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• Improving Manageability of Virtual Environments

  - by Jeff Victor

  Boot Environments for Solaris 10 Branded Zones Until recently, Solaris 10 Branded Zones on Solaris 11 suffered one notable regression: Live Upgrade did not work. The individual packaging and patching tools work correctly, but the ability to upgrade Solaris while the production workload continued running did not exist. A recent Solaris 11 SRU (Solaris 11.1 SRU 6.4) restored most of that functionality, although with a slightly different concept, different commands, and without all of the feature details. This new method gives you the ability to create and manage multiple boot environments (BEs) for a Solaris 10 Branded Zone, and modify the active or any inactive BE, and to do so while the production workload continues to run. Background In case you are new to Solaris: Solaris includes a set of features that enables you to create a bootable Solaris image, called a Boot Environment (BE). This newly created image can be modified while the original BE is still running your workload(s). There are many benefits, including improved uptime and the ability to reboot into (or downgrade to) an older BE if a newer one has a problem. In Solaris 10 this set of features was named Live Upgrade. Solaris 11 applies the same basic concepts to the new packaging system (IPS) but there isn't a specific name for the feature set. The features are simply part of IPS. Solaris 11 Boot Environments are not discussed in this blog entry. Although a Solaris 10 system can have multiple BEs, until recently a Solaris 10 Branded Zone (BZ) in a Solaris 11 system did not have this ability. This limitation was addressed recently, and that enhancement is the subject of this blog entry. This new implementation uses two concepts. The first is the use of a ZFS clone for each BE. This makes it very easy to create a BE, or many BEs. This is a distinct advantage over the Live Upgrade feature set in Solaris 10, which had a practical limitation of two BEs on a system, when using UFS. The second new concept is a very simple mechanism to indicate the BE that should be booted: a ZFS property. The new ZFS property is named com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe (isn't that creative? ). It's important to note that the property is inherited from the original BE's file system to any BEs you create. In other words, all BEs in one zone have the same value for that property. When the (Solaris 11) global zone boots the Solaris 10 BZ, it boots the BE that has the name that is stored in the activebe property. Here is a quick summary of the actions you can use to manage these BEs: To create a BE: Create a ZFS clone of the zone's root dataset To activate a BE: Set the ZFS property of the root dataset to indicate the BE To add a package or patch to an inactive BE: Mount the inactive BE Add packages or patches to it Unmount the inactive BE To list the available BEs: Use the "zfs list" command. To destroy a BE: Use the "zfs destroy" command. Preparation Before you can use the new features, you will need a Solaris 10 BZ on a Solaris 11 system. You can use these three steps - on a real Solaris 11.1 server or in a VirtualBox guest running Solaris 11.1 - to create a Solaris 10 BZ. The Solaris 11.1 environment must be at SRU 6.4 or newer. Create a flash archive on the Solaris 10 system s10# flarcreate -n s10-system /net/zones/archives/s10-system.flar Configure the Solaris 10 BZ on the Solaris 11 system s11# zonecfg -z s10z Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone. zonecfg:s10z create -t SYSsolaris10 zonecfg:s10z set zonepath=/zones/s10z zonecfg:s10z exit s11# zoneadm list -cv ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP 0 global running / solaris shared - s10z configured /zones/s10z solaris10 excl Install the zone from the flash archive s11# zoneadm -z s10z install -a /net/zones/archives/s10-system.flar -p You can find more information about the migration of Solaris 10 environments to Solaris 10 Branded Zones in the documentation. The rest of this blog entry demonstrates the commands you can use to accomplish the aforementioned actions related to BEs. New features in action Note that the demonstration of the commands occurs in the Solaris 10 BZ, as indicated by the shell prompt "s10z# ". Many of these commands can be performed in the global zone instead, if you prefer. If you perform them in the