-mail or trap. We also heard IT managers tell us they needed a Ph.D. in computer engineering to manage today's servers. It doesn't have to be that way.  Thanks to the latest innovations to Oracle ILOM, we present hardware inventory and status in way that makes sense – to anyone.  Green means everything is healthy and red means something is wrong.  When a component needs to be replaced a clear message indicates where the problem is and points you at a knowledge article about that problem.  It's that simple. Simpler management and simple interfaces mean reduced complexity and lower costs to manage.  And we know that's really important. ILOM does all this while also providing advanced service processor features you depend on for managing enterprise class systems.  You can remotely control the server power, interact with a virtual video console for the server, and mount media on the server remotely.  There is no need to spend money on a KVM switch to get this functionality. And when people hear how advanced ILOM is, they can't believe ILOM is free.  All features are enabled and included with each Oracle server that you buy.  There are no advanced licenses you need to purchase or features to unlock. Configuring ILOM has also never been easier.  It is now possible to configure almost all aspects of the server directly from ILOM.  This includes changing BIOS settings, persistently modifying boot order, and optimizing power settings -- all directly from ILOM. But Oracle's innovation does not stop with ILOM.  Oracle has engineered Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to integrate directly with ILOM, providing centralized management across all of our servers. Ops Center will discover each of your Oracle servers over the network by searching for ILOMs.  When it finds one, it knows how to communicate with ILOM to monitoring and configure that server from application to disk. Since every server that Oracle produces, from x86 Systems to SPARC T-Series up and down the line, comes with Oracle ILOM, you can manage all Oracle servers in the same way.  And while all of our servers may have different components on the inside, each with their specialized functions, the way you integrate them and the way you monitor and manage them is exactly the same. Oracle ILOM is state-of-art.  If you are looking for a server that make systems management simple and is easy to integrate and maintain, check out the latest advances to Oracle ILOM. Josh Rosen is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle and previously spent more than a decade as a developer and architect of system management software. Josh has worked on system management for many of Oracle's hardware products ranging from the earliest blade systems to the latest Oracle x86 servers.

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• SQL SERVER – An Efficiency Tool to Compare and Synchronize SQL Server Databases

  - by Pinal Dave

  There is no need to reinvent the wheel if it is already invented and if the wheel is already available at ease, there is no need to wait to grab it. Here is the similar situation. I came across a very interesting situation and I had to look for an efficient tool which can make my life easier and solve my business problem. Here is the scenario. One of the developers had deleted few rows from the very important mapping table of our development server (thankfully, it was not the production server). Though it was a development server, the entire development team had to stop working as the application started to crash on every page. Think about the lost of manpower and efficiency which we started to loose.  Pretty much every department had to stop working as our internal development application stopped working. Thankfully, we even take a backup of our development server and we had access to full backup of the entire database at 6 AM morning. We do not take as a frequent backup of development server as production server (naturally!). Even though we had a full backup, the solution was not to restore the database. Think about it, there were plenty of the other operations since the last good full backup and if we restore a full backup, we will pretty much overwrite on the top of the work done by developers since morning. Now, as restoring the full backup was not an option we decided to restore the same database on another server. Once we had restored our database to another server, the challenge was to compare the table from where the database was deleted. The mapping table from where the data were deleted contained over 5000 rows and it was humanly impossible to compare both the tables manually. Finally we decided to use efficiency tool dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server from DevArt. dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server is a powerful, fast and easy to use SQL compare tool, capable of using native SQL Server backups as metadata source. (FYI we Downloaded dbForge Data Compare) Once we discovered the product, we immediately downloaded the product and installed on our development server. After we installed the product, we were greeted with the following screen. We clicked on the New Data Comparision to start our new comparison project. It brought up following screen. Here is the best part of the product, we just had to enter our database connection username and password along with source and destination details and we are done. The entire process is very simple and self intuiting. The best part was that for the source, we can either select database or even backup. This was indeed fantastic feature. Think about this, if you have a very big database, it will take long time to restore on the server. Once it is restored, you will be able to work with it. However, when you are working with dbForge Data Compare it will accept database backup as your source or destination. Once I click on the execute it brought up following screen where it displayed an excellent summary of the data compare. It has dedicated tabs for the what is changing in what table as well had details of the changed data. The best part is that, once we had reviewed the change. We click on the Synchronize button in the menu bar and it brought up following screen. You can see that the screen has very simple straight forward but very powerful features. You can generate a script to synchronize from target to source or even from source to target. Additionally, the database is a very complicated world and there are extensive options to configure various database options on the next screen. We also have the option to either generate script or directly execute the script to target server. I like to play on the safe side and I generated the script for my synchronization and later on after review I deployed the scripts on the server. Well, my team and we were able to get going from our disaster in less than 10 minutes. There were few people in our team were indeed disappointed as they were thinking of going home early that day but in less than 10 minutes they had to get back to work. There are so many other features in  dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server, I am already planning to make this product company wide recommended product for Data Compare tool. Hats off to the team who have build this product. Here are few of the features salient features of the dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server Perform SQL Server database comparison to detect changes Compare SQL Server backups with live databases Analyze data differences between two databases Synchronize two databases that went out of sync Restore data of a particular table from the backup Generate data comparison reports in Excel and HTML formats Copy look-up data from development database to production Automate routine data synchronization tasks with command-line interface Go Ahead and Download the dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server right away. It is always a good idea to get familiar with the important tools before hand instead of learning it under pressure of disaster. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

