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  • help with fixing fwts errors log

    - by jasmines
    Here is an extract of results.log: MTRR validation. Test 1 of 3: Validate the kernel MTRR IOMEM setup. FAILED [MEDIUM] MTRRIncorrectAttr: Test 1, Memory range 0xc0000000 to 0xdfffffff (PCI Bus 0000:00) has incorrect attribute Write-Combining. FAILED [MEDIUM] MTRRIncorrectAttr: Test 1, Memory range 0xfee01000 to 0xffffffff (PCI Bus 0000:00) has incorrect attribute Write-Protect. ==================================================================================================== Test 1 of 1: Kernel log error check. Kernel message: [ 0.208079] [Firmware Bug]: ACPI: BIOS _OSI(Linux) query ignored ADVICE: This is not exactly a failure mode but a warning from the kernel. The _OSI() method has implemented a match to the 'Linux' query in the DSDT and this is redundant because the ACPI driver matches onto the Windows _OSI strings by default. FAILED [HIGH] KlogACPIErrorMethodExecutionParse: Test 1, HIGH Kernel message: [ 3.512783] ACPI Error : Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.GFX0._DOD] (Node f7425858), AE_AML_PACKAGE_LIMIT (20110623/psparse-536) ADVICE: This is a bug picked up by the kernel, but as yet, the firmware test suite has no diagnostic advice for this particular problem. Found 1 unique errors in kernel log. ==================================================================================================== Check if system is using latest microcode. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cannot read microcode file /usr/share/misc/intel-microcode.dat. Aborted test, initialisation failed. ==================================================================================================== MSR register tests. FAILED [MEDIUM] MSRCPUsInconsistent: Test 1, MSR SYSENTER_ESP (0x175) has 1 inconsistent values across 2 CPUs for (shift: 0 mask: 0xffffffffffffffff). MSR CPU 0 -> 0xf7bb9c40 vs CPU 1 -> 0xf7bc7c40 FAILED [MEDIUM] MSRCPUsInconsistent: Test 1, MSR MISC_ENABLE (0x1a0) has 1 inconsistent values across 2 CPUs for (shift: 0 mask: 0x400c51889). MSR CPU 0 -> 0x850088 vs CPU 1 -> 0x850089 ==================================================================================================== Checks firmware has set PCI Express MaxReadReq to a higher value on non-motherboard devices. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 1: Check firmware settings MaxReadReq for PCI Express devices. MaxReadReq for pci://00:00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) is low (128) [Audio device]. MaxReadReq for pci://00:02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN [Shiloh] Network Connection is low (128) [Network controller]. FAILED [LOW] LowMaxReadReq: Test 1, 2 devices have low MaxReadReq settings. Firmware may have configured these too low. ADVICE: The MaxReadRequest size is set too low and will affect performance. It will provide excellent bus sharing at the cost of bus data transfer rates. Although not a critical issue, it may be worth considering setting the MaxReadRequest size to 256 or 512 to increase throughput on the PCI Express bus. Some drivers (for example the Brocade Fibre Channel driver) allow one to override the firmware settings. Where possible, this BIOS configuration setting is worth increasing it a little more for better performance at a small reduction of bus sharing. ==================================================================================================== PCIe ASPM check. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 2: PCIe ASPM ACPI test. PCIE ASPM is not controlled by Linux kernel. ADVICE: BIOS reports that Linux kernel should not modify ASPM settings that BIOS configured. It can be intentional because hardware vendors identified some capability bugs between the motherboard and the add-on cards. Test 2 of 2: PCIe ASPM registers test. WARNING: Test 2, RP 00h:1Ch.01h L0s not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, RP 00h:1Ch.01h L1 not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, Device 02h:00h.00h L0s not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, Device 02h:00h.00h L1 not enabled. PASSED: Test 2, PCIE aspm setting matched was matched. WARNING: Test 2, RP 00h:1Ch.05h L0s not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, RP 00h:1Ch.05h L1 not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, Device 85h:00h.00h L0s not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, Device 85h:00h.00h L1 not enabled. PASSED: Test 2, PCIE aspm setting matched was matched. ==================================================================================================== Extract and analyse Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Test 1 of 2: Check Windows Management Instrumentation in DSDT Found WMI Method WMAA with GUID: 5FB7F034-2C63-45E9-BE91-3D44E2C707E4, Instance 0x01 Found WMI Event, Notifier ID: 0x80, GUID: 95F24279-4D7B-4334-9387-ACCDC67EF61C, Instance 0x01 PASSED: Test 1, GUID 95F24279-4D7B-4334-9387-ACCDC67EF61C is handled by driver hp-wmi (Vendor: HP). Found WMI Event, Notifier ID: 0xa0, GUID: 2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0, Instance 0x01 FAILED [MEDIUM] WMIUnknownGUID: Test 1, GUID 2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0 is unknown to the kernel, a driver may need to be implemented for this GUID. ADVICE: A WMI driver probably needs to be written for this event. It can checked for using: wmi_has_guid("2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0"). One can install a notify handler using wmi_install_notify_handler("2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0", handler, NULL). http://lwn.net/Articles/391230 describes how to write an appropriate driver. Found WMI Object, Object ID AB, GUID: 05901221-D566-11D1-B2F0-00A0C9062910, Instance 0x01, Flags: 00 Found WMI Method WMBA with GUID: 1F4C91EB-DC5C-460B-951D-C7CB9B4B8D5E, Instance 0x01 Found WMI Object, Object ID BC, GUID: 2D114B49-2DFB-4130-B8FE-4A3C09E75133, Instance 0x7f, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BD, GUID: 988D08E3-68F4-4C35-AF3E-6A1B8106F83C, Instance 0x19, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BE, GUID: 14EA9746-CE1F-4098-A0E0-7045CB4DA745, Instance 0x01, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BF, GUID: 322F2028-0F84-4901-988E-015176049E2D, Instance 0x01, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BG, GUID: 8232DE3D-663D-4327-A8F4-E293ADB9BF05, Instance 0x01, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BH, GUID: 8F1F6436-9F42-42C8-BADC-0E9424F20C9A, Instance 0x00, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BI, GUID: 8F1F6435-9F42-42C8-BADC-0E9424F20C9A, Instance 0x00, Flags: 00 Found WMI Method WMAC with GUID: 7391A661-223A-47DB-A77A-7BE84C60822D, Instance 0x01 Found WMI Object, Object ID BJ, GUID: DF4E63B6-3BBC-4858-9737-C74F82F821F3, Instance 0x05, Flags: 00 ==================================================================================================== Disassemble DSDT to check for _OSI("Linux"). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 1: Disassemble DSDT to check for _OSI("Linux"). This is not strictly a failure mode, it just alerts one that this has been defined in the DSDT and probably should be avoided since the Linux ACPI driver matches onto the Windows _OSI strings { If (_OSI ("Linux")) { Store (0x03E8, OSYS) } If (_OSI ("Windows 2001")) { Store (0x07D1, OSYS) } If (_OSI ("Windows 2001 SP1")) { Store (0x07D1, OSYS) } If (_OSI ("Windows 2001 SP2")) { Store (0x07D2, OSYS) } If (_OSI ("Windows 2006")) { Store (0x07D6, OSYS) } If (LAnd (MPEN, LEqual (OSYS, 0x07D1))) { TRAP (0x01, 0x48) } TRAP (0x03, 0x35) } WARNING: Test 1, DSDT implements a deprecated _OSI("Linux") test. ==================================================================================================== 0 passed, 0 failed, 1 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 info only. ==================================================================================================== ACPI DSDT Method Semantic Tests. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP Failed to install global event handler. Test 22 of 93: Check _PSR (Power Source). ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 22, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_SB_.AC__._PSR'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. PASSED: Test 22, \_SB_.AC__._PSR correctly acquired and released locks 16 times. Test 35 of 93: Check _TMP (Thermal Zone Current Temp). ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 35, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_TZ_.DTSZ._TMP'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.DTSZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 14 times. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 35, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_TZ_.CPUZ._TMP'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.CPUZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 10 times. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 35, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_TZ_.SKNZ._TMP'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.SKNZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 10 times. PASSED: Test 35, _TMP correctly returned sane looking value 0x00000b4c (289.2 degrees K) PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.BATZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 9 times. PASSED: Test 35, _TMP correctly returned sane looking value 0x00000aac (273.2 degrees K) PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.FDTZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 7 times. Test 46 of 93: Check _DIS (Disable). FAILED [MEDIUM] MethodShouldReturnNothing: Test 46, \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.SIO_.COM1._DIS returned values, but was expected to return nothing. Object returned: INTEGER: 0x00000000 ADVICE: This probably won't cause any errors, but it should be fixed as the AML code is not conforming to the expected behaviour as described in the ACPI specification. FAILED [MEDIUM] MethodShouldReturnNothing: Test 46, \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.SIO_.LPT0._DIS returned values, but was expected to return nothing. Object returned: INTEGER: 0x00000000 ADVICE: This probably won't cause any errors, but it should be fixed as the AML code is not conforming to the expected behaviour as described in the ACPI specification. Test 61 of 93: Check _WAK (System Wake). Test _WAK(1) System Wake, State S1. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test _WAK(2) System Wake, State S2. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test _WAK(3) System Wake, State S3. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test _WAK(4) System Wake, State S4. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test _WAK(5) System Wake, State S5. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test 87 of 93: Check _BCL (Query List of Brightness Control Levels Supported). Package has 2 elements: 00: INTEGER: 0x00000000 01: INTEGER: 0x00000000 FAILED [MEDIUM] Method_BCLElementCount: Test 87, Method _BCL should return a package of more than 2 integers, got just 2. Test 88 of 93: Check _BCM (Set Brightness Level). ACPICA Exception AE_AML_PACKAGE_LIMIT during execution of method _BCM FAILED [CRITICAL] AEAMLPackgeLimit: Test 88, Detected error 'Package limit' when evaluating '\_SB_.PCI0.GFX0.DD02._BCM'. ==================================================================================================== ACPI table settings sanity checks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 1: Check ACPI tables. PASSED: Test 1, Table APIC passed. Table ECDT not present to check. FAILED [MEDIUM] FADT32And64BothDefined: Test 1, FADT 32 bit FIRMWARE_CONTROL is non-zero, and X_FIRMWARE_CONTROL is also non-zero. Section 5.2.9 of the ACPI specification states that if the FIRMWARE_CONTROL is non-zero then X_FIRMWARE_CONTROL must be set to zero. ADVICE: The FADT FIRMWARE_CTRL is a 32 bit pointer that points to the physical memory address of the Firmware ACPI Control Structure (FACS). There is also an extended 64 bit version of this, the X_FIRMWARE_CTRL pointer that also can point to the FACS. Section 5.2.9 of the ACPI specification states that if the X_FIRMWARE_CTRL field contains a non zero value then the FIRMWARE_CTRL field *must* be zero. This error is also detected by the Linux kernel. If FIRMWARE_CTRL and X_FIRMWARE_CTRL are defined, then the kernel just uses the 64 bit version of the pointer. PASSED: Test 1, Table HPET passed. PASSED: Test 1, Table MCFG passed. PASSED: Test 1, Table RSDT passed. PASSED: Test 1, Table RSDP passed. Table SBST not present to check. PASSED: Test 1, Table XSDT passed. ==================================================================================================== Re-assemble DSDT and find syntax errors and warnings. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 2: Disassemble and reassemble DSDT FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError4043: Test 1, Assembler error in line 2261 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02258| 0x00000000, // Range Minimum 02259| 0xFEDFFFFF, // Range Maximum 02260| 0x00000000, // Translation Offset 02261| 0x00000000, // Length | ^ | error 4043: Invalid combination of Length and Min/Max fixed flags 02262| ,, _Y0E, AddressRangeMemory, TypeStatic) 02263| DWordMemory (ResourceProducer, PosDecode, MinFixed, MaxFixed, Cacheable, ReadWrite, 02264| 0x00000000, // Granularity ==================================================================================================== ADVICE: (for error #4043): This occurs if the length is zero and just one of the resource MIF/MAF flags are set, or the length is non-zero and resource MIF/MAF flags are both set. These are illegal combinations and need to be fixed. See section 6.4.3.5 Address Space Resource Descriptors of version 4.0a of the ACPI specification for more details. FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError4050: Test 1, Assembler error in line 2268 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02265| 0xFEE01000, // Range Minimum 02266| 0xFFFFFFFF, // Range Maximum 02267| 0x00000000, // Translation Offset 02268| 0x011FEFFF, // Length | ^ | error 4050: Length is not equal to fixed Min/Max window 02269| ,, , AddressRangeMemory, TypeStatic) 02270| }) 02271| Method (_CRS, 0, Serialized) ==================================================================================================== ADVICE: (for error #4050): The minimum address is greater than the maximum address. This is illegal. FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 1, Assembler error in line 8885 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 08882| Method (_DIS, 0, NotSerialized) 08883| { 08884| DSOD (0x02) 08885| Return (0x00) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_DIS) 08886| } 08887| 08888| Method (_SRS, 1, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 1, Assembler error in line 9195 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 09192| Method (_DIS, 0, NotSerialized) 09193| { 09194| DSOD (0x01) 09195| Return (0x00) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_DIS) 09196| } 09197| 09198| Method (_SRS, 1, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1127: Test 1, Assembler error in line 9242 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 09239| CreateWordField (CRES, \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.SIO.LPT0._CRS._Y21._MAX, MAX2) 09240| CreateByteField (CRES, \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.SIO.LPT0._CRS._Y21._LEN, LEN2) 09241| CreateWordField (CRES, \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.SIO.LPT0._CRS._Y22._INT, IRQ0) 09242| CreateWordField (CRES, \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.SIO.LPT0._CRS._Y23._DMA, DMA0) | ^ | warning level 0 1127: ResourceTag smaller than Field (Tag: 8 bits, Field: 16 bits) 09243| If (RLPD) 09244| { 09245| Store (0x00, Local0) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1128: Test 1, Assembler error in line 18682 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 18679| Store (0x01, Index (DerefOf (Index (Local0, 0x02)), 0x01)) 18680| If (And (WDPE, 0x40)) 18681| { 18682| Wait (\_SB.BEVT, 0x10) | ^ | warning level 0 1128: Result is not used, possible operator timeout will be missed 18683| } 18684| 18685| Store (BRID, Index (DerefOf (Index (Local0, 0x02)), 0x02)) ==================================================================================================== ADVICE: (for warning level 0 #1128): The operation can possibly timeout, and hence the return value indicates an timeout error. However, because the return value is not checked this very probably indicates that the code is buggy. A possible scenario is that a mutex times out and the code attempts to access data in a critical region when it should not. This will lead to undefined behaviour. This should be fixed. Table DSDT (0) reassembly: Found 2 errors, 4 warnings. Test 2 of 2: Disassemble and reassemble SSDT PASSED: Test 2, SSDT (0) reassembly, Found 0 errors, 0 warnings. FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 2, Assembler error in line 60 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00057| { 00058| Store (CPDC (Arg0), Local0) 00059| GCAP (Local0) 00060| Return (Local0) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_PDC) 00061| } 00062| 00063| Method (_OSC, 4, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 2, Assembler error in line 174 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00171| { 00172| Store (\_PR.CPU0.CPDC (Arg0), Local0) 00173| GCAP (Local0) 00174| Return (Local0) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_PDC) 00175| } 00176| 00177| Method (_OSC, 4, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 2, Assembler error in line 244 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00241| { 00242| Store (\_PR.CPU0.CPDC (Arg0), Local0) 00243| GCAP (Local0) 00244| Return (Local0) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_PDC) 00245| } 00246| 00247| Method (_OSC, 4, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 2, Assembler error in line 290 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00287| { 00288| Store (\_PR.CPU0.CPDC (Arg0), Local0) 00289| GCAP (Local0) 00290| Return (Local0) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_PDC) 00291| } 00292| 00293| Method (_OSC, 4, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== Table SSDT (1) reassembly: Found 0 errors, 4 warnings. PASSED: Test 2, SSDT (2) reassembly, Found 0 errors, 0 warnings. PASSED: Test 2, SSDT (3) reassembly, Found 0 errors, 0 warnings. ==================================================================================================== 3 passed, 10 failed, 0 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 info only. ==================================================================================================== Critical failures: 1 method test, at 1 log line: 1449: Detected error 'Package limit' when evaluating '\_SB_.PCI0.GFX0.DD02._BCM'. High failures: 11 klog test, at 1 log line: 121: HIGH Kernel message: [ 3.512783] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.GFX0._DOD] (Node f7425858), AE_AML_PACKAGE_LIMIT (20110623/psparse-536) syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1668: Assembler error in line 2261 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1687: Assembler error in line 2268 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1703: Assembler error in line 8885 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1716: Assembler error in line 9195 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1729: Assembler error in line 9242 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1742: Assembler error in line 18682 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1766: Assembler error in line 60 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1779: Assembler error in line 174 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1792: Assembler error in line 244 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1805: Assembler error in line 290 Medium failures: 9 mtrr test, at 1 log line: 76: Memory range 0xc0000000 to 0xdfffffff (PCI Bus 0000:00) has incorrect attribute Write-Combining. mtrr test, at 1 log line: 78: Memory range 0xfee01000 to 0xffffffff (PCI Bus 0000:00) has incorrect attribute Write-Protect. msr test, at 1 log line: 165: MSR SYSENTER_ESP (0x175) has 1 inconsistent values across 2 CPUs for (shift: 0 mask: 0xffffffffffffffff). msr test, at 1 log line: 173: MSR MISC_ENABLE (0x1a0) has 1 inconsistent values across 2 CPUs for (shift: 0 mask: 0x400c51889). wmi test, at 1 log line: 528: GUID 2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0 is unknown to the kernel, a driver may need to be implemented for this GUID. method test, at 1 log line: 1002: \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.SIO_.COM1._DIS returned values, but was expected to return nothing. method test, at 1 log line: 1011: \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.SIO_.LPT0._DIS returned values, but was expected to return nothing. method test, at 1 log line: 1443: Method _BCL should return a package of more than 2 integers, got just 2. acpitables test, at 1 log line: 1643: FADT 32 bit FIRMWARE_CONTROL is non-zero, and X_FIRMWARE_CONTROL is also non-zero. Se

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  • Microsoft Declares the Future of ASP.NET is Web API

