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• Recommended Method to Watch Amazon Prime using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

  - by Kurt Sanger

  I realize that Hal is no longer in the Ubuntu Software Center for Ubuntu 14.04 and it is only available from a third party at this time. But I would like to know what Ubuntu's plans are for integrating DRM into Linux? Especially with Amazon's integration into the search tool, one would hope that they would make it easier for their Amazon Prime customers to watch Instant Videos. Is the repository for getting Hal for 13.10 safe for use? What will that break if I install it onto 14.04? Or do we need to find another OS that has DRM built into it? If Hal is okay to add to the OS using a third party repo, then why doesn't Ubuntu Software Center support it too? I imagine that Amazon's contract with the video copyright holders requires that they have some protection on electronically distributed media. I also imagine that getting Amazon to change is much harder than getting a bunch of software engineers to fix Ubuntu. Unless they don't want too. At which point Ubuntu isn't really a complete OS. Very disappointing. In general the ease of use of Ubuntu, the software center, and the large variety of applications was alluring. But breaking DRM wasn't a great idea. Can't wait to see what fails in our next update. Please tell us that there is a plan that is going to work in our future.

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• Best of OTN - Week of May 25th

  - by CassandraClark-OTN

  Architect Community Podcast: Going Mobile - Developing Enterprise Mobile Apps This four-part OTN ArchBeat Podcast series is devoted to a discussion about bringing mobility to the enterprise, and how architects and developers can take advantage of the opportunities in the evolution of mobile application development. Video: Data Modeling and Moving Meditation with Kent Graziano Want to learn more about Kent's Kscope 2014 data modeling sessions and how Chi Gung can help you get a great start on your day? Check out this video interview. Video: Oracle ACE Director Stewart Bryson on OBIEE, ODI, GoldenGate In this interview Stewart talks about how OBIEE, ODI, GoldenGate and other technologies fit into his Kscope 2014 sessions, and about the sessions he plans to attend. Friday Funny from OTN Architect Community Manager Bob Rhubart:Even if you're not a person of a certain age, you need read A journey into my colon -- and yours, humorist Dave Barry's wildly funny 2008 account of his colonoscopy. Because one day you will be a person of certain age... Get involved in community conversations on the following OTN channels... OTN TechBlog The Java Source Blog The OTN Garage Blog The OTN ArchBeat Blog @oracleotn @java @OTN_Garage @OTNArchBeat @OracleDBDev OTN I Love Java OTN Garage OTN ArchBeat Oracle DB Dev OTN Java OTN ArchBeat

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• Who is code wanderer?

  - by DigiMortal

  In every area of life there are people with some bad habits or misbehaviors that affect the work process. Software development is also not free of this kind of people. Today I will introduce you code wanderer. Who is code wanderer? Code wandering is more like bad habit than serious diagnose. Code wanderers tend to review and “fix” source code in files written by others. When code wanderer has some free moments he starts to open the code files he or she has never seen before and starts making little fixes to these files. Why is code wanderer dangerous? These fixes seem correct and are usually first choice to do when considering nice code. But as changes are made by coder who has no idea about the code he or she “fixes” then “fixing” usually ends up with messing up working code written by others. Often these “fixes” are not found immediately because they doesn’t introduce errors detected by compilers. So these “fixes” find easily way to production environments because there is also very good chance that “fixed” code goes through all tests without any problems. How to stop code wanderer? The first thing is to talk with person and explain him or her why those changes are dangerous. It is also good to establish rules that state clearly why, when and how can somebody change the code written by other people. If this does not work it is possible to isolate this person so he or she can post his or her changes to code repository as patches and somebody reviews those changes before applying them.

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• Referrer Strings

  - by WernerCD

  I'm not exactly sure how to ask this, but here I go. I work for a company that provides IT services. Our main costumer has a website developed by WebCompany.com, and I act as a maintainer/middle-man for this website for our customer. What's happening is that on the front page there is a drop-down-menu with links. One link goes to a third party website - ThirdParty.com. This third party website automatically logs you in based on your IP or your referrer string. Homepage ThirdParty.com Logged in via IP or referrer string. What's happening... is Website.com is passing along inconsistent referrer strings. I've asked them to look into it and they say it's not their fault, referrer strings are handled at the browser. ThirdParty.com is actually nice enough to have IP and referrer string listed on the front page for users not logged in. So... how can I trace the referrer string so that I can figure out why http://Website.com's front page link to ThirdParty.com is showing a referrer as "None" or "Thirdparty.com" instead of "ThirdParty.com"? Their website is build in PHP. Can you force all links on a website to list "referrer" as "http://website.com/"? instead of "http://website.com/portal/1" or "http://website.com/page3"?

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• Run database checks but omit large tables or filegroups - New option in Ola Hallengren's Scripts

