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• J2EE Applications, SPARC T4, Solaris Containers, and Resource Pools

  - by user12620111

  I've obtained a substantial performance improvement on a SPARC T4-2 Server running a J2EE Application Server Cluster by deploying the cluster members into Oracle Solaris Containers and binding those containers to cores of the SPARC T4 Processor. This is not a surprising result, in fact, it is consistent with other results that are available on the Internet. See the "references", below, for some examples. Nonetheless, here is a summary of my configuration and results. (1.0) Before deploying a J2EE Application Server Cluster into a virtualized environment, many decisions need to be made. I'm not claiming that all of the decisions that I have a made will work well for every environment. In fact, I'm not even claiming that all of the decisions are the best possible for my environment. I'm only claiming that of the small sample of configurations that I've tested, this is the one that is working best for me. Here are some of the decisions that needed to be made: (1.1) Which virtualization option? There are several virtualization options and isolation levels that are available. Options include: Hard partitions:  Dynamic Domains on Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series Servers Hypervisor based virtualization such as Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDOMs) on SPARC T-Series Servers OS Virtualization using Oracle Solaris Containers Resource management tools in the Oracle Solaris OS to control the amount of resources an application receives, such as CPU cycles, physical memory, and network bandwidth. Oracle Solaris Containers provide the right level of isolation and flexibility for my environment. To borrow some words from my friends in marketing, "The SPARC T4 processor leverages the unique, no-cost virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris Zones"  (1.2) How to associate Oracle Solaris Containers with resources? There are several options available to associate containers with resources, including (a) resource pool association (b) dedicated-cpu resources and (c) capped-cpu resources. I chose to create resource pools and associate them with the containers because I wanted explicit control over the cores and virtual processors.  (1.3) Cluster Topology? Is it best to deploy (a) multiple application servers on one node, (b) one application server on multiple nodes, or (c) multiple application servers on multiple nodes? After a few quick tests, it appears that one application server per Oracle Solaris Container is a good solution. (1.4) Number of cluster members to deploy? I chose to deploy four big 64-bit application servers. I would like go back a test many 32-bit application servers, but that is left for another day. (2.0) Configuration tested. (2.1) I was using a SPARC T4-2 Server which has 2 CPU and 128 virtual processors. To understand the physical layout of the hardware on Solaris 10, I used the OpenSolaris psrinfo perl script available at http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/download/Community+Group+performance/files/psrinfo.pl: test# ./psrinfo.pl -pv The physical processor has 8 cores and 64 virtual processors (0-63) The core has 8 virtual processors (0-7)   The core has 8 virtual processors (8-15)   The core has 8 virtual processors (16-23)   The core has 8 virtual processors (24-31)   The core has 8 virtual processors (32-39)   The core has 8 virtual processors (40-47)   The core has 8 virtual processors (48-55)   The core has 8 virtual processors (56-63)     SPARC-T4 (chipid 0, clock 2848 MHz) The physical processor has 8 cores and 64 virtual processors (64-127)   The core has 8 virtual processors (64-71)   The core has 8 virtual processors (72-79)   The core has 8 virtual processors (80-87)   The core has 8 virtual processors (88-95)   The core has 8 virtual processors (96-103)   The core has 8 virtual processors (104-111)   The core has 8 virtual processors (112-119)   The core has 8 virtual processors (120-127)     SPARC-T4 (chipid 1, clock 2848 MHz) (2.2) The "before" test: without processor binding. I started with a 4-member cluster deployed into 4 Oracle Solaris Containers. Each container used a unique gigabit Ethernet port for HTTP traffic. The containers shared a 10 gigabit Ethernet port for JDBC traffic. (2.3) The "after" test: with processor binding. I ran one application server in the Global Zone and another application server in each of the three non-global zones (NGZ):  (3.0) Configuration steps. The following steps need to be repeated for all three Oracle Solaris Containers. (3.1) Stop AppServers from the BUI. (3.2) Stop the NGZ. test# ssh test-z2 init 5 (3.3) Enable resource pools: test# svcadm enable pools (3.4) Create the resource pool: test# poolcfg -dc 'create pool pool-test-z2' (3.5) Create the processor set: test# poolcfg -dc 'create pset pset-test-z2' (3.6) Specify the maximum number of CPU's that may be addd to the processor set: test# poolcfg -dc 'modify pset pset-test-z2 (uint pset.max=32)' (3.7) bash syntax to add Virtual CPUs to the processor set: test# (( i = 64 )); while (( i < 96 )); do poolcfg -dc "transfer to pset pset-test-z2 (cpu $i)"; (( i = i + 1 )) ; done (3.8) Associate the resource pool with the processor set: test# poolcfg -dc 'associate pool pool-test-z2 (pset pset-test-z2)' (3.9) Tell the zone to use the resource pool that has been created: test# zonecfg -z test-z1 set pool=pool-test-z2 (3.10) Boot the Oracle Solaris Container test# zoneadm -z test-z2 boot (3.11) Save the configuration to /etc/pooladm.conf test# pooladm -s (4.0) Results. Using the resource pools improves both throughput and response time: (5.0) References: System Administration Guide: Oracle Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Oracle Solaris Zones Capitalizing on large numbers of processors with WebSphere Portal on Solaris WebSphere Application Server and T5440 (Dileep Kumar's Weblog)  http://www.brendangregg.com/zones.html Reuters Market Data System, RMDS 6 Multiple Instances (Consolidated), Performance Test Results in Solaris, Containers/Zones Environment on Sun Blade X6270 by Amjad Khan, 2009.

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• SQL SERVER – Using expressor Composite Types to Enforce Business Rules

  - by pinaldave

  One of the features that distinguish the expressor Data Integration Platform from other products in the data integration space is its concept of composite types, which provide an effective and easily reusable way to clearly define the structure and characteristics of data within your application.  An important feature of the composite type approach is that it allows you to easily adjust the content of a record to its ultimate purpose.  For example, a record used to update a row in a database table is easily defined to include only the minimum set of columns, that is, a value for the key column and values for only those columns that need to be updated. Much like a class in higher level programming languages, you can also use the composite type as a way to enforce business rules onto your data by encapsulating a datum’s name, data type, and constraints (for example, maximum, minimum, or acceptable values) as a single entity, which ensures that your data can not assume an invalid value.  To what extent you use this functionality is a decision you make when designing your application; the expressor design paradigm does not force this approach on you. Let’s take a look at how these features are used.  Suppose you want to create a group of applications that maintain the employee table in your human resources database. Your table might have a structure similar to the HumanResources.Employee table in the AdventureWorks database.  This table includes two columns, EmployeID and rowguid, that are maintained by the relational database management system; you cannot provide values for these columns when inserting new rows into the table. Additionally, there are columns such as VacationHours and SickLeaveHours that you might choose to update for all employees on a monthly basis, which justifies creation of a dedicated application. By creating distinct composite types for the read, insert and update operations against this table, you can more easily manage this table’s content. When developing this application within expressor Studio, your first task is to create a schema artifact for the database table.  This process is completely driven by a wizard, only requiring that you select the desired database schema and table.  The resulting schema artifact defines the mapping of result set records to a record within the expressor data integration application.  The structure of the record within the expressor application is a composite type that is given the default name CompositeType1.  As you can see in the following figure, all columns from the table are included in the result set and mapped to an identically named attribute in the default composite type. If you are developing an application that needs to read this table, perhaps to prepare a year-end report of employees by department, you would probably not be interested in the data in the rowguid and ModifiedDate columns.  A typical approach would be to drop this unwanted data in a downstream operator.  But using an alternative composite type provides a better approach in which the unwanted data never enters your application. While working in expressor  Studio’s schema editor, simply create a second composite type within the same schema artifact, which you could name ReadTable, and remove the attributes corresponding to the unwanted columns. The value of an alternative composite type is even more apparent when you want to insert into or update the table.  In the composite type used to insert rows, remove the attributes corresponding to the EmployeeID primary key and rowguid uniqueidentifier columns since these values are provided by the relational database management system. And to update just the VacationHours and SickLeaveHours columns, use a composite type that includes only the attributes corresponding to the EmployeeID, VacationHours, SickLeaveHours and ModifiedDate columns. By specifying this schema artifact and composite type in a Write Table operator, your upstream application need only deal with the four required attributes and there is no risk of unintentionally overwriting a value in a column that does not need to be updated. Now, what about the option to use the composite type to enforce business rules?  If you review the composition of the default composite type CompositeType1, you will note that the constraints defined for many of the attributes mirror the table column specifications.  For example, the maximum number of characters in the NationaIDNumber, LoginID and Title attributes is equivalent to the maximum width of the target column, and the size of the MaritalStatus and Gender attributes is limited to a single character as required by the table column definition.  If your application code leads to a violation of these constraints, an error will be raised.  The expressor design paradigm then allows you to handle the error in a way suitable for your application.  For example, a string value could be truncated or a numeric value could be rounded. Moreover, you have the option of specifying additional constraints that support business rules unrelated to the table definition. Let’s assume that the only acceptable values for marital status are S, M, and D.  Within the schema editor, double-click on the MaritalStatus attribute to open the Edit Attribute window.  Then click the Allowed Values checkbox and enter the acceptable values into the Constraint Value text box. The schema editor is updated accordingly. There is one more option that the expressor semantic type paradigm supports.  Since the MaritalStatus attribute now clearly specifies how this type of information should be represented (a single character limited to S, M or D), you can convert this attribute definition into a shared type, which will allow you to quickly incorporate this definition into another composite type or into the description of an output record from a transform operator. Again, double-click on the MaritalStatus attribute and in the Edit Attribute window, click Convert, which opens the Share Local Semantic Type window that you use to name this shared type.  There’s no requirement that you give the shared type the same name as the attribute from which it was derived.  You should supply a name that makes it obvious what the shared type represents. In this posting, I’ve overviewed the expressor semantic type paradigm and shown how it can be used to make your application development process more productive.  The beauty of this feature is that you choose when and to what extent you utilize the functionality, but I’m certain that if you opt to follow this approach your efforts will become more efficient and your work will progress more quickly.  As always, I encourage you to download and evaluate expressor Studio for your current and future data integration needs. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: CodeProject, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Getting your bearings and defining the project objective