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• Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

  - by Michael Hylton

  Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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• NTFS Issues in Windows 7 and 2008 R2 - 'Is it a Bug?'

  - by renewieldraaijer

  I have been using the various versions of the Microsoft Windows product line since NT4 and I really thought I knew the ins and outs about the NTFS filesystem by now. There were always a few rules of thumb to understand what happens if you move data around. These rules were: "If you copy data, the copied data will inherit the permissions of the location it is being copied to. The same goes for moving data between disk partitions. Only when you move data within the same partition, the permissions are kept."  Recently I was asked to assist in troubleshooting some NTFS related issues. This forced me to have another good look at this theory. To my surprise I found out that this theory does not completely stand anymore. Apparently some things have changed since the release of Windows Vista / Windows 2008. Since the release of these Operating Systems, a move within the same disk partition results in the data inheriting the permissions of the location it is being copied into. A major change in the NTFS filesystem you would think!  Not quite! The above only counts when the move operation is being performed by using Windows Explorer. A move by using the 'move' command from within a cmd prompt for example, retains the NTFS permissions, just like before in Windows XP and older systems. Conclusion: The Windows Explorer is responsible for changing the ACL's of the moved data. This is a remarkable change, but if you follow this theory, the resulting ACL after a move operation is still predictable.  We could say that since Windows Vista and Windows 2008, a new rule set applies: "If you copy data, the copied data will inherit the permissions of the location it is being copied to. Same goes for moving data between disk partitions and within disk partitions. Only when you move data within the same partition by using something else than the Windows Explorer, the permissions are kept." The above behavior should be unchanged in Windows 7 / Windows 2008 R2, compared to Windows Vista / 2008. But somehow the NTFS permissions are not so predictable in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. Moving data within the same disk partition the one time results in the permissions being kept and the next time results in inherited permissions from the destination location. I will try to demonstrate this in a few examples: Example 1 (Incorrect behavior): Consider two folders, 'Folder A' and 'Folder B' with the following permissions configured.                    Now we create the test file 'test file 1.txt' in 'Folder A' and afterwards move this file to 'Folder B' using Windows Explorer.                       According to the new theory, the file should inherit the permissions of 'Folder B' and therefore 'Group B' should appear in the ACL of 'test file 1.txt'. In the screenshot below the resulting permissions are displayed. The permissions from the originating location are kept, while the permissions of 'Folder B' should be inherited.                   Example 2 (Correct behavior): Again, consider the same two folders. This time we make a small modification to the ACL of 'Folder A'. We add 'Group C' to the ACL and again we create a file in 'Folder A' which we name 'test file 2.txt'.                    Next, we move 'test file 2.txt' to 'Folder B'.                       Again, we check the permissions of 'test file 2.txt' at the target location. We can now see that the permissions are inherited. This is what should be happening, and can be considered 'correct behavior' for Windows Vista / 2008 / 7 / 2008 R2. It remains uncertain why this behavior is so inconsistent. At this time, this is under investigation with Microsoft Support. The investigation has been going for the last two weeks and it is beginning to look like there is no rational reason for this, other than a bug in the Windows Explorer in Windows 7 and 2008 R2. As soon as there is any certainty on this, I will note it here in this blog.                   The examples above are harmless tests, by using my own laptop. If you would create the same set of folders and groups, and configure exactly the same permissions, you will see exactly the same behavior. Be sure to use Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2.   Initially the problem arose at a customer site where move operations on data on the fileserver by users would result in unpredictable results. This resulted in the wrong set of people having àccess permissions on data that they should not have permissions to. Off course this is something we want to prevent at all costs.   I have also done several tests with move operations by using the move command in a cmd prompt. This way the behavior is always consistent. The inconsistent behavior is only exposed when using the Windows Explorer to initiate the move operation, and only when using Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 systems. It is evident that this behavior changes when the ACL of a folder has been changed, for example by adding an extra entry. The reason for this remains uncertain though. To be continued…. A dutch version of this post can be found at: http://blogs.platani.nl/?p=612