  - by Greg Low

  One of the things I've always wanted in DBCC CHECKDB is the option to omit particular tables from the check. The situation that I often see is that companies with large databases often have only one or two very large tables. They want to run a DBCC CHECKDB on the database to check everything except those couple of tables due to time constraints. I posted a request on the Connect site about time some time ago: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/611164/dbcc-checkdb-omit-tables-option The workaround from the product team was that you could script out the checks that you did want to carry out, rather than omitting the ones that you didn't. I didn't overly like this as a workaround as clients often had a very large number of objects that they did want to check and only one or two that they didn't. I've always been impressed with the work that our buddy Ola Hallengren has done on his maintenance scripts. He pinged me recently about my old Connect item and said he was going to implement something similar. The good news is that it's available now. Here are some examples he provided of the newly-supported syntax: EXECUTE dbo.DatabaseIntegrityCheck @Databases = 'AdventureWorks', @CheckCommands = 'CHECKDB' EXECUTE dbo.DatabaseIntegrityCheck @Databases = 'AdventureWorks', @CheckCommands = 'CHECKALLOC,CHECKTABLE,CHECKCATALOG', @Objects = 'AdventureWorks.Person.Address' EXECUTE dbo.DatabaseIntegrityCheck @Databases = 'AdventureWorks', @CheckCommands = 'CHECKALLOC,CHECKTABLE,CHECKCATALOG', @Objects = 'ALL_OBJECTS,-AdventureWorks.Person.Address' EXECUTE dbo.DatabaseIntegrityCheck @Databases = 'AdventureWorks', @CheckCommands = 'CHECKFILEGROUP,CHECKCATALOG', @FileGroups = 'AdventureWorks.PRIMARY' EXECUTE dbo.DatabaseIntegrityCheck @Databases = 'AdventureWorks', @CheckCommands = 'CHECKFILEGROUP,CHECKCATALOG', @FileGroups = 'ALL_FILEGROUPS,-AdventureWorks.PRIMARY' Note the syntax to omit an object from the list of objects and the option to omit one filegroup. Nice! Thanks Ola! You'll find details here: http://ola.hallengren.com/  

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• Architecture- Tracking lead origin when data is submitted by a server

  - by Kevin

  I'm looking for some assistance in determining the least complex strategy for tracking leads on an affiliate's website. The idea is to make the affiliate's integration with my application as easy as possible. I've run into theoretical barriers, so i'm here to explore other options. Application Overview: This is a lead aggregation / distribution platform. We will be focusing on the affiliate portion of this website. Essentially affiliates sign up, enter in marketing campaigns and sell us their conversions. Problem to be solved: We want to track a lead's origin and other events on the affiliate site. We want to know what pages, ads, and forms they viewed before they converted. This can easily be solved with pixel tracking. Very straightforward. Theoretical Issues: I thought I would ask affiliates to place the pixel where I could log impressions and set a third party cookie when the pixel is first called. Then I could associate future impressions with this cookie. The problem is that when the visitor converts on the affiliate's site and I receive their information via HTTP POST from the Affiliate's server I wouldn't be able to access the cookie and associate it with the lead record unless the lead lands on my processor via a redirect and is then redirected back to the affiliate's landing page. I don't want to force the affiliates to submit their forms directly to my tracking site, so allowing them to make an HTTP POST from their server side form processor would be ideal. I've considered writing JavaScript to set a First Party cookie but this seems to make things more complicated for the affiliate. I also considered having the affiliate submit the lead's data via a conversion pixel. This seems to be the most ideal scenario so far as almost all pixels are as easy as copy/paste. The only complication comes from the conversion pixel- which would submit all of the lead information and the request would come from the visitor's machine so I could access my third party cookie.

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• Legal issues regarding embedding a toolbar into a browser [closed]

  - by OmarOthman

  We are in the process of developing a software that provides service to internet users and we would like to ask about the legal liabilities of some issues. Of course, everything is to be done with the consent of the user of our software but our concern is about third party tools and services that may be invoked/used by our product. In particular, these are the concerns: (1) Embedding a toolbar to an existing browser. This screenshot is an example, where the words in the highlighted toolbar are passed to www.google.com for searching, and the contents of the window are the results of the search. I want to know if any consent should be obtained before such a toolbar can be embedded in a web browser, whether there are any legal requirements by the web browser; whether different web browsers have different requirements (at least for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari). (2) Invoking a free website from that toolbar (like Google’s search page). The screenshot above demonstrates such an existing toolbar. (3) Full ownership and unrestricted access to the data entered to this toolbar. In the screenshot above, I want to take the words (translation english to spanish) and own them, i.e. storing them in my database and do some processing on them. (4) Ability to track the pages entered by the user starting from that free website. In the screenshot above, you can notice that the user opted only for the third result, whose URL is translate.google.com. I want to have access to this and all URLs clicked from this page for some processing as well. This is a commercial application, so I need a very concrete, precise and reference-supported answer.

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• Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for SQL Server