  - by johndoucette

  I wrote this two years ago and thought it was worth posting… Some may think this is a daunting task and some may even say “what a waste of time” and want to open MS Project and start typing out tasks because someone asked for an estimate and a task list. Hell, maybe you even use Excel and pump out a spreadsheet with some real scientific formula for guessing how long it will take to code a bunch of classes. However, this short exercise will provide the basis for the entire project, whether small or large and be a great friend when communicating to anyone on your team or even your client. I call this the Project Brief. If you find yourself going beyond a single page, then you must decompose the sections and summarize your findings so there is a complete and clear picture of the project you are working on in a relatively short statement. Here is a great quote from the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) relative to what a project is;   A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. With this in mind, the project brief should encompass the entirety (objective) of the endeavor in its explanation and what it will take (goals) to create the product, service or result (deliverables). Normally the process of identifying the project objective is done during the first stage of a project called the Project Kickoff, but you can perform this very important step anytime to help you get a bearing. There are many more parts to helping a project stay on course, but this is usually the foundation where it can be grounded on. Through a series of 3 exercises, you should be able to come up with the objective, goals and deliverables on your project. Follow these steps, and in no time (about &frac12; hour), you will have the foundation of your project plan. (See examples below) Exercise 1 – Objectives Begin with the end in mind. Think about your project in business terms with a couple things to help you understand the objective; Reference the business benefit in terms of cost, speed and / or quality, Provide a higher level of what the outcome will look like (future sense) It should be non-measurable, that’s what the goals are all about The output should be a single paragraph with three sentences and take 10 minutes to write. *Typically, agreement must be reached on the objectives of the project before you would proceed to the next steps of the project. Exercise 2 – Goals A project goal is a statement that answers questions about who, what, why, where and when. A good project goal statement; Answers the five “W” questions for the project Is measurable in each of its parts Is published and agreed on by all the owners This helps the Project Manager receive confirmation on defining the project target. Using the established project objective done in the first exercise, think about the things it will take to get the job done. Think about tangible activities which are the top level tasks in a typical Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The overall goal statement plus all the deliverables (next exercise) can be seen as the project team’s contract with the project owners. Write 3 - 5 goals in about 10 minutes. You should not write the words “Who, what, why, where and when, but merely be able to answer the questions when you read a goal. Exercise 3 – Deliverables Every project creates some type of output and these outputs are called deliverables. There are two classes of deliverables; Internal – produced for project team members to meet their goals External – produced for project owners to meet their expectations The list you enter here provides a checklist for the team’s delivery and/or is a statement of all the expectations of the project owners. Here are some typical project deliverables; Product and product documentation End product/system Requirements/feature documents Installation guides Demo/prototype System design documents User guides/help files Plans Project plan Training plan Conversion/installation/delivery plan Test plans Documentation plan Communication plan Reports and general documentation Progress reports System acceptance tests Outstanding bug list Procedures Risk and issue logs Project history Deliverables should go with each of the goals. Have 3-5 deliverables for each goal. When you are done, you will have established a great foundation for the clarity of your project. This exercise can take some time, but with practice, you should be able to whip this one out in 10 minutes as well, especially if you are intimate with an ongoing project. Samples  Objective [Client] is implementing a series of MOSS sites to support external public (Internet), internal employee (Intranet) and an external secure (password protected Internet) applications. This project will focus on the public-facing web site and will provide [Client] with architectural recommendations based on the current design being done by their design partner [Partner] and the internal Content Team. In addition, it will provide [Client] with a development plan and confidence they need to deploy a world class public Internet website. Goals 1.  [Consultant] will provide technical guidance and set project team expectations for the implementation of the MOSS Internet site based on provided features/functions within three weeks. 2.  [Consultant] will understand phase 2 secure password-protected Internet site design and provide recommendations.   Deliverables 1.1  Public Internet (unsecure) Architectural Recommendation Plan 1.2  Physical Site construction Work Breakdown Structure and plan (Time, cost and resources needed) 2.1  Two Factor authentication recommendation document   Objective [Client] is currently using an application developed by [Consultant] many years ago called "XXX". This application, although functional, does not meet their new updated business requirements and contains a few defects which [Client] has developed work-around processes. [Client] would like to have a "new and improved" system to support their membership management needs by expanding membership and subscription capabilities, provide accounting integration with internal (GL) and external (VeriSign) systems, and implement hooks to the current CRM solution. This effort will take place through a series of phases, beginning with envisioning. Goals 1. Through discussions with users, [Consultant] will discover current issues/bugs which need to be resolved which must meet the current functionality requirements within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will gather requirements from the users about what is "needed" vs. "what they have" for enhancements and provide a high level document supporting their needs. 3. [Consultant] will meet with the team members through a series of meetings and help define the overall project plan to deliver a new and improved solution. Deliverables 1.1 Prioritized list of Current application issues/bugs that need to be resolved 1.2 Provide a resolution plan on the issues/bugs identified in the current application 1.3 Risk Assessment Document 2.1 Deliver a Requirements Document showing high-level [Client] needs for the new XXX application. · New feature functionality not in the application today · Existing functionality that will remain in the new functionality 2.2 Reporting Requirements Document 3.1 A Project Plan showing the deliverables and cost for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.2 A Statement of Work for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.3 An Estimate of any work that would need to follow the second phase.

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• People, Process & Engagement: WebCenter Partner Keste

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Within the WebCenter group here at Oracle, discussions about people, process and engagement cross over many vertical industries and products. Amidst our growing partner ecosystem, the community provides us insight into great customer use cases every day. Such is the case with our partner, Keste, who provides us a guest post on our blog today with an overview of their innovative solution for a customer in the transportation industry. Keste is an Oracle software solutions and development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. As a Platinum member of the Oracle® PartnerNetwork, Keste designs, develops and deploys custom solutions that automate complex business processes. Seamless Customer Self-Service Experience in the Trucking Industry with Oracle WebCenter Portal  Keste, Oracle Platinum Partner Customer Overview Omnitracs, Inc., a Qualcomm company provides mobility solutions for trucking fleets to companies in the transportation industry. Omnitracs’ mobility services include basic communications such as text as well as advanced monitoring services such as GPS tracking, temperature tracking of perishable goods, load tracking and weighting distribution, and many others. Customer Business Needs Already the leading provider of mobility solutions for large trucking fleets, they chose to target smaller trucking fleets as new customers. However their existing high-touch customer support method would not be a cost effective or scalable method to manage and service these smaller customers. Omnitracs needed to provide several self-service features to make customer support more scalable while keeping customer satisfaction levels high and the costs manageable. The solution also had to be very intuitive and easy to use. The systems that Omnitracs sells to these trucking customers require professional installation and smaller customers need to track and schedule the installation. Information captured in Oracle eBusiness Suite needed to be readily available for new customers to track these purchases and delivery details. Omnitracs wanted a high impact User Interface to significantly improve customer experience with the ability to integrate with EBS, provisioning systems as well as CRM systems that were already implemented. Omnitracs also wanted to build an architecture platform that could potentially be extended to other Portals. Omnitracs’ stated goal was to deliver an “eBay-like” or “Amazon-like” experience for all of their customers so that they could reach a much broader market beyond their large company customer base. Solution Overview In order to manage the increased complexity, the growing support needs of global customers and improve overall product time-to-market in a cost-effective manner, IT began to deliver a self-service model. This self service model not only transformed numerous business processes but is also allowing the business to keep up with the growing demands of the (internal and external) customers. This solution was a customer service Portal that provided self service capabilities for large and small customers alike for Activation of mobility products, managing add-on applications for the devices (much like the Apple App Store), transferring services when trucks are sold to other companies as well as deactivation all without the involvement of a call service agent or sending multiple emails to different Omnitracs contacts. This is a conceptual view of the Customer Portal showing the details of the components that make up the solution. 12.00 The portal application for transactions was entirely built using ADF 11g R2. Omnitracs’ business had a pressing requirement to have a portal available 24/7 for its customers. Since there were interactions with EBS in the back-end, the downtimes on the EBS would negate this availability. Omnitracs devised a decoupling strategy at the database side for the EBS data. The decoupling of the database was done using Oracle Data Guard and completely insulated the solution from any eBusiness Suite down time. The customer has no knowledge whether eBS is running or not. Here are two sample screenshots of the portal application built in Oracle ADF. Customer Benefits The Customer Portal not only provided the scalability to grow the business but also provided the seamless integration with other disparate applications. Some of the key benefits are: Improved Customer Experience: With a modern look and feel and a Portal that has the aspects of an App Store, the customer experience was significantly improved. Page response times went from several seconds to sub-second for all of the pages. Enabled new product launches: After successfully dominating the large fleet market, Omnitracs now has a scalable solution to sell and manage smaller fleet customers giving them a huge advantage over their nearest competitors. Dozens of new customers have been acquired via this portal through an onboarding process that now takes minutes Seamless Integrations Improves Customer Support: ADF 11gR2 allowed Omnitracs to bring a diverse list of applications into one integrated solution. This provided a seamless experience for customers to route them from Marketing focused application to a customer-oriented portal. Internally, it also allowed Sales Representatives to have an integrated flow for taking a prospect through the various steps to onboard them as a customer. Key integrations included: Unity Core Salesforce.com Merchant e-Solution for credit card Custom Omnitracs Applications like CUPS and AUTO Security utilizing OID and OVD Back end integration with EBS (Data Guard) and iQ Database Business Impact Significant business impacts were realized through the launch of customer portal. It not only allows the business to push through in underserved segments, but also reduces the time it needs to spend on customer support—allowing the business to focus more on sales and identifying the market for new products. Some of the Immediate Benefits are The entire onboarding process is now completely automated and now completes in minutes. This represents an 85% productivity improvement over their previous processes. And it was 160 times faster! With the success of this self-service solution, the business is now targeting about 3X customer growth in the next five years. This represents a tripling of their overall customer base and significant downstream revenue for the ongoing services. 90%+ improvement of customer onboarding and management process by utilizing, single sign on integration using OID/OAM solution, performance improvements and new self-service functionality Unified login for all Customers, Partners and Internal Users enables login to a common portal and seamless access to all other integrated applications targeted at the respective audience Significantly improved customer experience with a better look and feel with a more user experience focused Portal screens. Helped sales of the new product by having an easy way of ordering and activating the product. Data Guard helped increase availability of the Portal to 99%+ and make it independent of EBS downtime. This gave customers the feel of high availability of the portal application. Some of the anticipated longer term Benefits are: Platform that can be leveraged to launch any new product introduction and enable all product teams to reach new customers and new markets Easy integration with content management to allow business owners more control of the product catalog Overall reduced TCO with standardization of the Oracle platform Managed IT support cost savings through optimization of technology skills needed to support and modify this solution ------------------------------------------------------------ 12.00 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}

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• Silverlight Cream for November 22, 2011 -- #1172

