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• Team Foundation Server – How to pass ReferencePath argument to MSBuild

  - by Gopinath

  When we manually build a .NET project using Visual Studio, the reference paths set in Project Properties are picked up by Visual Studio for referring to dependent DLLs. But the project is built using TFS, the reference path’s specified in project properties are not considered. This is because Reference Paths are user specific settings and they are not stored in .proj files(they are stored in user settings files). The TFS build may break if it does not find the required DLLs in GAC. We can solve the problem by passing ReferencePath parameter to MSBuild in TFS build configurations. Go to Team Explorer Select Build Defintion >> Edit Build Definition Switch to Process tab Navigate to Advanced Section and locate MSBuild Arguments Add the following: /p:ReferencePath=”{File path}”

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• Convince developer to use IDE

  - by artjom

  There is a developer, lets call him John (currently on probationary period) in company(pretty small company approx. 10 persons, 3 developers, one of them works long in this company know business process around and can be consider as Team leader) who didn't want to use any IDE at all(he is using some text editor). Application this team working on is medium size Java application with Spring Hibernate technology stack and refactoring/adding new features to launch new version of that application in near future. John performance working without IDE on this application is lower then desirable, team leader's (lets call him Bill) assumption is this happens because John is not using IDE. Bill try to persuade John to use IDE, but this idea meets a lot of resistance and main reason is "I want to be in total control of what I am doing, so I need to write all code by myself". How can Bill convince John to try to use IDE? (considering the fact what Bill already protected John from company owner several complaints about John performance)

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• Is it my responsibility to code for errors on a completely separate website and domain when redirecting or doing a single sign on?

  - by kappasims

  If my application is responsible for redirecting/doing a single sign on to a destination managed by a third party, in general, where should I draw the line for error handling during this process? If an error happens on the other application's end, is it reasonable for my stakeholder to expect the application I am working with to share responsibility for handling these scenarios? Notes: I am going to keep solutions limited to those that entail only one request--I am familiar with the "do an xmlhttprequest and see how that fares before doing anything else" approach. I am speaking in terms of an enterprise-level application with fairly decent customer traffic.

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• Why doesn't apache2 respect my envvars file?

  - by Avery Chan

  My envvar files has these lines in it: export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=www-data My apache2.conf has these lines in it: # These need to be set in /etc/apache2/envvars User ${APACHE_RUN_USER} Group ${APACHE_RUN_GROUP} But when I run apache2 -M I get this: apache2: bad user name ${APACHE_RUN_USER} A temporary fix is to hard-code www-data into it my apache2.conf file. There was some speculation here that this was because some configuration script didn't replace the env vars correctly in my apache2.conf file. Regardless how do I get apache2 to consult my envvars file? As another data point this site seems to indicate the envvars is generated at build, but read by apache2ctl at runtime, suggesting that this file isn't just poop leftover by the build process.

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• Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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• How to Multitask in the Linux Terminal: 3 Ways to Use Multiple Shells at Once

  - by Chris Hoffman

  The Linux terminal has rich multitasking capabilities. You can switch between the virtual consoles already running on your system, use Bash job control to run processes in the background, and take advantage of GNU screen, a terminal “window manager.” You don’t have to stick to a single command at a time. Whether you want to run a process in the background and revisit it occasionally or run multiple time-consuming tasks at once, Linux offers several options. How to Stress Test the Hard Drives in Your PC or Server How To Customize Your Android Lock Screen with WidgetLocker The Best Free Portable Apps for Your Flash Drive Toolkit

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• Monitor SQL Server Replication Jobs

