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• Christmas in the Clouds

  - by andrewbrust

  I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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• 3 Weeks Left to Save $100 for the Oracle Value Chain Summit

  - by Stephen Slade

  Projected to be sellout event, for the next 3 weeks you can save $100 with the Early-Bird Registration rate for the Oracle Value Chain Summit. Attend and experience 6 pillar product Conferences under one roof. Bring your supply chain team and receive a group discount (4+ attendees).  The site hotel has a dedicated room block (at a discounted rate) that is filling fast - so be sure to take advantage of these great offers! A new agenda was just published this week with an exciting lineup of best practices and success stories that I'm sure many of you can benefit from. REGISTER_TODAY!

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• Oracle University New Courses (Week 42)

  - by rituchhibber

    Oracle University released the following new (versions of) courses recently: Engineered Systems Exadata Database Machine Administration Workshop (Training On Demand) Development Tools Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g: Build Applications with ADF I (Training On Demand) Fusion Middleware Oracle AIA Foundation Pack 11g: Developing Applications (Training On Demand) Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Administration (Training On Demand) Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for Oracle (Training On Demand) Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g: Build Applications with ADF I (Training On Demand) Oracle WebCenter Portal 11g: Spaces Administration (3 days) Java Architect Enterprise Applications with Java EE (5 days) Hyperion Oracle Hyperion Planning 11.1.2: Create & Manage Applications (Training On Demand) Oracle Hyperion Financial Mgmt 11.1.2: Create & Manage Applications (Training On Demand) Get in contact with your local Oracle University team for more details and course dates.

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• IRM Item Codes &ndash; what are they for?

  - by martin.abrahams

  A number of colleagues have been asking about IRM item codes recently – what are they for, when are they useful, how can you control them to meet some customer requirements? This is quite a big topic, but this article provides a few answers. An item code is part of the metadata of every sealed document – unless you define a custom metadata model. The item code is defined when a file is sealed, and usually defaults to a timestamp/filename combination. This time/name combo tends to make item codes unique for each new document, but actually item codes are not necessarily unique, as will become clear shortly. In most scenarios, item codes are not relevant to the evaluation of a user’s rights - the context name is the critical piece of metadata, as a user typically has a role that grants access to an entire classification of information regardless of item code. This is key to the simplicity and manageability of the Oracle IRM solution. Item codes are occasionally exposed to users in the UI, but most users probably never notice and never care. Nevertheless, here is one example of where you can see an item code – when you hover the mouse pointer over a sealed file. As you see, the item code for this freshly created file combines a timestamp with the file name. But what are item codes for? The first benefit of item codes is that they enable you to manage exceptions to the policy defined for a context. Thus, I might have access to all oracle – internal files - except for 2011_03_11 13:33:29 Board Minutes.sdocx. This simple mechanism enables Oracle IRM to provide file-by-file control where appropriate, whilst offering the scalability and manageability of classification-based control for the majority of users and content. You really don’t want to be managing each file individually, but never say never. Item codes can also be used for the opposite effect – to include a file in a user’s rights when their role would ordinarily deny access. So, you can assign a role that allows access only to specified item codes. For example, my role might say that I have access to precisely one file – the one shown above. So how are item codes set? In the vast majority of scenarios, item codes are set automatically as part of the sealing process. The sealing API uses the timestamp and filename as shown, and the user need not even realise that this has happened. This automatically creates item codes that are for all practical purposes unique - and that are also intelligible to users who might want to refer to them when viewing or assigning rights in the management UI. It is also possible for suitably authorised users and applications to set the item code manually or programmatically if required. Setting the item code manually using the IRM Desktop The manual process is a simple extension of the sealing task. An authorised user can select the Advanced… sealing option, and will see a dialog that offers the option to specify the item code. To see this option, the user’s role needs the Set Item Code right – you don’t want most users to give any thought at all to item codes, so by default the option is hidden. Setting the item code programmatically A more common scenario is that an application controls the item code programmatically. For example, a document management system that seals documents as part of a workflow might set the item code to match the document’s unique identifier in its repository. This offers the option to tie IRM rights evaluation directly to the security model defined in the document management system. Again, the sealing application needs to be authorised to Set Item Code. The Payslip Scenario To give a concrete example of how item codes might be used in a real world scenario, consider a Human Resources workflow such as a payslips. The goal might be to allow the HR team to have access to all payslips, but each employee to have access only to their own payslips. To enable this, you might have an IRM classification called Payslips. The HR team have a role in the normal way that allows access to all payslips. However, each employee would have an Item Reader role that only allows them to access files that have a particular item code – and that item code might match the employee’s payroll number. So, employee number 123123123 would have access to items with that code. This shows why item codes are not necessarily unique – you can deliberately set the same code on many files for ease of administration. The employees might have the right to unseal or print their payslip, so the solution acts as a secure delivery mechanism that allows payslips to be distributed via corporate email without any fear that they might be accessed by IT administrators, or forwarded accidentally to anyone other than the intended recipient. All that remains is to ensure that as each user’s payslip is sealed, it is assigned the correct item code – something that is easily managed by a simple IRM sealing application. Each month, an employee’s payslip is sealed with the same item code, so you do not need to keep amending the list of items that the user has access to – they have access to all documents that carry their employee code.