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: XAMLGeek, WindowsPhoneGeek, Nigel Sampson, Jesse Liberty, Sumit Dutta(-2-), Dave Bost, Jared Bienz, Joost van Schaik, and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10)" Michael Crump WP7: "Using MVVMLight, ItemsControl, Blend and behaviors to make a ‘heads up compass’" Joost van Schaik Metro/WinRT/W8: "“Badevand” for Windows 8" XAMLGeek Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up From SilverlightCream.com:“Badevand” for Windows 8XAMLGeek posted a Metro app that shows water and air temperature and rain level for 5 beaches in Copenhagen, Denmark... no source, but good to see people posting appsGetting Started with Windows Phone RemindersWindowsPhoneGeek digs into Reminders in this WP7.1 post... the code you need, description, and a project to downloadHelp my app has been revoked!Nigel Sampson had a surprise when his latest app was revoked on his device, and then another... read what the solution wasA Dozen Windows Phone Videos… And CountingJesse Liberty posted his 12th WP7.1 video on Channel 9 - all about Reminders in MangoPart 23 - Windows Phone 7 - Detect Operator and Network InformationSumit Dutta has 2 more parts to his WP7 quest up... this part 23 is about getting mobile operator information and hot to get network capabilities using Microsoft.Phone.Net.DeviceNetworkInformationPart 24 - Windows Phone 7 - Microphone RepeaterIn part 24, Sumit Dutta uses the Microsoft.Xna.Framework Microphone class to record and play back voice.31 Days of Mango | Day #13: Marketplace Test KitDave Bost is at the helm of Jeff Blankenburg's Day 13 in his 31 day quest, discussing the Marketplace Test Kit and showing how to use it to determine if your app is ready for certification31 Days of Mango | Day #12; Beta DistributionJeff Blankenburg's Day 12 is written by guest author Jared Bienz, and shows how to submit an application for Beta testingUsing MVVMLight, ItemsControl, Blend and behaviors to make a ‘heads up compass’Joost van Schaik has a tutorial up showing how to make a WP7 Compass app using MVVMLight, Expression Blend, and then shows his thoughts on using the ItemsControl and Behaviors... code, descriptions and a project to download.... and I think I got your name right for the first time, Joost :)10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10)Michael Crump put out part 7 of his Silverlight 5 series at SilverlightShow... this is actually part 2 of OS Integration with Silverlight covering, among other things, 64-bit browser support and Power AwarenessStay in the 'Light!Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCreamJoin me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User GroupTechnorati Tags:Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows PhoneMIX10

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• Configuration "diff" across Oracle WebCenter Sites instances

  - by Mark Fincham-Oracle

  Problem Statement With many Oracle WebCenter Sites environments - how do you know if the various configuration assets and settings are in sync across all of those environments? Background At Oracle we typically have a "W" shaped set of environments.  For the "Production" environments we typically have a disaster recovery clone as well and sometimes additional QA environments alongside the production management environment. In the case of www.java.com we have 10 different environments. All configuration assets/settings (CSElements, Templates, Start Menus etc..) start life on the Development Management environment and are then published downstream to other environments as part of the software development lifecycle. Ensuring that each of these 10 environments has the same set of Templates, CSElements, StartMenus, TreeTabs etc.. is impossible to do efficiently without automation. Solution Summary  The solution comprises of two components. A JSON data feed from each environment. A simple HTML page that consumes these JSON data feeds.  Data Feed: Create a JSON WebService on each environment. The WebService is no more than a SiteEntry + CSElement. The CSElement queries various DB tables to obtain details of the assets/settings returning this data in a JSON feed. Report: Create a simple HTML page that uses JQuery to fetch the JSON feed from each environment and display the results in a table. Since all assets (CSElements, Templates etc..) are published between environments they will have the same last modified date. If the last modified date of an asset is different in the JSON feed or is mising from an environment entirely then highlight that in the report table. Example Solution Details Step 1: Create a Site Entry + CSElement that outputs JSON Site Entry & CSElement Setup  The SiteEntry should be uncached so that the most recent configuration information is returned at all times. In the CSElement set the contenttype accordingly: Step 2: Write the CSElement Logic The basic logic, that we repeat for each asset or setting that we are interested in, is to query the DB using <ics:sql> and then loop over the resultset with <ics:listloop>. For example: <ics:sql sql="SELECT name,updateddate FROM Template WHERE status != 'VO'" listname="TemplateList" table="Template" /> "templates": [ <ics:listloop listname="TemplateList"> {"name":"<ics:listget listname="TemplateList"  fieldname="name"/>", "modified":"<ics:listget listname="TemplateList"  fieldname="updateddate"/>"}, </ics:listloop> ], A comprehensive list of SQL queries to fetch each configuration asset/settings can be seen in the appendix at the end of this article. For the generation of the JSON data structure you could use Jettison (the library ships with the 11.1.1.8 version of the product), native Java 7 capabilities or (as the above example demonstrates) you could roll-your-own JSON output but that is not advised. Step 3: Create an HTML Report The JavaScript logic looks something like this.. 1) Create a list of JSON feeds to fetch: ENVS['dev-mgmngt'] = 'http://dev-mngmnt.example.com/sites/ContentServer?d=&pagename=settings.json'; ENVS['dev-dlvry'] = 'http://dev-dlvry.example.com/sites/ContentServer?d=&pagename=settings.json';  ENVS['test-mngmnt'] = 'http://test-mngmnt.example.com/sites/ContentServer?d=&pagename=settings.json';  ENVS['test-dlvry'] = 'http://test-dlvry.example.com/sites/ContentServer?d=&pagename=settings.json';   2) Create a function to get the JSON feeds: function getDataForEnvironment(url){ return $.ajax({ type: 'GET', url: url, dataType: 'jsonp', beforeSend: function (jqXHR, settings){ jqXHR.originalEnv = env; jqXHR.originalUrl = url; }, success: function(json, status, jqXHR) { console.log('....success fetching: ' + jqXHR.originalUrl); // store the returned data in ALLDATA ALLDATA[jqXHR.originalEnv] = json; }, error: function(jqXHR, status, e) { console.log('....ERROR: Failed to get data from [' + url + '] ' + status + ' ' + e); } }); } 3) Fetch each JSON feed: for (var env in ENVS) { console.log('Fetching data for env [' + env +'].'); var promisedData = getDataForEnvironment(ENVS[env]); promisedData.success(function (data) {}); }  4) For each configuration asset or setting create a table in the report For example, CSElements: 1) Get a list of unique CSElement names from all of the returned JSON data. 2) For each unique CSElement name, create a row in the table  3) Select 1 environment to represent the master or ideal state (e.g. "Everything should be like Production Delivery") 4) For each environment, compare the last modified date of this envs CSElement to the master. Highlight any differences in last modified date or missing CSElements. 5) Repeat...    Appendix This section contains various SQL statements that can be used to retrieve configuration settings from the DB.  Templates  <ics:sql sql="SELECT name,updateddate FROM Template WHERE status != 'VO'" listname="TemplateList" table="Template" /> CSElements <ics:sql sql="SELECT name,updateddate FROM CSElement WHERE status != 'VO'" listname="CSEList" table="CSElement" /> Start Menus <ics:sql sql="select sm.id, sm.cs_name, sm.cs_description, sm.cs_assettype, sm.cs_assetsubtype, sm.cs_itemtype, smr.cs_rolename, p.name from StartMenu sm, StartMenu_Sites sms, StartMenu_Roles smr, Publication p where sm.id=sms.ownerid and sm.id=smr.cs_ownerid and sms.pubid=p.id order by sm.id" listname="startList" table="Publication,StartMenu,StartMenu_Roles,StartMenu_Sites"/>  Publishing Configurations <ics:sql sql="select id, name, description, type, dest, factors from PubTarget" listname="pubTargetList" table="PubTarget" /> Tree Tabs <ics:sql sql="select tt.id, tt.title, tt.tooltip, p.name as pubname, ttr.cs_rolename, ttsect.name as sectname from TreeTabs tt, TreeTabs_Roles ttr, TreeTabs_Sect ttsect,TreeTabs_Sites ttsites LEFT JOIN Publication p  on p.id=ttsites.pubid where p.id is not null and tt.id=ttsites.ownerid and ttsites.pubid=p.id and tt.id=ttr.cs_ownerid and tt.id=ttsect.ownerid order by tt.id" listname="treeTabList" table="TreeTabs,TreeTabs_Roles,TreeTabs_Sect,TreeTabs_Sites,Publication" />  Filters <ics:sql sql="select name,description,classname from Filters" listname="filtersList" table="Filters" /> Attribute Types <ics:sql sql="select id,valuetype,name,updateddate from AttrTypes where status != 'VO'" listname="AttrList" table="AttrTypes" /> WebReference Patterns <ics:sql sql="select id,webroot,pattern,assettype,name,params,publication from WebReferencesPatterns" listname="WebRefList" table="WebReferencesPatterns" /> Device Groups <ics:sql sql="select id,devicegroupsuffix,updateddate,name from DeviceGroup" listname="DeviceList" table="DeviceGroup" /> Site Entries <ics:sql sql="select se.id,se.name,se.pagename,se.cselement_id,se.updateddate,cse.rootelement from SiteEntry se LEFT JOIN CSElement cse on cse.id = se.cselement_id where se.status != 'VO'" listname="SiteList" table="SiteEntry,CSElement" /> Webroots <ics:sql sql="select id,name,rooturl,updatedby,updateddate from WebRoot" listname="webrootList" table="WebRoot" /> Page Definitions <ics:sql sql="select pd.id, pd.name, pd.updatedby, pd.updateddate, pd.description, pdt.attributeid, pa.name as nameattr, pdt.requiredflag, pdt.ordinal from PageDefinition pd, PageDefinition_TAttr pdt, PageAttribute pa where pd.status != 'VO' and pa.id=pdt.attributeid and pdt.ownerid=pd.id order by pd.id,pdt.ordinal" listname="pageDefList" table="PageDefinition,PageAttribute,PageDefinition_TAttr" /> FW_Application <ics:sql sql="select id,name,updateddate from FW_Application where status != 'VO'" listname="FWList" table="FW_Application" /> Custom Elements <ics:sql sql="select elementname from ElementCatalog where elementname like 'CustomElements%'" listname="elementList" table="ElementCatalog" />

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• Einladung zum Oracle Partner Day 2012