    - by sbwalker
    Sitting on a plane on my way home from Tech Ed 2012 in Orlando, I thought it would be a good time to jot down some key takeaways from this year’s conference. Some of these items I have known since the Microsoft MVP Summit which occurred in Redmond in late February ( but due to NDA restrictions I could not share them with the developer community at large ) and some of them are a result of insightful conversations with a wide variety of industry insiders and Microsoft employees at the conference. First, let’s travel back in time 4 years to the Microsoft MVP Summit in 2008. Microsoft was facing some heat from market newcomer Ruby on Rails and responded with a new web development framework of its own, ASP.NET MVC. At the Summit they estimated that MVC would only be applicable for ~10% of all new web development projects. Based on that prediction I questioned why they were investing such considerable resources for such a relative edge case, but my guess is that they felt it was an important edge case at the time as some of the more vocal .NET evangelists as well as some very high profile start-ups ( ie. Twitter ) had publicly announced their intent to use Rails. Microsoft made a lot of noise about MVC. In fact, they focused so much of their messaging and marketing hype around MVC that it appeared that WebForms was essentially dead. Yes, it may have been true that Microsoft continued to invest in WebForms, but from an outside perspective it really appeared that MVC was the only framework getting any real attention. As a result, MVC started to gain market share. An inside source at Microsoft told me that MVC usage has grown at a rate of about 5% per year and now sits at ~30%. Essentially by focusing so much marketing effort on MVC, Microsoft actually created a larger market demand for it.  This is because in the Microsoft ecosystem there is somewhat of a bandwagon mentality amongst developers. If Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about a specific technology, developers get the perception that it must be really important. So rather than choosing the right tool for the job, they often choose the tool with the most marketing hype and then try to sell it to the customer. In 2010, I blogged about the fact that MVC did not make any business sense for the DotNetNuke platform. This was because our ecosystem relied on third party extensions which were dependent on the WebForms model. If we migrated the core to MVC it would mean that all of the third party extensions would no longer be compatible, which would be an irresponsible business decision for us to make at the expense of our users and customers. However, this did not stop the debate from continuing to occur in our ecosystem. Clearly some developers had drunk Microsoft’s Kool-Aid about MVC and were of the mindset, to paraphrase an old Scottish saying, “If its not MVC, it’s crap”. Now, this is a rather ignorant position to take as most of the benefits of MVC can be achieved in WebForms with solid architecture and responsible coding practices. Clean separation of concerns, unit testing, and direct control over page output are all possible in the WebForms model – it just requires diligence and discipline. So over the past few years some horror stories have begun to bubble to the surface of software development projects focused on ground-up rewrites of web applications for the sole purpose of migrating from WebForms to MVC. These large scale rewrites were typically initiated by engineering teams with only a single argument driving the business decision, that Microsoft was promoting MVC as “the future”. These ill-fated rewrites offered no benefit to end users or customers and in fact resulted in a less stable, less scalable and more complicated systems – basically taking one step forward and two full steps back. A case in point is the announcement earlier this week that a popular open source .NET CMS provider has decided to pull the plug on their new MVC product which has been under active development for more than 18 months and revert back to WebForms. The availability of multiple server-side development models has deeply fragmented the Microsoft developer community. Some folks like to compare it to the age-old VB vs. C# language debate. However, the VB vs. C# language debate was ultimately more of a religious war because at least the two dominant programming languages were compatible with one another and could be used interchangeably. The issue with WebForms vs. MVC is much more challenging. This is because the messaging from Microsoft has positioned the two solutions as being incompatible with one another and as a result web developers feel like they are forced to choose one path or another. Yes, it is true that it has always been technically possible to use WebForms and MVC in the same project, but the tooling support has always made this feel “dirty”. The fragmentation has also made it difficult to attract newcomers as the perceived barrier to entry for learning ASP.NET has become higher. As a result many new software developers entering the market are gravitating to environments where the development model seems more simple and intuitive ( ie. PHP or Ruby ). At the same time that the Web Platform team was busy promoting ASP.NET MVC, the Microsoft Office team has been promoting Sharepoint as a platform for building internal enterprise web applications. Sharepoint has great penetration in the enterprise and over time has been enhanced with improved extensibility capabilities for software developers. But, like many other mature enterprise ASP.NET web applications, it is built on the WebForms development model. Similar to DotNetNuke, Sharepoint leverages a rich third party ecosystem for both generic web controls and more specialized WebParts – both of which rely on WebForms. So basically this resulted in a situation where the Web Platform group had headed off in one direction and the Office team had gone in another direction, and the end customer was stuck in the middle trying to figure out what to do with their existing investments in Microsoft technology. It really emphasized the perception that the left hand was not speaking to the right hand, as strategically speaking there did not seem to be any high level plan from Microsoft to ensure consistency and continuity across the different product lines. With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, it also made some of the third party control vendors scratch their heads, and wonder what the heck Microsoft was thinking. The original value proposition of ASP.NET over Classic ASP was the ability for web developers to emulate the highly productive desktop development model by using abstract components for creating rich, interactive web interfaces. Web control vendors like Telerik, Infragistics, DevExpress, and ComponentArt had all built sizable businesses offering powerful user interface components to WebForms developers. And even after MVC was introduced these vendors continued to improve their products, offering greater productivity and a superior user experience via AJAX to what was possible in MVC. And since many developers were comfortable and satisfied with these third party solutions, the demand remained strong and the third party web control market continued to prosper despite the availability of MVC. While all of this was going on in the Microsoft ecosystem, there has also been a fundamental shift in the general software development industry. Driven by the explosion of Internet-enabled devices, the focus has now centered on service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service-oriented architecture is all about defining a public API for your product that any client can consume; whether it’s a native application running on a smart phone or tablet, a web browser taking advantage of HTML5 and Javascript, or a rich desktop application running on a PC. REST-based services which utilize the less verbose characteristics of JSON as a transport mechanism, have become the preferred approach over older, more bloated SOAP-based techniques. SOA also has the benefit of producing a cross-platform API, as every major technology stack is able to interact with standard REST-based web services. And for web applications, more and more developers are turning to robust Javascript libraries like JQuery and Knockout for browser-based client-side development techniques for calling web services and rendering content to end users. In fact, traditional server-side page rendering has largely fallen out of favor, resulting in decreased demand for server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails, WebForms, and (gasp) MVC. In response to these new industry trends, Microsoft did what it always does – it immediately poured some resources into developing a solution which will ensure they remain relevant and competitive in the web space. This work culminated in a new framework which was branded as Web API. It is convention-based and designed to embrace native HTTP standards without copious layers of abstraction. This framework is designed to be the ultimate replacement for both the REST aspects of WCF and ASP.NET MVC Web Services. And since it was developed out of band with a dependency only on ASP.NET 4.0, it means that it can be used immediately in a variety of production scenarios. So at Tech Ed 2012 it was made abundantly clear in numerous sessions that Microsoft views Web API as the “Future of ASP.NET”. In fact, one Microsoft PM even went as far as to say that if we look 3-4 years into the future, that all ASP.NET web applications will be developed using the Web API approach. This is a fairly bold prediction and clearly telegraphs where Microsoft plans to allocate its resources going forward. Currently Web API is being delivered as part of the MVC4 package, but this is only temporary for the sake of convenience. It also sounds like there are still internal discussions going on in terms of how to brand the various aspects of ASP.NET going forward – perhaps the moniker of “ASP.NET Web Stack” coined a couple years ago by Scott Hanselman and utilized as part of the open source release of ASP.NET bits on Codeplex a few months back will eventually stick. Web API is being positioned as the unification of ASP.NET – the glue that is able to pull this fragmented mess back together again. The  “One ASP.NET” strategy will promote the use of all frameworks - WebForms, MVC, and Web API, even within the same web project. Basically the message is utilize the appropriate aspects of each framework to solve your business problems. Instead of navigating developers to a fork in the road, the plan is to educate them that “hybrid” applications are a great strategy for delivering solutions to customers. In addition, the service-oriented approach coupled with client-side development promoted by Web API can effectively be used in both WebForms and MVC applications. So this means it is also relevant to application platforms like DotNetNuke and Sharepoint, which means that it starts to create a unified development strategy across all ASP.NET product lines once again. And so what about MVC? There have actually been rumors floated that MVC has reached a stage of maturity where, similar to WebForms, it will be treated more as a maintenance product line going forward ( MVC4 may in fact be the last significant iteration of this framework ). This may sound alarming to some folks who have recently adopted MVC but it really shouldn’t, as both WebForms and MVC will continue to play a vital role in delivering solutions to customers. They will just not be the primary area where Microsoft is spending the majority of its R&D resources. That distinction will obviously go to Web API. And when the question comes up of why not enhance MVC to make it work with Web API, you must take a step back and look at this from the higher level to see that it really makes no sense. MVC is a server-side page compositing framework; whereas, Web API promotes client-side page compositing with a heavy focus on web services. In order to make MVC work well with Web API, would require a complete rewrite of MVC and at the end of the day, there would be no upgrade path for existing MVC applications. So it really does not make much business sense. So what does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well, around 8-12 months ago we recognized the software industry trends towards web services and client-side development. We decided to utilize a “hybrid” model which would provide compatibility for existing modules while at the same time provide a bridge for developers who wanted to utilize more modern web techniques. Customers who like the productivity and familiarity of WebForms can continue to build custom modules using the traditional approach. However, in DotNetNuke 6.2 we also introduced a new Service Framework which is actually built on top of MVC2 ( we chose to leverage MVC because it had the most intuitive, light-weight REST implementation in the .NET stack ). The Services Framework allowed us to build some rich interactive features in DotNetNuke 6.2, including the Messaging and Notification Center and Activity Feed. But based on where we know Microsoft is heading, it makes sense for the next major version of DotNetNuke ( which is expected to be released in Q4 2012 ) to migrate from MVC2 to Web API. This will likely result in some breaking changes in the Services Framework but we feel it is the best approach for ensuring the platform remains highly modern and relevant. The fact that our development strategy is perfectly aligned with the “One ASP.NET” strategy from Microsoft means that our customers and developer community can be confident in their current and future investments in the DotNetNuke platform.

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  • The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin &ndash; #3 &ndash; Make Evolvability inevitable

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/04/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin-ndash-3-ndash-make-evolvability-inevitable.aspxThe easier something to measure the more likely it will be produced. Deviations between what is and what should be can be readily detected. That´s what automated acceptance tests are for. That´s what sprint reviews in Scrum are for. It´s no small wonder our software looks like it looks. It has all the traits whose conformance with requirements can easily be measured. And it´s lacking traits which cannot easily be measured. Evolvability (or Changeability) is such a trait. If an operation is correct, if an operation if fast enough, that can be checked very easily. But whether Evolvability is high or low, that cannot be checked by taking a measure or two. Evolvability might correlate with certain traits, e.g. number of lines of code (LOC) per function or Cyclomatic Complexity or test coverage. But there is no threshold value signalling “evolvability too low”; also Evolvability is hardly tangible for the customer. Nevertheless Evolvability is of great importance - at least in the long run. You can get away without much of it for a short time. Eventually, though, it´s needed like any other requirement. Or even more. Because without Evolvability no other requirement can be implemented. Evolvability is the foundation on which all else is build. Such fundamental importance is in stark contrast with its immeasurability. To compensate this, Evolvability must be put at the very center of software development. It must become the hub around everything else revolves. Since we cannot measure Evolvability, though, we cannot start watching it more. Instead we need to establish practices to keep it high (enough) at all times. Chefs have known that for long. That´s why everybody in a restaurant kitchen is constantly seeing after cleanliness. Hygiene is important as is to have clean tools at standardized locations. Only then the health of the patrons can be guaranteed and production efficiency is constantly high. Still a kitchen´s level of cleanliness is easier to measure than software Evolvability. That´s why important practices like reviews, pair programming, or TDD are not enough, I guess. What we need to keep Evolvability in focus and high is… to continually evolve. Change must not be something to avoid but too embrace. To me that means the whole change cycle from requirement analysis to delivery needs to be gone through more often. Scrum´s sprints of 4, 2 even 1 week are too long. Kanban´s flow of user stories across is too unreliable; it takes as long as it takes. Instead we should fix the cycle time at 2 days max. I call that Spinning. No increment must take longer than from this morning until tomorrow evening to finish. Then it should be acceptance checked by the customer (or his/her representative, e.g. a Product Owner). For me there are several resasons for such a fixed and short cycle time for each increment: Clear expectations Absolute estimates (“This will take X days to complete.”) are near impossible in software development as explained previously. Too much unplanned research and engineering work lurk in every feature. And then pervasive interruptions of work by peers and management. However, the smaller the scope the better our absolute estimates become. That´s because we understand better what really are the requirements and what the solution should look like. But maybe more importantly the shorter the timespan the more we can control how we use our time. So much can happen over the course of a week and longer timespans. But if push comes to shove I can block out all distractions and interruptions for a day or possibly two. That´s why I believe we can give rough absolute estimates on 3 levels: Noon Tonight Tomorrow Think of a meeting with a Product Owner at 8:30 in the morning. If she asks you, how long it will take you to implement a user story or bug fix, you can say, “It´ll be fixed by noon.”, or you can say, “I can manage to implement it until tonight before I leave.”, or you can say, “You´ll get it by tomorrow night at latest.” Yes, I believe all else would be naive. If you´re not confident to get something done by tomorrow night (some 34h from now) you just cannot reliably commit to any timeframe. That means you should not promise anything, you should not even start working on the issue. So when estimating use these four categories: Noon, Tonight, Tomorrow, NoClue - with NoClue meaning the requirement needs to be broken down further so each aspect can be assigned to one of the first three categories. If you like absolute estimates, here you go. But don´t do deep estimates. Don´t estimate dozens of issues; don´t think ahead (“Issue A is a Tonight, then B will be a Tomorrow, after that it´s C as a Noon, finally D is a Tonight - that´s what I´ll do this week.”). Just estimate so Work-in-Progress (WIP) is 1 for everybody - plus a small number of buffer issues. To be blunt: Yes, this makes promises impossible as to what a team will deliver in terms of scope at a certain date in the future. But it will give a Product Owner a clear picture of what to pull for acceptance feedback tonight and tomorrow. Trust through reliability Our trade is lacking trust. Customers don´t trust software companies/departments much. Managers don´t trust developers much. I find that perfectly understandable in the light of what we´re trying to accomplish: delivering software in the face of uncertainty by means of material good production. Customers as well as managers still expect software development to be close to production of houses or cars. But that´s a fundamental misunderstanding. Software development ist development. It´s basically research. As software developers we´re constantly executing experiments to find out what really provides value to users. We don´t know what they need, we just have mediated hypothesises. That´s why we cannot reliably deliver on preposterous demands. So trust is out of the window in no time. If we switch to delivering in short cycles, though, we can regain trust. Because estimates - explicit or implicit - up to 32 hours at most can be satisfied. I´d say: reliability over scope. It´s more important to reliably deliver what was promised then to cover a lot of requirement area. So when in doubt promise less - but deliver without delay. Deliver on scope (Functionality and Quality); but also deliver on Evolvability, i.e. on inner quality according to accepted principles. Always. Trust will be the reward. Less complexity of communication will follow. More goodwill buffer will follow. So don´t wait for some Kanban board to show you, that flow can be improved by scheduling smaller stories. You don´t need to learn that the hard way. Just start with small batch sizes of three different sizes. Fast feedback What has been finished can be checked for acceptance. Why wait for a sprint of several weeks to end? Why let the mental model of the issue and its solution dissipate? If you get final feedback after one or two weeks, you hardly remember what you did and why you did it. Resoning becomes hard. But more importantly youo probably are not in the mood anymore to go back to something you deemed done a long time ago. It´s boring, it´s frustrating to open up that mental box again. Learning is harder the longer it takes from event to feedback. Effort can be wasted between event (finishing an issue) and feedback, because other work might go in the wrong direction based on false premises. Checking finished issues for acceptance is the most important task of a Product Owner. It´s even more important than planning new issues. Because as long as work started is not released (accepted) it´s potential waste. So before starting new work better make sure work already done has value. By putting the emphasis on acceptance rather than planning true pull is established. As long as planning and starting work is more important, it´s a push process. Accept a Noon issue on the same day before leaving. Accept a Tonight issue before leaving today or first thing tomorrow morning. Accept a Tomorrow issue tomorrow night before leaving or early the day after tomorrow. After acceptance the developer(s) can start working on the next issue. Flexibility As if reliability/trust and fast feedback for less waste weren´t enough economic incentive, there is flexibility. After each issue the Product Owner can change course. If on Monday morning feature slices A, B, C, D, E were important and A, B, C were scheduled for acceptance by Monday evening and Tuesday evening, the Product Owner can change her mind at any time. Maybe after A got accepted she asks for continuation with D. But maybe, just maybe, she has gotten a completely different idea by then. Maybe she wants work to continue on F. And after B it´s neither D nor E, but G. And after G it´s D. With Spinning every 32 hours at latest priorities can be changed. And nothing is lost. Because what got accepted is of value. It provides an incremental value to the customer/user. Or it provides internal value to the Product Owner as increased knowledge/decreased uncertainty. I find such reactivity over commitment economically very benefical. Why commit a team to some workload for several weeks? It´s unnecessary at beast, and inflexible and wasteful at worst. If we cannot promise delivery of a certain scope on a certain date - which is what customers/management usually want -, we can at least provide them with unpredecented flexibility in the face of high uncertainty. Where the path is not clear, cannot be clear, make small steps so you´re able to change your course at any time. Premature completion Customers/management are used to premeditating budgets. They want to know exactly how much to pay for a certain amount of requirements. That´s understandable. But it does not match with the nature of software development. We should know that by now. Maybe there´s somewhere in the world some team who can consistently deliver on scope, quality, and time, and budget. Great! Congratulations! I, however, haven´t seen such a team yet. Which does not mean it´s impossible, but I think it´s nothing I can recommend to strive for. Rather I´d say: Don´t try this at home. It might hurt you one way or the other. However, what we can do, is allow customers/management stop work on features at any moment. With spinning every 32 hours a feature can be declared as finished - even though it might not be completed according to initial definition. I think, progress over completion is an important offer software development can make. Why think in terms of completion beyond a promise for the next 32 hours? Isn´t it more important to constantly move forward? Step by step. We´re not running sprints, we´re not running marathons, not even ultra-marathons. We´re in the sport of running forever. That makes it futile to stare at the finishing line. The very concept of a burn-down chart is misleading (in most cases). Whoever can only think in terms of completed requirements shuts out the chance for saving money. The requirements for a features mostly are uncertain. So how does a Product Owner know in the first place, how much is needed. Maybe more than specified is needed - which gets uncovered step by step with each finished increment. Maybe less than specified is needed. After each 4–32 hour increment the Product Owner can do an experient (or invite users to an experiment) if a particular trait of the software system is already good enough. And if so, she can switch the attention to a different aspect. In the end, requirements A, B, C then could be finished just 70%, 80%, and 50%. What the heck? It´s good enough - for now. 33% money saved. Wouldn´t that be splendid? Isn´t that a stunning argument for any budget-sensitive customer? You can save money and still get what you need? Pull on practices So far, in addition to more trust, more flexibility, less money spent, Spinning led to “doing less” which also means less code which of course means higher Evolvability per se. Last but not least, though, I think Spinning´s short acceptance cycles have one more effect. They excert pull-power on all sorts of practices known for increasing Evolvability. If, for example, you believe high automated test coverage helps Evolvability by lowering the fear of inadverted damage to a code base, why isn´t 90% of the developer community practicing automated tests consistently? I think, the answer is simple: Because they can do without. Somehow they manage to do enough manual checks before their rare releases/acceptance checks to ensure good enough correctness - at least in the short term. The same goes for other practices like component orientation, continuous build/integration, code reviews etc. None of that is compelling, urgent, imperative. Something else always seems more important. So Evolvability principles and practices fall through the cracks most of the time - until a project hits a wall. Then everybody becomes desperate; but by then (re)gaining Evolvability has become as very, very difficult and tedious undertaking. Sometimes up to the point where the existence of a project/company is in danger. With Spinning that´s different. If you´re practicing Spinning you cannot avoid all those practices. With Spinning you very quickly realize you cannot deliver reliably even on your 32 hour promises. Spinning thus is pulling on developers to adopt principles and practices for Evolvability. They will start actively looking for ways to keep their delivery rate high. And if not, management will soon tell them to do that. Because first the Product Owner then management will notice an increasing difficulty to deliver value within 32 hours. There, finally there emerges a way to measure Evolvability: The more frequent developers tell the Product Owner there is no way to deliver anything worth of feedback until tomorrow night, the poorer Evolvability is. Don´t count the “WTF!”, count the “No way!” utterances. In closing For sustainable software development we need to put Evolvability first. Functionality and Quality must not rule software development but be implemented within a framework ensuring (enough) Evolvability. Since Evolvability cannot be measured easily, I think we need to put software development “under pressure”. Software needs to be changed more often, in smaller increments. Each increment being relevant to the customer/user in some way. That does not mean each increment is worthy of shipment. It´s sufficient to gain further insight from it. Increments primarily serve the reduction of uncertainty, not sales. Sales even needs to be decoupled from this incremental progress. No more promises to sales. No more delivery au point. Rather sales should look at a stream of accepted increments (or incremental releases) and scoup from that whatever they find valuable. Sales and marketing need to realize they should work on what´s there, not what might be possible in the future. But I digress… In my view a Spinning cycle - which is not easy to reach, which requires practice - is the core practice to compensate the immeasurability of Evolvability. From start to finish of each issue in 32 hours max - that´s the challenge we need to accept if we´re serious increasing Evolvability. Fortunately higher Evolvability is not the only outcome of Spinning. Customer/management will like the increased flexibility and “getting more bang for the buck”.

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  • Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

    - by Roger Hart
    Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so  intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want.  Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized  an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize  grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

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  • Why should main() be short?