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• H1 Visa interview tips–What you must know before attending the interview?

  - by Gopinath

  USA’s H1 visa allows highly qualified professionals from other countries to work in America. Many IT professionals in India aspire to go to USA on H1 and work for their clients. Recently I had a chance to study H1 visa process to help one of my friends and I would like to share what I learned. With the assumption that your H1 petition is approved and you got an interview scheduled at US Embassy for your visa stamping, here are tips you must know before attending the interview Dress Code – Formals Say no to casuals or any fancy dress when you attend the interview. It’s not a party or friends home you are visiting. Consider H1 Visa interview as your job interview and dress up in formals. There is no option B for your, you must be in formals. A plain formal shirt with a matching pant is suggested for men. Tie and Suit would not be required, but if you are a professional at management level you can consider wearing suit. Women can wear either formal Salwar or formal pant-shirt. Avoid heavy jewellery, wear what is must as per your tradition or culture. Body Language -  Smile on your face Your body language reflects what you are and what’s going on in your mind. Don’t be nervous or restless, be relaxed and wear a beautiful smile on your face. A smile is a curve that sets everything straight. When you are called for the interview, greet the interviewer with a beautiful smile. Say Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening depending on time you are visiting them. Whenever appropriate say Thank You. Generally American professionals are very friendly people and they reciprocate for your greetings. Make sure that you make them comfortable to start the interview. Carry original documents in a separate folder I don’t want to talk much about the documents that are required for your H1B interview as it’s big subject on it’s own and it requires a separate post. I assume that your consultant or employer helped you in gathering all the required documents like – petition, DS 160 forms, education & job related documents, resume, interview call letters, client letters, etc. For all the documents you are going to submit at the interview make sure that you have originals in a separate folder.  If required interviewer may ask you show the originals of any of the document you submitted for visa processing. Don’t mix the original documents with the documents you need to submit for interview. Have a separate folder for them. For those who are going to stamping along with their spouse and children, they need to carry few extra original documents like – marriage certificate, marriage photos(30 numbers)/album, birth certificates, passports, education and profession related certificates of the spouse and children. Know your role & responsibilities The interviewer will ask you questions on your roles and responsibilities at client location. Be clear what is your day to day tasks at client place and prepared to face detailed questions on the same. When asked explain clearly and also make sure what you say is inline with what is mentioned in your petition and client invitation letter. At times they may ask you questions specific to the project/technology you are going to work. So doing some homework in this area will help you easily answer the questions. Failing to answer basic questions on your role & responsibilities may result in rejection. You work for your Employer at Client location but NOT FOR CLIENT One of the important things to keep in mind that you work for your employer and you are being deputed to client location on a work visa.  Your employer is going to be solely responsible for your salary, work, promotion, pay hikes or what so ever during your stay at USA. Your client will not be responsible for anything. Lets say you are employed with Company X in India and they are applying for H1B to work at your client(ex: Microsoft) in USA, you must keep in my mind that Microsoft is not your employer. Microsoft will not pay your salaries or responsible for any employment related activities. Company X will be solely responsible for all your employer related activities. If you don’t get this correctly and say to Visa interviewer that your client is responsible, then you may get into troubles. Know your client It’s always good to know the clients with whom you are going to work in USA and their business. If your client is a well know organisation then you may not get many questions from interviewer else you need to be well prepared to provide details like – nature of business, location, size of the organisation, etc.  Get to know the basic details about your client and be confident while providing those details to the interviewer. Also make sure that you never talk about any confidential details of your client projects and business. Revealing confidential details of your client may land your job itself in soup. Make sure that your spouse is also in sync with you If you’ve applied a H4 visa for your spouse along with your H1, make sure that spouse is in sync with you. Your spouse also should know the basic details of your job, your employer, client and location where you will be travelling. Your spouse should also be prepared to answers questions related to marriage, their profession(if working), kids, education, etc. Interviewers will try to asses your spouse communication skills, whereabouts while staying in USA and would they prefer to work USA or not. On H4, which is a dependent visa, your spouse is not allowed to work in USA and at any point your spouse should not show the intentions to search for work in USA. Less luggage more comfort You would have definitely heard that there are lot of restrictions on what you can carry along with you to an US Embassy while attending the interview. To be frank it’s not good to say there are many restrictions, but there are a hell a lot of restrictions. There are unbelievable restrictions and it’s for the safety of everyone. You are not allowed to carry mobile phones, CD/DVDs, USBs, bank cards, cameras, cosmetics, food(except baby food), water, wallets, backpacks, sealed covers, etc. Trust me most of the things we carry with us regularly every day are not allowed inside. As there are 100s of restrictions, it would be easier if you understand what you can carry along with you and just carry them alone. Ask your employer/consultant to provide you a checklist of items that you can carry. Most what you would require are H1B related documents provided by the employer/consultant Photographs All original documents supporting your H1B Passports Some cash for your travel expenses (avoid coins) Any important phone number / details written in a paper(like your cab driver number, etc.) If you carry restricted stuff then you will be stopped at security checks, you have to find people who can safely keep all the restricted items. Due to heavy restrictions in and around the US Embassy you will not find any  place to keep your luggage. So just carry the bare minimum things required so that you feel more comfortable. Useful Links THE U.S. NON IMMIGRANT VISA APPLICATION PROCESS U.S VISA SECURITY REGULATIONS GENERAL FAQS Hope this information is helpful to you and best of luck for your interview. Creative commons Image credit: Flickr/ alexfrance, vinothchandar. hughelectronic, architratan, striatic