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• Login failed for user 'sa' because the account is currently locked out. The system administrator can

  - by cabhilash

  Login failed for user 'sa' because the account is currently locked out. The system administrator can unlock it. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18486) SQL server has local password policies. If policy is enabled which locks down the account after X number of failed attempts then the account is automatically locked down.This error with 'sa' account is very common. sa is default administartor login available with SQL server. So there are chances that an ousider has tried to bruteforce your system. (This can cause even if a legitimate tries to access the account with wrong password.Sometimes a user would have changed the password without informing others. So the other users would try to lo) You can unlock the account with the following options (use another admin account or connect via windows authentication) Alter account & unlock ALTER LOGIN sa WITH PASSWORD='password' UNLOCK Use another account Almost everyone is aware of the sa account. This can be the potential security risk. Even if you provide strong password hackers can lock the account by providing the wrong password. ( You can provide extra security by installing firewall or changing the default port but these measures are not always practical). As a best practice you can disable the sa account and use another account with same privileges.ALTER LOGIN sa DISABLE You can edit the lock-ot options using gpedit.msc( in command prompt type gpedit.msc and press enter). Navigate to Account Lokout policy as shown in the figure The Following options are available Account lockout threshold This security setting determines the number of failed logon attempts that causes a user account to be locked out. A locked-out account cannot be used until it is reset by an administrator or until the lockout duration for the account has expired. You can set a value between 0 and 999 failed logon attempts. If you set the value to 0, the account will never be locked out. Failed password attempts against workstations or member servers that have been locked using either CTRL+ALT+DELETE or password-protected screen savers count as failed logon attempts. Account lockout duration This security setting determines the number of minutes a locked-out account remains locked out before automatically becoming unlocked. The available range is from 0 minutes through 99,999 minutes. If you set the account lockout duration to 0, the account will be locked out until an administrator explicitly unlocks it. If an account lockout threshold is defined, the account lockout duration must be greater than or equal to the reset time. Default: None, because this policy setting only has meaning when an Account lockout threshold is specified. Reset account lockout counter after This security setting determines the number of minutes that must elapse after a failed logon attempt before the failed logon attempt counter is reset to 0 bad logon attempts. The available range is 1 minute to 99,999 minutes. If an account lockout threshold is defined, this reset time must be less than or equal to the Account lockout duration. Default: None, because this policy setting only has meaning when an Account lockout threshold is specified.When creating SQL user you can set CHECK_POLICY=on which will enforce the windows password policy on the account. The following policies will be applied Define the Enforce password history policy setting so that several previous passwords are remembered. With this policy setting, users cannot use the same password when their password expires.  Define the Maximum password age policy setting so that passwords expire as often as necessary for your environment, typically, every 30 to 90 days. With this policy setting, if an attacker cracks a password, the attacker only has access to the network until the password expires.  Define the Minimum password age policy setting so that passwords cannot be changed until they are more than a certain number of days old. This policy setting works in combination with the Enforce password historypolicy setting. If a minimum password age is defined, users cannot repeatedly change their passwords to get around the Enforce password history policy setting and then use their original password. Users must wait the specified number of days to change their passwords.  Define a Minimum password length policy setting so that passwords must consist of at least a specified number of characters. Long passwords--seven or more characters--are usually stronger than short ones. With this policy setting, users cannot use blank passwords, and they have to create passwords that are a certain number of characters long.  Enable the Password must meet complexity requirements policy setting. This policy setting checks all new passwords to ensure that they meet basic strong password requirements.  Password must meet the following complexity requirement, when they are changed or created: Not contain the user's entire Account Name or entire Full Name. The Account Name and Full Name are parsed for delimiters: commas, periods, dashes or hyphens, underscores, spaces, pound signs, and tabs. If any of these delimiters are found, the Account Name or Full Name are split and all sections are verified not to be included in the password. There is no check for any character or any three characters in succession. Contain characters from three of the following five categories:  English uppercase characters (A through Z) English lowercase characters (a through z) Base 10 digits (0 through 9) Non-alphabetic characters (for example, !, $, #, %) A catch-all category of any Unicode character that does not fall under the previous four categories. This fifth category can be regionally specific.