    - by Stargazer712
    I've been programming for over 9 years, and according to the advice of my first programming teacher, I always keep my main() function extremely short. At first I had no idea why. I just obeyed without understanding, much to the delight of my professors. After gaining experience, I realized that if I designed my code correctly, having a short main() function just sortof happened. Writing modularized code and following the single responsibility principle allowed my code to be designed in "bunches", and main() served as nothing more than a catalyst to get the program running. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I was looking at Python's souce code, and I found the main() function: /* Minimal main program -- everything is loaded from the library */ ... int main(int argc, char **argv) { ... return Py_Main(argc, argv); } Yay Python. Short main() function == Good code. Programming teachers were right. Wanting to look deeper, I took a look at Py_Main. In its entirety, it is defined as follows: /* Main program */ int Py_Main(int argc, char **argv) { int c; int sts; char *command = NULL; char *filename = NULL; char *module = NULL; FILE *fp = stdin; char *p; int unbuffered = 0; int skipfirstline = 0; int stdin_is_interactive = 0; int help = 0; int version = 0; int saw_unbuffered_flag = 0; PyCompilerFlags cf; cf.cf_flags = 0; orig_argc = argc; /* For Py_GetArgcArgv() */ orig_argv = argv; #ifdef RISCOS Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 0; #endif PySys_ResetWarnOptions(); while ((c = _PyOS_GetOpt(argc, argv, PROGRAM_OPTS)) != EOF) { if (c == 'c') { /* -c is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the command to interpret. */ command = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (command == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -c argument"); strcpy(command, _PyOS_optarg); strcat(command, "\n"); break; } if (c == 'm') { /* -m is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the module to interpret. */ module = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (module == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -m argument"); strcpy(module, _PyOS_optarg); break; } switch (c) { case 'b': Py_BytesWarningFlag++; break; case 'd': Py_DebugFlag++; break; case '3': Py_Py3kWarningFlag++; if (!Py_DivisionWarningFlag) Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; case 'Q': if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "old") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 0; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warn") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warnall") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 2; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "new") == 0) { /* This only affects __main__ */ cf.cf_flags |= CO_FUTURE_DIVISION; /* And this tells the eval loop to treat BINARY_DIVIDE as BINARY_TRUE_DIVIDE */ _Py_QnewFlag = 1; break; } fprintf(stderr, "-Q option should be `-Qold', " "`-Qwarn', `-Qwarnall', or `-Qnew' only\n"); return usage(2, argv[0]); /* NOTREACHED */ case 'i': Py_InspectFlag++; Py_InteractiveFlag++; break; /* case 'J': reserved for Jython */ case 'O': Py_OptimizeFlag++; break; case 'B': Py_DontWriteBytecodeFlag++; break; case 's': Py_NoUserSiteDirectory++; break; case 'S': Py_NoSiteFlag++; break; case 'E': Py_IgnoreEnvironmentFlag++; break; case 't': Py_TabcheckFlag++; break; case 'u': unbuffered++; saw_unbuffered_flag = 1; break; case 'v': Py_VerboseFlag++; break; #ifdef RISCOS case 'w': Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 1; break; #endif case 'x': skipfirstline = 1; break; /* case 'X': reserved for implementation-specific arguments */ case 'U': Py_UnicodeFlag++; break; case 'h': case '?': help++; break; case 'V': version++; break; case 'W': PySys_AddWarnOption(_PyOS_optarg); break; /* This space reserved for other options */ default: return usage(2, argv[0]); /*NOTREACHED*/ } } if (help) return usage(0, argv[0]); if (version) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s\n", PY_VERSION); return 0; } if (Py_Py3kWarningFlag && !Py_TabcheckFlag) /* -3 implies -t (but not -tt) */ Py_TabcheckFlag = 1; if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') Py_InspectFlag = 1; if (!saw_unbuffered_flag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONUNBUFFERED")) && *p != '\0') unbuffered = 1; if (!Py_NoUserSiteDirectory && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONNOUSERSITE")) && *p != '\0') Py_NoUserSiteDirectory = 1; if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONWARNINGS")) && *p != '\0') { char *buf, *warning; buf = (char *)malloc(strlen(p) + 1); if (buf == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy PYTHONWARNINGS"); strcpy(buf, p); for (warning = strtok(buf, ","); warning != NULL; warning = strtok(NULL, ",")) PySys_AddWarnOption(warning); free(buf); } if (command == NULL && module == NULL && _PyOS_optind < argc && strcmp(argv[_PyOS_optind], "-") != 0) { #ifdef __VMS filename = decc$translate_vms(argv[_PyOS_optind]); if (filename == (char *)0 || filename == (char *)-1) filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #else filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #endif } stdin_is_interactive = Py_FdIsInteractive(stdin, (char *)0); if (unbuffered) { #if defined(MS_WINDOWS) || defined(__CYGWIN__) _setmode(fileno(stdin), O_BINARY); _setmode(fileno(stdout), O_BINARY); #endif #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ setbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL); #endif /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ } else if (Py_InteractiveFlag) { #ifdef MS_WINDOWS /* Doesn't have to have line-buffered -- use unbuffered */ /* Any set[v]buf(stdin, ...) screws up Tkinter :-( */ setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !MS_WINDOWS */ #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); #endif /* HAVE_SETVBUF */ #endif /* !MS_WINDOWS */ /* Leave stderr alone - it should be unbuffered anyway. */ } #ifdef __VMS else { setvbuf (stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); } #endif /* __VMS */ #ifdef __APPLE__ /* On MacOS X, when the Python interpreter is embedded in an application bundle, it gets executed by a bootstrapping script that does os.execve() with an argv[0] that's different from the actual Python executable. This is needed to keep the Finder happy, or rather, to work around Apple's overly strict requirements of the process name. However, we still need a usable sys.executable, so the actual executable path is passed in an environment variable. See Lib/plat-mac/bundlebuiler.py for details about the bootstrap script. */ if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONEXECUTABLE")) && *p != '\0') Py_SetProgramName(p); else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #endif Py_Initialize(); if (Py_VerboseFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL && stdin_is_interactive)) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s on %s\n", Py_GetVersion(), Py_GetPlatform()); if (!Py_NoSiteFlag) fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", COPYRIGHT); } if (command != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } if (module != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' so that PySys_SetArgv correctly sets sys.path[0] to '' rather than looking for a file called "-m". See tracker issue #8202 for details. */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } PySys_SetArgv(argc-_PyOS_optind, argv+_PyOS_optind); if ((Py_InspectFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL)) && isatty(fileno(stdin))) { PyObject *v; v = PyImport_ImportModule("readline"); if (v == NULL) PyErr_Clear(); else Py_DECREF(v); } if (command) { sts = PyRun_SimpleStringFlags(command, &cf) != 0; free(command); } else if (module) { sts = RunModule(module, 1); free(module); } else { if (filename == NULL && stdin_is_interactive) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* do exit on SystemExit */ RunStartupFile(&cf); } /* XXX */ sts = -1; /* keep track of whether we've already run __main__ */ if (filename != NULL) { sts = RunMainFromImporter(filename); } if (sts==-1 && filename!=NULL) { if ((fp = fopen(filename, "r")) == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: can't open file '%s': [Errno %d] %s\n", argv[0], filename, errno, strerror(errno)); return 2; } else if (skipfirstline) { int ch; /* Push back first newline so line numbers remain the same */ while ((ch = getc(fp)) != EOF) { if (ch == '\n') { (void)ungetc(ch, fp); break; } } } { /* XXX: does this work on Win/Win64? (see posix_fstat) */ struct stat sb; if (fstat(fileno(fp), &sb) == 0 && S_ISDIR(sb.st_mode)) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: '%s' is a directory, cannot continue\n", argv[0], filename); fclose(fp); return 1; } } } if (sts==-1) { /* call pending calls like signal handlers (SIGINT) */ if (Py_MakePendingCalls() == -1) { PyErr_Print(); sts = 1; } else { sts = PyRun_AnyFileExFlags( fp, filename == NULL ? "<stdin>" : filename, filename != NULL, &cf) != 0; } } } /* Check this environment variable at the end, to give programs the * opportunity to set it from Python. */ if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') { Py_InspectFlag = 1; } if (Py_InspectFlag && stdin_is_interactive && (filename != NULL || command != NULL || module != NULL)) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* XXX */ sts = PyRun_AnyFileFlags(stdin, "<stdin>", &cf) != 0; } Py_Finalize(); #ifdef RISCOS if (Py_RISCOSWimpFlag) fprintf(stderr, "\x0cq\x0c"); /* make frontend quit */ #endif #ifdef __INSURE__ /* Insure++ is a memory analysis tool that aids in discovering * memory leaks and other memory problems. On Python exit, the * interned string dictionary is flagged as being in use at exit * (which it is). Under normal circumstances, this is fine because * the memory will be automatically reclaimed by the system. Under * memory debugging, it's a huge source of useless noise, so we * trade off slower shutdown for less distraction in the memory * reports. -baw */ _Py_ReleaseInternedStrings(); #endif /* __INSURE__ */ return sts; } Good God Almighty...it is big enough to sink the Titanic. It seems as though Python did the "Intro to Programming 101" trick and just moved all of main()'s code to a different function called it something very similar to "main". Here's my question: Is this code terribly written, or are there other reasons reasons to have a short main function? As it stands right now, I see absolutely no difference between doing this and just moving the code in Py_Main() back into main(). Am I wrong in thinking this?

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  • PTLQueue : a scalable bounded-capacity MPMC queue

    - by Dave
    Title: Fast concurrent MPMC queue -- I've used the following concurrent queue algorithm enough that it warrants a blog entry. I'll sketch out the design of a fast and scalable multiple-producer multiple-consumer (MPSC) concurrent queue called PTLQueue. The queue has bounded capacity and is implemented via a circular array. Bounded capacity can be a useful property if there's a mismatch between producer rates and consumer rates where an unbounded queue might otherwise result in excessive memory consumption by virtue of the container nodes that -- in some queue implementations -- are used to hold values. A bounded-capacity queue can provide flow control between components. Beware, however, that bounded collections can also result in resource deadlock if abused. The put() and take() operators are partial and wait for the collection to become non-full or non-empty, respectively. Put() and take() do not allocate memory, and are not vulnerable to the ABA pathologies. The PTLQueue algorithm can be implemented equally well in C/C++ and Java. Partial operators are often more convenient than total methods. In many use cases if the preconditions aren't met, there's nothing else useful the thread can do, so it may as well wait via a partial method. An exception is in the case of work-stealing queues where a thief might scan a set of queues from which it could potentially steal. Total methods return ASAP with a success-failure indication. (It's tempting to describe a queue or API as blocking or non-blocking instead of partial or total, but non-blocking is already an overloaded concurrency term. Perhaps waiting/non-waiting or patient/impatient might be better terms). It's also trivial to construct partial operators by busy-waiting via total operators, but such constructs may be less efficient than an operator explicitly and intentionally designed to wait. A PTLQueue instance contains an array of slots, where each slot has volatile Turn and MailBox fields. The array has power-of-two length allowing mod/div operations to be replaced by masking. We assume sensible padding and alignment to reduce the impact of false sharing. (On x86 I recommend 128-byte alignment and padding because of the adjacent-sector prefetch facility). Each queue also has PutCursor and TakeCursor cursor variables, each of which should be sequestered as the sole occupant of a cache line or sector. You can opt to use 64-bit integers if concerned about wrap-around aliasing in the cursor variables. Put(null) is considered illegal, but the caller or implementation can easily check for and convert null to a distinguished non-null proxy value if null happens to be a value you'd like to pass. Take() will accordingly convert the proxy value back to null. An advantage of PTLQueue is that you can use atomic fetch-and-increment for the partial methods. We initialize each slot at index I with (Turn=I, MailBox=null). Both cursors are initially 0. All shared variables are considered "volatile" and atomics such as CAS and AtomicFetchAndIncrement are presumed to have bidirectional fence semantics. Finally T is the templated type. I've sketched out a total tryTake() method below that allows the caller to poll the queue. tryPut() has an analogous construction. Zebra stripping : alternating row colors for nice-looking code listings. See also google code "prettify" : https://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/ Prettify is a javascript module that yields the HTML/CSS/JS equivalent of pretty-print. -- pre:nth-child(odd) { background-color:#ff0000; } pre:nth-child(even) { background-color:#0000ff; } border-left: 11px solid #ccc; margin: 1.7em 0 1.7em 0.3em; background-color:#BFB; font-size:12px; line-height:65%; " // PTLQueue : Put(v) : // producer : partial method - waits as necessary assert v != null assert Mask = 1 && (Mask & (Mask+1)) == 0 // Document invariants // doorway step // Obtain a sequence number -- ticket // As a practical concern the ticket value is temporally unique // The ticket also identifies and selects a slot auto tkt = AtomicFetchIncrement (&PutCursor, 1) slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] // waiting phase : // wait for slot's generation to match the tkt value assigned to this put() invocation. // The "generation" is implicitly encoded as the upper bits in the cursor // above those used to specify the index : tkt div (Mask+1) // The generation serves as an epoch number to identify a cohort of threads // accessing disjoint slots while s-Turn != tkt : Pause assert s-MailBox == null s-MailBox = v // deposit and pass message Take() : // consumer : partial method - waits as necessary auto tkt = AtomicFetchIncrement (&TakeCursor,1) slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] // 2-stage waiting : // First wait for turn for our generation // Acquire exclusive "take" access to slot's MailBox field // Then wait for the slot to become occupied while s-Turn != tkt : Pause // Concurrency in this section of code is now reduced to just 1 producer thread // vs 1 consumer thread. // For a given queue and slot, there will be most one Take() operation running // in this section. // Consumer waits for producer to arrive and make slot non-empty // Extract message; clear mailbox; advance Turn indicator // We have an obvious happens-before relation : // Put(m) happens-before corresponding Take() that returns that same "m" for T v = s-MailBox if v != null : s-MailBox = null ST-ST barrier s-Turn = tkt + Mask + 1 // unlock slot to admit next producer and consumer return v Pause tryTake() : // total method - returns ASAP with failure indication for auto tkt = TakeCursor slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] if s-Turn != tkt : return null T v = s-MailBox // presumptive return value if v == null : return null // ratify tkt and v values and commit by advancing cursor if CAS (&TakeCursor, tkt, tkt+1) != tkt : continue s-MailBox = null ST-ST barrier s-Turn = tkt + Mask + 1 return v The basic idea derives from the Partitioned Ticket Lock "PTL" (US20120240126-A1) and the MultiLane Concurrent Bag (US8689237). The latter is essentially a circular ring-buffer where the elements themselves are queues or concurrent collections. You can think of the PTLQueue as a partitioned ticket lock "PTL" augmented to pass values from lock to unlock via the slots. Alternatively, you could conceptualize of PTLQueue as a degenerate MultiLane bag where each slot or "lane" consists of a simple single-word MailBox instead of a general queue. Each lane in PTLQueue also has a private Turn field which acts like the Turn (Grant) variables found in PTL. Turn enforces strict FIFO ordering and restricts concurrency on the slot mailbox field to at most one simultaneous put() and take() operation. PTL uses a single "ticket" variable and per-slot Turn (grant) fields while MultiLane has distinct PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors and abstract per-slot sub-queues. Both PTL and MultiLane advance their cursor and ticket variables with atomic fetch-and-increment. PTLQueue borrows from both PTL and MultiLane and has distinct put and take cursors and per-slot Turn fields. Instead of a per-slot queues, PTLQueue uses a simple single-word MailBox field. PutCursor and TakeCursor act like a pair of ticket locks, conferring "put" and "take" access to a given slot. PutCursor, for instance, assigns an incoming put() request to a slot and serves as a PTL "Ticket" to acquire "put" permission to that slot's MailBox field. To better explain the operation of PTLQueue we deconstruct the operation of put() and take() as follows. Put() first increments PutCursor obtaining a new unique ticket. That ticket value also identifies a slot. Put() next waits for that slot's Turn field to match that ticket value. This is tantamount to using a PTL to acquire "put" permission on the slot's MailBox field. Finally, having obtained exclusive "put" permission on the slot, put() stores the message value into the slot's MailBox. Take() similarly advances TakeCursor, identifying a slot, and then acquires and secures "take" permission on a slot by waiting for Turn. Take() then waits for the slot's MailBox to become non-empty, extracts the message, and clears MailBox. Finally, take() advances the slot's Turn field, which releases both "put" and "take" access to the slot's MailBox. Note the asymmetry : put() acquires "put" access to the slot, but take() releases that lock. At any given time, for a given slot in a PTLQueue, at most one thread has "put" access and at most one thread has "take" access. This restricts concurrency from general MPMC to 1-vs-1. We have 2 ticket locks -- one for put() and one for take() -- each with its own "ticket" variable in the form of the corresponding cursor, but they share a single "Grant" egress variable in the form of the slot's Turn variable. Advancing the PutCursor, for instance, serves two purposes. First, we obtain a unique ticket which identifies a slot. Second, incrementing the cursor is the doorway protocol step to acquire the per-slot mutual exclusion "put" lock. The cursors and operations to increment those cursors serve double-duty : slot-selection and ticket assignment for locking the slot's MailBox field. At any given time a slot MailBox field can be in one of the following states: empty with no pending operations -- neutral state; empty with one or more waiting take() operations pending -- deficit; occupied with no pending operations; occupied with one or more waiting put() operations -- surplus; empty with a pending put() or pending put() and take() operations -- transitional; or occupied with a pending take() or pending put() and take() operations -- transitional. The partial put() and take() operators can be implemented with an atomic fetch-and-increment operation, which may confer a performance advantage over a CAS-based loop. In addition we have independent PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors. Critically, a put() operation modifies PutCursor but does not access the TakeCursor and a take() operation modifies the TakeCursor cursor but does not access the PutCursor. This acts to reduce coherence traffic relative to some other queue designs. It's worth noting that slow threads or obstruction in one slot (or "lane") does not impede or obstruct operations in other slots -- this gives us some degree of obstruction isolation. PTLQueue is not lock-free, however. The implementation above is expressed with polite busy-waiting (Pause) but it's trivial to implement per-slot parking and unparking to deschedule waiting threads. It's also easy to convert the queue to a more general deque by replacing the PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors with Left/Front and Right/Back cursors that can move either direction. Specifically, to push and pop from the "left" side of the deque we would decrement and increment the Left cursor, respectively, and to push and pop from the "right" side of the deque we would increment and decrement the Right cursor, respectively. We used a variation of PTLQueue for message passing in our recent OPODIS 2013 paper. ul { list-style:none; padding-left:0; padding:0; margin:0; margin-left:0; } ul#myTagID { padding: 0px; margin: 0px; list-style:none; margin-left:0;} -- -- There's quite a bit of related literature in this area. I'll call out a few relevant references: Wilson's NYU Courant Institute UltraComputer dissertation from 1988 is classic and the canonical starting point : Operating System Data Structures for Shared-Memory MIMD Machines with Fetch-and-Add. Regarding provenance and priority, I think PTLQueue or queues effectively equivalent to PTLQueue have been independently rediscovered a number of times. See CB-Queue and BNPBV, below, for instance. But Wilson's dissertation anticipates the basic idea and seems to predate all the others. Gottlieb et al : Basic Techniques for the Efficient Coordination of Very Large Numbers of Cooperating Sequential Processors Orozco et al : CB-Queue in Toward high-throughput algorithms on many-core architectures which appeared in TACO 2012. Meneghin et al : BNPVB family in Performance evaluation of inter-thread communication mechanisms on multicore/multithreaded architecture Dmitry Vyukov : bounded MPMC queue (highly recommended) Alex Otenko : US8607249 (highly related). John Mellor-Crummey : Concurrent queues: Practical fetch-and-phi algorithms. Technical Report 229, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester Thomasson : FIFO Distributed Bakery Algorithm (very similar to PTLQueue). Scott and Scherer : Dual Data Structures I'll propose an optimization left as an exercise for the reader. Say we wanted to reduce memory usage by eliminating inter-slot padding. Such padding is usually "dark" memory and otherwise unused and wasted. But eliminating the padding leaves us at risk of increased false sharing. Furthermore lets say it was usually the case that the PutCursor and TakeCursor were numerically close to each other. (That's true in some use cases). We might still reduce false sharing by incrementing the cursors by some value other than 1 that is not trivially small and is coprime with the number of slots. Alternatively, we might increment the cursor by one and mask as usual, resulting in a logical index. We then use that logical index value to index into a permutation table, yielding an effective index for use in the slot array. The permutation table would be constructed so that nearby logical indices would map to more distant effective indices. (Open question: what should that permutation look like? Possibly some perversion of a Gray code or De Bruijn sequence might be suitable). As an aside, say we need to busy-wait for some condition as follows : "while C == 0 : Pause". Lets say that C is usually non-zero, so we typically don't wait. But when C happens to be 0 we'll have to spin for some period, possibly brief. We can arrange for the code to be more machine-friendly with respect to the branch predictors by transforming the loop into : "if C == 0 : for { Pause; if C != 0 : break; }". Critically, we want to restructure the loop so there's one branch that controls entry and another that controls loop exit. A concern is that your compiler or JIT might be clever enough to transform this back to "while C == 0 : Pause". You can sometimes avoid this by inserting a call to a some type of very cheap "opaque" method that the compiler can't elide or reorder. On Solaris, for instance, you could use :"if C == 0 : { gethrtime(); for { Pause; if C != 0 : break; }}". It's worth noting the obvious duality between locks and queues. If you have strict FIFO lock implementation with local spinning and succession by direct handoff such as MCS or CLH,then you can usually transform that lock into a queue. Hidden commentary and annotations - invisible : * And of course there's a well-known duality between queues and locks, but I'll leave that topic for another blog post. * Compare and contrast : PTLQ vs PTL and MultiLane * Equivalent : Turn; seq; sequence; pos; position; ticket * Put = Lock; Deposit Take = identify and reserve slot; wait; extract & clear; unlock * conceptualize : Distinct PutLock and TakeLock implemented as ticket lock or PTL Distinct arrival cursors but share per-slot "Turn" variable provides exclusive role-based access to slot's mailbox field put() acquires exclusive access to a slot for purposes of "deposit" assigns slot round-robin and then acquires deposit access rights/perms to that slot take() acquires exclusive access to slot for purposes of "withdrawal" assigns slot round-robin and then acquires withdrawal access rights/perms to that slot At any given time, only one thread can have withdrawal access to a slot at any given time, only one thread can have deposit access to a slot Permissible for T1 to have deposit access and T2 to simultaneously have withdrawal access * round-robin for the purposes of; role-based; access mode; access role mailslot; mailbox; allocate/assign/identify slot rights; permission; license; access permission; * PTL/Ticket hybrid Asymmetric usage ; owner oblivious lock-unlock pairing K-exclusion add Grant cursor pass message m from lock to unlock via Slots[] array Cursor performs 2 functions : + PTL ticket + Assigns request to slot in round-robin fashion Deconstruct protocol : explication put() : allocate slot in round-robin fashion acquire PTL for "put" access store message into slot associated with PTL index take() : Acquire PTL for "take" access // doorway step seq = fetchAdd (&Grant, 1) s = &Slots[seq & Mask] // waiting phase while s-Turn != seq : pause Extract : wait for s-mailbox to be full v = s-mailbox s-mailbox = null Release PTL for both "put" and "take" access s-Turn = seq + Mask + 1 * Slot round-robin assignment and lock "doorway" protocol leverage the same cursor and FetchAdd operation on that cursor FetchAdd (&Cursor,1) + round-robin slot assignment and dispersal + PTL/ticket lock "doorway" step waiting phase is via "Turn" field in slot * PTLQueue uses 2 cursors -- put and take. Acquire "put" access to slot via PTL-like lock Acquire "take" access to slot via PTL-like lock 2 locks : put and take -- at most one thread can access slot's mailbox Both locks use same "turn" field Like multilane : 2 cursors : put and take slot is simple 1-capacity mailbox instead of queue Borrow per-slot turn/grant from PTL Provides strict FIFO Lock slot : put-vs-put take-vs-take at most one put accesses slot at any one time at most one put accesses take at any one time reduction to 1-vs-1 instead of N-vs-M concurrency Per slot locks for put/take Release put/take by advancing turn * is instrumental in ... * P-V Semaphore vs lock vs K-exclusion * See also : FastQueues-excerpt.java dice-etc/queue-mpmc-bounded-blocking-circular-xadd/ * PTLQueue is the same as PTLQB - identical * Expedient return; ASAP; prompt; immediately * Lamport's Bakery algorithm : doorway step then waiting phase Threads arriving at doorway obtain a unique ticket number Threads enter in ticket order * In the terminology of Reed and Kanodia a ticket lock corresponds to the busy-wait implementation of a semaphore using an eventcount and a sequencer It can also be thought of as an optimization of Lamport's bakery lock was designed for fault-tolerance rather than performance Instead of spinning on the release counter, processors using a bakery lock repeatedly examine the tickets of their peers --