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• CSS vendor prefixes considered harmful

  I recently came across a post about border-radius by the IE team, that said IE9 supportsborder-radius (cool!) without vendor prefix (even cooler!)The post continues:While a number of web pages already make use of this feature, some [...] do not render properly in IE9 or Opera 10.50 because they lack an unprefixed declaration of the border-radius property.As the specification nears Recommendation and browser vendors are working on their final implementations and testcases for submission to the W3C,...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Transiltion from maintenance programing to design

  - by andrew wang

  What to do guys do develop a design for a s/w for a given set of requirements? I like many people joined a Semiconductor MNC and got stuck in maintenance for quite a couple of years. My work was usually changing a lines of code for windows drivers supplied by my company or a couple of small script (style like) C programs for validating h/w. As a result I developed the bad habit of 'programming by coincidence'. I have not developed the ability for designing tools/programs from scratch. I was the only s/w member of the local team and thus some grunt work from the well established other site of the company came to be done by me. Now I have moved to a different company and thus finding developing from scratch very difficult. How do I unlearn my bad habit and develop this ability of designing s/w and then coding it ?

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• How to measure the right time to bring a new client?

  - by Byron Sommardahl

  My growing company has a team of developers working on a number of separate projects. Our developers depend on us to keep them working, and we depend on them to make our clients happy. Our projects have differing start and end dates, as you can imagine. The company's responsibility to the developers is to make sure we have clients waiting in the wings so that when one project ends, another can start. For now, finding clients is not a problem and not the topic of this question. What I'm trying to think through right now is, how can I best measure/view/evaluate the end dates of projects so that I know when I need to start courting the next client. Is there a tool that does this? If it's just a spreadsheet, what might it look like?