  - by A&C Redaktion

  EINLADUNG: ORACLE PARTNER DAY GERMANY - 29. Oktober 2012: COMMERZBANK ARENA, Frankfurt Sehr geehrter Oracle Partner, volle Kraft voraus! Unsere Neuausrichtung und Zusammenfassung der Ressourcen, die Sie sicherlich aufmerksam verfolgt haben, ist nun abgeschlossen. Wir sind sehr überzeugt davon, dass wir alle gemeinsam von diesen Veränderungen nachhaltig profitieren werden. Nur ein Stichwort dazu: „One Oracle Red Stack“. Oracle Alliances & Channels und seine Partner können ab sofort das komplette Oracle Produktportfolio bestehend aus Oracle Software Technology, Oracle Applications und Oracle Hardware anbieten – bei bestmöglichem Support aus unserer neuen Organisation. Mein Name ist Christian Werner. Ich bin seit einigen Wochen verantwortlich für alle Alliances & Channels Bereiche in Deutschland. Frau Silvia Kaske leitet jetzt den kompletten A&C Bereich in Europe North in der Funktion als Senior Director Europe North Alliances & Channel Sales. Willkommen an Bord! Was Sie als Oracle Partner davon erwarten können? Wir haben alle unsere Kräfte konzentriert. Aus drei eigenen Bereichen wird ein großes Ganzes. Für Sie bedeutet das: fokussiertes Wachstum, geballte Kompetenz und Supportinfrastruktur. Abgestimmte Prozesse und kürzere Zeiten für Approvals. Wir meinen: Die Zeit ist reif, um jetzt gemeinsam den Hebel auf „Volle Kraft voraus“ zu legen. Und die Bedingungen für Sie sind besser als jemals zuvor, wenn Sie Ihre Kundenbasis erweitern oder neue Marktbereiche erschließen wollen. Leinen los: Kommen Sie zum Oracle Partner Day, wenn Sie wissen wollen, was sich für Sie verbessern wird: am 29. Oktober 2012 in der Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt. Treffen Sie Ihr neu aufgestelltes A&C-Team. Erleben Sie die Produktneuheiten von der Oracle Open World in San Francisco (30. September bis 4. Oktober 2012) aus erster Hand. Nutzen Sie das neue Speed Dating-Format mit ausgewählten Oracle Experten vor Ort – für konkrete Fragen zu Vertrieb und Produkten. Ganz besonders freue ich mich, dass dieses Jahr Jürgen Kunz, SVP Technology Northern Europe & Country Leader Germany, als Keynote Speaker dabei sein wird. Ich lade Sie ganz herzlich ein und freue mich, Sie in Frankfurt zu begrüßen! Die Teilnahme ist für Sie als Oracle Partner selbstverständlich kostenfrei. Hier finden Sie weitere Informationen zum Oracle Partner Day sowie die unkomplizierte Anmeldemöglichkeit. Ich freue mich auf Sie! Ihr Christian WernerSenior Director Alliances & Channels Germany Übrigens: Direkt nach dem Oracle Partner Day findet der Oracle Day für Endkunden statt. Sie als Partner können natürlich gemeinsam mit Ihren Kunden an dieser Veranstaltung teilnehmen. Bitte melden Sie sich schnell an, da die Plätze limitiert sind. Hier finden Sie weitere Infos zum Oracle Day.

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• Einladung zum Oracle Partner Day 2012

  - by A&C Redaktion

  EINLADUNG: ORACLE PARTNER DAY GERMANY - 29. Oktober 2012: COMMERZBANK ARENA, Frankfurt Sehr geehrter Oracle Partner, volle Kraft voraus! Unsere Neuausrichtung und Zusammenfassung der Ressourcen, die Sie sicherlich aufmerksam verfolgt haben, ist nun abgeschlossen. Wir sind sehr überzeugt davon, dass wir alle gemeinsam von diesen Veränderungen nachhaltig profitieren werden. Nur ein Stichwort dazu: „One Oracle Red Stack“. Oracle Alliances & Channels und seine Partner können ab sofort das komplette Oracle Produktportfolio bestehend aus Oracle Software Technology, Oracle Applications und Oracle Hardware anbieten – bei bestmöglichem Support aus unserer neuen Organisation. Mein Name ist Christian Werner. Ich bin seit einigen Wochen verantwortlich für alle Alliances & Channels Bereiche in Deutschland. Frau Silvia Kaske leitet jetzt den kompletten A&C Bereich in Europe North in der Funktion als Senior Director Europe North Alliances & Channel Sales. Willkommen an Bord! Was Sie als Oracle Partner davon erwarten können? Wir haben alle unsere Kräfte konzentriert. Aus drei eigenen Bereichen wird ein großes Ganzes. Für Sie bedeutet das: fokussiertes Wachstum, geballte Kompetenz und Supportinfrastruktur. Abgestimmte Prozesse und kürzere Zeiten für Approvals. Wir meinen: Die Zeit ist reif, um jetzt gemeinsam den Hebel auf „Volle Kraft voraus“ zu legen. Und die Bedingungen für Sie sind besser als jemals zuvor, wenn Sie Ihre Kundenbasis erweitern oder neue Marktbereiche erschließen wollen. Leinen los: Kommen Sie zum Oracle Partner Day, wenn Sie wissen wollen, was sich für Sie verbessern wird: am 29. Oktober 2012 in der Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt. Treffen Sie Ihr neu aufgestelltes A&C-Team. Erleben Sie die Produktneuheiten von der Oracle Open World in San Francisco (30. September bis 4. Oktober 2012) aus erster Hand. Nutzen Sie das neue Speed Dating-Format mit ausgewählten Oracle Experten vor Ort – für konkrete Fragen zu Vertrieb und Produkten. Ganz besonders freue ich mich, dass dieses Jahr Jürgen Kunz, SVP Technology Northern Europe & Country Leader Germany, als Keynote Speaker dabei sein wird. Ich lade Sie ganz herzlich ein und freue mich, Sie in Frankfurt zu begrüßen! Die Teilnahme ist für Sie als Oracle Partner selbstverständlich kostenfrei. Hier finden Sie weitere Informationen zum Oracle Partner Day sowie die unkomplizierte Anmeldemöglichkeit. Ich freue mich auf Sie! Ihr Christian WernerSenior Director Alliances & Channels Germany Übrigens: Direkt nach dem Oracle Partner Day findet der Oracle Day für Endkunden statt. Sie als Partner können natürlich gemeinsam mit Ihren Kunden an dieser Veranstaltung teilnehmen. Bitte melden Sie sich schnell an, da die Plätze limitiert sind. Hier finden Sie weitere Infos zum Oracle Day.

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• Announcement: Employee Info Starter Kit (v6.0–ASP.NET MVC Edition) is Released

  - by Mohammad Ashraful Alam

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/joycsharp/archive/2013/06/16/announcement-employee-info-starter-kit-v6.0asp.net-mvc-edition-is-released.aspxAfter a long wait, the next version of Employee Info Starter Kit is released! This starter kit is basically a project template that contains code samples targeting a specific technology, such as ASP.NET Web Form, ASP.NET MVC etc. Since its first release, this open source project gained a huge popularity in the developer community and had 250K+ combined downloads. This starter kit is honored to be placed at the official ASP.NET site, along with other asp.net starter kits, which all are being considered as the “best” ASP.NET coding standards, recommended by Microsoft. EISK is showcased in Microsoft’s Channel 9’s Weekly Show, as well. The ASP.NET MVC Edition of the new version 6.0 bundles most of the greatest and successful platforms, frameworks and technologies together, to enable web developers to learn and build manageable and high performance web applications with rich user experience effectively and quickly. User End Specifications Creating a new employee record Read existing employee records Update an existing employee record Delete existing employee records Role based security model Key Technology Areas ASP.NET MVC 4 Entity Framework 4.3.1 Sql Server Compact Edition 4 Visual Studio 2012 QuickStart Guide Getting started with EISK 6.0 ASP.NET is pretty easy. Once you've Visual Studio 2012 installed, then just follow the steps as provided below: Download the EISK 6.0 MVC version. Extract the file. From the extracted folder, click the solution file "Eisk.MVC-VS2012.sln". Right click the "Eisk.MVC" project node and select "Select set as StartUp Project". Hit Ctrl+F5 and explore! Architectural Overview Overall architecture is based on Model-View-Controller pattern Support for desktop & mobile browsers. Usage of Domain Model, Repository and Unit of Work pattern from Domain Driven Development approach Usage of Data Annotations in model (entity) classes to centralize basic validation mechanism that facilitates DRY principle Usage of IValidatableObject interface in model (entity) classes that isolates custom business logic from application layer Usage of OOP inheritance and Value Object pattern in model (entity) classes that provides reusability in application architecture Usage of View Model, Editor Model pattern that provides mechanism for testable view rendering logic Several helper classes and extension methods to enable developers build application with reduced code If you want to learn more about it in details, just check the following links: Getting Started - Hands on Coding Walkthrough – Technology Stack - Design & Architecture Enjoy!

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• Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

  - by Kerrie Foy

  Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now?  No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access.  For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment.  ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey.  In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014.   Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives.  Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster.   Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation.  Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article. 

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• Hostapd - WLAN as AP

  - by BBK

  I'm trying to start hostapd but without success. I'm using Headless Ubuntu 11.10 oneiric 3.0.0-16-server x86_64. WLAN driver is rt2800usb and my wireless nic card TP-Link TL-WN727N supports AP mode as shows below: us0# ifconfig wlan0 wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:27:19:be:cd:b6 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) us0# lsusb Bus 003 Device 003: ID 148f:3070 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2870/RT3070 Wireless Adapter us0# lshw -C network *-network:3 description: Wireless interface physical id: 4 bus info: usb@3:2 logical name: wlan0 serial: 00:27:19:be:cd:b6 capabilities: ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rt2800usb driverversion=3.0.0-16-server firmware=0.29 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn us0# hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf Configuration file: /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf Could not read interface wlan0 # The int flags: No such device nl80211 driver initialization failed. ELOOP: remaining socket: sock=4 eloop_data=0xd3e4a0 user_data=0xd3ecc0 handler=0x433880 ELOOP: remaining socket: sock=6 eloop_data=0xd411f0 user_data=(nil) handler=0x43cc10 us0# cat /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf ssid=Home interface=wlan0 # The interface name of the card #driver=rt2800usb driver=nl80211 macaddr_acl=0 ieee80211n=1 channel=1 hw_mode=g auth_algs=1 ignore_broadcast_ssid=0 wpa=2 wpa_passphrase=88888888 wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK wpa_pairwise=TKIP rsn_pairwise=CCMP us0# iw list Wiphy phy0 Band 1: Capabilities: 0x172 HT20/HT40 Static SM Power Save RX Greenfield RX HT20 SGI RX HT40 SGI RX STBC 1-stream Max AMSDU length: 7935 bytes No DSSS/CCK HT40 Maximum RX AMPDU length 65535 bytes (exponent: 0x003) Minimum RX AMPDU time spacing: 2 usec (0x04) HT RX MCS rate indexes supported: 0-7, 32 TX unequal modulation not supported HT TX Max spatial streams: 1 HT TX MCS rate indexes supported may differ Frequencies: * 2412 MHz [1] (20.0 dBm) * 2417 MHz [2] (20.0 dBm) * 2422 MHz [3] (20.0 dBm) * 2427 MHz [4] (20.0 dBm) * 2432 MHz [5] (20.0 dBm) * 2437 MHz [6] (20.0 dBm) * 2442 MHz [7] (20.0 dBm) * 2447 MHz [8] (20.0 dBm) * 2452 MHz [9] (20.0 dBm) * 2457 MHz [10] (20.0 dBm) * 2462 MHz [11] (20.0 dBm) * 2467 MHz [12] (20.0 dBm) (passive scanning, no IBSS) * 2472 MHz [13] (20.0 dBm) (passive scanning, no IBSS) * 2484 MHz [14] (20.0 dBm) (passive scanning, no IBSS) Bitrates (non-HT): * 1.0 Mbps * 2.0 Mbps (short preamble supported) * 5.5 Mbps (short preamble supported) * 11.0 Mbps (short preamble supported) * 6.0 Mbps * 9.0 Mbps * 12.0 Mbps * 18.0 Mbps * 24.0 Mbps * 36.0 Mbps * 48.0 Mbps * 54.0 Mbps max # scan SSIDs: 4 Supported interface modes: * IBSS * managed * AP * AP/VLAN * WDS * monitor * mesh point Supported commands: * new_interface * set_interface * new_key * new_beacon * new_station * new_mpath * set_mesh_params * set_bss * authenticate * associate * deauthenticate * disassociate * join_ibss * Unknown command (68) * Unknown command (55) * Unknown command (57) * Unknown command (59) * Unknown command (67) * set_wiphy_netns * Unknown command (65) * Unknown command (66) * connect * disconnect The question is: Why the hostapd not starting?