  - by Yaniv Etrogi

  The Replication infrastructure in SQL Server is implemented using SQL Server Agent to execute the various components involved in the form of a job (e.g. LogReader agent job, Distribution agent job, Merge agent job) SQL Server jobs execute a binary executable file which is basically C++ code. You can download all the scripts for this article here SQL Server Job Schedules By default each of job has only one schedule that is set to Start automatically when SQL Server Agent starts. This schedule ensures that when ever the SQL Server Agent service is started all the replication components are also put into action. This is OK and makes sense but there is one problem with this default configuration that needs improvement  -  if for any reason one of the components fails it remains down in a stopped state.   Unless you monitor the status of each component you will typically get to know about such a failure from a customer complaint as a result of missing data or data that is not up to date at the subscriber level. Furthermore, having any of these components in a stopped state can lead to more severe problems if not corrected within a short time. The action required to improve on this default settings is in fact very simple. Adding a second schedule that is set as a Daily Reoccurring schedule which runs every 1 minute does the trick. SQL Server Agent’s scheduler module knows how to handle overlapping schedules so if the job is already being executed by another schedule it will not get executed again at the same time. So, in the event of a failure the failed job remains down for at most 60 seconds. Many DBAs are not aware of this capability and so search for more complex solutions such as having an additional dedicated job running an external code in VBS or another scripting language that detects replication jobs in a stopped state and starts them but there is no need to seek such external solutions when what is needed can be accomplished by T-SQL code. SQL Server Jobs Status In addition to the 1 minute schedule we also want to ensure that key components in the replication are enabled so I can search for those components by their Category, and set their status to enabled in case they are disabled, by executing the stored procedure MonitorEnableReplicationAgents. The jobs that I typically have handled are listed below but you may want to extend this, so below is the query to return all jobs along with their category. SELECT category_id, name FROM msdb.dbo.syscategories ORDER BY category_id; Distribution Cleanup LogReader Agent Distribution Agent Snapshot Agent Jobs By default when a publication is created, a snapshot agent job also gets created with a daily schedule. I see more organizations where the snapshot agent job does not need to be executed automatically by the SQL Server Agent  scheduler than organizations who   need a new snapshot generated automatically. To assure this setting is in place I created the stored procedure MonitorSnapshotAgentsSchedules which disables snapshot agent jobs and also deletes the job schedule. It is worth mentioning that when the publication property immediate_sync is turned off then the snapshot files are not created when the Snapshot agent is executed by the job. You control this property when the publication is created with a parameter called @immediate_sync passed to sp_addpublication and for an existing publication you can use sp_changepublication. Implementation The scripts assume the existence of a database named PerfDB. Steps: Run the scripts to create the stored procedures in the PerfDB database. Create a job that executes the stored procedures every hour. -- Verify that the 1_Minute schedule exists. EXEC PerfDB.dbo.MonitorReplicationAgentsSchedules @CategoryId = 10; /* Distribution */ EXEC PerfDB.dbo.MonitorReplicationAgentsSchedules @CategoryId = 13; /* LogReader */ -- Verify all replication agents are enabled. EXEC PerfDB.dbo.MonitorEnableReplicationAgents @CategoryId = 10; /* Distribution */ EXEC PerfDB.dbo.MonitorEnableReplicationAgents @CategoryId = 13; /* LogReader */ EXEC PerfDB.dbo.MonitorEnableReplicationAgents @CategoryId = 11; /* Distribution clean up */ -- Verify that Snapshot agents are disabled and have no schedule EXEC PerfDB.dbo.MonitorSnapshotAgentsSchedules; Want to read more of about replication? Check at my replication posts at my blog.

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• HTG Explains: How Windows 8's Secure Boot Feature Works & What It Means for Linux

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Whether you plan on using Windows 8 or not, everyone buying a PC in the future will end up with the Microsoft-driven Secure Boot feature enabled. Secure Boot prevents “unauthorized” operating systems and software from loading during the startup process. Secure Boot is a feature enabled by UEFI – which replaces the traditional PC BIOS – but Microsoft mandates specific implementations for x86 (Intel) and ARM PCs. Any computer with a Windows 8 logo sticker has Secure Boot enabled. Image Credit: Kiwi Flickr HTG Explains: How Windows 8′s Secure Boot Feature Works & What It Means for Linux Hack Your Kindle for Easy Font Customization HTG Explains: What Is RSS and How Can I Benefit From Using It?