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• Ceská obchodní banka, a.s. Upgrades to Oracle Database 11g On Time, On Budget and without Disrupting Business Operations

  - by jgelhaus

  You want the new features of the latest release, but upgrading a database is one of those things DBAs can "lose sleep" over.  Ceská obchodní banka, a.s."CSOB" needed to upgrade its production systems in the Czech Republic and Slovakia that supported 90 key applications for its retail, corporate, internet, and ATM services from Oracle Database 9i to Oracle Database 11g with simultaneous migration from Alpha processors/OpenVMS-based hardware to a Power7, AIX system. Oracle Consulting helped to complete the upgrade within schedule and budget, while meeting tight restrictions on downtime. Knowledge transfer by Oracle Consulting to the bank’s IT team has improved self-sufficiency in support and maintenance while the technical and advisory services of Oracle Consulting Expert Services continue to optimize performance and availability while lowering cost of ownership. Read how CSOB maximized the value of its investment in Oracle Database technology with an upgrade to Oracle Database 11g.

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• Do you develop with localization in mind?

  - by Jimmy C

  When working on a software project or a website, do you develop with localization in mind? By this I mean e.g. Externalizing all strings, including error messages. Not using images that contain text. Designing your UI with text expansion in mind. Using pseudo-translation to test your UI's early in the process. etc. On projects you work on, are these in the 'nice to have' category and let the L10N team worry about the rest, or do you have localization readiness built into your development process? I'm interested to hear how developers view localization in general.

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• Welcome to new blog!! Agile.NAV

  - by ssmantha

  I am quite ecstatic to announce a new blog, to which I am also a co-author. http://agilenav.wordpress.com. Agile.NAV brings in a vast amount of information of the work I did together with my colleague on bringing Microsoft Dynamics NAV under the hood of Team Foundation Server. For the past couple of years we have been working on creating development tools (more on integration side) for Microsoft Dynamics NAV which includes, Version Control, Automated Build system and our new automation testing integration with Dynamics NAV 2013. To start of with we got very good initial responses from community’s distinguished members like Luc van Vugt (see here). The idea is to drive the shift in mind-set for the Microsoft Dynamics NAV developer community. We share the same passion as people like Luc, about creating software in a professional manner.

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• High level project workflow

  - by user775060

  We are a small software company trying our hand at our second game. Since our first games' process was a living nightmare (since we used webdevelopment workflow) I have decided to educate myself on how to manage a game project on a high level. How does your process work, from idea to launch? Preferably in situations where you have a team that needs to cooperate. I've seen these 2 links, which are useful in a way, but was wondering if there are better/more comprehensive ways to do this? http://www.goodcontroller.com/blog/?p=136 http://gogogic.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/symbol6-how-we-created-an-iphone-game/ All input would be infinitely appreciated.

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• Murali Papana Blogs About Date Effectivity

  - by steve.muench

  Murali Papana from our Human Capital Management (HCM) Fusion Applications team has posted a series of blogs on a lesser-known, but quite powerful feature of ADF called "date effectivity". This is a feature that allows the framework to simplify managing records whose data values are effective for a given period of time. Imagine an employee's job title or salary that changes over time, which as well might be entered today by an HR reprepsentative but go into effect at some time in the future. Check out these articles if you're curious to learn more: Learning basics of Date Effectivity in ADFADF Model: Creating Date Effective EOADF Model: Creating Date Effective Association and Date Effective VOADF UI - Implementing Date Effective Search with Example

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• Live from the #summit13 keynote : 2013-10-17

  - by AaronBertrand

  Douglas McDowell (EVP Finance) takes the stage (no kilt), and talks numbers. PASS has an impressive $1MM in reserves as a "rainy day" fund. Last fiscal year they spent $7.6MM on community; 30% of that internationally. Bill Graziano comes on (no kilt) to say goodbye and thanks to the outgoing board members, Douglas McDowell, Rob Farley and Rushabh Mehta. Thomas LaRock comes on. No kilt , but he did tuck his shirt in . He introduces the incoming executive team. The 2014 PASS Business Analytics Conference...(read more)

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• Oracle 11g RAC 11.1.0.7 on OEL 5.4 templates for Oracle VM released!