  - by SQLOS Team

  Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for Windows Server Machine Running SQL Server With the release of MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta, we have added a new scenario to assess your Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness. The MAP 8.0 Beta performs a comprehensive assessment of Windows Servers running SQL Server to determine you level of readiness to migrate an on-premise physical or virtual machine to Windows Azure Virtual Machines. The MAP Toolkit then offers suggested changes to prepare the machines for migration, such as upgrading the operating system or SQL Server. MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Now, let’s walk through the MAP Toolkit task for completing the Windows Azure Virtual Machine assessment and capacity planning. The tasks include the following: Perform an inventory View the Windows Azure VM Readiness results and report Collect performance data for determine VM sizing View the Windows Azure Capacity results and report Perform an inventory: 1. To perform an inventory against a single machine or across a complete environment, choose Perform an Inventory to launch the Inventory and Assessment Wizard as shown below: 2. After the Inventory and Assessment Wizard launches, select either the Windows computers or SQL Server scenario to inventory Windows machines. HINT: If you don’t care about completely inventorying a machine, just select the SQL Server scenario. Click Next to Continue. 3. On the Discovery Methods page, select how you want to discover computers and then click Next to continue. Description of Discovery Methods: Use Active Directory Domain Services -- This method allows you to query a domain controller via the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and select computers in all or specific domains, containers, or OUs. Use this method if all computers and devices are in AD DS. Windows networking protocols --  This method uses the WIN32 LAN Manager application programming interfaces to query the Computer Browser service for computers in workgroups and Windows NT 4.0–based domains. If the computers on the network are not joined to an Active Directory domain, use only the Windows networking protocols option to find computers. System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) -- This method enables you to inventory computers managed by System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). You need to provide credentials to the System Center Configuration Manager server in order to inventory the managed computers. When you select this option, the MAP Toolkit will query SCCM for a list of computers and then MAP will connect to these computers. Scan an IP address range -- This method allows you to specify the starting address and ending address of an IP address range. The wizard will then scan all IP addresses in the range and inventory only those computers. Note: This option can perform poorly, if many IP addresses aren’t being used within the range. Manually enter computer names and credentials -- Use this method if you want to inventory a small number of specific computers. Import computer names from a files -- Using this method, you can create a text file with a list of computer names that will be inventoried. 4. On the All Computers Credentials page, enter the accounts that have administrator rights to connect to the discovered machines. This does not need to a domain account, but needs to be a local administrator. I have entered my domain account that is an administrator on my local machine. Click Next after one or more accounts have been added. NOTE: The MAP Toolkit primarily uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to collect hardware, device, and software information from the remote computers. In order for the MAP Toolkit to successfully connect and inventory computers in your environment, you have to configure your machines to inventory through WMI and also allow your firewall to enable remote access through WMI. The MAP Toolkit also requires remote registry access for certain assessments. In addition to enabling WMI, you need accounts with administrative privileges to access desktops and servers in your environment. 5. On the Credentials Order page, select the order in which want the MAP Toolkit to connect to the machine and SQL Server. Generally just accept the defaults and click Next. 6. On the Enter Computers Manually page, click Create to pull up at dialog to enter one or more computer names. 7. On the Summary page confirm your settings and then click Finish. After clicking Finish the inventory process will start, as shown below: Windows Azure Readiness results and report After the inventory progress has completed, you can review the results under the Database scenario. On the tile, you will see the number of Windows Server machine with SQL Server that were analyzed, the number of machines that are ready to move without changes and the number of machines that require further changes. If you click this Azure VM Readiness tile, you will see additional details and can generate the Windows Azure VM Readiness Report. After the report is generated, select View | Saved Reports and Proposals to view the location of the report. Open up WindowsAzureVMReadiness* report in Excel. On the Windows tab, you can see the results of the assessment. This report has a column for the Operating System and SQL Server assessment and provides a recommendation on how to resolve, if there a component is not supported. Collect Performance Data Launch the Performance Wizard to collect performance information for the Windows Server machines that you would like the MAP Toolkit to suggest a Windows Azure VM size for. Windows Azure Capacity results and report After the performance metrics are collected, the Azure VM Capacity title will display the number of Virtual Machine sizes that are suggested for the Windows Server and Linux machines that were analyzed. You can then click on the Azure VM Capacity tile to see the capacity details and generate the Windows Azure VM Capacity Report. Within this report, you can view the performance data that was collected and the Virtual Machine sizes.   MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Useful References: Windows Azure Homepage How to guides for Windows Azure Virtual Machines Provisioning a SQL Server Virtual Machine on Windows Azure Windows Azure Pricing     Peter Saddow Senior Program Manager – MAP Toolkit Team

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• REST Service and CQRS

  - by Paul Wade

  I am struggling with architecture on a new project. I am using the following patterns/technology. CQRS - anything going in goes through a command REST - using WebAPI MVC - asp.net mvc Angular - building a spa nhibernate I belive this provides some great separation and should help keep a very complex domain from growing into a giant set of services that mix queries with other business logic. The REST services have become non restful. They are putting methods in rest that are "SearchByDate", "SearchByItem" etc. Service Methods that execute commands are called with a "web" model class, a new command is built in the service and executed, I feel like there is a lot of extra code. I expected this to be much different but I wasn't around to keep things on track. Finally my questions are this... I would have liked to see PUT Person (CreatePersonCommand) but then I realized that isn't restful either is it? the put should be a person entity not a command. Can I make CQRS and REST service work together or am I going about this all wrong? How do I handle service methods that don't fit into a REST model. I am not performing CRUD on the object but rather executing some business logic. I.E. I don't want the UI to be responsible for how a shipment is "unshipped" I want the service layer to worry about that.

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• Ideal data structure/techniques for storing generic scheduler data in C#

  - by GraemeMiller

  I am trying to implement a generic scheduler object in C# 4 which will output a table in HTML. Basic aim is to show some object along with various attributes, and whether it was doing something in a given time period. The scheduler will output a table displaying the headers: Detail Field 1 ....N| Date1.........N I want to initialise the table with a start date and an end date to create the date range (ideally could also do other time periods e.g. hours but that isn't vital). I then want to provide a generic object which will have associated events. Where an object has events within the period I want a table cell to be marked E.g. Name Height Weight 1/1/2011 2/1/2011 3/1/20011...... 31/1/2011 Ben 5.11 75 X X X Bill 5.7 83 X X So I created scheduler with Start Date=1/1/2011 and end date 31/1/2011 I'd like to give it my person object (already sorted) and tell it which fields I want displayed (Name, Height, Weight) Each person has events which have a start date and end date. Some events will start and end outwith but they should still be shown on the relevant date etc. Ideally I'd like to have been able to provide it with say a class booking object as well. So I'm trying to keep it generic. I have seen Javasript implementations etc of similar. What would a good data structure be for this? Any thoughts on techniques I could use to make it generic. I am not great with generics so any tips appreciated.

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• How should an API use http basic authentication

  - by user1626384

  When an API requires that a client authenticates to it, i've seen two different scenarios used and I am wondering which case I should use for my situation. Example 1. An API is offered by a company to allow third parties to authenticate with a token and secret using HTTP Basic. Example 2. An API accepts a username and password via HTTP Basic to authenticate an end user. Generally they get a token back for future requests. My Setup: I will have an JSON API that I use as my backend for a mobile and web app. It seems like good practice for both the mobile and web app to send along a token and secret so only these two apps can access the API blocking any other third party. But the mobile and web app allow users to login and submit posts, view their data, etc. So I would want them to login via HTTP Basic as well on each request. Do I somehow use a combination of both these methods or only send the end user credentials (username and token) on each request? If I only send the end user credentials, do I store them in a cookie on the client?