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• C# async and actors

  - by Alex.Davies

  If you read my last post about async, you might be wondering what drove me to write such odd code in the first place. The short answer is that .NET Demon is written using NAct Actors. Actors are an old idea, which I believe deserve a renaissance under C# 5. The idea is to isolate each stateful object so that only one thread has access to its state at any point in time. That much should be familiar, it's equivalent to traditional lock-based synchronization. The different part is that actors pass "messages" to each other rather than calling a method and waiting for it to return. By doing that, each thread can only ever be holding one lock. This completely eliminates deadlocks, my least favourite concurrency problem. Most people who use actors take this quite literally, and there are plenty of frameworks which help you to create message classes and loops which can receive the messages, inspect what type of message they are, and process them accordingly. But I write C# for a reason. Do I really have to choose between using actors and everything I love about object orientation in C#? Type safety Interfaces Inheritance Generics As it turns out, no. You don't need to choose between messages and method calls. A method call makes a perfectly good message, as long as you don't wait for it to return. This is where asynchonous methods come in. I have used NAct for a while to wrap my objects in a proxy layer. As long as I followed the rule that methods must always return void, NAct queued up the call for later, and immediately released my thread. When I needed to get information out of other actors, I could use EventHandlers and callbacks (continuation passing style, for any CS geeks reading), and NAct would call me back in my isolated thread without blocking the actor that raised the event. Using callbacks looks horrible though. To remind you: m_BuildControl.FilterEnabledForBuilding(    projects,    enabledProjects = m_OutOfDateProjectFinder.FilterNeedsBuilding(        enabledProjects,             newDirtyProjects =             {                 ....... Which is why I'm really happy that NAct now supports async methods. Now, methods are allowed to return Task rather than just void. I can await those methods, and C# 5 will turn the rest of my method into a continuation for me. NAct will run the other method in the other actor's context, but will make sure that when my method resumes, we're back in my context. Neither actor was ever blocked waiting for the other one. Apart from when they were actually busy doing something, they were responsive to concurrent messages from other sources. To be fair, you could use async methods with lock statements to achieve exactly the same thing, but it's ugly. Here's a realistic example of an object that has a queue of data that gets passed to another object to be processed: class QueueProcessor {    private readonly ItemProcessor m_ItemProcessor = ...     private readonly object m_Sync = new object();    private Queue<object> m_DataQueue = ...    private List<object> m_Results = ...     public async Task ProcessOne() {         object data = null;         lock (m_Sync)         {             data = m_DataQueue.Dequeue();         }         var processedData = await m_ItemProcessor.ProcessData(data); lock (m_Sync)         {             m_Results.Add(processedData);         }     } } We needed to write two lock blocks, one to get the data to process, one to store the result. The worrying part is how easily we could have forgotten one of the locks. Compare that to the version using NAct: class QueueProcessorActor : IActor { private readonly ItemProcessor m_ItemProcessor = ... private Queue<object> m_DataQueue = ... private List<object> m_Results = ... public async Task ProcessOne()     {         // We are an actor, it's always thread-safe to access our private fields         var data = m_DataQueue.Dequeue();         var processedData = await m_ItemProcessor.ProcessData(data);         m_Results.Add(processedData);     } } You don't have to explicitly lock anywhere, NAct ensures that your code will only ever run on one thread, because it's an actor. Either way, async is definitely better than traditional synchronous code. Here's a diagram of what a typical synchronous implementation might do: The left side shows what is running on the thread that has the lock required to access the QueueProcessor's data. The red section is where that lock is held, but doesn't need to be. Contrast that with the async version we wrote above: Here, the lock is released in the middle. The QueueProcessor is free to do something else. Most importantly, even if the ItemProcessor sometimes calls the QueueProcessor, they can never deadlock waiting for each other. So I thoroughly recommend you use async for all code that has to wait a while for things. And if you find yourself writing lots of lock statements, think about using actors as well. Using actors and async together really takes the misery out of concurrent programming.