  - by wim.coekaerts

  We just released 2 new template packs for Oracle VM on our e-delivery website. The RAC team spent a lot of time building these fine templates for Oracle VM including elaborate documentation for both test and production usage. The documentation is included in the tar/zip files. Have fun ! you can go to http://edelivery.oracle.com/oraclevm Product Pack : Oracle VM templates Platform : x86 32 bit or x86 64 bit Oracle VM Templates for Oracle RAC Media Pack for x86 (32 bit) Oracle VM Templates for Oracle RAC Media Pack for x86_64 (64 bit) Freely downloadable OEL (+OEL/JeOS) and Oracle VM and free download of the trial version of Oracle 11g RAC.

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• How do you balance documentation requirements with Agile developments

  - by Jeremy

  In our development group there is currently discussions around agile and waterfal methodology. No-one has any practical experience with agile, but we are doing some reading. The agile manifesto lists 4 values: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan We are an internal development group developing applications for the consumption of other units in our enterprise. A team of 10 developers builds and releases multiple projects simultanously, typically with 1 - maybe 2 (rarely) developer on each project. It seems to be that from a supportability perspective the organization needs to put some real value on documentation - as without it, there are serious risks with resourcing changes. With agile favouring interactions, and software deliverables over processes and documentation, how do you balance that with the requirements of supportable systems and maintaining knowledge and understanding of how those systems work? With a waterfall approach which favours documentation (requirements before design, design specs before construction) it is easy to build a process that meets some of the organizational requirements - how do we do this with an agile approach?

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• Happy Holidays

  - by peggy.chen

  Happy Holidays from the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Product Marketing Team! AC_FL_RunContent = 0; if (AC_FL_RunContent == 0) { alert("This page requires AC_RunActiveContent.js."); } else { AC_FL_RunContent( 'codebase', 'http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0', 'width', '500', 'height', '315', 'src', 'http://www.oracle.com/us/e-cards/ecard15-english-188059', 'quality', 'high', 'pluginspage', 'http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer', 'align', 'middle', 'play', 'true', 'loop', 'true', 'scale', 'showall', 'wmode', 'window', 'devicefont', 'false', 'id', 'ecard15_english', 'bgcolor', '#000000', 'name', 'ecard15_english', 'menu', 'true', 'allowFullScreen', 'false', 'allowScriptAccess','always', 'movie', 'http://www.oracle.com/us/e-cards/ecard15-english-188059', 'salign', '' ); //end AC code }

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• Project development without experience

  - by Raven13

  I'm a web developer who is part of a three-man team that has been tasked with a rather large and complex development project. Other than some direction and impetus from management, we're pretty much on our own to develop the new website. None of us have any project management experience nor do my two coworkers seem like they would be interested in taking on that role, so I feel like it's up to me to implement some kind of structure to the development process in order to avoid issues down the road. My question is: what can I do as a developer without project managment experience to ensure that our project gets developed successfully and avoid the pitfalls of developing a project without a plan?

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• Not attending the LUGM mini-meetup - 05. Oct 2013