global zone, you must change the ZFS file system names. Create The only complicated action is the creation of a BE. In the Solaris 10 BZ, create a new "boot environment" - a ZFS clone. You can assign any name to the final portion of the clone's name, as long as it meets the requirements for a ZFS file system name. s10z# zfs snapshot rpool/ROOT/zbe-0@snap s10z# zfs clone -o mountpoint=/ -o canmount=noauto rpool/ROOT/zbe-0@snap rpool/ROOT/newBE cannot mount 'rpool/ROOT/newBE' on '/': directory is not empty filesystem successfully created, but not mounted You can safely ignore that message: we already know that / is not empty! We have merely told ZFS that the default mountpoint for the clone is the root directory. List the available BEs and active BE Because each BE is represented by a clone of the rpool/ROOT dataset, listing the BEs is as simple as listing the clones. s10z# zfs list -r rpool/ROOT NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT rpool/ROOT 3.55G 42.9G 31K legacy rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 1K 42.9G 3.55G / rpool/ROOT/newBE 3.55G 42.9G 3.55G / The output shows that two BEs exist. Their names are "zbe-0" and "newBE". You can tell Solaris that one particular BE should be used when the zone next boots by using a ZFS property. Its name is com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe. The value of that property is the name of the clone that contains the BE that should be booted. s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe zbe-0 local Change the active BE When you want to change the BE that will be booted next time, you can just change the activebe property on the rpool/ROOT dataset. s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe zbe-0 local s10z# zfs set com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe=newBE rpool/ROOT s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe newBE local s10z# shutdown -y -g0 -i6 After the zone has rebooted: s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe newBE local s10z# zfs mount rpool/ROOT/newBE / rpool/export /export rpool/export/home /export/home rpool /rpool Mount the original BE to see that it's still there. s10z# zfs mount -o mountpoint=/mnt rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 s10z# ls /mnt Desktop export platform Documents export.backup.20130607T214951Z proc S10Flar home rpool TT_DB kernel sbin bin lib system boot lost+found tmp cdrom mnt usr dev net var etc opt Patch an inactive BE At this point, you can modify the original BE. If you would prefer to modify the new BE, you can restore the original value to the activebe property and reboot, and then mount the new BE to /mnt (or another empty directory) and modify it. Let's mount the original BE so we can modify it. (The first command is only needed if you haven't already mounted that BE.) s10z# zfs mount -o mountpoint=/mnt rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 s10z# patchadd -R /mnt -M /var/sadm/spool 104945-02 Note that the typical usage will be: Create a BE Mount the new (inactive) BE Use the package and patch tools to update the new BE Unmount the new BE Reboot Delete an inactive BE ZFS clones are children of their parent file systems. In order to destroy the parent, you must first "promote" the child. This reverses the parent-child relationship. (For more information on this, see the documentation.) The original rpool/ROOT file system is the parent of the clones that you create as BEs. In order to destroy an earlier BE that is that parent of other BEs, you must first promote one of the child BEs to be the ZFS parent. Only then can you destroy the original BE. Fortunately, this is easier to do than to explain: s10z# zfs promote rpool/ROOT/newBE s10z# zfs destroy rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 s10z# zfs list -r rpool/ROOT NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT rpool/ROOT 3.56G 269G 31K legacy rpool/ROOT/newBE 3.56G 269G 3.55G / Documentation This feature is so new, it is not yet described in the Solaris 11 documentation. However, MOS note 1558773.1 offers some details. Conclusion With this new feature, you can add and patch packages to boot environments of a Solaris 10 Branded Zone. This ability improves the manageability of these zones, and makes their use more practical. It also means that you can use the existing P2V tools with earlier Solaris 10 updates, and modify the environments after they become Solaris 10 Branded Zones.