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• Long-term Freelance contract: should it have a salary-day or not?

  - by otto

  I don't like to speak about money. I just like to work. I still believe in a relationship between good work and good compensation. Hence I don't want ask my employer about my compensations, actually they are asking me. So I created a liberal contract with unspecified salary-day -- I did not want to lose my rights to my own projects and I did not pay any attention to the salary-day. Now the firm said that they would have paid me 1 month earlier if I had provided a tax -paper. I provided it before the next payment -day (unspecified). During the next month, the co-employer pretty much blocks my working -- does not allow me to access working repository and the co-employer goes to cruise when we should finalize a project so I cannot do anything. Now the project is not finalized, the co-employer has apparently provided some false statements to the boss about my doings (not getting anything for one month's work and 1 month when the co-employer pretty much wasted just my time) -- I was only allowed to debug the code of my co-employer and not to do anything. I feel that co-employer did not allow me to work by purpose so that they have an excuse not to pay any salary. The co-employer says that I cannot speak to the boss. The boss say that I need to speak directly to co-employer, not to him. I haven't said anything about the situation. I did not get things done because I was not allowed and now I am not even allowed to speak. Boss is the person who pays salaries. But both boss and co-employer have stages in the firm -- I think co-employer and boss are the same person pretty much, they created a theatre so that they get almost 2 month's work for free. Now I have multiple ideas how to avoid this kind of situations in the future: specify the salary day make sure you can speak directly to the manager and the boss, not through middle-hand other?

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• Special Value Sets in Oracle Applications

  - by Manoj Madhusoodanan

  Here I am going to explain Special Value Sets in Oracle Applications.I have a requirement in which I want to execute a BIP report with some parameters. The first parameter Current Month should allow only MON-YYYY format.Schedule Start Date and Schedule End Date should be with in first parameter month. Approach 1If the report is through PL/SQL Stored Procedure executable the we can do all the validation in backend. Approach 2Second approach is through Special Value Sets.This value set has events like Edit,Load and Validate.We can attach PL/SQL code snippet to each event.Here I am going to attach validation routine to Validate event to validate the user input.Validate event fires when the focus leaves from the item. Here I am going to create two special value sets ( one for first parameter and another for the second and third parameter). Value Set 1Name : XXCUST_CURRENT_MONTHList Type : List of ValuesFormat Type : CharMaximum Size : 8Validation Type : SpecialEvent : ValidateFunction : XXCUST_CURRENT_MONTH_VALIDATE_ROUTINEValue Set 2Name : XXCUST_DATESList Type : List of ValuesFormat Type : Standard DateValidation Type : SpecialEvent : ValidateFunction : XXCUST_DATES_VALIDATE_ROUTINE Note: Inside the validate routine I am using FND messages.Generate message file also using "FNDMDGEN apps/password 0 Y US XXCUST DB_TO_RUNTIME". Attach XXCUST_CURRENT_MONTH to first parameter.Also XXCUST_DATES to second and third parameter. Note: Since the program is using Special Value Sets it can be submit only through Oracle Forms.Submission through OA Framework and PL/SQL APIs are not recommended. OutputGive Current Date as 01-2012 Give Schedule Start Date out of current month.

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• Never Bet Against the Impossible

  - by BuckWoody

  My uncle used to say “If a man tells you that his car squirts milk in his eye when you lift the hood, don’t bet against that. You’ll end up with milk in your eye.” My friend Allen White tells me this is taken from a play (and was said about playing cards), but I think the sentiment holds, even in database work. I mentioned the other day that you should allow the other person to talk and actively listen before you propose a solution. Well, I saw a consultant “bet against the impossible”  the other day – and it bit her. She explained to the person telling her the problem that the situation simply couldn’t exist that way, and he proceeded to show her that it did. She got silent, typed a few things, muttered a little, and then said “well, must be something else.” She just couldn’t admit she was wrong. So don’t go there. If someone explains a problem to you with their database, listen with purpose, and then explore the troubleshooting steps you know to find the problem. But keep your absolutes to yourself. In fact, I have a friend that has recently sent me one of those. He connects to a system with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) version 2008 (if I recall correctly) and it shows a certain version number of the target system in the connection tab. Then he connects to it using SSMS 2008 R2 and gets a different number. Now, as far as I know, we didn’t change the connection string information, and that’s provided by the target system, so this is impossible. But I won’t tell him that. Not until I look a little more. :) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-04-12

  - by Bob Rhubart

  2012 Real World Performance Tour Dates |Performance Tuning | Performance Engineering www.ioug.org Coming to your town: a full day of real world database performance with Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth, and Graham Wood. Rochester, NY - March 8 Los Angeles, CA - April 30 Orange County, CA - May 1 Redwood Shores, CA - May 3 Oracle Technology Network Developer Day: MySQL - New York www.oracle.com Wednesday, May 02, 2012 8:00 AM – 4:30 PM Grand Hyatt New York 109 East 42nd Street, Grand Central Terminal New York, NY 10017 Webcast Series: Data Warehousing Best Practices event.on24.com April 19, 2012 - Best Practices for Workload Management of a Data Warehouse on Oracle Exadata May 10, 2012 - Best Practices for Extreme Data Warehouse Performance on Oracle Exadata Webcast: Untangle Your Business with Oracle Unified SOA and Data Integration event.on24.com Date: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 Time: 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET Speakers: Mala Narasimharajan - Senior Product Marketing Manager, Oracle Data Integration, Oracle Bruce Tierney - Director of Product Marketing, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle The Increasing Focus on Architecture (ArchBeat) blogs.oracle.com As a "third wave" of computing, Cloud computing is changing how IT organizations and individuals within those organizations approach the creation of solutions. Updated SOA Documents now available in ITSO Reference Library blogs.oracle.com Nine updated documents have just been added to the IT Strategies from Oracle library, including SOA Practitioner Guides, SOA Reference Architectures, and SOA White Papers and Data Sheets. Access to all documents within the ITSO library is free to those with a free Oracle.com membership. WebLogic JMS Clustering and Spring | Rene van Wijk middlewaremagic.com Oracle ACE Rene van Wijk sets up a WebLogic cluster that includes a JMS environment, which will be used by Spring. Running Built-In Test Simulator with SOA Suite Healthcare 11g in PS4 and PS5 | Shub Lahiri blogs.oracle.com Shub Lahiri shows how the pre-installed simulator that comes with the SOA Suite for Healthcare Integration pack can be used as an external endpoint to generate inbound and outbound HL7 traffic on specified MLLP ports. In the cloud era, let's start calling IT what it is: 'Innovation Team' | Joe McKendrick www.zdnet.com Cloud, the third great shift in 50 years of computing, presents a golden opportunity for IT to get out in front and lead. Thought for the Day "Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?" — Anonymous