  Not attending a meeting of the LUGM can be fun, too. It's getting a bit of a habit that Ish is organising small gatherings, aka mini-meetups, of the Linux User Group Mauritius/Meta (LUGM) almost every Saturday. There they mainly discuss and talk about various elements of using Linux as ones main operating systems and the possibilities you are going to have. On top of course, some tips & tricks about mastering the command line and initial steps in scripting or even writing HTML. In general, sounds like a good portion of fun and great spirit of community. Unfortunately, I'm usually quite busy with private and family matters during the weekend and so I already signalised that I wouldn't be around. Well, at least not physically... But this Saturday a couple of things worked out faster than expected and so I was hanging out on my machine. I made virtual contact with one of Pawan's messages over on Facebook... And somehow that kicked off some kind of an online game fun on basic configuration of Apache HTTPd 2.2.x, PHP 5.x and how to improve the overall performance of a newly installed blog based on WordPress. Default configuration files Nitin's website finally came alive and despite the dark theme and the hidden Apple 'fanboy' advertisement I was more interested in the technical situation. As with any new installation there is usually quite some adjustment to be done. And Nitin's page was no exception. Unfortunately, out of the box installations of Apache httpd and PHP are too verbose and expose too much information under the hood. You might think that this isn't really a problem at all, well, think about it again after completely reading this article. First, I checked the HTTP response headers - using either Chrome Developer Tools or Firefox Web Developer extension - of Nitin's page and based on that I advised him to lower the noise levels a little bit. It's not really necessary that detailed information about web server software and scripting language has to be published in every response made. Quite a number of script kiddies and exploits actually check for version specifics prior to an attack. So, removing at least version details hardens the system a little bit. In particular, I'm talking about these response values: Server X-Powered-By How to achieve that? By tweaking the configuration files... Namely, we are going to look into the following ones: apache2.conf httpd.conf .htaccess php.ini The above list contains some additional files, I'm talking about in the next paragraphs. Anyway, those are the ones involved. Tweaking Apache Open your favourite text editor and start to modify the apache2.conf. Eventually, you might like to have a quick peak at the file to see whether it is necessary to adjust it or not. Following is a handy combination of commands to get an overview of your active directives: # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf | grep -v '^$' | less There you keep an eye on those two Apache directives: ServerSignature Off ServerTokens Prod If that's not the case, change them as highlighted above. In order to activate your modifications you have to restart Apache httpd server. On Debian and Ubuntu you might use apache2ctl for that, on other distributions you might have to use service or run the init-scripts again: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Refresh your website and check the HTTP response header. Tweaking PHP5 (a little bit) Next, check your php.ini file with the following statement: # sudo grep -v ';' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini | grep -v '^$' | less And check the value of expose_php = Off Again, if it's not as highlighted, change it... Some more Apache love Okay, back to Apache it might also be interesting to improve the situation about browser caching and removing more obsolete information. When you run your website against the usual performance checks like Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow you might see those check points with bad grades on a standard, default configuration. Well, this can be done easily. Configure entity tags (ETags) ETags are only interesting when you run your websites on a farm of multiple web servers. Removing this data for your static resources is very simple in Apache. As we are going to deal with the HTTP response header information you have to ensure that Apache is capable to manipulate them. First, check your enabled modules: # sudo ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep headers And in case that the 'headers' module is not listed, you have to enable it from the available ones: # sudo a2enmod headers Second, check your httpd.conf file (in case it exists): # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/httpd.conf | grep -v '^$' | less In newer (better said fresh) installations you might have to create a new configuration file below your conf.d folder with your favourite text editor like so: # sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf.d/headers.conf Then, in order to tweak your HTTP responses either check for those lines or add them: Header unset ETagFileETag None In case that your file doesn't exist or those lines are missing, feel free to create/add them. Afterwards, check your Apache configuration syntax and restart your running instances as already shown above: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Add Expires headers To improve the loading performance of your website, you should take some care into the proper configuration of how to leverage the browser's ability to cache certain resources and files. This is done by adding an Expires: value to the HTTP response header. Generally speaking it is advised that you specify a near-future, read: 1 week or a little bit more, for your static content like JavaScript files or Cascading Style Sheets. One solution to adjust this is to put some instructions into the .htaccess file in the root folder of your web site. Of course, this could also be placed into a more generic location of your Apache installation but honestly, I'd like to keep this at the web site level. Following some adjustments I'm currently using on this blog site: # Turn on Expires and set default to 0ExpiresActive OnExpiresDefault A0 # Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">ExpiresDefault A29030400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 1 week<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">ExpiresDefault A604800Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 31 days<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$">ExpiresDefault A2678400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> As we are editing the .htaccess files, it is not necessary to restart Apache. In case that your web site doesn't load anymore or you're experiencing an error while trying to restart your httpd, check that the 'expires' module is actually an enabled module: # ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep expires# sudo a2enmod expires Of course, the instructions above a re not feature complete but I hope that they might provide a better default configuration for your LAMP stack. Resume of the day Within a couple of hours, and while being occupied with an eLearning course on SQL Server 2012, I had some good fun in helping and assisting other LUGM members while they were some kilometers away at Bagatelle. According to other blog articles it seems that Nitin had quite some moments of desperation. Just for the records: At no time it was my intention to either kick his butt or pull a leg on him. Simply, providing some input based on the lessons I've learned over the last couple of years configuring Apache HTTPd and PHP. Check out the other blogs, too: LUGM mini-meetup... Epic! Superb Saturday Linux Meetup And last but not least, the man himself: The end of a new beginning Cheers, and happy community'ing! Updates Due to our weekly Code & Coffee sessions in the MSCC community, I had a chance to talk to Nitin directly and he showed me the problems directly on his machine. This led to update this article hence the paragraphs on enabling the modules 'headers' and 'expires'.