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• Adaptive Case Management OTN WebCast with Danilo Schmiedel

  - by JuergenKress

  Oracle ACE Director Danilo Schmiedel, SOA/BPM solution architect with Opitz Consulting in Germany, talks about Adaptive Case Management, Predictive Analytics, and Process Mining. Watch the video here. To download the Adaptive Case Management post mentioned in this interview, please visit the blog post. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: ACM,Adaptive Case Management,Danilo Schmiedel,Opitz,OTN,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Release

  - by Leonard Mwangi

  Microsoft is planning to release the second edition of SQL Server 2008, the new edition will named SQL Server 2008 R2 due to be released by May 1st 2010.   Amongst the change on the edition is pricing which is anticipated to go up by 25% for the Standard Edition and about 15% for the Enterprise Edition. As for the features, there are some very cool additions  including PowerPivot for SharePoint, Master Data Services and Multi-Server Administration. There is also enhancements on the Database Engine, Reporting Services and Installation Process.    More information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb500435(SQL.105).aspx   Have a happy Upgrade

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• Improve your Application Performance with .NET Framework 4.0

  Nice Article on CodeGuru. This processors we use today are quite different from those of just a few years ago, as most processors today provide multiple cores and/or multiple threads. With multiple cores and/or threads we need to change how we tackle problems in code. Yes we can still continue to write code to perform an action in a top down fashion to complete a task. This apprach will continue to work; however, you are not taking advantage of the extra processing power available. The best way to take advantage of the extra cores prior to .NET Framework 4.0 was to create threads and/or utilize the ThreadPool. For many developers utilizing Threads or the ThreadPool can be a little daunting. The .NET 4.0 Framework drastically simplified the process of utilizing the extra processing power through the Task Parallel Library (TPL). This article talks following topics “Data Parallelism”, “Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)” and “Task Parallelism”. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• BizTalk and Cloud computing

  - by Suresh Behera

  Now a day I am more thinking on cloud computing,biztalk ,appfabrick,health care,HPC and data bursting. I guess I should have my own lab now and wish have enough time to play around. I will start writing more blog abound this subject slowly .I am in process to setting up a very nicely distributed and decoupled environment for biztalk .I got my first surprise.I will do more VM Role setup with windows Azure 4.0 . (Installation on Biztalk 2010 and database on different server.)   Thanks, Suresh...(read more)

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• PASS Summit 2013 - A Bunch of Blog Posts Recently

  - by RickHeiges

  Recently, there have been a number of blog posts about having the 2013 PASS Summit in Seattle or elsewhere. I had a post in November about the process and some of the major factors that were on my mind. You can read it here . There is value in moving the Summit to another venue. There is value in having the Summit in the same location/venue year after year as well. Many of the posts that I read recently make excellent arguments for each. As time goes on and you hear another good argument for one...(read more)

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• Video Encoding library for C++ game

  - by Paulo Pinto

  I'm looking for a video encoding library in C++ that I can use to record game footage. It can not be an external application like Fraps, it must be a library. Ideally the encoding can be done in real time without affecting game performance too much, although this is not a must have requirement. Another preference is that the video file being saved from the game is already compressed and ready to be used by most video players without any further processing. I realize that this might not be possible especially for real time encoding, so I would accept a trade off of having to process the file later for better compression and/or better file format. I'd like to hear about your experience integrating the library into a game if possible and any interesting trade offs you had to make. Some libraries support more that one file format or codec, so advice on the file format would also be appreciated.

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• Remote install of Ubuntu Server

  - by David Walker

  Hi all, I have a machine located 500 miles away that's running Ubuntu 8.04. I figure it's just about time that I upgrade to the latest LTS. However, there's a software raid (md_raid) in there, and I'm afraid that just a dist-upgrade when I switch over the sources.list will end with catastrophic failure. Like a panic on boot that the raid'd disk can't be read, or something else. First, hoping that's not the case, however, if it ends up happening I'm wondering if there's a means of having someone drop in a Ubuntu 10.04 server install disk, and flip on ssh, and some means for me to hop on and re-run the installer remotely. Is this feasible? If so, what would one need to do aside run apt-get install ssh on the target machine? I do have friends who can be in front of the target machine to initiate the process, just not execute it out.