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  • Issue 15: Oracle Exadata Marketing Campaigns

    - by rituchhibber
         PARTNER FOCUS Oracle ExadataMarketing Campaign Steve McNickleVP Europe, cVidya Steve McNickle is VP Europe for cVidya, an innovative provider of revenue intelligence solutions for telecom, media and entertainment service providers including AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone. The company's product portfolio helps operators and service providers maximise margins, improve customer experience and optimise ecosystem relationships through revenue assurance, fraud and security management, sales performance management, pricing analytics, and inter-carrier services. cVidya has partnered with Oracle for more than a decade. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Communications cVidya SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Are you ready for Oracle OpenWorld this October? -- -- Please could you tell us a little about cVidya's partnering history with Oracle, and expand on your Oracle Exastack accreditations? "cVidya was established just over ten years ago and we've had a strong relationship with Oracle almost since the very beginning. Through our Revenue Intelligence work with some of the world's largest service providers we collect tremendous amounts of information, amounting to billions of records per day. We help our clients to collect, store and analyse that data to ensure that their end customers are getting the best levels of service, are billed correctly, and are happy that they are on the correct price plan. We have been an Oracle Gold level partner for seven years, and crucially just two months ago we were also accredited as Oracle Exastack Optimized for MoneyMap, our core Revenue Assurance solution. Very soon we also expect to be Oracle Exastack Optimized DRMap, our Data Retention solution." What unique capabilities and customer benefits does Oracle Exastack add to your applications? "Oracle Exastack enables us to deliver radical benefits to our customers. A typical mobile operator in the UK might handle between 500 million and two billion call data record details daily. Each transaction needs to be validated, billed correctly and fraud checked. Because of the enormous volumes involved, our clients demand scalable infrastructure that allows them to efficiently acquire, store and process all that data within controlled cost, space and environmental constraints. We have proved that the Oracle Exadata system can process data up to seven times faster and load it as much as 20 times faster than other standard best-of-breed server approaches. With the Oracle Exadata Database Machine they can reduce their datacentre equipment from say, the six or seven cabinets that they needed in the past, down to just one. This dramatic simplification delivers incredible value to the customer by cutting down enormously on all of their significant cost, space, energy, cooling and maintenance overheads." "The Oracle Exastack Program has given our clients the ability to switch their focus from reactive to proactive. Traditionally they may have spent 80 percent of their day processing, and just 20 percent enabling end customers to see advanced analytics, and avoiding issues before they occur. With our solutions and Oracle Exadata they can now switch that balance around entirely, resulting not only in reduced revenue leakage, but a far higher focus on proactive leakage prevention. How has the Oracle Exastack Program transformed your customer business? "We can already see the impact. Oracle solutions allow our delivery teams to achieve successful deployments, happy customers and self-satisfaction, and the power of Oracle's Exa solutions is easy to measure in terms of their transformational ability. We gained our first sale into a major European telco by demonstrating the major performance gains that would transform their business. Clients can measure the ease of organisational change, the early prevention of business issues, the reduction in manpower required to provide protection and coverage across all their products and services, plus of course end customer satisfaction. If customers know that that service is provided accurately and that their bills are calculated correctly, then over time this satisfaction can be attributed to revenue intelligence and the underlying systems which provide it. Combine this with the further integration we have with the other layers of the Oracle stack, including the telecommunications offerings such as NCC, OCDM and BRM, and the result is even greater customer value—not to mention the increased speed to market and the reduced project risk." What does the Oracle Exastack community bring to cVidya, both in terms of general benefits, and also tangible new opportunities and partnerships? "A great deal. We have participated in the Oracle Exastack community heavily over the past year, and have had lots of meetings with Oracle and our peers around the globe. It brings us into contact with like-minded, innovative partners, who like us are not happy to just stand still and want to take fresh technology to their customer base in order to gain enhanced value. We identified three new partnerships in each of two recent meetings, and hope these will open up new opportunities, not only in areas that exactly match where we operate today, but also in some new associative areas that will expand our reach into new business sectors. Notably, thanks to the Exastack community we were invited on stage at last year's Oracle OpenWorld conference. Appearing so publically with Oracle senior VP Judson Althoff elevated awareness and visibility of cVidya and has enabled us to participate in a number of other events with Oracle over the past eight months. We've been involved in speaking opportunities, forums and exhibitions, providing us with invaluable opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have got close to." How has Exastack differentiated cVidya as an ISV, and helped you to evolve your business to the next level? "When we are selling to our core customer base of Tier 1 telecommunications providers, we know that they want more than just software. They want an enduring partnership that will last many years, they want innovation, and a forward thinking partner who knows how to guide them on where they need to be to meet market demand three, five or seven years down the line. Membership of respected global bodies, such as the Telemanagement Forum enables us to lead standard adherence in our area of business, giving us a lot of credibility, but Oracle is also involved in this forum with its own telecommunications portfolio, strengthening our position still further. When we approach CEOs, CTOs and CIOs at the very largest Tier 1 operators, not only can we easily show them that our technology is fantastic, we can also talk about our strong partnership with Oracle, and our joint embracing of today's standards and tomorrow's innovation." Where would you like cVidya to be in one year's time? "We want to get all of our relevant products Oracle Exastack Optimized. Our MoneyMap Revenue Assurance solution is already Exastack Optimised, our DRMAP Data Retention Solution should be Exastack Optimised within the next month, and our FraudView Fraud Management solution within the next two to three months. We'd then like to extend our Oracle accreditation out to include other members of the Oracle Engineered Systems family. We are moving into the 'Big Data' space, and so we're obviously very keen to work closely with Oracle to conduct pilots, map new technologies onto Oracle Big Data platforms, and embrace and measure the benefits of other Oracle systems, namely Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. We would also like to examine how the Oracle Database Appliance might benefit our Tier 2 service provider customers. Finally, we'd also like to continue working with the Oracle Communications Global Business Unit (CGBU), furthering our integration with Oracle billing products so that we are able to quickly deploy fraud solutions into Oracle's Engineered System stack, give operational benefits to our clients that are pre-integrated, more cost-effective, and can be rapidly deployed rapidly and producing benefits in three months, not nine months." Chris Baker ,Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners' business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? "Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best – building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best in class application platform so the ISV is free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success." How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? "We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme." How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? "One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry." What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? "My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data – a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle." What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? "As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation." Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? "The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: “I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud”. The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them." -- Gergely Strbik is Oracle Hardware and Software Product Manager for Avnet in Hungary. Avnet Technology Solutions is an OracleValue Added Distributor focused on the development of the existing Oracle channel. This includes the recruitment and enablement of Oracle partners as well as driving deeper adoption of Oracle's technology and application products within the IT channel. "The main business benefits of ODA for our customers and partners are scalability, flexibility, a great price point for the high performance delivered, and the easily configurable embedded Linux operating system. People welcome a lower point of entry and the ability to grow capacity on demand as their business expands." "Marketing and selling the ODA requires another way of thinking because it is an appliance. We have to transform the ways in which our partners and customers think from buying hardware and software independently to buying complete solutions. Successful early adopters and satisfied customer reactions will certainly help us to sell the ODA. We will have more experience with the product after the first deliveries and installations—end users need to see the power and benefits for themselves." "Our typical ODA customers will be those looking for complete solutions from a single reseller partner who is also able to manage the appliance. They will have enjoyed using Oracle Database but now want a new product that is able to unlock new levels of performance. A higher proportion of potential customers will come from our existing Oracle base, with around 30% from new business, but we intend to evangelise the ODA on the market to see how we can change this balance as all our customers adjust to the concept of 'Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together'. -- Back to the welcome page

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 09, 2014

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 09, 2014Popular ReleasesQuickMon: Version 3.9: First official release of the PowerShell script Collector. Corrective script can now also be PowerShell scripts! There are a couple of internal bugfixes to the core components as well. e.g. Overriding remote host setting now applies to ALL child collectors Main UI app now indicates (in Window title) if there are changes that needs to be saved. Polling frequency can be adjusted by 'slide bar' Note: If you have issues with the new PowerShell script collector please see my post about issu...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.21.4: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to Version 2.1.21.4The ReadStrings method of the binary reader will now convert strings straight from ASCII as they’re now being written in the data file as ASCII only. The ReadCollection method of the binary reader will now return arrays of integers rather than generic lists to reduce memory consumption. This change has required some public methods to use IList rather the List types. 3rd party source code that accesses the library via these methods may...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.597b: Thank you for being patient, againThere are a number of fixes in place with this release. and some new features added. Most are self explanatory, so check out the options in Preferences. Couple of new Features:* Movie - Allow save Title and Sort Title in Title Case format. * Movie - Allow save fanart.jpg if movie in folder. * TV - display episode source. Get episode source from episode filename. Fixed:* Movie - Added Fill Tags from plot keywords to Batch Rescraper. * Movie - Fixed TMDB s...SimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.3.0.0: Contains several bugfixes, newly identified properties and some UI improvements. Main new features UI overhaul for the main index list: Icons for each different index, including icons for different property files Tooltips for all relevant fields Removed clutter Identified hundreds of additional properties (thanks to MaxisGuillaume) - this should make modding gameplay easierSeal Report: Seal Report 1.4: New Features: Report Designer: New option to convert a Report Source into a Repository Source. Report Designer: New contextual helper menus to select, remove, copy, prompt elements in a model. Web Server: New option to expand sub-folders displayed in the tree view. Web Server: Web Folder Description File can be a .cshtml file to display a MVC View. Views: additional CSS parameters for some DIVs. NVD3 Chart: Some default configuration values have been changed. Issues Addressed:16 ...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.002: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.0.VidCoder: 1.5.22 Beta: Added ability to burn SRT subtitles. Updated to HandBrake SVN 6169. Added checks to prevent VidCoder from running with a database version newer than it expects. Tooltips in the Advanced Video panel now trigger on the field labels as well as the fields themselves. Fixed updating preset/profile/tune/level settings on changing video encoder. This should resolve some problems with QSV encoding. Fixed tunes and profiles getting set to blank when switching between x264 and x265. Fixed co...NuGet: NuGet 2.8.2: We will be releasing a 2.8.2 version of our own NuGet packages and the NuGet.exe command-line tool. The 2.8.2 release will not include updated VS or WebMatrix extensions. NuGet.Server.Extensions.dll needs to be used alongside NuGet-Signed.exe to provide the NuGet.exe mirror functionality.babelua: 1.5.3: V1.5.3 - 2014.5.6Stability improvement: support relative path when debugging lua files; improve variable view function in debugger; fix a bug that when a file is loaded at runtime , its breakpoints would not take effect; some other bug fix; New feature: improve tool windows color scheme to look better with different vs themes; comment/uncomment code block easily; some other improve;SmartStore.NET - Free ASP.NET MVC Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solution: SmartStore.NET 2.0.2: SmartStore.NET 2.0.2 is primarily a maintenance release for version 2.0.0, which has been released on April 04 2014. It contains several improvements & important fixes. BugfixesIMPORTANT FIX: Memory leak leads to OutOfMemoryException in application after a while Installation fix: some varchar(MAX) columns get created as varchar(4000). Added a migration to fix the column specs. Installation fix: Setup fails with exception Value cannot be null. Parameter name: stream Bugfix for stock iss...Channel9's Absolute Beginner Series: Windows Phone 8.1: Entire source code for Windows Phone 8.1 Absolute Beginner Series.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6.6: This BIDS Helper beta release brings support for SQL Server 2014 and SSDTBI for Visual Studio 2013. (Note that SSDTBI for Visual Studio 2013 is currently unavailable to download from Microsoft. We are releasing BIDS Helper support to help those who downloaded it before it became unavailable, and we will recheck BIDS Helper 2014 is compatible after SSDTBI becomes available to download again.) BIDS Helper 2014 Beta Limitations: SQL Server 2014 support for Biml is still in progress, so this bet...Windows Phone IsoStoreSpy (a cool WP8.1 + WP8 Isolated Storage Explorer): IsoStoreSpy WP8.1 3.0.0.0 (Win8 only): 3.0.0.0 + WP8.1 & WP8 device allowed + Local, Roaming or Temp directory Selector for WindowsRuntime apps + Version number in the title :)CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.24.0: ShortcutMapping panel now allows direct modification of the shortcuts. Custom updater dropped support for MSI installation but it still allows downloading of MSI http://www.csscript.net/npp/codeplex/non_msi_update.pngProDinner - ASP.NET MVC Sample (EF5, N-Tier, jQuery): 8.2: upgrade to mvc 5 upgrade to ASP.net MVC Awesome 4.0, EF 6.1, latest jcrop, Windsor Castle etc. ability to show/hide the dog using tinymce for the feedback page mobile friendly uiASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 4.0: version 4.0 ========================== - added InitPopup, InitPopupForm helpers, open initialized popups using awe.open(name, params) - added Tag or Tags for all helpers, usable in mod code - added popup aweclose, aweresize events - popups have api accessible via .data('api'), with methods open, close and destroy - all popups have .awe-popup class - popups can be grouped using .Group(string), only 1 popup in the same group can exist at the same time - added awebeginload event for...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.028.008 Release 2: Fixes for drag-drop copying. Added ship joiner, to rejoin a broken ship! Installation of this version will replace older version.ScreenToGif: Release 1.0: What's new: • Small UI tweaks everywhere. • You can add Text, Subtitles and Title Frames. • Processing the gif now takes less time. • Languages: Spanish, Italian and Tamil added. • Single .exe multi language. • Takes less time to apply blur and pixelated efect. • Restart button. • Language picker. (If the user wants to select a diferent language than the system's) • "Encoding Finished" page with a link to open the file. • GreenScreen unchanged pixels to save kilobytes. • "Check for Updates" t...Touchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 11: Changes Support for multiple monitor setup Additional settings for analog sticks More reliable pairing Bug fixes and improvementsPowerShell App Deployment Toolkit: PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit v3.1.2: Added Get-IniValue / Set-IniValue functions. Replaces Get-IniContent / Set-IniContent which were a bit unwieldy. The new functions are much easier to use. Added -Value parameter to Get-RegistryKey so that a specific registry value can be retrieved instead of the entire Key as an object Fixed Test-Battery to work with machines that can have multiple batteries Fixed issue where BlockExecution would fail if a Custom Temp Path was specified in the config file Updated examples with latest ...New ProjectsAgriComer: Este proyecto es creado con el objetivo inicial de ofrecer una herramienta integral para el comercio agrícola.AST - a tool for exploring windows kernel: A project for exploring windows kernel. It is consist of a Winform for presentation(by C#), and a windows driver(by C). VS2013 + WDK8.1 are required.CondimarSW: Sistema de ventasDeco Pattern: This project shows how the deco design pattern works.Geïntegreerd Project GH5: Geïntegreerd project .NET voor groep GH5Groep_EF4: PXL Groep EF4HttpRequestor: HttpRequestor is a nifty little tool for web developers, developed using Windows Forms, to make different types of HTTP requests to a web endpoint. IBehaviorPortable: This project has a single goal: to make it possible to write behaviors in a PCLKalkulator: Unit Test dan Coded UI TestLorenOS: LorenOS, an operating system based on MikeOSModernUI Extend: ModernUI ExtendPetite Scheme auto-execute pipeline: This program was originally created to avoid the steep learning curve of Emacs, and allow any editor to be used with ease for Chez Petite Scheme.projectgroep3.net: .net project for schoolReadable Athens (Hold-Cold Interactive Map): Demo application for Readable Athens art project Pins JPGs on map (using GPS EXIF info), shows at pin hover, louder noise closer to more text (*.jpg.txt OCRed)Training_Network_Messenger: Training network messengerTsLinq: This is a linq like implementation for typescript. Because typescript gets compiled into javascript, you can use this library for common javascript too.TSQL Smells SSDT: TSQL 'smells' finders TSQL Code can smell, it may work just fine but there can be hidden dangers held within. ??????-??????【??】????????: ?????????????????????????????,??????????,????,????,?????????、??????,??????。??????-??????【??】????????: ????????????????,?????????????? ??。????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。????-????【??】??????: ??????,??????:?????,?????,??????,??????????,????????。????????!?????-?????【??】???????: ?????????????????????????,????,????,??????????。???????????????,??,??,??????????,??????...?????-?????【??】?????????: ??????????????????????:????、????、??????????????,????????。????????!???????-???????【??】?????????: ???????????????????,???????????,??????????????,??????????,??????????????!???????-???????????: ????????????????,???????????????。???????????,??????:????、????、???????!?????-?????【??】???????: ??????????????????,?????????????,????,??????????,?????????????,?????,?????!??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????、????、????、??????、????、????????,????????、?????????,?????。??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,??????????????、???????、???????、???????、?????!??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,?????????????。?????????????????,???????,???????,?????,?????。????-????【??】??????: ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ??????? ?????,????????????????.????-????【??】????????: ????????????????????????,???????????,????????,?????????????????????。??????-??????【??】????????: ????????????????,????,????,??????,????“????、????、????、????”????????,??????.??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????????,????“???????,???????”?????,????????????!?????-?????【??】???????: ????????????,?????,???????????,???????,????,????,????,?????。?????-?????【??】?????????: ???????????????????,????????:??、??、???,?????????????????????!?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????????????,????????????????,????????????????,??????!??????-??????【??】????????: ????????????????????,??????????,????????、????,??????????,??????????。??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????、????,??100%????,??????,????????????,???????????!??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????6?,???????????????????????????,??????????????,?????????!????-????【??】????????: ??????????、???、??、??????????????????????????????,????????????????! ????-????【??】????????: ???????????????????????????、????、????、???????????,????,????!?????-?????【??】???????: ???????????,????,??????????? ???? ???? ?????????,???,??,?????!

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  • Why should main() be short?