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• Social Analytics and the Customer

  - by David Dorf

  Many successful retailers put the customer at the center of everything they do, so its important that the customer is modeled correctly across all their systems.  The path to omni-channel starts and ends with the customer so at ARTS, our next big project is focused on ensuring a consistent representation of customers across our transactional data model, datawarehouse model, and XML schemas.  Further, we've started a new whitepaper that describes how Big Data and Social Media Analytics should be leveraged by retailers to add and additional level of customer insight. Let's start by taking a closer look at the meaning of social analytics.  Here's my definition: Social Analytics, in the retail context, describes the analysis of data obtained from social media sources in an effort to better comprehend and interact with the community of consumers.  This discipline seeks to understand what’s being said by the community about brands and products (“monitoring”), as well as understand the behaviors of those in the community (“profiling”).  The results are used to enforce the brand image, improve product decisions, and better focus marketing, all of which lead to increased sales. To help illustrate the facets of social analytics, I drew the diagram below which was originally published by Retail Touchpoints. There are lots of tools on the market that allow retailers to monitor social media for brand and product mentions.  These include analysis of sentiment, reach, share of voice, engagement, etc.  When your brand is mentioned, good or bad, its an opportunity to engage with the customer and possibly lead to a sale.  Because products are not always unique, its much more difficult to monitor product mentions, but detecting product trends early can help a retailer make better merchandising decisions, especially in fashion. Once a retailer understands what's being said, the next step is learn more about who's saying it.  That involves profiling customers beyond simple demographics to understand their motivations.  Much can be learned from patterns, and even more when customers voluntarily share their data.  Knowing that a customer is passionate about, for example, mountain biking allows the retailer to make relevant offers on helmets, ask for opinions on hydration, and help spread marketing messages. Social analytics has many facets that benefit retailers, some of which are easy but many of which are hard.  Its important for the CMO and CIO to work closely together to plan for these capabilities and monitor the maturity of tools on the market.  This is an area that will separate winners from losers.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for July 3, 2013

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Industrial SOA Chapter 5: Enterprise Service Bus Enterprise Service Bus, the fifth and latest addition to the Industrial SOA article series, answers some of the most important questions surrounding the use of an ESB. Industrial SOA Chapter 4: SOA Maturity The fourth article in the Industrial SOA series, SOA Maturity offers "an exploration of the fundamentals of applying a factory approach to modern service-oriented software development." Using the Exalytics Summary Advisor and Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.4 | Mark Rittman Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman's post revisits "the use of the Summary Advisor, with my BI Apps installation bumped-up to version 7.9.6.4, and the Exalytics environment patched up to 11.1.1.6.9, the latest patch release we’ve applied to that environment." Part 1 - 12c Database and WLS - Overview | Steve Felts Steve Felts shares a handy table that "maps the Oracle 12c Database features supported with various combinations of currently available WLS releases, 11g and 12c Drivers, and 11g and 12c Databases." Developers WebCast: Deploy Highly-Available Custom Services on Your Data Grid Products - July 11 Oracle Coherence Sr. Architect Brian Oliver hosts this free July 11 webcast for developers to show you how to "create and deploy customized, highly-available services for your data grid, and how real-time data processing will allow you to provide unmatched end-user experiences." A checklist for OIM go live | Daniel Gralewski FMW A-Team solution architect Daniel Gralewski's list is intended to complement Oracle Identity Manager. His post "provides tips on a few topics that are not part of the documentation." How Many ODI Master Repositories Should We Have? | Christophe Dupupet FMW solution architect Christophe Dupupet provides a simple along with best practices for the architecture of ODI repositories in a corporate environment. Distinguish EA from enterprise wide solution architecture | John Wu My buddy Tony Meyer, who did a great presentation recently at the Cleveland-area Enterprise Architect / Solution Architect Meet-up, recommends this Toolbox article by John Wu. YouTube: Oracle Fusion Applications Developer Tips If you work with Fusion Applications you'll want to check out the tips and tricks for building extensions, customizations, and integrations now available on the new Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer Relations YouTube channel. The CX Factor: Wooing and wowing customers in the digital age "There was a time when 'customer experience' was limited to what happened to you when you walked into a store, restaurant, or other place of business or when you called a business on the telephone. But that was back when you could still smoke on airplanes." Thought for the Day "If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.' " — Dave Barry (Born July 3, 1947) Source: brainyquote.com

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• links for 2010-03-24

  - by Bob Rhubart

  @dhinchcliffe: When online communities go to work "As we see a growing set of examples of successful online communities in the enterprise space (both internally and externally), the broad outlines are emerging of what is turning into a vital new channel for innovation, business agility, customer relationships, and productive output for most organizations: Online communities as one of the most potent new ways to achieve business objectives, both in terms of cost and quality." -- Dion Hinchcliffe (tags: enterprisearchitecture entarch enterprise2.0 socialmedia) Steven Chan: WebCenter 11g (11.1.1.2) Certified with E-Business Suite Release 12 Steven Chan shares information on WebCenter 11g's (11.1.1.2) certification with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, along with a list of certified EBS 12 Platforms (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 webcenter ebs) @oraclenerd: 1Z0-052 - Exploring the Oracle Database Architecture Oracle ACE Chet "Oraclenerd" Justice shares a list of resources/documentation covering Oracle Database Architecture. (tags: oracle otn oracleace dba certification architecture) @oraclenerd: 1Z0-052 - Books "I don't believe I have ever purchased a book on or about Oracle. The documentation provided, especially for the database, is top notch. There is so much information available out there if you just know how to find it. Reading AskTom for years didn't hurt either." -- Chet "@oraclenerd" Justice. (tags: otn oracle oracleace certification dba) Lucas Jellema: Castle in the clouds – Building the Connexys SaaS application with Fusion Middleware Oracle ACE Director Lucas Jellema shares the slides from the presentation he and colleague Arne van der Ing submitted for OBUG 2010. (tags: otn oracle oracleace cloud saas obug fusionmiddleware connexys) John Burke: Why Your ERP System Isn't Ready for the Next Evolution of the Enterprise "[ERP] has to become a stealthy modern app to help you quickly adapt to business changes while managing vital information. And through modern middleware it will connect to everything. So yes ERP as we've know it is dead, but long live ERP as a connected application member of the modern enterprise." -- John Burke, Group VP, Applications Business Unit, Oracle (tags: oracle otn entarch erp) Darwin-IT: Postfix for handling mail in your integration solution "It took me some time to understand Postfix. I was quite overwhelmed by the options. And it took me some time to figure out how to configure it for this particular usecase...But as with most other things..it turns out to be simple." -- Martien van den Akker (tags: oracle linux soa postfix) TheServerSide.com: Cameron Purdy at TSSJS 2010: If Java beats C++, what's next? ''It turns out that Java performance is much better on modern architecture. That is because of multicore processors and in-lining.'' -- Cameron Purdy, as quoted in an article by Jack Vaughn (tags: oracle java otn c++)

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• Watch 53rd Grammy Awards 2011 Live Stream & Follow The Event On Facebook & Twitter

  - by Gopinath

  Grammy Awards is the biggest music awards ceremony that honours music genres. The 53rd Grammy Awards function will be held on February 13, 2011 at Staples Center in Los Angeles. The star studded musical event will be telecasted live on CBS TV between 8pm ET until 11:30pm ET. Behind The Scenes Live Stream On YouTube and Grammy.com Grammy, YouTube and TurboTax has teamed up to provide live stream of behind the scene coverage of key events starting at 5pm Feb 11th and runs through February 13th. Note that this stream will not broadcast the 3 hour long award presentation. Kind of bad, except the award presentation rest of the ceremony is streamed here.  The video stream is embedded below Catch live behind-the-scenes coverage of key events during GRAMMY week. Before the show, you can watch the Nominees Reception, Clive Davis Pre-GRAMMY Gala, the red carpet and the pre-telecast ceremony. During the show, go backstage to see the winners after they accept their award! You can catch the same stream on Grammys’s YouTube channel as well as on Grammy.com website Follow Grammy Awards On Facebook & Twitter The Grammy Awards has an official Facebook and Twitter account and you can follow them for all the latest information The Grammy’s Facebook Page The Grammy’s Twitter Page Grammy Live Streaming on UStream & Justin.tv Even though there is no official source that stream live of The Grammy Awards presentation ceremony, there will be plenty of unofficial sources on UStream and Justin.tv. So search UStream and Justin.tv for live streaming of The Grammy’s. TV Channels Telecasting The Grammy Awards 2011 Here is the list of TV channels in various countries offering live telecast of The Grammy Awards 2011. We keep updating this section as and when we get more information USA – CBS Television Network  – February 13, 2011 India – VH1 TV – February 14  2011 , 6:30 AM United Kingdom – ITV2  – 16 February 2011, 10:00PM – 12:00AM This article titled,Watch 53rd Grammy Awards 2011 Live Stream & Follow The Event On Facebook & Twitter, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Connect to running web role on Azure using Remote Desktop Connection and VS2012