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• TimeStamp and mini-ETL (extract, transform, load)

  - by Tomaz.tsql

  Short example how to use Timestamp for a mini ETL process of your data. example below is following: Table_1 is production table on server1 Table_2 is datawarehouse table on server2 where datawarehouse is located Every day data are extracted, transformed and loaded to dataware house for further off-line usage and data analysis and business decision support. 1. Creating the environment if object_id ('table_1') is not null drop table table_1; go if object_id ('table_2') is not null drop...(read more)

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• Typical Method Of Building Puzzle Levels

  - by Josh Kahane

  Hi I am designing a puzzle game for the iphone and was wondering as most puzzle games consist of the player progressing through multiple levels. You see for example Angry Birds has over 100 levels. Once the basis of the game is made, how do developers typically go about building their levels? Do they generally build them from scratch each one more or less, or work of their own template or have some other method which they use to tailor these levels? I imagine building so many levels is a long process, certainly if building each one individually. Do they do this, or have a method which speeds it up once they have their basis? Thanks.

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• SEO consequences for merging country sites in a .com

  - by Pekka

  I am in the process of refactoring a number of rental portals I've built for a company with locations in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Instead of the current setting of each country site running under its own domain name: www.companyname.de www.companyname.ch www.companyname.at I would love to merge them all in this way: www.companyname.com/de www.companyname.com/ch www.companyname.com/at with the country TLDs doing a 301 redirect to the respective .com address. However, I have been repeatedly told not to do this due to likely problems with SEO - the business is very SEO dependent, and being a rental chain, needs to be strong in local results. So the question is: Is there an unavoidable hit in Search Engine Optimization when redirecting to a central .com domain? What measures can be taken to soften the blow? What comes to my mind is explicitly specifying a lang attribute in the html tag. Are there any other ways to specifically point out geographical location for sub-directories?

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• Legal responsibility for emebedding code

  - by Tom Gullen

  On our website we have an HTML5 arcade. For each game it has an embed this game on your website copy + paste code box. We've done the approval process of games as strictly and safely as possible, we don't actually think it is possible to have any malicious code in the games. However, we are aware that there's a bunch of people out there smarter than us and they might be able to exploit it. For webmasters wanting to copy + paste our games on their websites, we want to warn them that they are doing it at their own risk - but could we be held responsible if say for instance a malicious game was hosted on an important website and it stole their users credentials and cause them damage? I'm wondering if having an HTML comment in the copy + paste code saying "Use at your own risk" is sufficient.

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• Bug unsubscribing from Ubuntu One Mobile

  - by rhino

  Hi guys, I have an Ubuntu One Mobile subscription, which I can see in my subscriptions page: one.ubuntu.com/account/subscription/756082 I no longer need my Ubuntu One Mobile subscription, so click the link to cancel the Mobile service subscription: one.ubuntu.com/account/cancel/756082/ Then confirm that request to cancel: one.ubuntu.com/account/cancel/756082/confirm/ But the process ends there showing a "Something has gone wrong page", and my subscription remains active :( The same problem occurred when I attempted the same a few weeks back, so not a temporary problem I'm thinking. Any input gratefully received. I would like to report this problem directly to the maintainer of this part of the Ubuntu site but cannot see how to do that.

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• Project Coin: JSR 334 has a Proposed Final Draft

  - by darcy

  Reaching nearly the last phase of the JCP process, JSR 334 now has a proposed final draft. There have been only a few refinements to the specification since public review: Incorporated language changes into JLS proper. Forbid combining diamond and explicit type arguments to a generic constructor. Removed unusual protocol around Throwable.addSuppressed(null) and added a new constructor to Throwable to allow suppression to be disabled. Added disclaimers that OutOfMemoryError, NullPointerException, and ArithmeticException objects created by the JVM may have suppression disabled. Added thread safely requirements to Throwable.addSuppressed and Throwable.getSuppressed. Next up is the final approval ballot; almost there!

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• Writing a new programming language - when and how to bootstrap datastructures?