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• CLR and C# Learning Materials

  - by Gerry O'Brien

  Have you ever found that one book or resource that just brings it all home?  Seriously.  These are rare finds when you read the content and all the stars seem to align, you have those "Ah ha!" moments. Well, I have found that book and it is CLR via C#, Third Edition by Jeffrey Richter.  If you're not familiar with Wintellect, look them up.  This book is published by Microsoft Press and is the third edition of this title.  I'm in chapter 5 at the moment and already I have a better understanding of the CLR and how things work.  I'm a former Visual Basic MVP and C# is a language I learned as a result of projects I worked on at a software development company a few years ago.  Like a lot of VB programmers, I never went deep into the workings of the "behind the scenes" aspects and just focused on the applications. My next possible career move involves a deeper knowledge of the CLR and a .NET language.  This book is one that I will have my bookshelf for reference long after I have read that last page. Gerry

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• Are your personal insecurities screwing up your internal communications?

  - by Lucy Boyes

  I do some internal comms as part of my job. Quite a lot of it involves talking to people about stuff. I’m spending the next couple of weeks talking to lots of people about internal comms itself, because we haven’t done a lot of audience/user feedback gathering, and it turns out that if you talk to people about how they feel and what they think, you get some pretty interesting insights (and an idea of what to do next that isn’t just based on guesswork and generalising from self). Three things keep coming up from talking to people about what we suck at  in terms of internal comms. And, as far as I can tell, they’re all examples where personal insecurity on the part of the person doing the communicating makes the experience much worse for the people on the receiving end. 1. Spending time telling people how you’re going to do something, not what you’re doing and why Imagine you’ve got to give an update to a lot of people who don’t work in your area or department but do have an interest in what you’re doing (either because they want to know because they’re curious or because they need to know because it’s going to affect their work too). You don’t want to look bad at your job. You want to make them think you’ve got it covered – ideally because you do*. And you want to reassure them that there’s lots of exciting work going on in your area to make [insert thing of choice] happen to [insert thing of choice] so that [insert group of people] will be happy. That’s great! You’re doing a good job and you want to tell people about it. This is good comms stuff right here. However, you’re slightly afraid you might secretly be stupid or lazy or incompetent. And you’re exponentially more afraid that the people you’re talking to might think you’re stupid or lazy or incompetent. Or pointless. Or not-adding-value. Or whatever the thing that’s the worst possible thing to be in your company is. So you open by mentioning all the stuff you’re going to do, spending five minutes or so making sure that everyone knows that you’re DOING lots of STUFF. And the you talk for the rest of the time about HOW you’re going to do the stuff, because that way everyone will know that you’ve thought about this really hard and done tons of planning and had lots of great ideas about process and that you’ve got this one down. That’s the stuff you’ve got to say, right? To prove you’re not fundamentally worthless as a human being? Well, maybe. But probably not. See, the people who need to know how you’re going to do the stuff are the people doing the stuff. And those are the people in your area who you’ve (hopefully-please-for-the-love-of-everything-holy) already talked to in depth about how you’re going to do the thing (because else how could they help do it?). They are the only people who need to know the how**. It’s the difference between strategy and tactics. The people outside of your bubble of stuff-doing need to know the strategy – what it is that you’re doing, why, where you’re going with it, etc. The people on the ground with you need the strategy and the tactics, because else they won’t know how to do the stuff. But the outside people don’t really need the tactics at all. Don’t bother with the how unless your audience needs it. They probably don’t. It might make you feel better about yourself, but it’s much more likely that Bob and Jane are thinking about how long this meeting has gone on for already than how personally impressive and definitely-not-an-idiot you are for knowing how you’re going to do some work. Feeling marginally better about yourself (but, let’s face it, still insecure as heck) is not worth the cost, which in this case is the alienation of your audience. 2. Talking for too long about stuff This is kinda the same problem as the previous problem, only much less specific, and I’ve more or less covered why it’s bad already. Basic motivation: to make people think you’re not an idiot. What you do: talk for a very long time about what you’re doing so as to make it sound like you know what you’re doing and lots about it. What your audience wants: the shortest meaningful update. Some of this is a kill your darlings problem – the stuff you’re doing that seems really nifty to you seems really nifty to you, and thus you want to share it with everyone to show that you’re a smart person who thinks up nifty things to do. The downside to this is that it’s mostly only interesting to you – if other people don’t need to know, they likely also don’t care. Think about how you feel when someone is talking a lot to you about a lot of stuff that they’re doing which is at best tangentially interesting and/or relevant. You’re probably not thinking that they’re really smart and clearly know what they’re doing (unless they’re talking a lot and being really engaging about it, which is not the same as talking a lot). You’re probably thinking about something totally unrelated to the thing they’re talking about. Or the fact that you’re bored. You might even – and this is the opposite of what they’re hoping to achieve by talking a lot about stuff – be thinking they’re kind of an idiot. There’s another huge advantage to paring down what you’re trying to say to the barest possible points – it clarifies your thinking. The lightning talk format, as well as other formats which limit the time and/or number of slides you have to say a thing, are really good for doing this. It’s incredibly likely that your audience in this case (the people who need to know some things about your thing but not all the things about your thing) will get everything they need to know from five minutes of you talking about it, especially if trying to condense ALL THE THINGS into a five-minute talk has helped you get clear in your own mind what you’re doing, what you’re trying to say about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The bonus of this is that by being clear in your thoughts and in what you say, and in not taking up lots of people’s time to tell them stuff they don’t really need to know, you actually come across as much, much smarter than the person who talks for half an hour or more about things that are semi-relevant at best. 3. Waiting until you’ve got every detail sorted before announcing a big change to the people affected by it This is the worst crime on the list. It’s also human nature. Announcing uncertainty – that something important is going to happen (big reorganisation, product getting canned, etc.) but you’re not quite sure what or when or how yet – is scary. There are risks to it. Uncertainty makes people anxious. It might even paralyse them. You can’t run a business while you’re figuring out what to do if you’ve paralysed everyone with fear over what the future might bring. And you’re scared that they might think you’re not the right person to be in charge of [thing] if you don’t even know what you’re doing with it. Best not to say anything until you know exactly what’s going to happen and you can reassure them all, right? Nope. The people who are going to be affected by whatever it is that you don’t quite know all the details of yet aren’t stupid***. You wouldn’t have hired them if they were. They know something’s up because you’ve got your guilty face on and you keep pulling people into meeting rooms and looking vaguely worried. Here’s the deal: it’s a lot less stressful for everyone (including you) if you’re up front from the beginning. We took this approach during a recent company-wide reorganisation and got really positive feedback. People would much, much rather be told that something is going to happen but you’re not entirely sure what it is yet than have you wait until it’s all fixed up and then fait accompli the heck out of them. They will tell you this themselves if you ask them. And here’s why: by waiting until you know exactly what’s going on to communicate, you remove any agency that the people that the thing is going to happen to might otherwise have had. I know you’re scared that they might get scared – and that’s natural and kind of admirable – but it’s also patronising and infantilising. Ask someone whether they’d rather work on a project which has an openly uncertain future from the beginning, or one where everything’s great until it gets shut down with no forewarning, and very few people are going to tell you they’d prefer the latter. Uncertainty is humanising. It’s you admitting that you don’t have all the answers, which is great, because no one does. It allows you to be consultative – you can actually ask other people what they think and how they feel and what they’d like to do and what they think you should do, and they’ll thank you for it and feel listened to and respected as people and colleagues. Which is a really good reason to start talking to them about what’s going on as soon as you know something’s going on yourself. All of the above assumes you actually care about talking to the people who work with you and for you, and that you’d like to do the right thing by them. If that’s not the case, you can cheerfully disregard the advice here, but if it is, you might want to think about the ways above – and the inevitable countless other ways – that making internal communication about you and not about your audience could actually be doing the people you’re trying to communicate with a huge disservice. So take a deep breath and talk. For five minutes or so. About the important things. Not the other things. As soon as you possibly can. And you’ll be fine.   *Of course you do. You’re good at your job. Don’t worry. **This might not always be true, but it is most of the time. Other people who need to know the how will either be people who you’ve already identified as needing-to-know and thus part of the same set as the people in you’re area you’ve already discussed this with, or else they’ll ask you. But don’t bring this stuff up unless someone asks for it, because most of the people in the audience really don’t care and you’re wasting their time. ***I mean, they might be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re not.