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• Deterministic/Consistent Unique Masking

  - by Dinesh Rajasekharan-Oracle

  One of the key requirements while masking data in large databases or multi database environment is to consistently mask some columns, i.e. for a given input the output should always be the same. At the same time the masked output should not be predictable. Deterministic masking also eliminates the need to spend enormous amount of time spent in identifying data relationships, i.e. parent and child relationships among columns defined in the application tables. In this blog post I will explain different ways of consistently masking the data across databases using Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting The readers of post should have minimal knowledge on Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Application Data Modeling, Data Masking concepts. For more information on these concepts, please refer to Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting document Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting 12c provides four methods using which users can consistently yet irreversibly mask their inputs. 1. Substitute 2. SQL Expression 3. Encrypt 4. User Defined Function SUBSTITUTE The substitute masking format replaces the original value with a value from a pre-created database table. As the method uses a hash based algorithm in the back end the mappings are consistent. For example consider DEPARTMENT_ID in EMPLOYEES table is replaced with FAKE_DEPARTMENT_ID from FAKE_TABLE. The substitute masking transformation that all occurrences of DEPARTMENT_ID say ‘101’ will be replaced with ‘502’ provided same substitution table and column is used , i.e. FAKE_TABLE.FAKE_DEPARTMENT_ID. The following screen shot shows the usage of the Substitute masking format with in a masking definition: Note that the uniqueness of the masked value depends on the number of columns being used in the substitution table i.e. if the original table contains 50000 unique values, then for the masked output to be unique and deterministic the substitution column should also contain 50000 unique values without which only consistency is maintained but not uniqueness. SQL EXPRESSION SQL Expression replaces an existing value with the output of a specified SQL Expression. For example while masking an EMPLOYEES table the EMAIL_ID of an employee has to be in the format EMPLOYEE’s [email protected] while FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME are the actual column names of the EMPLOYEES table then the corresponding SQL Expression will look like %FIRST_NAME%||’.’||%LAST_NAME%||’@COMPANY.COM’. The advantage of this technique is that if you are masking FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME of the EMPLOYEES table than the corresponding EMAIL ID will be replaced accordingly by the masking scripts. One of the interesting aspect’s of a SQL Expressions is that you can use sub SQL expressions, which means that you can write a nested SQL and use it as SQL Expression to address a complex masking business use cases. SQL Expression can also be used to consistently replace value with hashed value using Oracle’s PL/SQL function ORA_HASH. The following SQL Expression will help in the previous example for replacing the DEPARTMENT_IDs with a hashed number ORA_HASH (%DEPARTMENT_ID%, 1000) The following screen shot shows the usage of encrypt masking format with in the masking definition: ORA_HASH takes three arguments: 1. Expression which can be of any data type except LONG, LOB, User Defined Type [nested table type is allowed]. In the above example I used the Original value as expression. 2. Number of hash buckets which can be number between 0 and 4294967295. The default value is 4294967295. You can also co-relate the number of hash buckets to a range of numbers. In the above example above the bucket value is specified as 1000, so the end result will be a hashed number in between 0 and 1000. 3. Seed, can be any number which decides the consistency, i.e. for a given seed value the output will always be same. The default seed is 0. In the above SQL Expression a seed in not specified, so it to 0. If you have to use a non default seed then the function will look like. ORA_HASH (%DEPARTMENT_ID%, 1000, 1234 The uniqueness depends on the input and the number of hash buckets used. However as ORA_HASH uses a 32 bit algorithm, considering birthday paradox or pigeonhole principle there is a 0.5 probability of collision after 232-1 unique values. ENCRYPT Encrypt masking format uses a blend of 3DES encryption algorithm, hashing, and regular expression to produce a deterministic and unique masked output. The format of the masked output corresponds to the specified regular expression. As this technique uses a key [string] to encrypt the data, the same string can be used to decrypt the data. The key also acts as seed to maintain consistent outputs for a given input. The following screen shot shows the usage of encrypt masking format with in the masking definition: Regular Expressions may look complex for the first time users but you will soon realize that it’s a simple language. There are many resources in internet, oracle documentation, oracle learning library, my oracle support on writing a Regular Expressions, out of all the following My Oracle Support document helped me to get started with Regular Expressions: Oracle SQL Support for Regular Expressions[Video](Doc ID 1369668.1) USER DEFINED FUNCTION [UDF] User Defined Function or UDF provides flexibility for the users to code their own masking logic in PL/SQL, which can be called from masking Defintion. The standard format of an UDF in Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting is: Function udf_func (rowid varchar2, column_name varchar2, original_value varchar2) returns varchar2; Where • rowid is the row identifier of the column that needs to be masked • column_name is the name of the column that needs to be masked • original_value is the column value that needs to be masked You can achieve deterministic masking by using Oracle’s built in hash functions like, ORA_HASH, DBMS_CRYPTO.MD4, DBMS_CRYPTO.MD5, DBMS_UTILITY. GET_HASH_VALUE.Please refers to the Oracle Database Documentation for more information on the Oracle Hash functions. For example the following masking UDF generate deterministic unique hexadecimal values for a given string input: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION RD_DUX (rid varchar2, column_name varchar2, orig_val VARCHAR2) RETURN VARCHAR2 DETERMINISTIC PARALLEL_ENABLE IS stext varchar2 (26); no_of_characters number(2); BEGIN no_of_characters:=6; stext:=substr(RAWTOHEX(DBMS_CRYPTO.HASH(UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_RAW(text),1)),0,no_of_characters); RETURN stext; END; The uniqueness depends on the input and length of the string and number of bits used by hash algorithm. In the above function MD4 hash is used [denoted by argument 1 in the DBMS_CRYPTO.HASH function which is a 128 bit algorithm which produces 2^128-1 unique hashed values , however this is limited by the length of the input string which is 6, so only 6^6 unique values will be generated. Also do not forget about the birthday paradox/pigeonhole principle mentioned earlier in this post. An another example is to consistently replace characters or numbers preserving the length and special characters as shown below: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION RD_DUS(rid varchar2,column_name varchar2,orig_val VARCHAR2) RETURN VARCHAR2 DETERMINISTIC PARALLEL_ENABLE IS stext varchar2(26); BEGIN DBMS_RANDOM.SEED(orig_val); stext:=TRANSLATE(orig_val,'ABCDEFGHILKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ',DBMS_RANDOM.STRING('U',26)); stext:=TRANSLATE(stext,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz',DBMS_RANDOM.STRING('L',26)); stext:=TRANSLATE(stext,'0123456789',to_char(DBMS_RANDOM.VALUE(1,9))); stext:=REPLACE(stext,'.','0'); RETURN stext; END; The following screen shot shows the usage of an UDF with in a masking definition: To summarize, Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting helps you to consistently mask data across databases using one or all of the methods described in this post. It saves the hassle of identifying the parent-child relationships defined in the application table. Happy Masking

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• Thou shalt not put code on a piedestal - Code is a tool, no more, no less