  - by OnResolve

  I'm in the process of writing my own programming language which, thus far, has been going great in terms of what I set out to accomplish. However, now, I'd like to bootstrap some pre-existing data structures and/or objects. My problem is that I'm not really sure on how to begin. When the compiler begins do I splice in these add-ins so their part of the scope of the application? If I make these in some core library, my concern is how I distribute the library in addition to the compiler--or are they part of the compiler? I get that there are probably a number of plausible ways to approach this, but I'm having trouble with the setting my direction. If it helps, the language is on top of the .NET core (i.e it compiles to CLR code). Any help or suggestions are very much appreciated!

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• SQL SERVER – Why Do We Need Master Data Management – Importance and Significance of Master Data Management (MDM)

  - by pinaldave

  Let me paint a picture of everyday life for you.  Let’s say you and your wife both have address books for your groups of friends.  There is definitely overlap between them, so that you both have the addresses for your mutual friends, and there are addresses that only you know, and some only she knows.  They also might be organized differently.  You might list your friend under “J” for “Joe” or even under “W” for “Work,” while she might list him under “S” for “Joe Smith” or under your name because he is your friend.  If you happened to trade, neither of you would be able to find anything! This is where data management would be very important.  If you were to consolidate into one address book, you would have to set rules about how to organize the book, and both of you would have to follow them.  You would also make sure that poor Joe doesn’t get entered twice under “J” and under “S.” This might be a familiar situation to you, whether you are thinking about address books, record collections, books, or even shopping lists.  Wherever there is a lot of data to consolidate, you are going to run into problems unless everyone is following the same rules. I’m sure that my readers can figure out where I am going with this.  What is SQL Server but a computerized way to organize data?  And Microsoft is making it easier and easier to get all your “addresses” into one place.  In the  2008 version of SQL they introduced a new tool called Master Data Services (MDS) for Master Data Management, and they have improved it for the new 2012 version. MDM was hailed as a major improvement for business intelligence.  You might not think that an organizational system is terribly exciting, but think about the kind of “address books” a company might have.  Many companies have lots of important information, like addresses, credit card numbers, purchase history, and so much more.  To organize all this efficiently so that customers are well cared for and properly billed (only once, not never or multiple times!) is a major part of business intelligence. MDM comes into play because it will comb through these mountains of data and make sure that all the information is consistent, accurate, and all placed in one database so that employees don’t have to search high and low and waste their time. MDM also has operational MDM functions.  This is not a redundancy.  Operational MDM means that when one employee updates one bit of information in the database, for example – updating a new address for a customer, operational MDM ensures that this address is updated throughout the system so that all departments will have the correct information. Another cool thing about MDM is that it features Master Data Services Configuration Manager, which is exactly what it sounds like.  It has a built-in “helper” that lets you set up your database quickly, easily, and with the correct configurations.  While talking about cool features, I can’t skip over the add-in for Excel.  This allows you to link certain data to Excel files for easier sharing and uploading. In summary, I want to emphasize that the scariest part of the database is slowly disappearing.  Everyone knows that a database – one consolidated area for all your data – is a good idea, but the idea of setting one up is daunting.  But SQL Server is making data management easier and easier with features like Master Data Services (MDS). Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Master Data Services, MDM

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• Limiting Audit Exposure and Managing Risk – Q&A and Follow-Up Conversation