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• Is it wise for a programmer to move into management?

  - by Desolate Planet

  Many times, a developer has suggested that I become a team leader because I'm motivated, but during my career in the IT industry, I've seen so many people who are great at programming, move into management and they are miserable. I've also seen many managers return to programming stating "I'm a technical person, I like technical problems". If this is such a common thing, why do developers feel compelled to leave the technical domain and move into management? Sure you'll have more money and more control, but if you don't enjoy your work and take your problems out on your tream. Secondly, I've been asked in developer interviews, "Would you consider leading a team?" and I'm always tempted to cite the Peter Principle based on what I've seen. I am interested in furthering myself, but not in the way the company may want i.e "Vice President of department blah". To be honest, I've seen this more often in the corporate world than in small development houses and it's always put me off ever going back to a corporate environment. I just feel that this is becoming more and more the norm and it's impacting team morale and degrading the quality of the work. Question: Based on what I've said, Is it a smart move for a technical person to move into management?

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• Using Python to traverse a parent-child data set

  - by user132748

  I have a dataset of two columns in a csv file. Th purpose of this dataset is to provide a linking between two different id's if they belong to the same person. e.g (2,3,5 belong to 1) e.g COLA COLB 1 2 ; 1 3 ; 1 5 ; 2 6 ; 3 7 ; 9 10 In the above example 1 is linked to 2,3,5 and 2 is the linked to 6 and 3 is linked to 7. What I am trying to achieve is to identify all records which are linked to 1 directly (2,3,5) or indirectly(6,7) and be able to say that these id's in column B belong to same person in column A and then either dedupe or add a new column to the output file which will have 1 populated for all rows that link to 1 e.g of expected output colA colB GroupField 1 2 1; 1 3 1; 1 5 1 ; 2 6 1 ;3 7 1; 9 10 9; 10 11 9 I am a newbie and so am not sure on how to approach this problem.Appreciate any inputs you'll can provide.