    - by Stargazer712
    I've been programming for over 9 years, and according to the advice of my first programming teacher, I always keep my main() function extremely short. At first I had no idea why. I just obeyed without understanding, much to the delight of my professors. After gaining experience, I realized that if I designed my code correctly, having a short main() function just sortof happened. Writing modularized code and following the single responsibility principle allowed my code to be designed in "bunches", and main() served as nothing more than a catalyst to get the program running. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I was looking at Python's souce code, and I found the main() function: /* Minimal main program -- everything is loaded from the library */ ... int main(int argc, char **argv) { ... return Py_Main(argc, argv); } Yay python. Short main() function == Good code. Programming teachers were right. Wanting to look deeper, I took a look at Py_Main. In its entirety, it is defined as follows: /* Main program */ int Py_Main(int argc, char **argv) { int c; int sts; char *command = NULL; char *filename = NULL; char *module = NULL; FILE *fp = stdin; char *p; int unbuffered = 0; int skipfirstline = 0; int stdin_is_interactive = 0; int help = 0; int version = 0; int saw_unbuffered_flag = 0; PyCompilerFlags cf; cf.cf_flags = 0; orig_argc = argc; /* For Py_GetArgcArgv() */ orig_argv = argv; #ifdef RISCOS Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 0; #endif PySys_ResetWarnOptions(); while ((c = _PyOS_GetOpt(argc, argv, PROGRAM_OPTS)) != EOF) { if (c == 'c') { /* -c is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the command to interpret. */ command = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (command == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -c argument"); strcpy(command, _PyOS_optarg); strcat(command, "\n"); break; } if (c == 'm') { /* -m is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the module to interpret. */ module = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (module == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -m argument"); strcpy(module, _PyOS_optarg); break; } switch (c) { case 'b': Py_BytesWarningFlag++; break; case 'd': Py_DebugFlag++; break; case '3': Py_Py3kWarningFlag++; if (!Py_DivisionWarningFlag) Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; case 'Q': if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "old") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 0; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warn") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warnall") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 2; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "new") == 0) { /* This only affects __main__ */ cf.cf_flags |= CO_FUTURE_DIVISION; /* And this tells the eval loop to treat BINARY_DIVIDE as BINARY_TRUE_DIVIDE */ _Py_QnewFlag = 1; break; } fprintf(stderr, "-Q option should be `-Qold', " "`-Qwarn', `-Qwarnall', or `-Qnew' only\n"); return usage(2, argv[0]); /* NOTREACHED */ case 'i': Py_InspectFlag++; Py_InteractiveFlag++; break; /* case 'J': reserved for Jython */ case 'O': Py_OptimizeFlag++; break; case 'B': Py_DontWriteBytecodeFlag++; break; case 's': Py_NoUserSiteDirectory++; break; case 'S': Py_NoSiteFlag++; break; case 'E': Py_IgnoreEnvironmentFlag++; break; case 't': Py_TabcheckFlag++; break; case 'u': unbuffered++; saw_unbuffered_flag = 1; break; case 'v': Py_VerboseFlag++; break; #ifdef RISCOS case 'w': Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 1; break; #endif case 'x': skipfirstline = 1; break; /* case 'X': reserved for implementation-specific arguments */ case 'U': Py_UnicodeFlag++; break; case 'h': case '?': help++; break; case 'V': version++; break; case 'W': PySys_AddWarnOption(_PyOS_optarg); break; /* This space reserved for other options */ default: return usage(2, argv[0]); /*NOTREACHED*/ } } if (help) return usage(0, argv[0]); if (version) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s\n", PY_VERSION); return 0; } if (Py_Py3kWarningFlag && !Py_TabcheckFlag) /* -3 implies -t (but not -tt) */ Py_TabcheckFlag = 1; if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') Py_InspectFlag = 1; if (!saw_unbuffered_flag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONUNBUFFERED")) && *p != '\0') unbuffered = 1; if (!Py_NoUserSiteDirectory && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONNOUSERSITE")) && *p != '\0') Py_NoUserSiteDirectory = 1; if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONWARNINGS")) && *p != '\0') { char *buf, *warning; buf = (char *)malloc(strlen(p) + 1); if (buf == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy PYTHONWARNINGS"); strcpy(buf, p); for (warning = strtok(buf, ","); warning != NULL; warning = strtok(NULL, ",")) PySys_AddWarnOption(warning); free(buf); } if (command == NULL && module == NULL && _PyOS_optind < argc && strcmp(argv[_PyOS_optind], "-") != 0) { #ifdef __VMS filename = decc$translate_vms(argv[_PyOS_optind]); if (filename == (char *)0 || filename == (char *)-1) filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #else filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #endif } stdin_is_interactive = Py_FdIsInteractive(stdin, (char *)0); if (unbuffered) { #if defined(MS_WINDOWS) || defined(__CYGWIN__) _setmode(fileno(stdin), O_BINARY); _setmode(fileno(stdout), O_BINARY); #endif #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ setbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL); #endif /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ } else if (Py_InteractiveFlag) { #ifdef MS_WINDOWS /* Doesn't have to have line-buffered -- use unbuffered */ /* Any set[v]buf(stdin, ...) screws up Tkinter :-( */ setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !MS_WINDOWS */ #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); #endif /* HAVE_SETVBUF */ #endif /* !MS_WINDOWS */ /* Leave stderr alone - it should be unbuffered anyway. */ } #ifdef __VMS else { setvbuf (stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); } #endif /* __VMS */ #ifdef __APPLE__ /* On MacOS X, when the Python interpreter is embedded in an application bundle, it gets executed by a bootstrapping script that does os.execve() with an argv[0] that's different from the actual Python executable. This is needed to keep the Finder happy, or rather, to work around Apple's overly strict requirements of the process name. However, we still need a usable sys.executable, so the actual executable path is passed in an environment variable. See Lib/plat-mac/bundlebuiler.py for details about the bootstrap script. */ if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONEXECUTABLE")) && *p != '\0') Py_SetProgramName(p); else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #endif Py_Initialize(); if (Py_VerboseFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL && stdin_is_interactive)) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s on %s\n", Py_GetVersion(), Py_GetPlatform()); if (!Py_NoSiteFlag) fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", COPYRIGHT); } if (command != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } if (module != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' so that PySys_SetArgv correctly sets sys.path[0] to '' rather than looking for a file called "-m". See tracker issue #8202 for details. */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } PySys_SetArgv(argc-_PyOS_optind, argv+_PyOS_optind); if ((Py_InspectFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL)) && isatty(fileno(stdin))) { PyObject *v; v = PyImport_ImportModule("readline"); if (v == NULL) PyErr_Clear(); else Py_DECREF(v); } if (command) { sts = PyRun_SimpleStringFlags(command, &cf) != 0; free(command); } else if (module) { sts = RunModule(module, 1); free(module); } else { if (filename == NULL && stdin_is_interactive) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* do exit on SystemExit */ RunStartupFile(&cf); } /* XXX */ sts = -1; /* keep track of whether we've already run __main__ */ if (filename != NULL) { sts = RunMainFromImporter(filename); } if (sts==-1 && filename!=NULL) { if ((fp = fopen(filename, "r")) == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: can't open file '%s': [Errno %d] %s\n", argv[0], filename, errno, strerror(errno)); return 2; } else if (skipfirstline) { int ch; /* Push back first newline so line numbers remain the same */ while ((ch = getc(fp)) != EOF) { if (ch == '\n') { (void)ungetc(ch, fp); break; } } } { /* XXX: does this work on Win/Win64? (see posix_fstat) */ struct stat sb; if (fstat(fileno(fp), &sb) == 0 && S_ISDIR(sb.st_mode)) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: '%s' is a directory, cannot continue\n", argv[0], filename); fclose(fp); return 1; } } } if (sts==-1) { /* call pending calls like signal handlers (SIGINT) */ if (Py_MakePendingCalls() == -1) { PyErr_Print(); sts = 1; } else { sts = PyRun_AnyFileExFlags( fp, filename == NULL ? "<stdin>" : filename, filename != NULL, &cf) != 0; } } } /* Check this environment variable at the end, to give programs the * opportunity to set it from Python. */ if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') { Py_InspectFlag = 1; } if (Py_InspectFlag && stdin_is_interactive && (filename != NULL || command != NULL || module != NULL)) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* XXX */ sts = PyRun_AnyFileFlags(stdin, "<stdin>", &cf) != 0; } Py_Finalize(); #ifdef RISCOS if (Py_RISCOSWimpFlag) fprintf(stderr, "\x0cq\x0c"); /* make frontend quit */ #endif #ifdef __INSURE__ /* Insure++ is a memory analysis tool that aids in discovering * memory leaks and other memory problems. On Python exit, the * interned string dictionary is flagged as being in use at exit * (which it is). Under normal circumstances, this is fine because * the memory will be automatically reclaimed by the system. Under * memory debugging, it's a huge source of useless noise, so we * trade off slower shutdown for less distraction in the memory * reports. -baw */ _Py_ReleaseInternedStrings(); #endif /* __INSURE__ */ return sts; } Good God Almighty...it is big enough to sink the Titanic. It seems as though Python did the "Intro to Programming 101" trick and just moved all of main()'s code to a different function called it something very similar to "main". Here's my question: Is this code terribly written, or are there other reasons to have a short main function? As it stands right now, I see absolutely no difference between doing this and just moving the code in Py_Main() back into main(). Am I wrong in thinking this?

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, July 08, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, July 08, 2012Popular ReleasesBlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.7: 2012.07.08 Ver5.6.7 (1) ????????????????「????? Request.Receve()」?????????? (2) Web???????????FlMML customized: FlMML customized ??: FlMML customized ????。 ??、PCM??????????、??????。ecBlog: ecBlog 0.2: ecBlog alpha realaseTaskScheduler ASP.NET: Release 3 - 1.2.0.0: Release 3 - Version 1.2.0.0 That version was altered only the library: In TaskScheduler was added new properties: UseBackgroundThreads Enables the use of separate threads for each task. StoreThreadsInPool Manager enables to store in the Pool threads that are performing the tasks. OnStopSchedulerAutoCancelThreads Scheduler allows aborting threads when it is stopped. false if the scheduler is not aborted the threads that are running. AutoDeletedExecutedTasks Allows Manager Delete Task afte...DotNetNuke Persian Packages: ??? ?? ???? ????? ???? 6.2.0: *????? ???? ??? ?? ???? 6.2.0 ? ??????? ???? ????? ???? ??? ????? *????? ????? ????? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??????? ??????? - ???? *?????? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ???? ????? ? ?? ??? ?? ???? ???? ?? *????? ????? ????? ????? ????? / ??????? ???? ?? ???? ??? ??? - ???? *???? ???? ???? ????? ? ??????? ??? ??? ??? ?? ???? *????? ????? ???????? ??? ? ??????? ?? ?? ?????? ????? ????????? ????? ?????? - ???? *????? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ?? ?? ?? ???????? ????? ????? ????????? ????? ?????? *???? ?...testtom07052012git02: r1: r1Cypher Bot: Cypher Bot 4.1: Cypher Bot is the most advanced encryption tool on the planet.... and now it actually works. That's right we fixed the bugs! For a full program summary go to the Home Page or visit www.iRareMedia.com So what's new? We've pretty much fixed all the bugs, but here's a run down if you wanna know exactly what's different: Fixed Installation / Setup Error, where an error message would display: "No Internet Connection, Try Again Later" Fixed File Encryption / Decryption error where the file exten...Coding4Fun Kinect Service: Coding4Fun Kinect Service v1.5: Requires Kinect for Windows SDK v1.5 Minor bug fixes + Kinect for Windows SDK v1.5 Aligning version with the Kinect for Windows SDK requiredtedplay: tedplay 1.1: tedplay 1.1 source and Win32 binary is out now. Changes are: SID card support Commodore 64 PSID music format support optimized FIR filter global hotkeys for skipping tracks (Windows only) module properties window (Windows only) mutable noise channel via GUI button (Windows only) disable SID card from the menu (Windows only) bugfixes PSID tunes are played on the C64 clock frequency but in a Commodore plus/4 virtual machine. The purpose is not to have yet another SID player, but t...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib-resharper 0.6 (RS 7.0, 6.1.1): xunitcontrib release 0.6 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 7.0 (EAP build 82) and 6.1, targetting all versions of xUnit.net. (See the xUnit.net project to download xUnit.net itself.) Copies of the plugin that support previous verions of ReSharper can be downloaded from this release. The plan is to support the latest revisions of the last two paid-for major versions of ReSharper (namely 7.0 and 6.1) Also note that all builds work against ALL VERSIONS...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.8.0 Beta: Whats newuComponents in the core Multi-Node Tree Picker, Multiple Textstring, Slider and XPath Lists Easier Lucene searching built in IFile providers for easier file handling Updated 3rd party libraries Applications / Trees moved out of the database SQL Azure support added Various bug fixes Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to...CODE Framework: 4.0.20704.0: See CODE Framework (.NET) Change Log for changes in this version.xUnit.net - Unit testing framework for C# and .NET (a successor to NUnit): xUnit.net 1.9.1: xUnit.net release 1.9.1Build #1600 Important note for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. Important note for VS2012 users: The VS2012 runner is in the Visual Studio Gallery now, and should be installed via Tools | Extension Manager from insi...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 2.2.0: Added Modified all Mv4 related features to conform with the Mvc4 RC Now all items controls accept any IEnumerable<T>(before just List<T> were accepted by most of controls) retrievalManager class that retrieves automatically data from a data source whenever it catchs events triggered by filtering, sorting, and paging controls move method to the updatesManager to move one child objects from a father to another. The move operation can be undone like the insert, update and delete operatio...IronPython: 2.7.3: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm happy to announce the final release of IronPython 2.7.3. This release includes everything from IronPython 54498, 62475, and 74478 as well. Like all IronPython 2.7-series releases, .NET 4 is required to install it. Installing this release will replace any existing IronPython 2.7-series installation. The incompatibility with IronRuby has been resolved, and they can once again be installed side-by-side. The biggest improvements in IronPython 2.7.3 are: the...Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (v1.0.68.441): Just a bug fix release for when the connections try to refresh after an edit. Make sure you read the Quickstart for an introduction.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.58: Fix for Issue #18296: provide "ALL" value to the -ignore switch to ignore all error and warning messages. Fix for issue #18293: if encountering EOF before a function declaration or expression is properly closed, throw an appropriate error and don't crash. Adjust the variable-renaming algorithm so it's very specific when renaming variables with the same number of references so a single source file ends up with the same minified names on different platforms. add the ability to specify kno...LogExpert: 1.4 build 4566: This release for the 1.4 version line contains various fixes which have been made some times ago. Until now these fixes were only available in the 1.5 alpha versions. It also contains a fix for: 710. Column finder (press F8 to show) Terminal server issues: Multiple sessions with same user should work now Settings Export/Import available via Settings Dialog still incomple (e.g. tab colors are not saved) maybe I change the file format one day no command line support yet (for importin...CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8.5 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. FluentscriptCommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 contains a scripting language called FluentScript. Releases notes for FluentScript located at http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/wikipage?action=Edit&title=Release%20Notes&referringTitle=Documentation Fluentscript - 0.9.8.5 - Final ReleaseApplication: FluentScript Versio...SharePoint 2010 Metro UI: SharePoint 2010 Metro UI8: Please review the documentation link for how to install. Installation takes some basic knowledge of how to upload and edit SharePoint Artifact files. Please view the discussions tab for ongoing FAQsNew ProjectsAdventures of Adventure Land: Adventures of Adventure Land is a new text based adventure. You will be able to level up, fight challenging enemies, use magical spells, and simply adventure.AdventureWorks Silverlight samples: AdventureWorks Silverlight samplesAFS.Collab.Duplex: my duplexarmmychan: ????????C# - WPF - .Net - MSSQL - Open Source Restaurant POS System: A C# .Net / WPF / MSSQL Restaurant Point of Sale (POS) Software that is PCI-DSS 2.0 Compliant running stable in many restaurants / integrated with MercuryPay.dcview: dcinside.com? ??? ? ?? ?? ??? ???? ???.DotNetNuke Contact Form: simple yet effective DotNetNuke contact formISBNdb.com Helper Library: A .net helper library that encapsulates all the functionality of the API at www.isbndb.com in .NET CLR objects.JPO Class Register: Simple class register.NACHA C# Class with WPF Test App: Do you need to generate a NACHA PPD file? This is great starting point for you! Actually, it's a great, almost finished, point for you! More info below.NotificationsWidget In ASP MVC: SummaryPayPal Manager: I decided to make a basic (for now) desktop client for PayPal to get better at WebRequests in VB.NET. I will be adding much more such as sending payments, etc.Pomodoro Timer Count Down App: Pomodoro count down timer Application Features ------------------------------- Pomodoro Mode Count down timer mode Start stop pause Notification Powershell HTML Highlight: Powershell html syntax highlightingProject F10_P1: F10 p1Razor-sharp your skills: This project will have details about the C# 2.0 C# 3.0 C# 4.0 C# 5.0 Salaria: Bienvenue sur notre projet "Salaria".SharePoint 2010 - Unlock SP Files: Unlock any file in SharePoint or get lock information of a SharePoint file.( Compatible with office 365) ""The file "" is locked for exclusive use by""SharePoint 2010 Metro Masterpage: This project will give you a full metro masterpage for sharepoint 2010SharePoint Cache Refresh Framework: This project's aim is build a small and easy to use framework for SharePoint developers to be able to control cached objects across servers in a SharePoint FarmTFSProjectTest: A test project.uhimania test project: testUpgrade SPSolution: This is a Sharepoint 2010 Management Shell cmdlet, which upgrades a sharepoint solution and installs/activates any new features added in the package.Video Frame Explorer: Video Frame Explorer allows you to make thumbnails (caps, previews) of video files. It supports of practically any videos-formats (even MP4, MKV, MOV if you havWML: WML