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• Can Kind People Finish First?

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  by Jim Lein, Oracle Midsize Programs In an earlier post, I expressed my undying love for KIND Snacks' products. This month's Oracle Profit magazine features an interview with KIND Healthy Snacks Founder and CEO Daniel Lubetzky entitled "Better Business". Lubetzky expresses his vision for making KIND a "not for profit only" company.  All great companies start with a good idea. In this case, that one great idea was to offer a healthy snack with ingredients you can "see and pronounce". That's one of things I really like about this company--that coupled with the fact that their snacks taste great. They compete in an over crowded playing field but I've found that it's rare to find an energy snack that both tastes good and is good for you.  A couple of interesting facts I learned from reading this article: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} 9 out of 10 consumers who try a KIND bar will purchase a KIND product again and recommend it to others KIND has the highest Net Promoter Score among the top 10 brands in the nutritional bar category (I confess I've never heard about this rating before but now that I have it's pretty cool) KIND's coporate mantra, "Do the Kind Thing" both encourages people to do random acts of kindness and provides easy mechanisms for doing so. Not coincidentally, I think, KIND is indeed a story about how nice guys can finish first. KIND has doubled in size every year for the last ten  years and now employees over 300 people, with sales exceeding $120M annually. Growth Applies Pressures One thing I know for certain from interacting our with fast growing customers over the last fifteen years is that growth applies myriad pressures across the organization--resources, processes, technology systems, and leadership agility. And it's easy to forget that Oracle was once an entrepreneurial startup and experienced all those same pressures that other growing companies are experiencing today. When asked by Profit Editor in Chief Aaron Lazenby, " What sort of pressure does KIND"s growth and success place on operations?", Lubetzky responded, "We have a demand planning process right now that is manual to a significant extent, and it just takes so much management time. It takes us days and sometimes weeks to produce information that is critical to our business—and by the time we get the results, we need revised data. Our sales leadership could go out selling, but instead they’re talking to our team about forecasts." Hitching Your Wagon to Oracle Lubetzky and his team selected Oracle for what I believe is our company's greatest strength: hitch your wagon to Oracle and you can trust that we will be there for the long run with the solutions you need and financial staying power. In Lubetzky's words, "The KIND philosophy requires you to have a long-term view of things; taking shortcuts may be the fastest way to get things done, but in the long term that can come back and bite you. Oracle is the type of company—and has the kind of platform—that is here for the long term. It’s not going to go away tomorrow. And Oracle is going to invest all the necessary resources into staying ahead of the game and improving." o next time you're in the supermarket or an REI (my favorite store in the world) or any of the other 80,000 locations that carry KIND, give one a try. Maybe some day you'll want to become a KIND Brand Ambassador.   Looking for more news and information about Oracle Solutions for Midsize Companies? Read the latest Oracle for Midsize Companies Newsletter Sign-up to receive the latest communications from Oracle’s industry leaders and experts Jim Lein I evangelize Oracle's enterprise solutions for growing midsize companies. I recently celebrated 15 years with Oracle, having joined JD Edwards in 1999. I'm based in Evergreen, Colorado and love relating stories about creativity and innovation whether they be about software, live music, or the mountains. The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of Oracle.

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• HTML5 &lt;VIDEO/&gt; + IE9

  Yesterday at MIX Dean (general manager of the IE team) announced the availability of the first IE9 Platform Preview for developers. Dean also committed to updating the preview approximately every eight weeks. There is a good article on Beta News covering some of the technical details of the release. A key part of the announcements was the support for hardware accelerated HTML5 including supporting the video tag with the H.264 codec. What Im going to write next is based on a number of years of observations...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• HTML5 &lt;VIDEO/&gt; + IE9

  Yesterday at MIX Dean (general manager of the IE team) announced the availability of the first IE9 Platform Preview for developers. Dean also committed to updating the preview approximately every eight weeks. There is a good article on Beta News covering some of the technical details of the release. A key part of the announcements was the support for hardware accelerated HTML5 including supporting the video tag with the H.264 codec. What Im going to write next is based on a number of years of observations...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Extension Manager in Visual Studio 2010