  - by Ralf Westphal

  “Write great code and everything else becomes easier” is what Paul Pagel believes in. That´s his version of an adage by Brian Marick he cites: “treat code as an end, not just a means.” And he concludes: “My post-Agile world is software craftsmanship.” I wonder, if that´s really the way to go. Will “simply” writing great code lead the software industry into the light? He´s alluding to the philosopher Kant who proposed, a human beings should never be treated as a means, but always as an end. But should we transfer this ethical statement into the world of software? I doubt it.   Reason #1: Human beings are categorially different from code. They are autonomous entities who need to find a way of living happily together. To Kant it seemed this goal could only be reached if nobody (ab)used a human being for his/her purposes. Because using a human being, i.e. treating it as a means, would contradict the fundamental autonomy and freedom of human beings. People should hold up a symmetric view of their relationships: Since nobody wants to be (ab)used, nobody should (ab)use anybody else. If you want to be treated decently, with respect, in accordance with your own free will - which means as an end - then do the same to other people. Code is dead, it´s a product, it´s a tool for people to reach their goals. No company spends any money on code other than to save money or earn money in the long run. Code is not a puppy. Enterprises do not commission software development to just feel good in its company. Code is not a buddy. Code is a slave, if you will. A mechanical slave, a non-tangible robot. Code is a tool, is a tool. And if we start to treat it differently, if we elevate its status unduely… I guess that will contort our relationship in a contraproductive way. Please get me right: Just because something is “just a tool”, “just a product” does not mean we should not be careful while designing, building, using it. Right to the contrary. We should be very careful when writing code – but not for the code´s sake! We should be careful because we respect our customers who are fellow human beings who should be treated as an end. If we are careless, neglectful, ignorant when producing code on their behalf, then we´re using them. Being sloppy means you´re caring more for yourself that for your customer. You´re then treating the customer as a means to fulfill some of your own needs. That´s plain unethical behavior.   Reason #2: The focus should always be on your purpose, not on any tool. But if code is treated as an end, then the focus is on the code. That might sound right, because where else should be your focus as a software developer? But, well, I´d say, your focus should be on delivering value to your customer. Because in the end your customer does not care if you write a single line of code. She just wants her problem to be solved. Solving problems is the purpose of any contractor. Code must be treated just as a means, a tool we know how to handle very well. But if we´re really trying to be craftsmen then we should be conscious about exactly that and act ethically. That means we must never be so focused on our tool as to be unable to suggest better solutions to the problems of our customers than code.   I´m all with Paul when he urges us to “Write great code”. Sure, if you need to write code, then by all means do so. Write the best code you can think of – and then try to improve it. Paul has all the best intentions when he signs Brians “treat code as an end” - but as we all know: “The road to hell is paved with best intentions” ;-) Yes, I can imagine a “hell of code focus”. In fact, I don´t need to imagine it, I´m seeing it quite often. Because code hell is whereever two developers stand together and are so immersed in talking about all sorts of coding tricks, design patterns, code smells, technologies, platforms, tools that they lose sight of the big picture. Talking about TDD or SOLID or refactoring is a sign of consciousness – relative to the “cowboy coders” view of the world. But from yet another point of view TDD, SOLID, and refactoring are just cures for ailments within a system. And I fear, if “Writing great code” is the only focus or the main focus of software development, then we as an industry lose the ability to see that. Focus draws a line around something, it defines a horizon for perceptions and thinking. So if we focus on code our horizon ends where “the land of code” ends. I don´t think that should be our professional attitude.   So what about Software Craftsmanship as the next big thing after Agility? I think Software Craftsmanship has an important message for all software developers and beyond. But to make it the successor of the Agility movement seems to miss a point. Agility never claimed to solve all software development problems, I´d say. So to blame it for having missed out on certain aspects of it is wrong. If I had to summarize Agility in one word I´d say “Value”. Agility put value for the customer back in software development. Focus on delivering value early and often – that´s Agility´s mantra. All else follows from that. And I ask you: Is that obsolete? Is delivering value not hip anymore? No, sure not. That´s our very purpose as software developers. So how can Agility become obsolete and need to be replaced? We need to do away with this “either/or”-thinking. It´s either Agility or Lean or Software Craftsmanship or whatnot. Instead we should start integrating concepts and movements. Think “both/and”. Think Agility plus Software Craftsmanship plus Lean plus whatnot. We don´t neet to tear down anything from a piedestal and replace it with a new idol. Instead we should do away with piedestals and arrange whatever is helpful is a circle. Then we can turn to concepts, movements for whatever they are best. After 10 years of Agility we should be able to identify what it was good at – and keep that. Keep Agility around and add whatever Agility was lacking or never concerned with. Add whatever is at the core of Software Craftsmanship. Add whatever is at the core of Lean etc. But don´t call out the age of Post-Agility. Because it better never will end. Because once we start to lose Agility´s core we´re losing focus of the customer.

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• The Sensemaking Spectrum for Business Analytics: Translating from Data to Business Through Analysis