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• Html.RenderAction Failed when Validation Failed

  - by Shaun

  RenderAction method had been introduced when ASP.NET MVC 1.0 released in its MvcFuture assembly and then final announced along with the ASP.NET MVC 2.0. Similar as RenderPartial, the RenderAction can display some HTML markups which defined in a partial view in any parent views. But the RenderAction gives us the ability to populate the data from an action which may different from the action which populating the main view. For example, in Home/Index.aspx we can invoke the Html.RenderPartial(“MyPartialView”) but the data of MyPartialView must be populated by the Index action of the Home controller. If we need the MyPartialView to be shown in Product/Create.aspx we have to copy (or invoke) the relevant code from the Index action in Home controller to the Create action in the Product controller which is painful. But if we are using Html.RenderAction we can tell the ASP.NET MVC from which action/controller the data should be populated. in that way in the Home/Index.aspx and Product/Create.aspx views we just need to call Html.RenderAction(“CreateMyPartialView”, “MyPartialView”) so it will invoke the CreateMyPartialView action in MyPartialView controller regardless from which main view. But in my current project we found a bug when I implement a RenderAction method in the master page to show something that need to connect to the backend data center when the validation logic was failed on some pages. I created a sample application below.   Demo application I created an ASP.NET MVC 2 application and here I need to display the current date and time on the master page. I created an action in the Home controller named TimeSlot and stored the current date into ViewDate. This method was marked as HttpGet as it just retrieves some data instead of changing anything. 1: [HttpGet] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } Next, I created a partial view under the Shared folder to display the date and time string. 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<dynamic>" %> 2:  3: <span>Now: <% 1: : ViewData["timeslot"].ToString() %></span> Then at the master page I used Html.RenderAction to display it in front of the logon link. 1: <div id="logindisplay"> 2: <% 1: Html.RenderAction("TimeSlot", "Home"); %> 3:  4: <% 1: Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUserControl"); %> 5: </div> It’s fairly simple and works well when I navigated to any pages. But when I moved to the logon page and click the LogOn button without input anything in username and password the validation failed and my website crashed with the beautiful yellow page. (I really like its color style and fonts…)   How ASP.NET MVC executes Html.RenderAction In this example all other pages were rendered successful which means the ASP.NET MVC found the TimeSolt action under the Home controller except this situation. The only different is that when I clicked the LogOn button the browser send an HttpPost request to the server. Is that the reason of this bug? I created another action in Home controller with the same action name but for HttpPost. 1: [HttpPost] 2: [ActionName("TimeSlot")] 3: public ActionResult TimeSlot(object dummy) 4: { 5: return TimeSlot(); 6: } Or, I can use the AcceptVerbsAttribute on the TimeSlot action to let it allow both HttpGet and HttpPost. 1: [AcceptVerbs("GET", "POST")] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } And then repeat what I did before and this time it worked well. Why we need the action for HttpPost here as it’s just data retrieving? That is because of how ASP.NET MVC executes the RenderAction method. In the source code of ASP.NET MVC we can see when proforming the RenderAction ASP.NET MVC creates a RequestContext instance from the current RequestContext and created a ChildActionMvcHandler instance which inherits from MvcHandler class. Then the ASP.NET MVC processes the handler through the HttpContext.Server.Execute method. That means it performs the action as a stand-alone request asynchronously and flush the result into the  TextWriter which is being used to render the current page. Since when I clicked the LogOn the request was in HttpPost so when ASP.NET MVC processed the ChildActionMvcHandler it would find the action which allow the current request method, which is HttpPost. Then our TimeSlot method in HttpGet would not be matched.   Summary In this post I introduced a bug in my currently developing project regards the new Html.RenderAction method provided within ASP.NET MVC 2 when processing a HttpPost request. In ASP.NET MVC world the underlying Http information became more important than in ASP.NET WebForm world. We need to pay more attention on which kind of request it currently created and how ASP.NET MVC processes.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• SQL SERVER – Replace a Column Name in Multiple Stored Procedure all together