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 10, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 10, 2012Popular ReleasesjListSelect - jQuery plug-in for a fully customizable select input: 1.0: This is the initial release. Documentation is available using the Documentation tab above and inside the JavaScript code.Push Framework: Push Framework 1.5: This version brings many bug fixes and enhancements to its predecessor.DbDiff: Database Diff and Database Scripting: 1.1.3.3: Sql 2005, Sql 2012 fixes Removed dbdiff recommended default exe because it was a wrong build.re-linq: 1.13.158: This is build 1.13.158 of re-linq. Find the complete release notes for the build here: Release NotesMishra Reader: Mishra Reader beta 3: Per-feed browsing Tons of bug fixes Note: This release requires .NET 4.5 RC. You'll be prompted to install it if you don't already have it. The RC will be upgradeable to the RTM once it's available.MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V4 RTM: The issue with the installer is fixed, sorry for the problems folks This version supports Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, Silverlight 5, WPF 3.5 SP1, WPF4, Windows Phone 7.0 and 7.5, WinRT (Windows 8). Support for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 RC.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.7: 2012.07.08 Ver5.6.7 (1) ????????????????「????? Request.Receve()」?????????? (2) Web???????????FlMML customized: FlMML customized ??: FlMML customized ????。 ??、PCM??????????、??????。ecBlog: ecBlog 0.2: ecBlog alpha realaseTaskScheduler ASP.NET: Release 3 - 1.2.0.0: Release 3 - Version 1.2.0.0 That version was altered only the library: In TaskScheduler was added new properties: UseBackgroundThreads Enables the use of separate threads for each task. StoreThreadsInPool Manager enables to store in the Pool threads that are performing the tasks. OnStopSchedulerAutoCancelThreads Scheduler allows aborting threads when it is stopped. false if the scheduler is not aborted the threads that are running. AutoDeletedExecutedTasks Allows Manager Delete Task afte...DotNetNuke Persian Packages: ??? ?? ???? ????? ???? 6.2.0: *????? ???? ??? ?? ???? 6.2.0 ? ??????? ???? ????? ???? ??? ????? *????? ????? ????? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??????? ??????? - ???? *?????? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ???? ????? ? ?? ??? ?? ???? ???? ?? *????? ????? ????? ????? ????? / ??????? ???? ?? ???? ??? ??? - ???? *???? ???? ???? ????? ? ??????? ??? ??? ??? ?? ???? *????? ????? ???????? ??? ? ??????? ?? ?? ?????? ????? ????????? ????? ?????? - ???? *????? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ?? ?? ?? ???????? ????? ????? ????????? ????? ?????? *???? ?...Cypher Bot: Cypher Bot 4.1: Cypher Bot is the most advanced encryption tool on the planet.... and now it actually works. That's right we fixed the bugs! For a full program summary go to the Home Page or visit www.iRareMedia.com So what's new? We've pretty much fixed all the bugs, but here's a run down if you wanna know exactly what's different: Fixed Installation / Setup Error, where an error message would display: "No Internet Connection, Try Again Later" Fixed File Encryption / Decryption error where the file exten...Coding4Fun Kinect Service: Coding4Fun Kinect Service v1.5: Requires Kinect for Windows SDK v1.5 Minor bug fixes + Kinect for Windows SDK v1.5 Aligning version with the Kinect for Windows SDK requiredtedplay: tedplay 1.1: tedplay 1.1 source and Win32 binary is out now. Changes are: SID card support Commodore 64 PSID music format support optimized FIR filter global hotkeys for skipping tracks (Windows only) module properties window (Windows only) mutable noise channel via GUI button (Windows only) disable SID card from the menu (Windows only) bugfixes PSID tunes are played on the C64 clock frequency but in a Commodore plus/4 virtual machine. The purpose is not to have yet another SID player, but t...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib-resharper 0.6 (RS 7.0, 6.1.1): xunitcontrib release 0.6 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 7.0 (EAP build 82) and 6.1, targetting all versions of xUnit.net. (See the xUnit.net project to download xUnit.net itself.) Copies of the plugin that support previous verions of ReSharper can be downloaded from this release. The plan is to support the latest revisions of the last two paid-for major versions of ReSharper (namely 7.0 and 6.1) Also note that all builds work against ALL VERSIONS...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.8.0 Beta: Whats newuComponents in the core Multi-Node Tree Picker, Multiple Textstring, Slider and XPath Lists Easier Lucene searching built in IFile providers for easier file handling Updated 3rd party libraries Applications / Trees moved out of the database SQL Azure support added Various bug fixes Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to...CODE Framework: 4.0.20704.0: See CODE Framework (.NET) Change Log for changes in this version.xUnit.net - Unit testing framework for C# and .NET (a successor to NUnit): xUnit.net 1.9.1: xUnit.net release 1.9.1Build #1600 Important note for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. Important note for VS2012 users: The VS2012 runner is in the Visual Studio Gallery now, and should be installed via Tools | Extension Manager from insi...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 2.2.0: Added Modified all Mv4 related features to conform with the Mvc4 RC Now all items controls accept any IEnumerable<T>(before just List<T> were accepted by most of controls) retrievalManager class that retrieves automatically data from a data source whenever it catchs events triggered by filtering, sorting, and paging controls move method to the updatesManager to move one child objects from a father to another. The move operation can be undone like the insert, update and delete operatio...IronPython: 2.7.3: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm happy to announce the final release of IronPython 2.7.3. This release includes everything from IronPython 54498, 62475, and 74478 as well. Like all IronPython 2.7-series releases, .NET 4 is required to install it. Installing this release will replace any existing IronPython 2.7-series installation. The incompatibility with IronRuby has been resolved, and they can once again be installed side-by-side. The biggest improvements in IronPython 2.7.3 are: the...New ProjectsAuction Helper: Auction HelperBizTalk 0MQ Adapter: The BizTalk 0MQ Adapter allows BizTalk to send and receive messages using the ZeroMq cross platform messaging framework.fluentstatement: FluentStatement is a library for .NET usable to create Expressions Trees through its fluent interface. These ET can contain Lambda Expressions and Statements.Freemansoft: ??????????????????gppsoftware: gppsoftwarejAutoFitText - jQuery plug-in to auto-fit text similar to iOS applications: This is a jQuery plug-in that automatically fits text in a specific container using font size manipulation and/or string truncation. The end result is simjDelayedAction - jQuery plug-in to allow a delayed reaction to an event: This is a jQuery plug-in that allows the creation of an event (or multiple event) handler with a delay that can be extended or canceled before reacting.jInMemoryImageLoader - jQuery plug-in to asynchronously load an image: This is a jQuery plug-in that allows the asynchronous, in-memory loading of an image file with a callback for when it has succeeded or failed to load.jListSelect - jQuery plug-in for a fully customizable select input: A jQuery plug-in that allows you to create a fully customizable select input.jNumericalInput - jQuery plug-in to limit a text input to only numeric values: A simple jQuery plug-in that, when applied to an input of type text, only allows the input to have a numeric value (positive or negative).jVerticalAlignMiddle - jQuery plug-in to vertically align elements: A simple jQuery plug-in that vertically centers one element within its parent container.lhhp.net: this project is for testLiteCode: Your having enough of crackers, reverse engineers ? With LiteCode you can host your code remotely at a server where no cracker can touch itNetEx .net tool set: NetEx .net tool setOpenFlashChart: OpenFlashChart ??????Flash Chart??。 Project RPG: Developers learn how to design a game from the ground up.saka-pon.net: saka-pon.net.School System: Its all about school managementSeeForYourself: SeeForYourSelfSharepoint JQuery Editor Web Part: Enables quick JQuery development by executing your code immediately while in desing mode.Simplex: Simplex ???????????????J2EE???????????????。 Stuff.NET: This library provides several useful classes and methods to deal with frequently appearing challenges. e.g.: pathfinding, forms/controls, dynamic compiling, ...

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  • Cisco ASA: Allowing and Denying VPN Access based on membership to an AD group

    - by milkandtang
    I have a Cisco ASA 5505 connecting to an Active Directory server for VPN authentication. Usually we'd restrict this to a particular OU, but in this case users which need access are spread across multiple OUs. So, I'd like to use a group to specify which users have remote access. I've created the group and added the users, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to deny users which aren't in that group. Right now, if someone connects they get assigned the correct group policy "companynamera" if they are in that group, so the LDAP mapping is working. However, users who are not in that group still authenticate fine, and their group policy becomes the LDAP path of their first group, i.e. CN=Domain Users,CN=Users,DC=example,DC=com, and then are still allowed access. How do I add a filter so that I can map everything that isn't "companynamera" to no access? Config I'm using (with some stuff such as ACLs and mappings removed, since they are just noise here): gateway# show run : Saved : ASA Version 8.2(1) ! hostname gateway domain-name corp.company-name.com enable password gDZcqZ.aUC9ML0jK encrypted passwd gDZcqZ.aUC9ML0jK encrypted names name 192.168.0.2 dc5 description FTP Server name 192.168.0.5 dc2 description Everything server name 192.168.0.6 dc4 description File Server name 192.168.0.7 ts1 description Light Use Terminal Server name 192.168.0.8 ts2 description Heavy Use Terminal Server name 4.4.4.82 primary-frontier name 5.5.5.26 primary-eschelon name 172.21.18.5 dmz1 description Kerio Mail Server and FTP Server name 4.4.4.84 ts-frontier name 4.4.4.85 vpn-frontier name 5.5.5.28 ts-eschelon name 5.5.5.29 vpn-eschelon name 5.5.5.27 email-eschelon name 4.4.4.83 guest-frontier name 4.4.4.86 email-frontier dns-guard ! interface Vlan1 nameif inside security-level 100 ip address 192.168.0.254 255.255.255.0 ! interface Vlan2 description Frontier FiOS nameif outside security-level 0 ip address primary-frontier 255.255.255.0 ! interface Vlan3 description Eschelon T1 nameif backup security-level 0 ip address primary-eschelon 255.255.255.248 ! interface Vlan4 nameif dmz security-level 50 ip address 172.21.18.254 255.255.255.0 ! interface Vlan5 nameif guest security-level 25 ip address 172.21.19.254 255.255.255.0 ! interface Ethernet0/0 switchport access vlan 2 ! interface Ethernet0/1 switchport access vlan 3 ! interface Ethernet0/2 switchport access vlan 4 ! interface Ethernet0/3 switchport access vlan 5 ! interface Ethernet0/4 ! interface Ethernet0/5 ! interface Ethernet0/6 ! interface Ethernet0/7 ! ftp mode passive clock timezone PST -8 clock summer-time PDT recurring dns domain-lookup inside dns server-group DefaultDNS name-server dc2 domain-name corp.company-name.com same-security-traffic permit intra-interface access-list companyname_splitTunnelAcl standard permit 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 access-list companyname_splitTunnelAcl standard permit 172.21.18.0 255.255.255.0 access-list inside_nat0_outbound extended permit ip any 172.21.20.0 255.255.255.0 access-list inside_nat0_outbound extended permit ip any 172.21.18.0 255.255.255.0 access-list bypassingnat_dmz extended permit ip 172.21.18.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 pager lines 24 logging enable logging buffer-size 12288 logging buffered warnings logging asdm notifications mtu inside 1500 mtu outside 1500 mtu backup 1500 mtu dmz 1500 mtu guest 1500 ip local pool VPNpool 172.21.20.50-172.21.20.59 mask 255.255.255.0 no failover icmp unreachable rate-limit 1 burst-size 1 no asdm history enable arp timeout 14400 global (outside) 1 interface global (outside) 2 email-frontier global (outside) 3 guest-frontier global (backup) 1 interface global (dmz) 1 interface nat (inside) 0 access-list inside_nat0_outbound nat (inside) 2 dc5 255.255.255.255 nat (inside) 1 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 nat (dmz) 0 access-list bypassingnat_dmz nat (dmz) 2 dmz1 255.255.255.255 nat (dmz) 1 172.21.18.0 255.255.255.0 access-group outside_access_in in interface outside access-group dmz_access_in in interface dmz route outside 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 4.4.4.1 1 track 1 route backup 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 5.5.5.25 254 timeout xlate 3:00:00 timeout conn 1:00:00 half-closed 0:10:00 udp 0:02:00 icmp 0:00:02 timeout sunrpc 0:10:00 h323 0:05:00 h225 1:00:00 mgcp 0:05:00 mgcp-pat 0:05:00 timeout sip 0:30:00 sip_media 0:02:00 sip-invite 0:03:00 sip-disconnect 0:02:00 timeout sip-provisional-media 0:02:00 uauth 0:05:00 absolute timeout tcp-proxy-reassembly 0:01:00 ldap attribute-map RemoteAccessMap map-name memberOf IETF-Radius-Class map-value memberOf CN=RemoteAccess,CN=Users,DC=corp,DC=company-name,DC=com companynamera dynamic-access-policy-record DfltAccessPolicy aaa-server ActiveDirectory protocol ldap aaa-server ActiveDirectory (inside) host dc2 ldap-base-dn dc=corp,dc=company-name,dc=com ldap-scope subtree ldap-login-password * ldap-login-dn cn=administrator,ou=Admins,dc=corp,dc=company-name,dc=com server-type microsoft aaa-server ADRemoteAccess protocol ldap aaa-server ADRemoteAccess (inside) host dc2 ldap-base-dn dc=corp,dc=company-name,dc=com ldap-scope subtree ldap-login-password * ldap-login-dn cn=administrator,ou=Admins,dc=corp,dc=company-name,dc=com server-type microsoft ldap-attribute-map RemoteAccessMap aaa authentication enable console LOCAL aaa authentication ssh console LOCAL http server enable http 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 inside no snmp-server location no snmp-server contact snmp-server enable traps snmp authentication linkup linkdown coldstart sla monitor 123 type echo protocol ipIcmpEcho 4.4.4.1 interface outside num-packets 3 frequency 10 sla monitor schedule 123 life forever start-time now crypto ipsec transform-set ESP-3DES-SHA esp-3des esp-sha-hmac crypto ipsec security-association lifetime seconds 28800 crypto ipsec security-association lifetime kilobytes 4608000 crypto dynamic-map outside_dyn_map 20 set pfs crypto dynamic-map outside_dyn_map 20 set transform-set ESP-3DES-SHA crypto map outside_map 65535 ipsec-isakmp dynamic outside_dyn_map crypto map outside_map interface outside crypto isakmp enable outside crypto isakmp policy 10 authentication pre-share encryption 3des hash sha group 2 lifetime 86400 ! track 1 rtr 123 reachability telnet timeout 5 ssh 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 inside ssh timeout 5 ssh version 2 console timeout 0 management-access inside dhcpd auto_config outside ! threat-detection basic-threat threat-detection statistics access-list no threat-detection statistics tcp-intercept webvpn group-policy companynamera internal group-policy companynamera attributes wins-server value 192.168.0.5 dns-server value 192.168.0.5 vpn-tunnel-protocol IPSec password-storage enable split-tunnel-policy tunnelspecified split-tunnel-network-list value companyname_splitTunnelAcl default-domain value corp.company-name.com split-dns value corp.company-name.com group-policy companyname internal group-policy companyname attributes wins-server value 192.168.0.5 dns-server value 192.168.0.5 vpn-tunnel-protocol IPSec password-storage enable split-tunnel-policy tunnelspecified split-tunnel-network-list value companyname_splitTunnelAcl default-domain value corp.company-name.com split-dns value corp.company-name.com username admin password IhpSqtN210ZsNaH. encrypted privilege 15 tunnel-group companyname type remote-access tunnel-group companyname general-attributes address-pool VPNpool authentication-server-group ActiveDirectory LOCAL default-group-policy companyname tunnel-group companyname ipsec-attributes pre-shared-key * tunnel-group companynamera type remote-access tunnel-group companynamera general-attributes address-pool VPNpool authentication-server-group ADRemoteAccess LOCAL default-group-policy companynamera tunnel-group companynamera ipsec-attributes pre-shared-key * ! class-map type inspect ftp match-all ftp-inspection-map class-map inspection_default match default-inspection-traffic ! ! policy-map type inspect ftp ftp-inspection-map parameters class ftp-inspection-map policy-map type inspect dns migrated_dns_map_1 parameters message-length maximum 512 policy-map global_policy class inspection_default inspect dns migrated_dns_map_1 inspect ftp inspect h323 h225 inspect h323 ras inspect http inspect ils inspect netbios inspect rsh inspect rtsp inspect skinny inspect sqlnet inspect sunrpc inspect tftp inspect sip inspect xdmcp inspect icmp inspect icmp error inspect esmtp inspect pptp ! service-policy global_policy global prompt hostname context Cryptochecksum:487525494a81c8176046fec475d17efe : end gateway# Thanks so much!

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  • The broken Promise of the Mobile Web