  - by Joe Lamantia

  One of the most compelling outcomes of our strategic research efforts over the past several years is a growing vocabulary that articulates our cumulative understanding of the deep structure of the domains of discovery and business analytics. Modes are one example of the deep structure we’ve found.  After looking at discovery activities across a very wide range of industries, question types, business needs, and problem solving approaches, we've identified distinct and recurring kinds of sensemaking activity, independent of context.  We label these activities Modes: Explore, compare, and comprehend are three of the nine recognizable modes.  Modes describe *how* people go about realizing insights.  (Read more about the programmatic research and formal academic grounding and discussion of the modes here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971352_A_Taxonomy_of_Enterprise_Search_and_Discovery) By analogy to languages, modes are the 'verbs' of discovery activity.  When applied to the practical questions of product strategy and development, the modes of discovery allow one to identify what kinds of analytical activity a product, platform, or solution needs to support across a spread of usage scenarios, and then make concrete and well-informed decisions about every aspect of the solution, from high-level capabilities, to which specific types of information visualizations better enable these scenarios for the types of data users will analyze. The modes are a powerful generative tool for product making, but if you've spent time with young children, or had a really bad hangover (or both at the same time...), you understand the difficult of communicating using only verbs.  So I'm happy to share that we've found traction on another facet of the deep structure of discovery and business analytics.  Continuing the language analogy, we've identified some of the ‘nouns’ in the language of discovery: specifically, the consistently recurring aspects of a business that people are looking for insight into.  We call these discovery Subjects, since they identify *what* people focus on during discovery efforts, rather than *how* they go about discovery as with the Modes. Defining the collection of Subjects people repeatedly focus on allows us to understand and articulate sense making needs and activity in more specific, consistent, and complete fashion.  In combination with the Modes, we can use Subjects to concretely identify and define scenarios that describe people’s analytical needs and goals.  For example, a scenario such as ‘Explore [a Mode] the attrition rates [a Measure, one type of Subject] of our largest customers [Entities, another type of Subject] clearly captures the nature of the activity — exploration of trends vs. deep analysis of underlying factors — and the central focus — attrition rates for customers above a certain set of size criteria — from which follow many of the specifics needed to address this scenario in terms of data, analytical tools, and methods. We can also use Subjects to translate effectively between the different perspectives that shape discovery efforts, reducing ambiguity and increasing impact on both sides the perspective divide.  For example, from the language of business, which often motivates analytical work by asking questions in business terms, to the perspective of analysis.  The question posed to a Data Scientist or analyst may be something like “Why are sales of our new kinds of potato chips to our largest customers fluctuating unexpectedly this year?” or “Where can innovate, by expanding our product portfolio to meet unmet needs?”.  Analysts translate questions and beliefs like these into one or more empirical discovery efforts that more formally and granularly indicate the plan, methods, tools, and desired outcomes of analysis.  From the perspective of analysis this second question might become, “Which customer needs of type ‘A', identified and measured in terms of ‘B’, that are not directly or indirectly addressed by any of our current products, offer 'X' potential for ‘Y' positive return on the investment ‘Z' required to launch a new offering, in time frame ‘W’?  And how do these compare to each other?”.  Translation also happens from the perspective of analysis to the perspective of data; in terms of availability, quality, completeness, format, volume, etc. By implication, we are proposing that most working organizations — small and large, for profit and non-profit, domestic and international, and in the majority of industries — can be described for analytical purposes using this collection of Subjects.  This is a bold claim, but simplified articulation of complexity is one of the primary goals of sensemaking frameworks such as this one.  (And, yes, this is in fact a framework for making sense of sensemaking as a category of activity - but we’re not considering the recursive aspects of this exercise at the moment.) Compellingly, we can place the collection of subjects on a single continuum — we call it the Sensemaking Spectrum — that simply and coherently illustrates some of the most important relationships between the different types of Subjects, and also illuminates several of the fundamental dynamics shaping business analytics as a domain.  As a corollary, the Sensemaking Spectrum also suggests innovation opportunities for products and services related to business analytics. The first illustration below shows Subjects arrayed along the Sensemaking Spectrum; the second illustration presents examples of each kind of Subject.  Subjects appear in colors ranging from blue to reddish-orange, reflecting their place along the Spectrum, which indicates whether a Subject addresses more the viewpoint of systems and data (Data centric and blue), or people (User centric and orange).  This axis is shown explicitly above the Spectrum.  Annotations suggest how Subjects align with the three significant perspectives of Data, Analysis, and Business that shape business analytics activity.  This rendering makes explicit the translation and bridging function of Analysts as a role, and analysis as an activity. Subjects are best understood as fuzzy categories [http://georgelakoff.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/hedges-a-study-in-meaning-criteria-and-the-logic-of-fuzzy-concepts-journal-of-philosophical-logic-2-lakoff-19731.pdf], rather than tightly defined buckets.  For each Subject, we suggest some of the most common examples: Entities may be physical things such as named products, or locations (a building, or a city); they could be Concepts, such as satisfaction; or they could be Relationships between entities, such as the variety of possible connections that define linkage in social networks.  Likewise, Events may indicate a time and place in the dictionary sense; or they may be Transactions involving named entities; or take the form of Signals, such as ‘some Measure had some value at some time’ - what many enterprises understand as alerts.   The central story of the Spectrum is that though consumers of analytical insights (represented here by the Business perspective) need to work in terms of Subjects that are directly meaningful to their perspective — such as Themes, Plans, and Goals — the working realities of data (condition, structure, availability, completeness, cost) and the changing nature of most discovery efforts make direct engagement with source data in this fashion impossible.  Accordingly, business analytics as a domain is structured around the fundamental assumption that sense making depends on analytical transformation of data.  Analytical activity incrementally synthesizes more complex and larger scope Subjects from data in its starting condition, accumulating insight (and value) by moving through a progression of stages in which increasingly meaningful Subjects are iteratively synthesized from the data, and recombined with other Subjects.  The end goal of  ‘laddering’ successive transformations is to enable sense making from the business perspective, rather than the analytical perspective.Synthesis through laddering is typically accomplished by specialized Analysts using dedicated tools and methods. Beginning with some motivating question such as seeking opportunities to increase the efficiency (a Theme) of fulfillment processes to reach some level of profitability by the end of the year (Plan), Analysts will iteratively wrangle and transform source data Records, Values and Attributes into recognizable Entities, such as Products, that can be combined with Measures or other data into the Events (shipment of orders) that indicate the workings of the business.  More complex Subjects (to the right of the Spectrum) are composed of or make reference to less complex Subjects: a business Process such as Fulfillment will include Activities such as confirming, packing, and then shipping orders.  These Activities occur within or are conducted by organizational units such as teams of staff or partner firms (Networks), composed of Entities which are structured via Relationships, such as supplier and buyer.  The fulfillment process will involve other types of Entities, such as the products or services the business provides.  The success of the fulfillment process overall may be judged according to a sophisticated operating efficiency Model, which includes tiered Measures of business activity and health for the transactions and activities included.  All of this may be interpreted through an understanding of the operational domain of the businesses supply chain (a Domain).   We'll discuss the Spectrum in more depth in succeeding posts.