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• Reconstruct a file from a TCP stream

  - by Abhishek Chanda

  I have a client and a server and a third box which sees all packets from the server to the client (but not the other way around). Now when the client requests a file from the server (over HTTP), the third box sees the response. I am trying to reconstruct the file there. I am using libpcap to capture TCP datagrams and trying to reconstruct the file there. Here is what I did Listen for packets on an interface Group all packets which have the same ACK number Sort the group based on SEQ number Extract data from each packet and combine them and write to the disk The problem is, the file thus generated is not exactly the same as the original file. Does everything sound correct here? Some more details: I am using C++ The packet data is being stored as std::vector<char> I did change the byte order while reading the ack number and seq number from the packet using ntohl I am not sure if I need to change the byte order for the data as well. I tried to reverse the data from each packet before combining them, even that did not work. Is there something I am missing?

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• how to make a continuous machine gun sound-effect

  - by Jan

  I am trying to make an entity fire one or more machine-guns. For each gun I store the time between shots (1.0 / firing rate) and the time since the last shot. Also I've loaded ~10 different gun-shot sound-effects. Now, for each gun I do the following: function update(deltatime): timeSinceLastShot += deltatime if timeSinceLastShot >= timeBetweenShots + verySmallRandomValue(): timeSinceLastShot -= timeBetweenShots if gunIsFiring: displayMuzzleFlash() spawnBullet() selectRandomSound().play() But now I often get a crackling noise (which I assume is when two or more guns are firing at the same time and confuse the sound-device). My question is whether A) This a common problem and there is a well-known solution, maybe to do with the channels or something, or B) I am using a completely wrong approach to the task. I had a look at some sound-assets for other games and they used complete burst with multiple shots. I suppose I could try that, but I would like to have organic little hickups in the gun-fire (that's what the random value is for) to make the game more gritty and dirty. I am using Panda3D, but I had the exact same problem in PyGame and SDL. [edit] Thanks a lot for the answers so far! One more problem with faking it though: Now how do I stop the sound? Let's say I have an effect with 5 bangs... *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* And I magically manage to loop it so that there's no gap or overlap if the player fires more than 5 shots. Now, what do I do if the player stops firing halfway through the third bang? How do I know how long to keep playing the sample so that the third bang is completed and I can start playing the rumbling echo of the last shot? Of course I can look up the shot/pause timing of that sound-sample and code accordingly, but it feels extremely hacky.

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• Should we encourage coding styles in favor of developer's autonomy, or discourage it in favor of consistency?

  - by Saeed Neamati

  A developer writes if/else blocks with one-line code statements like: if (condition) // Do this one-line code else // Do this one-line code Another uses curly braces for all of them: if (condition) { // Do this one-line code } else { // Do this one-line code } A developer first instantiates an object, then uses it: HelperClass helper = new HelperClass(); helper.DoSomething(); Another developer instantiates and uses the object in one line: new HelperClass().DoSomething(); A developer is more easy with arrays, and for loops: string[] ordinals = new string[] {'First', 'Second', 'Third'}; for (i = 0; i < ordinals.Length; i++) { // Do something } Another writes: List<string> ordinals = new List<string>() {'First', 'Second', 'Third'}; foreach (string ordinal in ordinals) { // Do something } I'm sure that you know what I'm talking about. I call it coding style (cause I don't know what it's called). But whatever we call it, is it good or bad? Does encouraging it have an effect of higher productivity of developers? Should we ask developers to try to write code the way we tell them, so to make the whole system become style-consistent?

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• What type of pattern would be used in this case

  - by Admiral Kunkka

  I want to know how to tackle this type of scenario. We are building a person's background, from scratch, and I want to know, conceptually, how to proceed with a secure object pattern in both design and execution... I've been reading on Factory patterns, Model-View-Controller types, Dependency injection, Singleton approaches... and I can't seem to grasp or 'fit' these types of designs decisions into what I'm trying to do.. First and foremost, I started with having a big jack-of-all-trades class, then I read some more, and some tips were to make sure your classes only have a single purpose.. which makes sense and I started breaking down certain things into other classes. Okay, cool. Now I'm looking at dependency injection and kind of didn't really know what's going on. Example/insight of what kind of heirarchy I need to accomplish... class Person needs to access and build from a multitude of different classes. class Culture needs to access a sub-class for culture benefits class Social needs to access class Culture, and other sub-classes class Birth needs to access Social, Culture, and other sub-classes class Childhood/Adolescence/Adulthood need to access everything. Also, depending on different rolls, this class heirarchy needs to create multiple people as well, such as Family, and their backgrounds using some, if not all, of these same classes. Think of it as a people generator, all random, with backgrounds and things that happen to them. Ageing, death of loved ones, military careers, e.t.c. Most of the generation is done randomly, making calls to a mt_rand function to pick from most of the selections inside the classes, guaranteeing the data to be absolutely random. I have most of the bulk-data down, and was looking for some insight from fellow programmers, what do you think?

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• How to approach scrum task burn down when tasks have multiple peoples involvement?

  - by AgileMan

  In my company, a single task can never be completed by one individual. There is going to be a separate person to QA and Code Review each task. What this means is that each individual will give their estimates, per task, as to how much time it will take to complete. The problem is, how should I approach burn down? If I aggregate the hours together, assume the following estimate: 10 hrs - Dev time 4 hrs - QA 4 hrs - Code Review. Task Estimate = 18hrs At the end of each day I ask that the task be updated with "how much time is left until it is done". However, each person generally just thinks about their part of it. Should they mark the effort remaining, and then ADD the effort estimates to that? How are you guys doing this? UPDATE To help clarify a few things, at my organization each Task within a story requires 3 people. Someone to develop the task. (do unit tests, ect...) A QA specialist to review task (they primarily do integration and regression tests) A Tech lead to do code review. I don't think there is a wrong way or a right way, but this is our way ... and that won't be changing. We work as a team to complete even the smallest level of a story whenever possible. You cannot actually test if something works until it is dev complete, and you cannot review the quality of the code either ... so the best you can do is split things up into small logical slices so that the bare minimum functionality can be tested and reviewed as early into the process as possible. My question to those that work this way would be how to burn down a "task" when they are setup this way. Unless a Task has it's own sub-tasks (which JIRA doesn't allow) ... I'm not sure the best way to accomplish tracking "what's left" on a daily basis.