    - by Rick Strahl
    High end mobile devices have been with us now for almost 7 years and they have utterly transformed the way we access information. Mobile phones and smartphones that have access to the Internet and host smart applications are in the hands of a large percentage of the population of the world. In many places even very remote, cell phones and even smart phones are a common sight. I’ll never forget when I was in India in 2011 I was up in the Southern Indian mountains riding an elephant out of a tiny local village, with an elephant herder in front riding atop of the elephant in front of us. He was dressed in traditional garb with the loin wrap and head cloth/turban as did quite a few of the locals in this small out of the way and not so touristy village. So we’re slowly trundling along in the forest and he’s lazily using his stick to guide the elephant and… 10 minutes in he pulls out his cell phone from his sash and starts texting. In the middle of texting a huge pig jumps out from the side of the trail and he takes a picture running across our path in the jungle! So yeah, mobile technology is very pervasive and it’s reached into even very buried and unexpected parts of this world. Apps are still King Apps currently rule the roost when it comes to mobile devices and the applications that run on them. If there’s something that you need on your mobile device your first step usually is to look for an app, not use your browser. But native app development remains a pain in the butt, with the requirement to have to support 2 or 3 completely separate platforms. There are solutions that try to bridge that gap. Xamarin is on a tear at the moment, providing their cross-device toolkit to build applications using C#. While Xamarin tools are impressive – and also *very* expensive – they only address part of the development madness that is app development. There are still specific device integration isssues, dealing with the different developer programs, security and certificate setups and all that other noise that surrounds app development. There’s also PhoneGap/Cordova which provides a hybrid solution that involves creating local HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications, and then packaging them to run in a specialized App container that can run on most mobile device platforms using a WebView interface. This allows for using of HTML technology, but it also still requires all the set up, configuration of APIs, security keys and certification and submission and deployment process just like native applications – you actually lose many of the benefits that  Web based apps bring. The big selling point of Cordova is that you get to use HTML have the ability to build your UI once for all platforms and run across all of them – but the rest of the app process remains in place. Apps can be a big pain to create and manage especially when we are talking about specialized or vertical business applications that aren’t geared at the mainstream market and that don’t fit the ‘store’ model. If you’re building a small intra department application you don’t want to deal with multiple device platforms and certification etc. for various public or corporate app stores. That model is simply not a good fit both from the development and deployment perspective. Even for commercial, big ticket apps, HTML as a UI platform offers many advantages over native, from write-once run-anywhere, to remote maintenance, single point of management and failure to having full control over the application as opposed to have the app store overloads censor you. In a lot of ways Web based HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications have so much potential for building better solutions based on existing Web technologies for the very same reasons a lot of content years ago moved off the desktop to the Web. To me the Web as a mobile platform makes perfect sense, but the reality of today’s Mobile Web unfortunately looks a little different… Where’s the Love for the Mobile Web? Yet here we are in the middle of 2014, nearly 7 years after the first iPhone was released and brought the promise of rich interactive information at your fingertips, and yet we still don’t really have a solid mobile Web platform. I know what you’re thinking: “But we have lots of HTML/JavaScript/CSS features that allows us to build nice mobile interfaces”. I agree to a point – it’s actually quite possible to build nice looking, rich and capable Web UI today. We have media queries to deal with varied display sizes, CSS transforms for smooth animations and transitions, tons of CSS improvements in CSS 3 that facilitate rich layout, a host of APIs geared towards mobile device features and lately even a number of JavaScript framework choices that facilitate development of multi-screen apps in a consistent manner. Personally I’ve been working a lot with AngularJs and heavily modified Bootstrap themes to build mobile first UIs and that’s been working very well to provide highly usable and attractive UI for typical mobile business applications. From the pure UI perspective things actually look very good. Not just about the UI But it’s not just about the UI - it’s also about integration with the mobile device. When it comes to putting all those pieces together into what amounts to a consolidated platform to build mobile Web applications, I think we still have a ways to go… there are a lot of missing pieces to make it all work together and integrate with the device more smoothly, and more importantly to make it work uniformly across the majority of devices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Slow Standards Adoption HTML standards implementations and ratification has been dreadfully slow, and browser vendors all seem to pick and choose different pieces of the technology they implement. The end result is that we have a capable UI platform that’s missing some of the infrastructure pieces to make it whole on mobile devices. There’s lots of potential but what is lacking that final 10% to build truly compelling mobile applications that can compete favorably with native applications. Some of it is the fragmentation of browsers and the slow evolution of the mobile specific HTML APIs. A host of mobile standards exist but many of the standards are in the early review stage and they have been there stuck for long periods of time and seem to move at a glacial pace. Browser vendors seem even slower to implement them, and for good reason – non-ratified standards mean that implementations may change and vendor implementations tend to be experimental and  likely have to be changed later. Neither Vendors or developers are not keen on changing standards. This is the typical chicken and egg scenario, but without some forward momentum from some party we end up stuck in the mud. It seems that either the standards bodies or the vendors need to carry the torch forward and that doesn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. Mobile Device Integration just isn’t good enough Current standards are not far reaching enough to address a number of the use case scenarios necessary for many mobile applications. While not every application needs to have access to all mobile device features, almost every mobile application could benefit from some integration with other parts of the mobile device platform. Integration with GPS, phone, media, messaging, notifications, linking and contacts system are benefits that are unique to mobile applications and could be widely used, but are mostly (with the exception of GPS) inaccessible for Web based applications today. Unfortunately trying to do most of this today only with a mobile Web browser is a losing battle. Aside from PhoneGap/Cordova’s app centric model with its own custom API accessing mobile device features and the token exception of the GeoLocation API, most device integration features are not widely supported by the current crop of mobile browsers. For example there’s no usable messaging API that allows access to SMS or contacts from HTML. Even obvious components like the Media Capture API are only implemented partially by mobile devices. There are alternatives and workarounds for some of these interfaces by using browser specific code, but that’s might ugly and something that I thought we were trying to leave behind with newer browser standards. But it’s not quite working out that way. It’s utterly perplexing to me that mobile standards like Media Capture and Streams, Media Gallery Access, Responsive Images, Messaging API, Contacts Manager API have only minimal or no traction at all today. Keep in mind we’ve had mobile browsers for nearly 7 years now, and yet we still have to think about how to get access to an image from the image gallery or the camera on some devices? Heck Windows Phone IE Mobile just gained the ability to upload images recently in the Windows 8.1 Update – that’s feature that HTML has had for 20 years! These are simple concepts and common problems that should have been solved a long time ago. It’s extremely frustrating to see build 90% of a mobile Web app with relative ease and then hit a brick wall for the remaining 10%, which often can be show stoppers. The remaining 10% have to do with platform integration, browser differences and working around the limitations that browsers and ‘pinned’ applications impose on HTML applications. The maddening part is that these limitations seem arbitrary as they could easily work on all mobile platforms. For example, SMS has a URL Moniker interface that sort of works on Android, works badly with iOS (only works if the address is already in the contact list) and not at all on Windows Phone. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work universally using the same interface – after all all phones have supported SMS since before the year 2000! But, it doesn’t have to be this way Change can happen very quickly. Take the GeoLocation API for example. Geolocation has taken off at the very beginning of the mobile device era and today it works well, provides the necessary security (a big concern for many mobile APIs), and is supported by just about all major mobile and even desktop browsers today. It handles security concerns via prompts to avoid unwanted access which is a model that would work for most other device APIs in a similar fashion. One time approval and occasional re-approval if code changes or caches expire. Simple and only slightly intrusive. It all works well, even though GeoLocation actually has some physical limitations, such as representing the current location when no GPS device is present. Yet this is a solved problem, where other APIs that are conceptually much simpler to implement have failed to gain any traction at all. Technically none of these APIs should be a problem to implement, but it appears that the momentum is just not there. Inadequate Web Application Linking and Activation Another important piece of the puzzle missing is the integration of HTML based Web applications. Today HTML based applications are not first class citizens on mobile operating systems. When talking about HTML based content there’s a big difference between content and applications. Content is great for search engine discovery and plain browser usage. Content is usually accessed intermittently and permanent linking is not so critical for this type of content.  But applications have different needs. Applications need to be started up quickly and must be easily switchable to support a multi-tasking user workflow. Therefore, it’s pretty crucial that mobile Web apps are integrated into the underlying mobile OS and work with the standard task management features. Unfortunately this integration is not as smooth as it should be. It starts with actually trying to find mobile Web applications, to ‘installing’ them onto a phone in an easily accessible manner in a prominent position. The experience of discovering a Mobile Web ‘App’ and making it sticky is by no means as easy or satisfying. Today the way you’d go about this is: Open the browser Search for a Web Site in the browser with your search engine of choice Hope that you find the right site Hope that you actually find a site that works for your mobile device Click on the link and run the app in a fully chrome’d browser instance (read tiny surface area) Pin the app to the home screen (with all the limitations outline above) Hope you pointed at the right URL when you pinned Even for you and me as developers, there are a few steps in there that are painful and annoying, but think about the average user. First figuring out how to search for a specific site or URL? And then pinning the app and hopefully from the right location? You’ve probably lost more than half of your audience at that point. This experience sucks. For developers too this process is painful since app developers can’t control the shortcut creation directly. This problem often gets solved by crazy coding schemes, with annoying pop-ups that try to get people to create shortcuts via fancy animations that are both annoying and add overhead to each and every application that implements this sort of thing differently. And that’s not the end of it - getting the link onto the home screen with an application icon varies quite a bit between browsers. Apple’s non-standard meta tags are prominent and they work with iOS and Android (only more recent versions), but not on Windows Phone. Windows Phone instead requires you to create an actual screen or rather a partial screen be captured for a shortcut in the tile manager. Who had that brilliant idea I wonder? Surprisingly Chrome on recent Android versions seems to actually get it right – icons use pngs, pinning is easy and pinned applications properly behave like standalone apps and retain the browser’s active page state and content. Each of the platforms has a different way to specify icons (WP doesn’t allow you to use an icon image at all), and the most widely used interface in use today is a bunch of Apple specific meta tags that other browsers choose to support. The question is: Why is there no standard implementation for installing shortcuts across mobile platforms using an official format rather than a proprietary one? Then there’s iOS and the crazy way it treats home screen linked URLs using a crazy hybrid format that is neither as capable as a Web app running in Safari nor a WebView hosted application. Moving off the Web ‘app’ link when switching to another app actually causes the browser and preview it to ‘blank out’ the Web application in the Task View (see screenshot on the right). Then, when the ‘app’ is reactivated it ends up completely restarting the browser with the original link. This is crazy behavior that you can’t easily work around. In some situations you might be able to store the application state and restore it using LocalStorage, but for many scenarios that involve complex data sources (like say Google Maps) that’s not a possibility. The only reason for this screwed up behavior I can think of is that it is deliberate to make Web apps a pain in the butt to use and forcing users trough the App Store/PhoneGap/Cordova route. App linking and management is a very basic problem – something that we essentially have solved in every desktop browser – yet on mobile devices where it arguably matters a lot more to have easy access to web content we have to jump through hoops to have even a remotely decent linking/activation experience across browsers. Where’s the Money? It’s not surprising that device home screen integration and Mobile Web support in general is in such dismal shape – the mobile OS vendors benefit financially from App store sales and have little to gain from Web based applications that bypass the App store and the cash cow that it presents. On top of that, platform specific vendor lock-in of both end users and developers who have invested in hardware, apps and consumables is something that mobile platform vendors actually aspire to. Web based interfaces that are cross-platform are the anti-thesis of that and so again it’s no surprise that the mobile Web is on a struggling path. But – that may be changing. More and more we’re seeing operations shifting to services that are subscription based or otherwise collect money for usage, and that may drive more progress into the Web direction in the end . Nothing like the almighty dollar to drive innovation forward. Do we need a Mobile Web App Store? As much as I dislike moderated experiences in today’s massive App Stores, they do at least provide one single place to look for apps for your device. I think we could really use some sort of registry, that could provide something akin to an app store for mobile Web apps, to make it easier to actually find mobile applications. This could take the form of a specialized search engine, or maybe a more formal store/registry like structure. Something like apt-get/chocolatey for Web apps. It could be curated and provide at least some feedback and reviews that might help with the integrity of applications. Coupled to that could be a native application on each platform that would allow searching and browsing of the registry and then also handle installation in the form of providing the home screen linking, plus maybe an initial security configuration that determines what features are allowed access to for the app. I’m not holding my breath. In order for this sort of thing to take off and gain widespread appeal, a lot of coordination would be required. And in order to get enough traction it would have to come from a well known entity – a mobile Web app store from a no name source is unlikely to gain high enough usage numbers to make a difference. In a way this would eliminate some of the freedom of the Web, but of course this would also be an optional search path in addition to the standard open Web search mechanisms to find and access content today. Security Security is a big deal, and one of the perceived reasons why so many IT professionals appear to be willing to go back to the walled garden of deployed apps is that Apps are perceived as safe due to the official review and curation of the App stores. Curated stores are supposed to protect you from malware, illegal and misleading content. It doesn’t always work out that way and all the major vendors have had issues with security and the review process at some time or another. Security is critical, but I also think that Web applications in general pose less of a security threat than native applications, by nature of the sandboxed browser and JavaScript environments. Web applications run externally completely and in the HTML and JavaScript sandboxes, with only a very few controlled APIs allowing access to device specific features. And as discussed earlier – security for any device interaction can be granted the same for mobile applications through a Web browser, as they can for native applications either via explicit policies loaded from the Web, or via prompting as GeoLocation does today. Security is important, but it’s certainly solvable problem for Web applications even those that need to access device hardware. Security shouldn’t be a reason for Web apps to be an equal player in mobile applications. Apps are winning, but haven’t we been here before? So now we’re finding ourselves back in an era of installed app, rather than Web based and managed apps. Only it’s even worse today than with Desktop applications, in that the apps are going through a gatekeeper that charges a toll and censors what you can and can’t do in your apps. Frankly it’s a mystery to me why anybody would buy into this model and why it’s lasted this long when we’ve already been through this process. It’s crazy… It’s really a shame that this regression is happening. We have the technology to make mobile Web apps much more prominent, but yet we’re basically held back by what seems little more than bureaucracy, partisan bickering and self interest of the major parties involved. Back in the day of the desktop it was Internet Explorer’s 98+%  market shareholding back the Web from improvements for many years – now it’s the combined mobile OS market in control of the mobile browsers. If mobile Web apps were allowed to be treated the same as native apps with simple ways to install and run them consistently and persistently, that would go a long way to making mobile applications much more usable and seriously viable alternatives to native apps. But as it is mobile apps have a severe disadvantage in placement and operation. There are a few bright spots in all of this. Mozilla’s FireFoxOs is embracing the Web for it’s mobile OS by essentially building every app out of HTML and JavaScript based content. It supports both packaged and certified package modes (that can be put into the app store), and Open Web apps that are loaded and run completely off the Web and can also cache locally for offline operation using a manifest. Open Web apps are treated as full class citizens in FireFoxOS and run using the same mechanism as installed apps. Unfortunately FireFoxOs is getting a slow start with minimal device support and specifically targeting the low end market. We can hope that this approach will change and catch on with other vendors, but that’s also an uphill battle given the conflict of interest with platform lock in that it represents. Recent versions of Android also seem to be working reasonably well with mobile application integration onto the desktop and activation out of the box. Although it still uses the Apple meta tags to find icons and behavior settings, everything at least works as you would expect – icons to the desktop on pinning, WebView based full screen activation, and reliable application persistence as the browser/app is treated like a real application. Hopefully iOS will at some point provide this same level of rudimentary Web app support. What’s also interesting to me is that Microsoft hasn’t picked up on the obvious need for a solid Web App platform. Being a distant third in the mobile OS war, Microsoft certainly has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using fresh ideas and expanding into areas that the other major vendors are neglecting. But instead Microsoft is trying to beat the market leaders at their own game, fighting on their adversary’s terms instead of taking a new tack. Providing a kick ass mobile Web platform that takes the lead on some of the proposed mobile APIs would be something positive that Microsoft could do to improve its miserable position in the mobile device market. Where are we at with Mobile Web? It sure sounds like I’m really down on the Mobile Web, right? I’ve built a number of mobile apps in the last year and while overall result and response has been very positive to what we were able to accomplish in terms of UI, getting that final 10% that required device integration dialed was an absolute nightmare on every single one of them. Big compromises had to be made and some features were left out or had to be modified for some devices. In two cases we opted to go the Cordova route in order to get the integration we needed, along with the extra pain involved in that process. Unless you’re not integrating with device features and you don’t care deeply about a smooth integration with the mobile desktop, mobile Web development is fraught with frustration. So, yes I’m frustrated! But it’s not for lack of wanting the mobile Web to succeed. I am still a firm believer that we will eventually arrive a much more functional mobile Web platform that allows access to the most common device features in a sensible way. It wouldn't be difficult for device platform vendors to make Web based applications first class citizens on mobile devices. But unfortunately it looks like it will still be some time before this happens. So, what’s your experience building mobile Web apps? Are you finding similar issues? Just giving up on raw Web applications and building PhoneGap apps instead? Completely skipping the Web and going native? Leave a comment for discussion. Resources Rick Strahl on DotNet Rocks talking about Mobile Web© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in HTML5  Mobile   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • An Honest look at SharePoint Web Services

    - by juanlarios
    INTRODUCTION If you are a SharePoint developer you know that there are two basic ways to develop against SharePoint. 1) The object Model 2) Web services. SharePoint object model has the advantage of being quite rich. Anything you can do through the SharePoint UI as an administrator or end user, you can do through the object model. In fact everything that is done through the UI is done through the object model behind the scenes. The major disadvantage to getting at SharePoint this way is that the code needs to run on the server. This means that all web parts, event receivers, features, etc… all of this is code that is deployed to the server. The second way to get to SharePoint is through the built in web services. There are many articles on how to manipulate web services, how to authenticate to them and interact with them. The basic idea is that a remote application or process can contact SharePoint through a web service. Lots has been written about how great these web services are. This article is written to document the limitations, some of the issues and frustrations with working with SharePoint built in web services. Ultimately, for the tasks I was given to , SharePoint built in web services did not suffice. My evaluation of SharePoint built in services was compared against creating my own WCF Services to do what I needed. The current project I'm working on right now involved several "integration points". A remote application, installed on a separate server was to contact SharePoint and perform an task or operation. So I decided to start up Visual Studio and built a DLL and basically have 2 layers of logic. An integration layer and a data layer. A good friend of mine pointed me to SOLID principles and referred me to some videos and tutorials about it. I decided to implement the methodology (although a lot of the principles are common sense and I already incorporated in my coding practices). I was to deliver this dll to the application team and they would simply call the methods exposed by this dll and voila! it would do some task or operation in SharePoint. SOLUTION My integration layer implemented an interface that defined some of the basic integration tasks that I was to put together. My data layer was about the same, it implemented an interface with some of the tasks that I was going to develop. This gave me the opportunity to develop different data layers, ultimately different ways to get at SharePoint if I needed to. This is a classic SOLID principle. In this case it proved to be quite helpful because I wrote one data layer completely implementing SharePoint built in Web Services and another implementing my own WCF Service that I wrote. I should mention there is another layer underneath the data layer. In referencing SharePoint or WCF services in my visual studio project I created a class for every web service call. So for example, if I used List.asx. I created a class called "DocumentRetreival" this class would do the grunt work to connect to the correct URL, It would perform the basic operation of contacting the service and so on. If I used a view.asmx, I implemented a class called "ViewRetrieval" with the same idea as the last class but it would now interact with all he operations in view.asmx. This gave my data layer the ability to perform multiple calls without really worrying about some of the grunt work each class performs. This again, is a classic SOLID principle. So, in order to compare them side by side we can look at both data layers and with is involved in each. Lets take a look at the "Create Project" task or operation. The integration point is described as , "dll is to provide a way to create a project in SharePoint". Projects , in this case are basically document libraries. I am to implement a way in which a remote application can create a document library in SharePoint. Easy enough right? Use the list.asmx Web service in SharePoint. So here we go! Lets take a look at the code. I added the List.asmx web service reference to my project and this is the class that contacts it:  class DocumentRetrieval     {         private ListsSoapClient _service;      d   private bool _impersonation;         public DocumentRetrieval(bool impersonation, string endpt)         {             _service = new ListsSoapClient();             this.SetEndPoint(string.Format("{0}/{1}", endpt, ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["List"]));             _impersonation = impersonation;             if (_impersonation)             {                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.Password = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["password"];                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.UserName = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["username"];                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel =                     System.Security.Principal.TokenImpersonationLevel.Impersonation;             }     private void SetEndPoint(string p)          {             _service.Endpoint.Address = new EndpointAddress(p);          }          /// <summary>         /// Creates a document library with specific name and templateID         /// </summary>         /// <param name="listName">New list name</param>         /// <param name="templateID">Template ID</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public XmlElement CreateLibrary(string listName, int templateID, ref ExceptionContract exContract)         {             XmlDocument sample = new XmlDocument();             XmlElement viewCol = sample.CreateElement("Empty");             try             {                 _service.Open();                 viewCol = _service.AddList(listName, "", templateID);             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/CreateLibrary", ex.GetType(), "Connection Error", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error);                             }finally             {                 _service.Close();             }                                      return viewCol;         } } There was a lot more in this class (that I am not including) because i was reusing the grunt work and making other operations with LIst.asmx, For example, updating content types, changing or configuring lists or document libraries. One of the first things I noticed about working with the built in services is that you are really at the mercy of what is available to you. Before creating a document library (Project) I wanted to expose a IsProjectExisting method. This way the integration or data layer could recognize if a library already exists. Well there is no service call or method available to do that check. So this is what I wrote:   public bool DocLibExists(string listName, ref ExceptionContract exContract)         {             try             {                 var allLists = _service.GetListCollection();                                return allLists.ChildNodes.OfType<XmlElement>().ToList().Exists(x => x.Attributes["Title"].Value ==listName);             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/GetList/GetListWSCall", ex.GetType(), "Unable to Retrieve List Collection", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error);             }             return false;         } This really just gets an XMLElement with all the lists. It was then up to me to sift through the clutter and noise and see if Document library already existed. This took a little bit of getting used to. Now instead of working with code, you are working with XMLElement response format from web service. I wrote a LINQ query to go through and find if the attribute "Title" existed and had a value of the listname then it would return True, if not False. I didn't particularly like working this way. Dealing with XMLElement responses and then having to manipulate it to get at the exact data I was looking for. Once the check for the DocLibExists, was done, I would either create the document library or send back an error indicating the document library already existed. Now lets examine the code that actually creates the document library. It does what you are really after, it creates a document library. Notice how the template ID is really an integer. Every document library template in SharePoint has an ID associated with it. Document libraries, Image Library, Custom List, Project Tasks, etc… they all he a unique integer associated with it. Well, that's great but the client came back to me and gave me some specifics that each "project" or document library, should have. They specified they had 3 types of projects. Each project would have unique views, about 10 views for each project. Each Project specified unique configurations (auditing, versioning, content types, etc…) So what turned out to be a simple implementation of creating a document library as a repository for a project, turned out to be quite involved.  The first thing I thought of was to create a template for document library. There are other ways you can do this too. Using the web Service call, you could configure views, versioning, even content types, etc… the only catch is, you have to be working quite extensively with CAML. I am not fond of CAML. I can do it and work with it, I just don't like doing it. It is quite touchy and at times it is quite tough to understand where errors were made with CAML statements. Working with Web Services and CAML proved to be quite annoying. The service call would return a generic error message that did not particularly point me to a CAML statement syntax error, or even a CAML error. I was not sure if it was a security , performance or code based issue. It was quite tough to work with. At times it was difficult to work with because of the way SharePoint handles metadata. There are "Names", "Display Name", and "StaticName" fields. It was quite tough to understand at times, which one to use. So it took a lot of trial and error. There are tools that can help with CAML generation. There is also now intellisense for CAML statements in Visual Studio that might help but ultimately I'm not fond of CAML with Web Services.   So I decided on the template. So my plan was to create create a document library, configure it accordingly and then use The Template Builder that comes with the SharePoint SDK. This tool allows you to create site templates, list template etc… It is quite interesting because it does not generate an STP file, it actually generates an xml definition and a feature you can activate and make that template available on a site or site collection. The first issue I experienced with this is that one of the specifications to this template was that the "All Documents" view was to have 2 web parts on it. Well, it turns out that using the template builder , it did not include the web parts as part of the list template definition it generated. It backed up the settings, the views, the content types but not the custom web parts. I still decided to try this even without the web parts on the page. This new template defined a new Document library definition with a unique ID. The problem was that the service call accepts an int but it only has access to the built in library int definitions. Any new ones added or created will not be available to create. So this made it impossible for me to approach the problem this way.     I should also mention that one of the nice features about SharePoint is the ability to create list templates, back them up and then create lists based on that template. It can all be done by end user administrators. These templates are quite unique because they are saved as an STP file and not an xml definition. I also went this route and tried to see if there was another service call where I could create a document library based no given template name. Nope! none.      After some thinking I decide to implement a WCF service to do this creation for me. I was quite certain that the object model would allow me to create document libraries base on a template in which an ID was required and also templates saved as STP files. Now I don't want to bother with posting the code to contact WCF service because it's self explanatory, but I will post the code that I used to create a list with custom template. public ServiceResult CreateProject(string name, string templateName, string projectId)         {             string siteurl = SPContext.Current.Site.Url;             Guid webguid = SPContext.Current.Web.ID;                        using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteurl))             {                 using (SPWeb rootweb = site.RootWeb)                 {                     SPListTemplateCollection temps = site.GetCustomListTemplates(rootweb);                     ProcessWeb(siteurl, webguid, web => Act_CreateProject(web, name, templateName, projectId, temps));                 }//SpWeb             }//SPSite              return _globalResult;                   }         private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) {                         var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName));             if (temp != null)             {                             try                 {                                         Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp);                     SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid];                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success");                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString());                 }                                       }        private void ProcessWeb(string siteurl, Guid webguid, Action<SPWeb> action) {                        using (SPSite sitecollection = new SPSite(siteurl)) {                 using (SPWeb web = sitecollection.AllWebs[webguid]) {                     action(web);                 }                     }                  } This code is actually some of the code I implemented for the service. there was a lot more I did on Project Creation which I will cover in my next blog post. I implemented an ACTION method to process the web. This allowed me to properly dispose the SPWEb and SPSite objects and not rewrite this code over and over again. So I implemented a WCF service to create projects for me, this allowed me to do a lot more than just create a document library with a template, it now gave me the flexibility to do just about anything the client wanted at project creation. Once this was implemented , the client came back to me and said, "we reference all our projects with ID's in our application. we want SharePoint to do the same". This has been something I have been doing for a little while now but I do hope that SharePoint 2010 can have more of an answer to this and address it properly. I have been adding metadata to SPWebs through property bag. I believe I have blogged about it before. This time it required metadata added to a document library. No problem!!! I also mentioned these web parts that were to go on the "All Documents" View. I took the opportunity to configure them to the appropriate settings. There were two settings that needed to be set on these web parts. One of them was a Project ID configured in the webpart properties. The following code enhances and replaces the "Act_CreateProject " method above:  private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) {                         var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName));             if (temp != null)             {                 SPLimitedWebPartManager wpmgr = null;                               try                 {                                         Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp);                     SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid];                     SPFolder rootFolder = newList.RootFolder;                     rootFolder.Properties.Add(KEY, projectId);                     rootFolder.Update();                     if (rootFolder.ParentWeb != targetsite)                         rootFolder.ParentWeb.Dispose();                     if (!templateName.Contains("Natural"))                     {                         SPView alldocumentsview = newList.Views.Cast<SPView>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Title.Equals(ALLDOCUMENTS));                         SPFile alldocfile = targetsite.GetFile(alldocumentsview.ServerRelativeUrl);                         wpmgr = alldocfile.GetLimitedWebPartManager(PersonalizationScope.Shared);                         ConfigureWebPart(wpmgr, projectId, CUSTOMWPNAME);                                              alldocfile.Update();                     }                                        if (newList.ParentWeb != targetsite)                         newList.ParentWeb.Dispose();                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success");                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString());                 }                 finally                 {                     if (wpmgr != null)                     {                         wpmgr.Web.Dispose();                         wpmgr.Dispose();                     }                 }             }                         }       private void ConfigureWebPart(SPLimitedWebPartManager mgr, string prjId, string webpartname)         {             var wp = mgr.WebParts.Cast<System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.DisplayTitle.Equals(webpartname));             if (wp != null)             {                           (wp as ListRelationshipWebPart.ListRelationshipWebPart).ProjectID = prjId;                 mgr.SaveChanges(wp);             }         }   This Shows you how I was able to set metadata on the document library. It has to be added to the RootFolder of the document library, Unfortunately, the SPList does not have a Property bag that I can add a key\value pair to. It has to be done on the root folder. Now everything in the integration will reference projects by ID's and will not care about names. My, "DocLibExists" will now need to be changed because a web service is not set up to look at property bags.  I had to write another method on the Service to do the equivalent but with ID's instead of names.  The second thing you will notice about the code is the use of the Webpartmanager. I have seen several examples online, and also read a lot about memory leaks, The above code does not produce memory leaks. The web part manager creates an SPWeb, so just dispose it like I did. CONCLUSION This is a long long post so I will stop here for now, I will continue with more comparisons and limitations in my next post. My conclusion for this example is that Web Services will do the trick if you can suffer through CAML and if you are doing some simple operations. For Everything else, there's WCF! **** fireI apologize for the disorganization of this post, I was on a bus on a 12 hour trip to IOWA while I wrote it, I was half asleep and half awake, hopefully it makes enough sense to someone.