  - by Magnus Karlsson

  We want to be able to collect IntelliTrace information from our running app and also use remote desktop to connect to the IIS and look around(probably debugging). 1. Create certificate 1.1 Right-click the cloud project (marked in red) and select “Configure remote desktop”. 1.2 In the drop down list of certificates, choose <create> at the bottom. 1.3. Follow the instructions, you can set it up with default values. 1.4 When done. Choose the certificate and click “Copy to File…” as seen in the left of the picture above. 1.5. Save the file with any name you want. Now we will save it to local storage to be able to import it to our solution through the azure configuration manager in step 3. 2. Save certificate to local storage Now we need to attach it to our local certificate storage to be able to reach it from our confiuguration manager in visual studio. Microsoft provides the following steps for doing this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232137 In order to view the Certificates store on the local computer, perform the following steps: Click Start, and then click Run. Type "MMC.EXE" (without the quotation marks) and click OK. Click Console in the new MMC you created, and then click Add/Remove Snap-in. In the new window, click Add. Highlight the Certificates snap-in, and then click Add. Choose the Computer option and click Next. Select Local Computer on the next screen, and then click OK. Click Close , and then click OK. You have now added the Certificates snap-in, which will allow you to work with any certificates in your computer's certificate store. You may want to save this MMC for later use. Now that you have access to the Certificates snap-in, you can import the server certificate into you computer's certificate store by following these steps: Open the Certificates (Local Computer) snap-in and navigate to Personal, and then Certificates. Note: Certificates may not be listed. If it is not, that is because there are no certificates installed. Right-click Certificates (or Personal if that option does not exist.) Choose All Tasks, and then click Import. When the wizard starts, click Next. Browse to the PFX file you created containing your server certificate and private key. Click Next. Enter the password you gave the PFX file when you created it. Be sure the Mark the key as exportable option is selected if you want to be able to export the key pair again from this computer. As an added security measure, you may want to leave this option unchecked to ensure that no one can make a backup of your private key. Click Next, and then choose the Certificate Store you want to save the certificate to. You should select Personal because it is a Web server certificate. If you included the certificates in the certification hierarchy, it will also be added to this store. Click Next. You should see a summary of screen showing what the wizard is about to do. If this information is correct, click Finish. You will now see the server certificate for your Web server in the list of Personal Certificates. It will be denoted by the common name of the server (found in the subject section of the certificate). Now that you have the certificate backup imported into the certificate store, you can enable Internet Information Services 5.0 to use that certificate (and the corresponding private key). To do this, perform the following steps: Open the Internet Services Manager (under Administrative Tools) and navigate to the Web site you want to enable secure communications (SSL/TLS) on. Right-click on the site and click Properties. You should now see the properties screen for the Web site. Click the Directory Security tab. Under the Secure Communications section, click Server Certificate. This will start the Web Site Certificate Wizard. Click Next. Choose the Assign an existing certificate option and click Next. You will now see a screen showing that contents of your computer's personal certificate store. Highlight your Web server certificate (denoted by the common name), and then click Next. You will now see a summary screen showing you all the details about the certificate you are installing. Be sure that this information is correct or you may have problems using SSL or TLS in HTTP communications. Click Next, and then click OK to exit the wizard. You should now have an SSL/TLS-enabled Web server. Be sure to protect your PFX files from any unwanted personnel. Image of a typical MMC.EXE with the certificates up.   3. Import the certificate to you visual studio project. 3.1 Now right click your equivalent to the MvcWebRole1 (as seen in the first picture under the red oval) and choose properties. 3.2 Choose Certificates. Right click the ellipsis to the right of the “thumbprint” and you should be able to select your newly created certificate here. After selecting it- save the file.   4. Upload the certificate to your Azure subscription. 4.1 Go to the azure management portal, click the services menu icon to the left and choose the service. Click Upload in the bottom menu.     5. Connect to server. Since I tried to use account settings(have to use another name) we have to set up a new name for the connection. No biggie. 5.1 Go to azure management portal, select your service and in the bottom menu, choose “REMOTE”. This will display the configuration for remote connection. It will actually change your ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file. After you change It here it might be good to choose download and replace the one in your project. Set a name that is not your windows azure account name and not Administrator. 5.2 Goto visual studio, click Server Explorer. Choose as selected in the picture below and click “COnnect using remote desktop”.   5.2 You will now be able to log in with the name and password set up in step 5.1. and voila! Windows server 2012, IIS and other nice stuff!   To do this one I’ve been using http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683671.aspx where you can collect some of this information and additional one.

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• Happy New Year! Upcoming Events in January 2011

  - by mandy.ho

  Oracle Database kicks off the New Year at the following events during the month of January. Hope to see you there and please send in your pictures and feedback! Jan 20, 2011 - San Francisco, CA LinkShare Symposium West 2011 Oracle is a proud Gold Sponsor at the LinkShare Symposium West 2011 January 20 in San Francisco, California. Year after year LinkShare has been bringing their network the opportunity to come to life. At the LinkShare Symposium online performance marketing leaders meet to optimize face-to-face during a full day of networking. Learn more by attending Oracle Breakout Session, "Omni - Channel Retailing, What is possible now?" on Thursday, January 20, 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 noon, Grand Ballroom. http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=128306&src=6954634&src=6954634&Act=397 Jan 24, 2011 - Cincinnati, OH Greater Cincinnati Oracle User Group Meeting "Tom Kyte Day" - Featuring a day of sessions presented by Senior Technical Architect, Tom Kyte. Sessions include "Top 10, no 11, new features of Oracle Database 11g Release 2" and "What do I really need to know when upgrading", plus more. http://www.gcoug.org/ Jan 25, 2011 - Vancouver, British Columbia Oracle Security Solutions Forum Featuring a Special Keynote Presentation from Tom Kyte - Complete Database Security Join us at this half-day event; Oracle Database Security Solutions: Complete Information Security. Learn how Oracle Database Security solutions help you: • Prevent external threats like SQL injection attacks from reaching your databases • Transparently encrypt application data without application changes • Prevent privileged database users and administrators from accessing data • Use native database auditing to monitor and report on database activity • Mask production data for safe use in nonproduction environments http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=126974&src=6958351&src=6958351&Act=97 Jan 26, 2011 - Halifax, Nova Scotia Oracle Database Security Technology Day Exclusive Seminar on Complete Information Security with Oracle Database 11g The amount of digital data within organizations is growing at unprecedented rates, as is the value of that data and the challenges of safeguarding it. Yet most IT security programs fail to address database security--specifically, insecure applications and privileged users. So how can you protect your mission-critical information? Avoid risky third-party solutions? Defend against security breaches and compliance violations? And resist costly new infrastructure investments? Join us at this half-day seminar, Oracle Database Security Solutions: Complete Information Security, to find out http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=126269&src=6958351&src=6958351&Act=93

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• What's new in Solaris 11.1?

  - by Karoly Vegh

  Solaris 11.1 is released. This is the first release update since Solaris 11 11/11, the versioning has been changed from MM/YY style to 11.1 highlighting that this is Solaris 11 Update 1.  Solaris 11 itself has been great. What's new in Solaris 11.1? Allow me to pick some new features from the What's New PDF that can be found in the official Oracle Solaris 11.1 Documentation. The updates are very numerous, I really can't include all.  I. New AI Automated Installer RBAC profiles have been introduced to enable delegation of installation tasks. II. The interactive installer now supports installing the OS to iSCSI targets. III. ASR (Auto Service Request) and OCM (Oracle Configuration Manager) have been enabled by default to proactively provide support information and create service requests to speed up support processes. This is optional and can be disabled but helps a lot in supportcases. For further information, see: http://oracle.com/goto/solarisautoreg IV. The new command svcbundle helps you to create SMF manifests without having to struggle with XML editing. (btw, do you know the interactive editprop subcommand in svccfg? The listprop/setprop subcommands are great for scripting and automating, but for an interactive property editing session try, for example, this: svccfg -s svc:/application/pkg/system-repository:default editprop )  V. pfedit: Ever wondered how to delegate editing permissions to certain files? It is well known "sudo /usr/bin/vi /etc/hosts" is not the right way, for sudo elevates the complete vi process to admin levels, and the user can "break" out of the session as root with simply starting a shell from that vi. Now, the new pfedit command provides a solution exactly to this challenge - an auditable, secure, per-user configurable editing possibility. See the pfedit man page for examples.   VI. rsyslog, the popular logging daemon (filters, SSL, formattable output, SQL collect...) has been included in Solaris 11.1 as an alternative to syslog.  VII: Zones: Solaris Zones - as a major Solaris differentiator - got lots of love in terms of new features: ZOSS - Zones on Shared Storage: Placing your zones to shared storage (FC, iSCSI) has never been this easy - via zonecfg.  parallell updates - with S11's bootenvironments updating zones was no problem and meant no downtime anyway, but still, now you can update them parallelly, a way faster update action if you are running a large number of zones. This is like parallell patching in Solaris 10, but with all the IPS/ZFS/S11 goodness.  per-zone fstype statistics: Running zones on a shared filesystems complicate the I/O debugging, since ZFS collects all the random writes and delivers them sequentially to boost performance. Now, over kstat you can find out which zone's I/O has an impact on the other ones, see the examples in the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29024/gmheh.html#scrolltoc Zones got RDSv3 protocol support for InfiniBand, and IPoIB support with Crossbow's anet (automatic vnic creation) feature.  NUMA I/O support for Zones: customers can now determine the NUMA I/O topology of the system from within zones.  VIII: Security got a lot of attention too:  Automated security/audit reporting, with builtin reporting templates e.g. for PCI (payment card industry) audits.  PAM is now configureable on a per-user basis instead of system wide, allowing different authentication requirements for different users  SSH in Solaris 11.1 now supports running in FIPS 140-2 mode, that is, in a U.S. government security accredited fashion.  SHA512/224 and SHA512/256 cryptographic hash functions are implemented in a FIPS-compliant way - and on a T4 implemented in silicon! That is, goverment-approved cryptography at HW-speed.  Generally, Solaris is currently under evaluation to be both FIPS and Common Criteria certified.  IX. Networking, as one of the core strengths of Solaris 11, has been extended with:  Data Center Bridging (DCB) - not only setups where network and storage share the same fabric (FCoE, anyone?) can have Quality-of-Service requirements. DCB enables peers to distinguish traffic based on priorities. Your NICs have to support DCB, see the documentation, and additional information on Wikipedia. DataLink MultiPathing, DLMP, enables link aggregation to span across multiple switches, even between those of different vendors. But there are essential differences to the good old bandwidth-aggregating LACP, see the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E28993/gmdlu.html#scrolltoc VNIC live migration is now supported from one physical NIC to another on-the-fly  X. Data management:  FedFS, (Federated FileSystem) is new, it relies on Solaris 11's NFS referring mechanism to join separate shares of different NFS servers into a single filesystem namespace. The referring system has been there since S11 11/11, in Solaris 11.1 FedFS uses a LDAP - as the one global nameservice to bind them all.  The iSCSI initiator now uses the T4 CPU's HW-implemented CRC32 algorithm - thus improving iSCSI throughput while reducing CPU utilization on a T4 Storage locking improvements are now RAC aware, speeding up throughput with better locking-communication between nodes up to 20%!  XI: Kernel performance optimizations: The new Virtual Memory subsystem ("VM2") scales now to 100+ TB Memory ranges.  The memory predictor monitors large memory page usage, and adjust memory page sizes to applications' needs OSM, the Optimized Shared Memory allows Oracle DBs' SGA to be resized online XII: The Power Aware Dispatcher in now by default enabled, reducing power consumption of idle CPUs. Also, the LDoms' Power Management policies and the poweradm settings in Solaris 11 OS will cooperate. XIII: x86 boot: upgrade to the (Grand Unified Bootloader) GRUB2. Because grub2 differs in the configuration syntactically from grub1, one shall not edit the new grub configuration (grub.cfg) but use the new bootadm features to update it. GRUB2 adds UEFI support and also support for disks over 2TB. XIV: Improved viewing of per-CPU statistics of mpstat. This one might seem of less importance at first, but nowadays having better sorting/filtering possibilities on a periodically updated mpstat output of 256+ vCPUs can be a blessing. XV: Support for Solaris Cluster 4.1: The What's New document doesn't actually mention this one, since OSC 4.1 has not been released at the time 11.1 was. But since then it is available, and it requires Solaris 11.1. And it's only a "pkg update" away. ...aand I seriously need to stop here. There's a lot I missed, Edge Virtual Bridging, lofi tuning, ZFS sharing and crypto enhancements, USB3.0, pulseaudio, trusted extensions updates, etc - but if I mention all those then I effectively copy the What's New document. Which I recommend reading now anyway, it is a great extract of the 300+ new projects and RFE-followups in S11.1. And this blogpost is a summary of that extract.  For closing words, allow me to come back to Request For Enhancements, RFEs. Any customer can request features. Open up a Support Request, explain that this is an RFE, describe the feature you/your company desires to have in S11 implemented. The more SRs are collected for an RFE, the more chance it's got to get implemented. Feel free to provide feedback about the product, as well as about the Solaris 11.1 Documentation using the "Feedback" button there. Both the Solaris engineers and the documentation writers are eager to hear your input.Feel free to comment about this post too. Except that it's too long ;)  wbr,charlie