  One of the powerful aspect of Visual Studio is its ability to be extended and many people do that. You can find numerous extensions at the Visual Studio Gallery. The VSX team links to a 4-part blog series on how to create and share templates. You can also look find extension examples on the vsx code gallery.With Visual Studio 2010, you can search for items and install them directly from within Visual Studio's new Extension Manager. You launch it from the Tools menu:When the dialog comes up, be sure to explore the various actionable areas on the left and also note the search on the right. For example, I typed "MP" and it quickly filtered the list to show me the MPI Project Template:Others have written about this before me, just bing Extension Manager (and note that Beta2 introduced changes, some of which you can witness in the screenshot above). Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Build Controller status Unavailable issue in TFS2010

  - by jehan

  I ran into this problem few days back, I was not able to run the builds because the Build Controller was showing Status as Unavailable. It was showing the below exception: There was no endpoint listening at http://fullmachinename:9191/Build/v3.0/Services/Controller/2 that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more details. After trying out few things, I looked at below Build Service Properties.   Then, I did below modifications to the Build Services Properties: 1)      Changed the Local Build Service Endpoint(incoming) from http://machinename.domain.com:9191 to http://machinename:9191 2)      Changed the Connect to Team Project Collection (outgoing) from localhost to machine name. http://localhost:8080/tfs/defaultCollection to http://machinename:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection   After that Started the Build Services and it fixed the issue, the Build Controller was showing Available Status and was able to run the builds.

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• What Keeps You from Changing Your Public IP Address and Wreaking Havoc on the Internet?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  What exactly is preventing you (or anyone else) from changing their IP address and causing all sorts of headaches for ISPs and other Internet users? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Whitemage is curious about what’s preventing him from wantonly changing his IP address and causing trouble: An interesting question was asked of me and I did not know what to answer. So I’ll ask here. Let’s say I subscribed to an ISP and I’m using cable internet access. The ISP gives me a public IP address of 60.61.62.63. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75, and messing with another consumer’s internet access? For the sake of this argument, let’s say that this other IP address is also owned by the same ISP. Also, let’s assume that it’s possible for me to go into the cable modem settings and manually change the IP address. Under a business contract where you are allocated static addresses, you are also assigned a default gateway, a network address and a broadcast address. So that’s 3 addresses the ISP “loses” to you. That seems very wasteful for dynamically assigned IP addresses, which the majority of customers are. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Two things to investigate here, why can’t we just go around changing our addresses, and is the assignment process as wasteful as it seems? The Answer SuperUser contributor Moses offers some insight: Cable modems aren’t like your home router (ie. they don’t have a web interface with simple point-and-click buttons that any kid can “hack” into). Cable modems are “looked up” and located by their MAC address by the ISP, and are typically accessed by technicians using proprietary software that only they have access to, that only runs on their servers, and therefore can’t really be stolen. Cable modems also authenticate and cross-check settings with the ISPs servers. The server has to tell the modem whether it’s settings (and location on the cable network) are valid, and simply sets it to what the ISP has it set it for (bandwidth, DHCP allocations, etc). For instance, when you tell your ISP “I would like a static IP, please.”, they allocate one to the modem through their servers, and the modem allows you to use that IP. Same with bandwidth changes, for instance. To do what you are suggesting, you would likely have to break into the servers at the ISP and change what it has set up for your modem. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Every ISP is different, both in practice and how close they are with the larger network that is providing service to them. Depending on those factors, they could be using a combination of ACL and static ARP. It also depends on the technology in the cable network itself. The ISP I worked for used some form of ACL, but that knowledge was a little beyond my paygrade. I only got to work with the technician’s interface and do routine maintenance and service changes. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75 and mess with another consumer’s internet access? Given the above, what keeps you from changing your IP to one that your ISP hasn’t specifically given to you is a server that is instructing your modem what it can and can’t do. Even if you somehow broke into the modem, if 60.61.62.75 is already allocated to another customer, then the server will simply tell your modem that it can’t have it. David Schwartz offers some additional insight with a link to a white paper for the really curious: Most modern ISPs (last 13 years or so) will not accept traffic from a customer connection with a source IP address they would not route to that customer were it the destination IP address. This is called “reverse path forwarding”. See BCP 38. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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