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• How does software installation in Linux work?

  - by Saif Bechan

  I am new to Linux and trying to set up a server. For this project I need some additional software, but how to install the software I'm interested in is not always obvious. For example, this was my experience with a PHP package called htscanner: There is no installation guide on the website. The website says that the version I used did not have any dependencies, but this is incorrect. "Release 0.8.1: No dependencies registered." There is no configuration guide on the website. After I managed to get it installed it still didn't work. I decided to just uninstall it and find a better solution. Uninstalling isn't straightforward; the best answer I got is to manually look for the files and delete them. What are the basic concepts of installing and uninstalling software on Linux? How is this supposed to work?

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• What is the difference between SoftAP and Wifi-Direct?

  - by user1129812

  I want to buy a Wifi Dongle that, besides acting as an ordinary Wifi client, could change its mode to work as an Access Point too. Should I buy a dongle with SoftAP or should I buy one with Wifi-Direct ? What is the difference between these 2 concepts ? Or is there any difference between them ? Moreover, what chipset (Realtek, Ralink etc) could provide such a functionality ? Which chipset that has this functionality could work happily in a Debian/Ubuntu 32 bit environment ? Thanks in advance for any suggestion.

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• Linux box acting as wireless access point to share the internet connection

  - by Suresh

  A linux machine is connected to internet over two interfaces ppp0 and ppp1 using two modems. Also this machine acts as wireless access point through an interface say, eth0 with ip address 192.168.1.1 and acts as gateway for the connected devices through this network with subnet mask 255.255.255.0 Now is it possible to achieve the following: When any of the connected devices through wireless AP needs internet connection linux machine has to use ppp1 interface for internet. If any of the applications on the linux machine needs internet connection linux machine should use ppp0 interface for the internet. Can this be achieved by adding rules to chains in filter/nat tables? If the kernel routing table has a default rule to route the default traffic through interface ppp0, wil kernel completely ignore ppp1 for internet? PS: new to networking and routing concepts, If the question is not clear leave a comment, will try to give more information.

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• Agile sysadmin and devops - How to accomplish?

  - by Marco Ramos

  Nowadays, agile systems adminitration and devops are some of the most trending topics regarding systems administration and operations. Both these concepts are mainly focused on bridging the gap between operations/sysadmins and the projects (developers, business, etc). Even if you never heard of the devops concept, I'm sure that this topic is your concern too. So, what tools and techniques do you use to accomplish devops in you companies? I'm particularly interested in topics like change management, continous integration and automatization, but not only. Please share your thoughts. I'm looking forward to read your answers/opinions :)

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• passing URL vars to a wordpress page and pretty-fying it with .htaccess

  - by Jonah

  I have wordpress installed in a directory called welcome, and /welcome/samples is a "page" (created via Wordpress). It's has a php template waiting for a $_REQUEST['category'] When a user goes to /welcome/samples/fun, I want to have "fun" passed to the samples php template in the form welcome/samples/?category=fun But I want the URL to remain in its original form - it's currently replacing the it with the ugly "?cat...etc" # Outside the wordpress block so it won't be overwritten Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^samples/([^/]+)$ /welcome/samples?cat=$1 [R,L] # BEGIN WordPress <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /welcome/ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /welcome/index.php [L] </IfModule> # END WordPress I tried Rewriting with simply samples?cat=$1 but I was getting a 404. I tried putting in the RewriteBase /welcome/ in the first block. without the [R] flag it doesn't work at all. I keep trying different permutations... and failing:( Perhaps I'm missing some basic concepts... thanks if you take the time to even read through this:) ciao

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• Static Routes and the Routing Table

  - by TheD

  This is very much a learning question if someone would be happy to explain a couple of concepts. My question is - the default routing table that exists in, in my case, a default Windows 7 install, what do each of the routes in the table do? Here is a screenshot: The 10.128.4.0 is just a route I've added while messing. I understand from a question I posted on Superuser the first route is just a default route that will route all traffic for any IP to my default gateway on my Interface in use. But what about the others? And how would the routing table handle a machine with multiple NIC's, perhaps connected to two different networks, or maybe even two NIC's on the same network so a VM can have a physical Network card instead of each VM sharing the hosts. Thanks!