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• Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Millennials

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Christine Mellon Much is said and written about the new generations of employees entering our workforce, as though they are a strange specimen, a mysterious life form to be “figured out,” accommodated and engaged – at a safe distance, of course.  At its worst, this talk takes a critical and disapproving tone, with baby boomer employees adamantly refusing to validate this new breed of worker, let alone determine how to help them succeed and achieve their potential.   The irony of our baby-boomer resentments and suspicions is that they belie the fact that we created the very vision that younger employees are striving to achieve.  From our frustrations with empty careers that did not fulfill us, from our opposition to “the man,” from our sharp memories of our parents’ toiling for 30 years just for the right to retire, from the simple desire not to live our lives in a state of invisibility, came the seeds of hope for something better. One characteristic of Millennial workers that grew from these seeds is the desire to experience as much as possible.  They are the “Experiential Employee”, with a passion for growing in diverse ways and expanding personal and professional horizons.  Rather than rooting themselves in a single company for a career, or even in a single career path, these employees are committed to building a broad portfolio of experiences and capabilities that will enable them to make a difference and to leave a mark of significance in the world.  How much richer is the organization that nurtures and leverages this inclination?  Our curmudgeonly ways must be surrendered and our focus redirected toward building the next generation of talent ecosystems, if we are to optimize what future generations have to offer.   Accelerating Professional Development In spite of our Boomer grumblings about Millennials’ “unrealistic” expectations, the truth is that we have a well-matched set of circumstances.  We have executives-in-waiting who want to learn quickly and a concurrent, urgent need to ramp up their development time, based on anticipated high levels of retirement in the next 10+ years.  Since we need to rapidly skill up these heirs to the corporate kingdom, isn’t it a fortunate coincidence that they are hungry to learn, develop and move fluidly throughout our organizations??  So our challenge now is to efficiently operationalize the wisdom we have acquired about effective learning and development.   We have already evolved from classroom-based models to diverse instructional methods.  The next step is to find the best approaches to help younger employees learn quickly and apply new learnings in an impactful way.   Creating temporary or even permanent functional partnerships among Millennial employees is one way to maximize outcomes.  This might take the form of 2 or more employees owning aspects of what once fell under a single role.  While one might argue this would mean duplication of resources, it could be a short term cost while employees come up to speed.  And the potential benefits would be numerous:  leveraging and validating the inherent sense of community of new generations, creating cross-functional skills with broad applicability, yielding additional perspectives and approaches to traditional work outcomes, and accelerating the performance curve for incumbents through Cooperative Learning (Johnson, D. and Johnson R., 1989, 1999).  This well-researched teaching strategy, where students support each other in the absorption and application of new information, has been shown to deliver faster, more efficient learning, and greater retention. Alternately, perhaps short term contracts with exiting retirees, or former retirees, to help facilitate the development of following generations may have merit.  Again, a short term cost, certainly.  However, the gains realized in shortening the learning curve, and strengthening engagement are substantial and lasting. Ultimately, there needs to be creative thinking applied for each organization on how to accelerate the capabilities of our future leaders in unique ways that mesh with current culture. The manner in which performance is evaluated must finally shift as well.  Employees will need to be assessed on how well they have developed key skills and capabilities vs. end-to-end mastery of functional positions they have no interest in keeping for an entire career. As we become more comfortable in placing greater and greater weight on competencies vs. tasks, we will realize increased organizational agility via this new generation of workers, which will be further enhanced by their natural flexibility and appetite for change. Revisiting Succession  For many years, organizations have failed to deliver desired succession planning outcomes.  According to CEB’s 2013 research, only 28% of current leaders were pre-identified in a succession plan. These disappointing results, along with the entrance of the experiential, Millennial employee into the workforce, may just provide the needed impetus for HR to reinvent succession processes.   We have recognized that the best professional development efforts are not always linear, and the time has come to fully adopt this philosophy in regard to succession as well.  Paths to specific organizational roles will not look the same for newer generations who seek out unique learning opportunities, without consideration of a singular career destination.  Rather than charting particular jobs as precursors for key positions, the experiences and skills behind what makes an incumbent successful must become essential in succession mapping.  And the multitude of ways in which those experiences and skills may be acquired must be factored into the process, along with the individual employee’s level of learning agility. While this may seem daunting, it is necessary and long overdue.  We have talked about the criticality of competency-based succession, however, we have not lived up to our own rhetoric.  Many Boomers have experienced the same frustration in our careers; knowing we are capable of shining in a particular role, but being denied the opportunity due to how our career history lined up, on paper, with documented job requirements.  These requirements usually emphasized past jobs/titles and specific tasks, versus capabilities, drive and willingness (let alone determination) to learn new things.  How satisfying would it be for us to leave a legacy where such narrow thinking no longer applies and potential is amplified? Realizing Diversity Another bloom from the seeds we Boomers have tried to plant over the past decades is a completely evolved view of diversity.  Millennial employees assume a diverse workforce, and are startled by anything less.  Their social tolerance, nurtured by wide and diverse networks, is unprecedented.  College graduates expect a similar landscape in the “real world” to what they experienced throughout their lives.  They appreciate and seek out divergent points of view and experiences without needing any persuasion.  The face of our U.S. workforce will likely see dramatic change as Millennials apply their fresh take on hiring and building strong teams, with an inherent sense of inclusion.  This wonderful aspect of the Millennial wave should be celebrated and strongly encouraged, as it is the fulfillment of our own aspirations. Future Perfect The Experiential Employee is operating more as a free agent than a long term player, and their commitment will essentially last as long as meaningful organizational culture and personal/professional opportunities keep their interest.  As Boomers, we have laid the foundation for this new, spirited employment attitude, and we should take pride in knowing that.  Generations to come will challenge organizations to excel in how they identify, manage and nurture talent. Let’s support and revel in the future that we’ve helped invent, rather than lament what we think has been lost.  After all, the future is always connected to the past.  And as so eloquently phrased by Antoine Lavoisier, French nobleman, chemist and politico:  “Nothing is Lost, Nothing is Created, and Everything is Transformed.” Christine has over 25 years of diverse HR experience.  She has held HR consulting and corporate roles, including CHRO positions for Echostar in Denver, a 6,000+ employee global engineering firm, and Aepona, a startup software firm, successfully acquired by Intel. Christine is a resource to Oracle clients, to assist in Human Capital Management strategy development and implementation, compensation practices, talent development initiatives, employee engagement, global HR management, and integrated HR systems and processes that support the full employee lifecycle. 

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• Does Your Customer Engagement Create an Ah Feeling?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  An (Oracle CX Blog) article by Christina McKeon Companies that successfully engage customers all have one thing in common. They make it seem easy for the customer to get what they need. No one would argue that brands don’t want to leave customers with this “ah” feeling. Since 94% of customers who have a low-effort service experience will buy from that company again, it makes financial sense for brands.1 Some brands are thinking differently about how they engage their customers to create ah feelings. How do they do it? Toyota is a great example of using smart assistance technology to understand customer intent and answer questions before customers hit the submit button online. What is unique in this situation is that Toyota captures intent while customers are filling out email forms. Toyota analyzes the data in the form and suggests responses before the customer sends the email. The customer gets the right answer, and the email never makes it to your contact center — which makes you and the customer happy. Most brands are fully aware of chat as a service channel, but some brands take chat to a whole new level. Beauty.com, part of the drugstore.com and Walgreens family of brands, uses live chat to replicate the personal experience that one would find at high-end department store cosmetic counters. Trained beauty advisors, all with esthetician or beauty counter experience, engage in live chat sessions with online shoppers to share immediate advice on the best products for their personal needs. Agents can watch customer activity online and determine the right time to reach out and offer help, just as help would be offered in a brick-and-mortar store. And, agents can co-browse along with the customer helping customers with online check-out. These personal chat discussions also give Beauty.com the opportunity to present products, advertise promotions, and resolve customer issues when they arise. Beauty.com converts approximately 25% of chat sessions into product orders. Photobox, the European market leader in online photo services, wanted to deliver personal and responsive service to its 24 million members. It ensures customer inquiries on personalized photo products are routed based on agent knowledge so customers get what they need from the company experts. By using a queuing system to ensure that the agent with the most appropriate knowledge handles the query, agent productivity increased while response times to 1,500 customer queries per day decreased. A real-time dashboard prevents agents from being overloaded with queries. This approach has produced financial results with a 15% increase in sales to existing customers and a 45% increase in orders from newly referred customers.