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• SharePoint logging to a list

  - by Norgean

  I recently worked in an environment with several servers. Locating the correct SharePoint log file for error messages, or development trace calls, is cumbersome. And once the solution hit the cloud, it got even worse, as we had no access to the log files at all. Obviously we are not the only ones with this problem, and the current trend seems to be to log to a list. This had become an off-hour project, so rather than do the sensible thing and find a ready-made solution, I decided to do it the hard way. So! Fire up Visual Studio, create yet another empty SharePoint solution, and start to think of some requirements. Easy on/offI want to be able to turn list-logging on and off.Easy loggingFor me, this means being able to use string.Format.Easy filteringLet's have the possibility to add some filtering columns; category and severity, where severity can be "verbose", "warning" or "error". Easy on/off Well, that's easy. Create a new web feature. Add an event receiver, and create the list on activation of the feature. Tear the list down on de-activation. I chose not to create a new content type; I did not feel that it would give me anything extra. I based the list on the generic list - I think a better choice would have been the announcement type. Approximately: public void CreateLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListName);             if (list == null)             {                 var listGuid = web.Lists.Add(LogListName, "Logging for the masses", SPListTemplateType.GenericList);                 list = web.Lists[listGuid];                 list.Title = LogListTitle;                 list.Update();                 list.Fields.Add(Category, SPFieldType.Text, false);                 var stringColl = new StringCollection();                 stringColl.AddRange(new[]{Error, Information, Verbose});                 list.Fields.Add(Severity, SPFieldType.Choice, true, false, stringColl);                 ModifyDefaultView(list);             }         }Should be self explanatory, but: only create the list if it does not already exist (d'oh). Best practice: create it with a Url-friendly name, and, if necessary, give it a better title. ...because otherwise you'll have to look for a list with a name like "Simple_x0020_Log". I've added a couple of fields; a field for category, and a 'severity'. Both to make it easier to find relevant log messages. Notice that I don't have to call list.Update() after adding the fields - this would cause a nasty error (something along the lines of "List locked by another user"). The function for deleting the log is exactly as onerous as you'd expect:         public void DeleteLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);             if (list != null)             {                 list.Delete();             }         } So! "All" that remains is to log. Also known as adding items to a list. Lots of different methods with different signatures end up calling the same function. For example, LogVerbose(web, message) calls LogVerbose(web, null, message) which again calls another method which calls: private static void Log(SPWeb web, string category, string severity, string textformat, params object[] texts)         {             if (web != null)             {                 var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);                 if (list != null)                 {                     var item = list.AddItem(); // NOTE! NOT list.Items.Add… just don't, mkay?                     var text = string.Format(textformat, texts);                     if (text.Length > 255) // because the title field only holds so many chars. Sigh.                         text = text.Substring(0, 254);                     item[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title] = text;                     item[Degree] = severity;                     item[Category] = category;                     item.Update();                 }             } // omitted: Also log to SharePoint log.         } By adding a params parameter I can call it as if I was doing a Console.WriteLine: LogVerbose(web, "demo", "{0} {1}{2}", "hello", "world", '!'); Ok, that was a silly example, a better one might be: LogError(web, LogCategory, "Exception caught when updating {0}. exception: {1}", listItem.Title, ex); For performance reasons I use list.AddItem rather than list.Items.Add. For completeness' sake, let us include the "ModifyDefaultView" function that I deliberately skipped earlier.         private void ModifyDefaultView(SPList list)         {             // Add fields to default view             var defaultView = list.DefaultView;             var exists = defaultView.ViewFields.Cast<string>().Any(field => String.CompareOrdinal(field, Severity) == 0);               if (!exists)             {                 var field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Severity);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Category);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 defaultView.Update();                   var sortDoc = new XmlDocument();                 sortDoc.LoadXml(string.Format("<Query>{0}</Query>", defaultView.Query));                 var orderBy = (XmlElement) sortDoc.SelectSingleNode("//OrderBy");                 if (orderBy != null && sortDoc.DocumentElement != null)                     sortDoc.DocumentElement.RemoveChild(orderBy);                 orderBy = sortDoc.CreateElement("OrderBy");                 sortDoc.DocumentElement.AppendChild(orderBy);                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.Modified];                 var fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                   fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.ID];                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                 defaultView.Query = sortDoc.DocumentElement.InnerXml;                 //defaultView.Query = "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Modified' Ascending='FALSE' /><FieldRef Name='ID' Ascending='FALSE' /></OrderBy>";                 defaultView.Update();             }         } First two lines are easy - see if the default view includes the "Severity" column. If it does - quit; our job here is done.Adding "severity" and "Category" to the view is not exactly rocket science. But then? Then we build the sort order query. Through XML. The lines are numerous, but boring. All to achieve the CAML query which is commented out. The major benefit of using the dom to build XML, is that you may get compile time errors for spelling mistakes. I say 'may', because although the compiler will not let you forget to close a tag, it will cheerfully let you spell "Name" as "Naem". Whichever you prefer, at the end of the day the view will sort by modified date and ID, both descending. I added the ID as there may be several items with the same time stamp. So! Simple logging to a list, with sensible a view, and with normal functionality for creating your own filterings. I should probably have added some more views in code, ready filtered for "only errors", "errors and warnings" etc. And it would be nice to block verbose logging completely, but I'm not happy with the alternatives. (yetanotherfeature or an admin page seem like overkill - perhaps just removing it as one of the choices, and not log if it isn't there?) Before you comment - yes, try-catches have been removed for clarity. There is nothing worse than having a logging function that breaks your site!

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