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• Amazon RDS Pros/Cons of Multiple DBs per instance

  - by Joe Flowers

  I run two completely independent websites. I am moving their MySQL databases to Amazon RDS. I'm not going to do Multi A/Z deployment - let's remove that variable from this question. I'm not sure whether to create a single RDS instance with two databases, or two Amazon RDS instances with a single database. Ignore cost for the sake of this question. I will not hit the 1 TB data limit so let's ignore that. However, it is extremely important that crashing one of the websites doesn't impact the other. Based on this document - http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Concepts.DBInstance.html I'm assuming that if I write terrible code that crashes one of the databases in a given RDS instance, it could possibly take down the entire RDS instance (and thus inadvertantly affect the other database). Is that correct? Thanks

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• I'm an emacs user. How do I learn vim?

  - by Jason Baker

  Most of the time, I use emacs. However, I've decided to try to learn vim. I'm happy with emacs, I just am trying to avoid having it turn into Maslow's Hammer. I've seen a few tutorials, but I have yet to see a good one written from the standpoint of someone coming from emacs. Is there any general advice that someone who's undergone this learning process before can give me? Most importantly, what are some concepts in Vim that may not be intuitive to me coming from an emacs background?

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• Tips for teaching Linux to beginners?

  - by chiborg

  I will teach Linux to people of the ages 20-75 with no prior Linux knowledge. I want to teach some basic concepts (what's an OS, what's a file system) and some practical knowlede: How to install it, network configuration, set up email client, installing software with a packet manager, etc. I have held a system administrators course in the past, but was under the impression that my method of teaching was not adequate. I've explained what I was about to show, showed students on the projector, told them to repeat it on their computers and summarized what they should have learned. They could ask questions all the time. But I fear they remembered only one-third of the knowledge I taught them. I have two questions here: Are there better methods to teach this particular subject in a classroom equipped with computers? Are there some tricks that "slow me down" when I teach stuff that I know inside-out?

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• GNOME Screensaver Widgets

  - by darkfalcon

  Is there a way to add widgets to a Gnome screensaver? I think this can be done with KDE 4, but I've never liked KDE very much. I'm a programmer and comfortable with writing code if needed. I'd like to be able to: See the weather and forecast Control Rhythmbox Use a flash card widget for reviewing musical concepts The reason I want these on the screensaver is that I have login restrictions. I would like to be able to do a very limited subset of activities without having to log in.

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• would a dynamic wan disrupt a static lan?

  - by JohnMerlino

  So I found out that the cable company use the DHCP to assign the public ip address dynamically. So a subscriber's public facing ip address can change during the length of their subscription. Now what if you remove DHCP on a particular computer, which you plan to use as a web server, so that the machine has a static, unchanging IP address. If the public ip address was to change, would this confuse the Network Address Translation (NAT) and cause some sort of disruption? Please answer in layman terms, as I'm still grasping concepts here. thanks.

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• XenServer/Center: Shared SRs for hosts not in same pool?

  - by 3molo

  I would like to use the same SRs on XenServer hosts that are not able to be part of the same pool (because of not having the exact same cpu feature set, if I understand it correctly) in order to share templates, being able to (manually) start a host on another node, backing up running hosts on other hardware etc etc. The technology for SR can be any of iSCSI, NFS or CIFS, iSCSI would obviously be preferred. Trying to add an iSCSI volume renders a "This LUN is already in use as SR iSCSI - Shared Storage on pool xxxxxx.". Adding a NFS share on one XS host, creating a template there and then checking another XS host reveals they don't agree on used space etc. Coming from a vSphere world this is quite baffling, but if these are limitations then I will have to rethink some of the concepts for this low budget project.

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• Setting up a lab with Windows 2003 server and windows 7 clients

  - by Tathagata

  We are overhauling a lab with new machines with Windows 7 (as clients - around 150 of them). In the current infrastructure we have students logging in using a generic student id (as having individual student accounts doesn't really serve any additional purpose). This account, as you would imagine is a locked down one that can run a few (age old) softwares required by students in the class. Currently, the individual machines have XP images created by BartPE. What should be an ideal infrastructure design to cater to such a need with Windows Server 2003 and Windows 7 clients? It would be great if you can give me pointers to what concepts and background I need to have (like GPO), any design guidelines, best practices?

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• Windows XP: Consequences of setting a password for an account

  - by sleske

  I do not quite understand how Windows (specifically Windows XP) handles accounts with/without passwords. As far as I can see, on a fresh Windows XP install I have one default account which has admin rights does not have a password will auto-login (without password prompt) when the computer boots What happens if I set a password for this account? Will it still auto-login? Or will it always prompt for the PW? And generally, what consequences does it have if I set a password? I noted that Scheduled Tasks apparently cannot run under an account w/o password (creating a scheduled task will prompt for the account PW). Is there anything that will not work with a password set? Why is it even possible to have accounts without a password? I have some Unix/Linux background, but the concepts appear a little different under Windows.