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live ISACA webcast on Limiting Audit Exposure and Managing Risk with Metrics-Driven Identity Analytics. We were really fortunate to have Don Sparks from ISACA moderate the webcast featuring Stuart Lincoln, Vice President, IT P&L Client Services, BNP Paribas, North America and Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics. Stuart’s insights given the team’s role in providing IT for P&L Client Services and his tremendous experience in identity management and establishing sustainable compliance programs were true value-add at yesterday’s webcast. And if you are a healthcare organization looking to solve your compliance and security challenges, we recommend you join us for a live webcast on Tuesday, November 29 at 10 am PT. The webcast will feature experts from Kaiser Permanente, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Oracle and the focus of the discussion will be around the compliance challenges a healthcare organization faces and best practices for tackling those. Here are the details: Healthcare IT News Webcast: Managing Risk and Enforcing Compliance in Healthcare with Identity Analytics Tuesday, November 29, 201110:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET Register Today The ISACA webcast replay is now available on-demand and the slides are also available for download. Since we didn’t have time to address all the questions we received during the live Q&A portion of the webcast, we have captured responses to the remaining questions here. Please continue to provide us your feedback and insights from your experience in deploying identity compliance solutions. Q. Can you please clarify the mechanism utilized to populate the Identity Warehouse from each individual application's access management function / files? A. Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) supports direct imports from applications. Data collection is based on Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) that eliminates the need to write connectors to different applications. Oracle Identity Analytics’ import engine supports complex entitlement feeds saved as either text files or XML. The imports can be scheduled on a periodic basis or triggered as needed. If the applications are synchronized with a user provisioning solution like Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics has a seamless integration to pull in data from Oracle Identity Manager. Q.  Can you provide a short summary of the new features in your latest release of Oracle Identity Analytics? A. Oracle recently announced availability of enhanced Oracle Identity Analytics. This release focused on easing the certification process by offering risk analytics driven certification, advanced certification screens, business centric views and significant improvement in performance including 3X faster data imports, 3X faster certification campaign generation and advanced auto-certification features, that  will allow organizations to improve user productivity by up to 80%. Closed-loop risk feedback and IT policy monitoring with Oracle Identity Manager, a leading user provisioning solution, allows for more accurate certification reviews. And, OIA's improved performance enables customers to scale compliance initiatives supporting millions of user entitlements across thousands of applications, whether on premise or in the cloud, without compromising speed or integrity. Q. Will ISACA grant a CPE credit for attending this ISACA-sponsored webinar today? A. From ISACA: Hello and thank you for your interest in the 2011 ISACA Webinar Program!  Unfortunately, there are no CPEs offered for this program, archived or live.  We will be looking into the feasibility of offering them in the future.  Q. Would you be able to use this to help manage licenses for software? That is to say - could it track software that is not used by a user, thus eliminating the software license? A. OIA’s integration with Oracle Identity Manager, a leading user provisioning solution, allows organizations to detect ghost accounts or unused accounts via account reconciliation. Based on company’s policies, this could trigger an automated workflow for account deletion or asking for further investigation. Closed-loop feedback between the two solutions would then allow visibility into the complete audit trail of when the account was detected, the action taken, by whom, when and the current status. Q. We have quarterly attestations and .xls mechanisms are not working. Once the identity data is correlated in Identity Analytics, do you then automate access certification? A. OIA’s identity warehouse analyzes and correlates identity data across various resources that allows OIA to determine a user’s risk profile, who the access review request should go to, along with all the relevant access details of the user. The access certification manager gets notification on what to review, when and the relevant data is presented in a business friendly screen. Based on the result of the access certification process, actions are triggered and results recorded and archived. Access review managers have visual risk indicators that also allow them to prioritize access certification tasks and efforts. Q. How does Oracle Identity Analytics work with Cloud Security? A. For enterprises looking to build their own cloud(s), Oracle offers a set of security services that cloud developers can leverage including Oracle Identity Analytics.  For enterprises looking to manage their compliance requirements but without hosting those in-house and instead having a hosting provider offer managed Identity Management services to the organizations, Oracle Identity Analytics can be leveraged much the same way as you’d in an on-premise (within the enterprise) environment. In fact, organizations today are leveraging Oracle Identity Analytics to manage identity compliance in both these ways. Q. Would you recommend this as a cost effective solution for a smaller organization with @ 2,500 users? A. The key return-on-investment (ROI) on Oracle Identity Analytics is derived from automating compliance processes thereby eliminating administrative overhead, minimizing errors, maintaining cost- and time-effective sustainable compliance processes and minimizing audit exposures and penalties.  Of course, there are other tangible benefits that are derived from an Oracle Identity Analytics implementation as outlined in the webcast. For a quantitative analysis of your requirements and potential ROI calculation, we recommend you refer to the Forrester Study on Total Economic Impact of Oracle Identity Analytics. For an in-person discussion, please email Richard Caldwell.

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