  - by pinaldave

  I receive a lot of emails every day. I try to answer each and every email and comments on Facebook and Twitter. I prefer communication on social media as this gives opportunities to others to read the questions and participate along with me. There is always some question which everyone likes to read and remember. Here is one of the questions which I received in email. I believe the same question will be there any many developers who are beginning with SQL Server. I decided to blog about it so everyone can read it and participate. “I am beginner in SQL Server. I have a very interesting situation and need your help. I am beginner to SQL Server and that is why I do not have access to the production server and I work entirely on the development server. The project I am working on is also in the infant stage as well. In product I had to create a multiple tables and every table had few columns. Later on I have written Stored Procedures using those tables. During a code review my manager has requested to change one of the column which I have used in the table. As per him the naming convention was not accurate. Now changing the columname in the table is not a big issue. I figured out that I can do it very quickly either using T-SQL script or SQL Server Management Studio. The real problem is that I have used this column in nearly 50+ stored procedure. This looks like a very mechanical task. I believe I can go and change it in nearly 50+ stored procedure but is there a better solution I can use. Someone suggested that I should just go ahead and find the text in system table and update it there. Is that safe solution? If not, what is your solution. In simple words, How to replace a column name in multiple stored procedure efficiently and quickly? Please help me here with keeping my experience and non-production server in mind.” Well, I found this question very interesting. Honestly I would have preferred if this question was asked on my social media handles (Facebook and Twitter) as I am very active there and quite often before I reach there other experts have already answered this question. Anyway I am now answering the same question on the blog so all of us can participate here and come up with an appropriate answer. Here is my answer - “My Friend, I do not advice to touch system table. Please do not go that route. It can be dangerous and not appropriate. The issue which you faced today is what I used to face in early career as well I still face it often. There are two sets of argument I have observed – there are people who see no value in the name of the object and name objects like obj1, obj2 etc. There are sets of people who carefully chose the name of the object where object name is self-explanatory and almost tells a story. I am not here to take any side in this blog post – so let me go to a quick solution for your problem. Note: Following should not be directly practiced on Production Server. It should be properly tested on development server and once it is validated they should be pushed to your production server with your existing deployment practice. The answer is here assuming you have regular stored procedures and you are working on the Development NON Production Server. Go to Server Note >> Databases >> DatabaseName >> Programmability >> Stored Procedure Now make sure that Object Explorer Details are open (if not open it by clicking F7). You will see the list of all the stored procedures there. Now you will see a list of all the stored procedures on the right side list. Select either all of them or the one which you believe are relevant to your query. Now… Right click on the stored procedures >> SELECT DROP and CREATE to >> Now select New Query Editor Window or Clipboard. Paste the complete script to a new window if you have selected Clipboard option. Now press Control+H which will bring up the Find and Replace Screen. In this screen insert the column to be replaced in the “Find What”box and new column name into “Replace With” box. Now execute the whole script. As we have selected DROP and CREATE to, it will created drop the old procedure and create the new one. Another method would do all the same procedure but instead of DROP and CREATE manually replace the CREATE word with ALTER world. There is a small advantage in doing this is that if due to any reason the error comes up which prevents the new stored procedure to be created you will have your old stored procedure in the system as it is. “ Well, this was my answer to the question which I have received. Do you see any other workaround or solution? Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Stored Procedure, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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