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• Why do LCD screens need a backlight? (seriously)

  - by Tudor

  Bare with me on this, I'm well aware that most LCDs have backlights. But what if, they DIDN'T? I spend long hours in front of a screen and I hate the concept of staring into a lightbulb all the time and my eyes getting sore. I need to get a new lcd (some sort of IPS that doesn't cost a fortune) soon, but no matter what I'll get, I'll still be looking at a damn light. How come you can read on a kindle w/o a backlight but there aren't any monitors like that? I mean, ideally, a screen should be like a book or any other object in real life. Just for curiosity's sake, does anyone know of any new monitor concepts? Also, http://www.indiaonrent.com/view/l/laptop-transparent-monitor.html hah!

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• typesetting system

  - by itun

  All my life I used Microsoft Office on Windows for document writing and then Libre(Open)Office on Linux. This is not a bad software, but not perfect and I have some complaints. Now on my usual desktop I have Linux. I heard from people who work a lot with documents of different type and complexity (diagrams, articles, document design, presentation) that latex is a perfect thing. I have spent two days exploring Latex and my opinion as a beginner that it is out-of-date (the concepts of Latex language). The language is not intuitive and sometimes even complex. Can somebody advise another software product for document writing?

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• Explaining Git to someone new to revision control

  - by MaxMackie

  I've recently decided to jump into the whole world of revision control to work on some open source projects I have. I looked around (subversion, mercurial, git, etc) and found that Git seemed to make more sense conceptually to me. I've set everything up on my computer (opensuse) and made an account on gitorious (let me know if there is a more simple/better hosting provider). I understand Git from a conceptual point of view (work locally, commit to a local repo, others can now checkout from you, right?). But where does gitorious come into play? I commit to them as well as committing locally? Apart from conceptually, I don't quite understand HOW it works when it comes to making a local repository and running git init inside a folder and that HEAD file. Keep in mind I have never used any form of revision control ever before. So even the most basic concepts are foreign to me. As I post this, I'm also reading up and trying to figure it out myself.

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• “yourdomain/start is not the same thing as yourIP/start in Apache”

  - by user1883050

  Let's say you're trying to get a CMS up and going. And say you're supposed to find a Start Page at "www.yourdomain.com/start" But you don't have a domain name yet. You only have an IP address (yourIPaddress). Apache is visibly running at yourIPaddress. So you look in "yourIPaddress/start" And you don't find anything there, just a 404 page. And the person who installed it for you tells you: "In Apache, yourdomain/start is not the same thing as yourIP/start. Please read up on Apache server configuration to figure this out. And that's all the help I can give." My question is: what concepts (re: Apache configuration) should I read up on so that I can find the start page? Thoughts?

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• What's the deal with NTFS tags in windows 7

  - by polarix

  So back in the days of 'longhorn' there was this WinFS idea which was both cool looking and scary looking. Then it seemed to disappear, but we were told that many of the concepts would be rolled into Vista. Then maybe Win7. Anyway, nowadays if you look at a win7 Explorer window, you can have columns that have a lot of tag-based info about a file (right click on column header-more...), including one called "tags". Is this something in NTFS that can be modified per-file somehow? Is its GUI hiding, or is this something that's infinitely-delayed, or is it just a figment of my imagination? Sure would be nice to be able to get around the NTFS path 256 character limit for searches, and to filter file folders per Excel 2007.

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• Troubleshooting "connection reset" error on my linux server

  - by Chris

  I fervently hope someone here can help me with the problem I am experiencing. I am a programmer, and I have very little understanding of linux sysadmin terminology/concepts. I am attempting to troubleshoot a problem with my website. It is a Facebook app, and whenever I try to connect using Chrome, I get an error stating that the "connection was reset". I have been Googling for four days straight trying to find a solution to this problem, but no joy. A big part of the problem is that I do not understand the terminology being employed, and the output from many of the tools referenced is likewise indecipherable to me. I am running a VPS with CentOS 5, apache, PHP, and MySQL. I could spam this post with a ton of information from my iptables, apache, etc but if anyone needs information from my server, please let me know how to get it, and I will post it here. Thank you for any help you can offer!

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• Stop UAC/Secure Desktop from dimming the screen

  - by Florian

  I like the concepts of UAC and the "Secure Desktop" in Windows 7, but I don't like the dimming of the Secure Desktop to prompt for Admin credentials (or OK button to get clicked). However, dimming goes so far that my monitor regularly goes into PowerSaver mode, which is annoying (as it takes another 10 seconds for it to wake up), and might harm the monitor: two weeks after switching from XP to Windows 7, my 30" monitor stayed black and it had to get replaced. The web is full of tips how to turn off dimming, but that will always also turn off the "Secure Desktop". Is there a way to present the Secure Desktop without dimming? Or with a different visual effect to show that it is the Secure Desktop? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not looking for a way to disable dimming by disabling Secure Desktop (as is done by lowering the UAC level). I want to keep both UAC and Secure Desktop.

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