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• Azure Service Bus - Authorization failure

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I fell into this trap earlier in the week with a mistake I made when configuring a service to send and listen on the azure service bus and I thought it would be worth a little note for future reference as I didnt find anything online about it.  After configuring everything when I ran my code sample I was getting the below error. WebHost failed to process a request.Sender Information: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment+HostingManager/28316044Exception: System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException: The service '/-------/BrokeredMessageService.svc' cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation.  The exception message is: Generic: There was an authorization failure. Make sure you have specified the correct SharedSecret, SimpleWebToken or Saml transport client credentials.. ---> Microsoft.ServiceBus.AuthorizationFailedException: Generic: There was an authorization failure. Make sure you have specified the correct SharedSecret, SimpleWebToken or Saml transport client credentials.   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.ConnectRequestReplyContext.Send(Message message, TimeSpan timeout, IDuplexChannel& channel)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpListener.RelayedOnewayTcpListenerClient.Connect(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayTcpClient.EnsureConnected(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.RefcountedCommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.RelayedOnewayChannelListener.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionTransportManager.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManager.Open(TimeSpan timeout, TransportChannelListener channelListener)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.TransportManagerContainer.Open(TimeSpan timeout, SelectTransportManagersCallback selectTransportManagerCallback)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.SocketConnectionChannelListener`2.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.ActivateService(String normalizedVirtualPath)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath)   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath)   at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment.EnsureServiceAvailableFast(String relativeVirtualPath)Process Name: w3wpProcess ID: 8056As recommended by the error message I checked everything about the application configuration and also the keys and eventually I found the problem.When I set the permissions in the ACS rule group I had copied and pasted the claim name for net.windows.servicebus.action from the Azure portal and hadnt spotted the <space> character on the end of it like you sometimes pick up when copying text in the browser.  This meant that the listen and send permissions were not setup correctly which is why (as you would expect) my two applications could not connect to the service bus.So lesson learnt here, if you do copy and paste into the ACS rules just be careful you dont leave a space on the end of anything otherwise it will be difficult to spot that its configured incorrectly

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• Moving from Tortoise to TFS

  - by MarkPearl

  The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed many of the worries that I had about how safe my code was on a shared folder and also gave us the opportunity to safely have several developers work on the same project at the same time. The only times when we have been unhappy has been when we have had SVN hell days – which pretty much occur when you are doing something out of the norm and suddenly SVN just won’t resolve conflicts or something along those lines. This happens once every 4 or 5 months and is not necessarily a problem caused directly by SVN – but a problem augmented by SVN. When you have SVN hell days you want to curse SVN! With that in mind I recently have been relooking at our source code control. I have explored using GIT and was very impressed by it and have also looked at TFS. From a source code control perspective I don’t want to get into a heated discussion on which one is better – but I do want to mention that I wear two hats in my organization – software developer & manager, and with the manager hat on I tend to sway the TFS route. So when I was given a coupon to test DiscountASP.Net Team Foundation Server Service for a year, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try TFS in a distributed environment and also make the first step towards having an integrated development management system. Some of the things that appeal to me about DiscountASP’s offering are the following… Basic management / planning facilities like to do lists inside Visual Studio Daily backup of data on the server – we are developers, not IT managers and so the more of this I could outsource the better Distributed solution – all of us work remotely and so this was a big one as well. Registering and Setting Up with DiscountASP.NET The whole registration process was simple and intuitive. The web interface is not the most visually impressive one, but it is functional and a few seconds after I clicked the last submit button a email was sitting in my inbox giving me my control panel username and suggesting that I read the “Getting Started” article. The getting started article was easy to read and understand so no complaints there either. Next to set my dev environment to work. With a few references to the getting started article I had completed the whole setup process in a matter of minutes. Ten minutes after initiating the whole thing I was logged into VS2010 and creating my first TFS project. With the service that I signed up for, I have access for 5 users – which is sufficient for my internal needs. So from what I can tell, to set the rest of us up on the system I just need to supply them with their user credentials and url. My Concerns Resolved 1) Security So, a few concerns I had about the service. First and foremost – is it secure? I would hate for someone to get access to our code and the whole idea of putting it up on the internet is a concern for me. Turning to the Knowledge Base on the DiscountASP website this is one of the first question I can see answered. According to them it is secure. I have extracted their comment below regarding this. Our TFS hosting service is secure. We only accept HTTPS connections ensuring that any client-server data transmission is encrypted. At the network level, all of our systems are protected by multiple Juniper firewalls, Tipping Point's Intrusion Detection System (see Tipping Point's case study of our use here), and we also employ DDoS mitigation to add extra layers of security. Additionally, physical access to the servers is tightly restricted. Please see the security section of this Knowledge Base article for further details. 2) Web Portal Access The other big concern I have is regarding web portal access. In the ideal world I would like to be able to give my end users access to a web portal for reporting bugs etc. When I initially read through the FAQ of the site it mentioned that there was web portal access – but from what I can see this is just for “users”. Since I am limited to 5 users for the account, it would not be practical to set up external users that we could get feedback from on bugs etc. I would be interested if this is possible – and if so if someone could post it in the comments it would be much appreciated. If this isn’t possible, it is a slight let down as we rely heavily on end user feedback to get feedback and it would have been ideal to have gotten this within the service. Other than those two items, I didn’t have any real concerns that were unresolved. So where do I go from here? So time passed by from the initial writing of this post and as work whirred in and out of my inbox I have still not had a proper opportunity to give the service a test run. Recently though things have began to slow down and then surprise surprise I had another SVN Hell day. With that experience I had a new found resolve to get our team on TFS and so today we are going to start to use the service as a team. I am hoping that I do not have TFS hell days – but if I do, I will be sure to write about them. In short - the verdict is still out on whether this service is going to be invaluable to my business or whether it will create more headaches than it is worth BUT I am hopping it will be an invaluable service. I will only really be able to determine that in a few months… till then!

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• Java EE 7 turns one today!

  - by delabassee

  "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." (Benjamin Franklin) Today marks the first year anniversary of Java EE 7. The JSR 342 specification was finalised on May 28, 2013 with the official launch taking place on June 12, 2013 (original press release). As of today, there are already 3 Java EE 7 compatible Application Servers, coming from different 'vendors' (Oracle, TmaxSoft and Red Hat). Two of those Java EE 7 Application Servers are free and open source. We expect the list of Java EE 7 compatible Application Servers to grow over the coming months. Source: RebelLabs - 'Java Tools and Technologies Landscape for 2014' According to a recent independent survey, one third of the Java EE users who participated in that survey is already using Java EE 7. This is a good sign but it also means that a lot of people are not yet on Java EE 7. So if you haven't yet embarked on Java EE 7, now is really the time to do so! There are various ways to learn Java EE 7, in no particular order ... Continue to read The Aquarium. Through this blog, we are relaying Java EE news but we are also doing our best to highlight relevant technical contents such as articles, community tutorials, etc. Watch the GlassFish YouTube channel. Amongst others, it contains the different videos of the Java EE 7 launch, those videos will give you good technical update on Java EE and its different components specifications (JMS 2.0, JAX-RS 2.0, EJB 3.2, etc.) Take a formal training. Oracle University is starting to roll-out Java EE 7 trainings like the 'Java EE 7: New Features' class.  Attend conferences and JUGs sessions. On that note, we have spent a lot of time to create a strong JavaOne 'Server-Side Java' track. It's still possible to benefit from the early bird JavaOne pricing but don't wait too much! Read books. There are more than 25 (!) books related to Java EE 7 or to one of the Java EE 7 component specification.  There are many more ways to learn Java EE but if I have to suggest one and only one way, I would recommend the Java EE 7 Tutorial. It's exhaustive and clear, it's free and it continues to evolve. And finally as the introductory quote suggest, participation is key to learning. Participate in JUGs,  participate in Adopt-a-JSR, get involved in the different open source communities evolving around Java EE, participate in the JCP... in one word, participate!

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• How to implement efficient Fog of War?

  - by Cambrano

  I've asked a question how to implement Fog Of War(FOW) with shaders. Well I've got this working. I use the vertex color to identify the alpha of a single vertex. I guess the most of you know what the FOW of Age of Empires was like, anyway I'll shortly explain it: You have a map. Everything is unexplored(solid black / 100% transparency) at the beginning. When your NPC's / other game units explore the world (by moving around mostly) they unshadow the map. That means. Everything in a specific radius (viewrange) around a NPC is visible (0%transparency). Anything that is out of viewrange but already explored is visible but shadowed (50% transparency). So yeah, AoE had relatively huge maps. Requirements was something around 100mhz etc. So it should be relatively easy to implement something to solve this problem - actually. Okay. I'm currently adding planes above my world and set the color per vertex. Why do I use many planes ? Unity has a vertex limit of 65.000 per mesh. According to the size of my tiles and the size of my map I need more than one plane. So I actually need a lot of planes. This is obviously pita for my FPS. Well so my question is, what are simple (in sense of performance) techniques to implement a FOW shader? Okay some simplified code what I'm doin so far: // Setup for (int x = 0; x < (Map.Dimension/planeSize); x++) { for (int z = 0; z < (Map.Dimension/planeSize); z++) { CreateMeshAt(x*planeSize, 3, z*planeSize) } } // Explore (is called from NPCs when walking for example) for (int x = ((int) from.x - radius); x < from.x + radius; x ++) { for (int z = ((int) from.z - radius); z < from.z + radius; z ++) { if (from.Distance(x, 1, z) > radius) continue; _transparency[x/tileSize, z/tileSize] = 0.5f; } } // Update foreach(GameObject plane in planes){ foreach(Vector3 vertex in vertices){ Vector3 worldPos = GetWorldPos(vertex); vertex.Color = new Color(0,0,0, _transparency[worldPos.x/tileSize, worldPos.z/tileSize]); } } My shader just sets the transparency of the vertex now, which comes from the vertex color channel

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• How to debug lag using Bluetooth connected mouse and A2DP headset?

  - by gertvdijk

  I own a Logitech M555b mouse (since a week) for use with my HP Elitebook 8570w laptop running Kubuntu 12.04. Works fine right after connecting using the KDE Bluetooth control module. However, after some time (seemingly random), it starts to lag. Movements are being delayed for roughly 500ms for a short period of time. Usually it recovers after some time too, but it can take minutes. All actions are being delayed: movements, click, scrolls. Additionally, the movements can be choppy during these times. A workaround that always works for the same short period of time is to disconnect an re-connect the mouse. This can be done using the same KDE Bluetooth control module. What did I try already? Running this at boot time: echo on > `readlink -f /sys/class/bluetooth/hci0`/../../../power/level To disable any power saving features on the Bluetooth hci0 device. Check the mouse's batteries (it's just a week old, other new batteries: same result) Checking logs and kernel messages about Bluetooth-related entries: none aside the expected messages on connect time. I'm running kernel 3.5.0-13-generic as provided in the xorg-edgers PPA. Booting the regular 3.2 Precise kernel results in the same behaviour. Some other information that may help: It happens when no other Bluetooth connections are active on the machine. Similar symptoms also occur on my Bluetooth stereo (A2DP) headset, but then it's audio lagging and skipping. Swapping Bluetooth profiles as described here then helps. Conclusion: it's not the mouse that's faulty. The headset always worked fine using my now dead Thinkpad T61p with built-in Bluetooth. The bluetooth module in my laptop is connected via USB and shows up as Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0a5c:21e1 Broadcom Corp. I'm mobile and several people around me are using Bluetooth at work (A2DP mostly). It also occurs at home, where my neighbours are probably using Bluetooth as well. It could just be radio interference, but I think Bluetooth connections should just hop to another channel. And, moreover, it just works properly instantly when re-connecting. Therefore I think it's a software driver issue and I'd like to debug it. Is there any way to get more verbose logging on the Bluetooth(-hid) modules?

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