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  • 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by Michael Snow
    Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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  • 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

    - by Alan Smith
    For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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  • Optimized OCR black/white pixel algorithm

    - by eagle
    I am writing a simple OCR solution for a finite set of characters. That is, I know the exact way all 26 letters in the alphabet will look like. I am using C# and am able to easily determine if a given pixel should be treated as black or white. I am generating a matrix of black/white pixels for every single character. So for example, the letter I (capital i), might look like the following: 01110 00100 00100 00100 01110 Note: all points, which I use later in this post, assume that the top left pixel is (0, 0), bottom right pixel is (4, 4). 1's represent black pixels, and 0's represent white pixels. I would create a corresponding matrix in C# like this: CreateLetter("I", new List<List<bool>>() { new List<bool>() { false, true, true, true, false }, new List<bool>() { false, false, true, false, false }, new List<bool>() { false, false, true, false, false }, new List<bool>() { false, false, true, false, false }, new List<bool>() { false, true, true, true, false } }); I know I could probably optimize this part by using a multi-dimensional array instead, but let's ignore that for now, this is for illustrative purposes. Every letter is exactly the same dimensions, 10px by 11px (10px by 11px is the actual dimensions of a character in my real program. I simplified this to 5px by 5px in this posting since it is much easier to "draw" the letters using 0's and 1's on a smaller image). Now when I give it a 10px by 11px part of an image to analyze with OCR, it would need to run on every single letter (26) on every single pixel (10 * 11 = 110) which would mean 2,860 (26 * 110) iterations (in the worst case) for every single character. I was thinking this could be optimized by defining the unique characteristics of every character. So, for example, let's assume that the set of characters only consists of 5 distinct letters: I, A, O, B, and L. These might look like the following: 01110 00100 00100 01100 01000 00100 01010 01010 01010 01000 00100 01110 01010 01100 01000 00100 01010 01010 01010 01000 01110 01010 00100 01100 01110 After analyzing the unique characteristics of every character, I can significantly reduce the number of tests that need to be performed to test for a character. For example, for the "I" character, I could define it's unique characteristics as having a black pixel in the coordinate (3, 0) since no other characters have that pixel as black. So instead of testing 110 pixels for a match on the "I" character, I reduced it to a 1 pixel test. This is what it might look like for all these characters: var LetterI = new OcrLetter() { Name = "I", BlackPixels = new List<Point>() { new Point (3, 0) } } var LetterA = new OcrLetter() { Name = "A", WhitePixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(2, 4) } } var LetterO = new OcrLetter() { Name = "O", BlackPixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(3, 2) }, WhitePixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(2, 2) } } var LetterB = new OcrLetter() { Name = "B", BlackPixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(3, 1) }, WhitePixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(3, 2) } } var LetterL = new OcrLetter() { Name = "L", BlackPixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(1, 1), new Point(3, 4) }, WhitePixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(2, 2) } } This is challenging to do manually for 5 characters and gets much harder the greater the amount of letters that are added. You also want to guarantee that you have the minimum set of unique characteristics of a letter since you want it to be optimized as much as possible. I want to create an algorithm that will identify the unique characteristics of all the letters and would generate similar code to that above. I would then use this optimized black/white matrix to identify characters. How do I take the 26 letters that have all their black/white pixels filled in (e.g. the CreateLetter code block) and convert them to an optimized set of unique characteristics that define a letter (e.g. the new OcrLetter() code block)? And how would I guarantee that it is the most efficient definition set of unique characteristics (e.g. instead of defining 6 points as the unique characteristics, there might be a way to do it with 1 or 2 points, as the letter "I" in my example was able to). An alternative solution I've come up with is using a hash table, which will reduce it from 2,860 iterations to 110 iterations, a 26 time reduction. This is how it might work: I would populate it with data similar to the following: Letters["01110 00100 00100 00100 01110"] = "I"; Letters["00100 01010 01110 01010 01010"] = "A"; Letters["00100 01010 01010 01010 00100"] = "O"; Letters["01100 01010 01100 01010 01100"] = "B"; Now when I reach a location in the image to process, I convert it to a string such as: "01110 00100 00100 00100 01110" and simply find it in the hash table. This solution seems very simple, however, this still requires 110 iterations to generate this string for each letter. In big O notation, the algorithm is the same since O(110N) = O(2860N) = O(N) for N letters to process on the page. However, it is still improved by a constant factor of 26, a significant improvement (e.g. instead of it taking 26 minutes, it would take 1 minute). Update: Most of the solutions provided so far have not addressed the issue of identifying the unique characteristics of a character and rather provide alternative solutions. I am still looking for this solution which, as far as I can tell, is the only way to achieve the fastest OCR processing. I just came up with a partial solution: For each pixel, in the grid, store the letters that have it as a black pixel. Using these letters: I A O B L 01110 00100 00100 01100 01000 00100 01010 01010 01010 01000 00100 01110 01010 01100 01000 00100 01010 01010 01010 01000 01110 01010 00100 01100 01110 You would have something like this: CreatePixel(new Point(0, 0), new List<Char>() { }); CreatePixel(new Point(1, 0), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'B', 'L' }); CreatePixel(new Point(2, 0), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'A', 'O', 'B' }); CreatePixel(new Point(3, 0), new List<Char>() { 'I' }); CreatePixel(new Point(4, 0), new List<Char>() { }); CreatePixel(new Point(0, 1), new List<Char>() { }); CreatePixel(new Point(1, 1), new List<Char>() { 'A', 'B', 'L' }); CreatePixel(new Point(2, 1), new List<Char>() { 'I' }); CreatePixel(new Point(3, 1), new List<Char>() { 'A', 'O', 'B' }); // ... CreatePixel(new Point(2, 2), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'A', 'B' }); CreatePixel(new Point(3, 2), new List<Char>() { 'A', 'O' }); // ... CreatePixel(new Point(2, 4), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'O', 'B', 'L' }); CreatePixel(new Point(3, 4), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'A', 'L' }); CreatePixel(new Point(4, 4), new List<Char>() { }); Now for every letter, in order to find the unique characteristics, you need to look at which buckets it belongs to, as well as the amount of other characters in the bucket. So let's take the example of "I". We go to all the buckets it belongs to (1,0; 2,0; 3,0; ...; 3,4) and see that the one with the least amount of other characters is (3,0). In fact, it only has 1 character, meaning it must be an "I" in this case, and we found our unique characteristic. You can also do the same for pixels that would be white. Notice that bucket (2,0) contains all the letters except for "L", this means that it could be used as a white pixel test. Similarly, (2,4) doesn't contain an 'A'. Buckets that either contain all the letters or none of the letters can be discarded immediately, since these pixels can't help define a unique characteristic (e.g. 1,1; 4,0; 0,1; 4,4). It gets trickier when you don't have a 1 pixel test for a letter, for example in the case of 'O' and 'B'. Let's walk through the test for 'O'... It's contained in the following buckets: // Bucket Count Letters // 2,0 4 I, A, O, B // 3,1 3 A, O, B // 3,2 2 A, O // 2,4 4 I, O, B, L Additionally, we also have a few white pixel tests that can help: (I only listed those that are missing at most 2). The Missing Count was calculated as (5 - Bucket.Count). // Bucket Missing Count Missing Letters // 1,0 2 A, O // 1,1 2 I, O // 2,2 2 O, L // 3,4 2 O, B So now we can take the shortest black pixel bucket (3,2) and see that when we test for (3,2) we know it is either an 'A' or an 'O'. So we need an easy way to tell the difference between an 'A' and an 'O'. We could either look for a black pixel bucket that contains 'O' but not 'A' (e.g. 2,4) or a white pixel bucket that contains an 'O' but not an 'A' (e.g. 1,1). Either of these could be used in combination with the (3,2) pixel to uniquely identify the letter 'O' with only 2 tests. This seems like a simple algorithm when there are 5 characters, but how would I do this when there are 26 letters and a lot more pixels overlapping? For example, let's say that after the (3,2) pixel test, it found 10 different characters that contain the pixel (and this was the least from all the buckets). Now I need to find differences from 9 other characters instead of only 1 other character. How would I achieve my goal of getting the least amount of checks as possible, and ensure that I am not running extraneous tests?

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  • How do I do event handling in php with html?

    - by TheAmazingKnight
    I am constructing a simple quiz using html and php. The problem I'm having is that I'm not sure how to do event handlers since it's my first time doing php. Simply, the user click on Take Quiz and it brings up the quiz, then submit the quiz using the same page and show score results. The quiz was written in HTML as shown below: HTML CODE: <section> <h1 id="theme"><span class="initial">Q</span>uiz</h1> <div id="message">Why not go ahead and take the quiz to test your knowledge based on what you've learned in Smartphone Photography. There are only 5 questions surrounding the content of this site. Good Luck! :) <br/> <button type="button" name="name" onclick="takeQuiz()">Take Quiz!</button> </div> </section> </div> <form action="grade.php" method="post" id="quiz"> <!--Question 1--> <h3>1. How many percent of modern camera phones use CMOS?</h3> <div> <input type="radio" name="question-1-answers" id="question-1-answers-A" value="A" /> <label for="question-1-answers-A">A) 20%</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-1-answers" id="question-1-answers-B" value="B" /> <label for="question-1-answers-B">B) 80%</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-1-answers" id="question-1-answers-C" value="C" /> <label for="question-1-answers-C">C) 50%</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-1-answers" id="question-1-answers-D" value="D" /> <label for="question-1-answers-D">D) 90%</label> </div> <!--Question 2--> <h3>2. Which type of camera setting(s) is best for greater control and flexibility in terms of focusing on a subject?</h3> <div> <input type="radio" name="question-2-answers" id="question-2-answers-A" value="A" /> <label for="question-2-answers-A">A) Manual Focus</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-2-answers" id="question-2-answers-B" value="B" /> <label for="question-2-answers-B">B) Auto Focus</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-2-answers" id="question-2-answers-C" value="C" /> <label for="question-2-answers-C">C) Both A and B</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-2-answers" id="question-2-answers-D" value="D" /> <label for="question-2-answers-D">D) Neither</label> </div> <!--Question 3--> <h3>3. What are the three properties included in an exposure triangle?</h3> <div> <input type="radio" name="question-3-answers" id="question-3-answers-A" value="A" /> <label for="question-3-answers-A">A) White Balance, ISO, Low Light</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-3-answers" id="question-3-answers-B" value="B" /> <label for="question-3-answers-B">B) Shutter Speed, Exposure, ISO</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-3-answers" id="question-3-answers-C" value="C" /> <label for="question-3-answers-C">C) Aperture, ISO, Exposure</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-3-answers" id="question-3-answers-D" value="D" /> <label for="question-3-answers-D">D) ISO, Aperture, Shutter Speed</label> </div> <!--Question 4--> <h3>4. The higher the ISO, the more noise it produces in an image.</h3> <div> <input type="radio" name="question-4-answers" id="question-4-answers-A" value="A" /> <label for="question-4-answers-A">A) True</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-4-answers" id="question-4-answers-B" value="B" /> <label for="question-4-answers-B">B) False</label> </div> <!--Question 5--> <h3>5. What is the name of the smartphone you've seen all over this site?</h3> <div> <input type="radio" name="question-5-answers" id="question-5-answers-A" value="A" /> <label for="question-5-answers-A">A) Nokia Pureview 808</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-5-answers" id="question-5-answers-B" value="B" /> <label for="question-5-answers-B">B) Nokia Lumia 1020</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-5-answers" id="question-5-answers-C" value="C" /> <label for="question-5-answers-C">C) Nokia Lumia 925</label> <br/> <input type="radio" name="question-5-answers" id="question-5-answers-D" value="D" /> <label for="question-5-answers-D">D) Nokia Lumia 920</label> </div> <input type="submit" value="Submit Quiz" /> </form> Then I have a php file named grade.php which will print the results of the quiz grade. PHP CODE: <?php // create variables linking the questions' answers from the form $answer1 = $_POST['question-1-answers']; $answer2 = $_POST['question-2-answers']; $answer3 = $_POST['question-3-answers']; $answer4 = $_POST['question-4-answers']; $answer5 = $_POST['question-5-answers']; $totalCorrect = 0; // Set up if-statements and determine the correct answers to be POSTed if($answer1 == "D") { $totalCorrect++; } if($answer2 == "A") { $totalCorrect++; } if($answer3 == "D") { $totalCorrect++; } if($answer4 == "A") { $totalCorrect++; } if($answer5 == "B") { $totalCorrect++; } //display the results echo "<div id='results'>$totalCorrect / 5 correct</div>"; ?>

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  • Dealing with external processes

    - by Jesse Aldridge
    I've been working on a gui app that needs to manage external processes. Working with external processes leads to a lot of issues that can make a programmer's life difficult. I feel like maintenence on this app is taking an unacceptably long time. I've been trying to list the things that make working with external processes difficult so that I can come up with ways of mitigating the pain. This kind of turned into a rant which I thought I'd post here in order to get some feedback and to provide some guidance to anybody thinking about sailing into these very murky waters. Here's what I've got so far: Output from the child can get mixed up with output from the parent. This can make both outputs misleading and hard to read. It can be hard to tell what came from where. It becomes harder to figure out what's going on when things are asynchronous. Here's a contrived example: import textwrap, os, time from subprocess import Popen test_path = 'test_file.py' with open(test_path, 'w') as file: file.write(textwrap.dedent(''' import time for i in range(3): print 'Hello %i' % i time.sleep(1)''')) proc = Popen('python -B "%s"' % test_path) for i in range(3): print 'Hello %i' % i time.sleep(1) os.remove(test_path) I guess I could have the child process write its output to a file. But it can be annoying to have to open up a file every time I want to see the result of a print statement. If I have code for the child process I could add a label, something like print 'child: Hello %i', but it can be annoying to do that for every print. And it adds some noise to the output. And of course I can't do it if I don't have access to the code. I could manually manage the process output. But then you open up a huge can of worms with threads and polling and stuff like that. A simple solution is to treat processes like synchronous functions, that is, no further code executes until the process completes. In other words, make the process block. But that doesn't work if you're building a gui app. Which brings me to the next problem... Blocking processes cause the gui to become unresponsive. import textwrap, sys, os from subprocess import Popen from PyQt4.QtGui import * from PyQt4.QtCore import * test_path = 'test_file.py' with open(test_path, 'w') as file: file.write(textwrap.dedent(''' import time for i in range(3): print 'Hello %i' % i time.sleep(1)''')) app = QApplication(sys.argv) button = QPushButton('Launch process') def launch_proc(): # Can't move the window until process completes proc = Popen('python -B "%s"' % test_path) proc.communicate() button.connect(button, SIGNAL('clicked()'), launch_proc) button.show() app.exec_() os.remove(test_path) Qt provides a process wrapper of its own called QProcess which can help with this. You can connect functions to signals to capture output relatively easily. This is what I'm currently using. But I'm finding that all these signals behave suspiciously like goto statements and can lead to spaghetti code. I think I want to get sort-of blocking behavior by having the 'finished' signal from QProcess call a function containing all the code that comes after the process call. I think that should work but I'm still a bit fuzzy on the details... Stack traces get interrupted when you go from the child process back to the parent process. If a normal function screws up, you get a nice complete stack trace with filenames and line numbers. If a subprocess screws up, you'll be lucky if you get any output at all. You end up having to do a lot more detective work everytime something goes wrong. Speaking of which, output has a way of disappearing when dealing external processes. Like if you run something via the windows 'cmd' command, the console will pop up, execute the code, and then disappear before you have a chance to see the output. You have to pass the /k flag to make it stick around. Similar issues seem to crop up all the time. I suppose both problems 3 and 4 have the same root cause: no exception handling. Exception handling is meant to be used with functions, it doesn't work with processes. Maybe there's some way to get something like exception handling for processes? I guess that's what stderr is for? But dealing with two different streams can be annoying in itself. Maybe I should look into this more... Processes can hang and stick around in the background without you realizing it. So you end up yelling at your computer cuz it's going so slow until you finally bring up your task manager and see 30 instances of the same process hanging out in the background. Also, hanging background processes can interefere with other instances of the process in various fun ways, such as causing permissions errors by holding a handle to a file or someting like that. It seems like an easy solution to this would be to have the parent process kill the child process on exit if the child process didn't close itself. But if the parent process crashes, cleanup code might not get called and the child can be left hanging. Also, if the parent waits for the child to complete, and the child is in an infinite loop or something, you can end up with two hanging processes. This problem can tie in to problem 2 for extra fun, causing your gui to stop responding entirely and force you to kill everything with the task manager. F***ing quotes Parameters often need to be passed to processes. This is a headache in itself. Especially if you're dealing with file paths. Say... 'C:/My Documents/whatever/'. If you don't have quotes, the string will often be split at the space and interpreted as two arguments. If you need nested quotes you can use ' and ". But if you need to use more than two layers of quotes, you have to do some nasty escaping, for example: "cmd /k 'python \'path 1\' \'path 2\''". A good solution to this problem is passing parameters as a list rather than as a single string. Subprocess allows you to do this. Can't easily return data from a subprocess. You can use stdout of course. But what if you want to throw a print in there for debugging purposes? That's gonna screw up the parent if it's expecting output formatted a certain way. In functions you can print one string and return another and everything works just fine. Obscure command-line flags and a crappy terminal based help system. These are problems I often run into when using os level apps. Like the /k flag I mentioned, for holding a cmd window open, who's idea was that? Unix apps don't tend to be much friendlier in this regard. Hopefully you can use google or StackOverflow to find the answer you need. But if not, you've got a lot of boring reading and frusterating trial and error to do. External factors. This one's kind of fuzzy. But when you leave the relatively sheltered harbor of your own scripts to deal with external processes you find yourself having to deal with the "outside world" to a much greater extent. And that's a scary place. All sorts of things can go wrong. Just to give a random example: the cwd in which a process is run can modify it's behavior. There are probably other issues, but those are the ones I've written down so far. Any other snags you'd like to add? Any suggestions for dealing with these problems?

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  • Processing incorrect mac addresses from 802.11 frames with pcap

    - by Quentin Swain
    I'm working throurgh a project with pcap and wireless. Following an example posted in response to oe of my earlier questions I am trying to extract the mac addresses from wireless frames. I have created structures for the radiotap header and a basic management frame. For some reason when it comes to trying to output the mac addresses I am printing out the wrong data. When I compare to wireshark I don't see why the radio tap data is printing out correctly but the mac addresses are not. I don't see any additional padding in the hex dump that wireshark displays when i look at the packets and compare the packets that I have captured. I am somewhat famialar with c but not an expert so maybe I am not using the pointers and structures properly could someone help show me what I am doing wrong? Thanks, Quentin // main.c // MacSniffer // #include <pcap.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdlib.h> #define MAXBYTES2CAPTURE 65535 #ifdef WORDS_BIGENDIAN typedef struct frame_control { unsigned int subtype:4; /*frame subtype field*/ unsigned int protoVer:2; /*frame type field*/ unsigned int version:2; /*protocol version*/ unsigned int order:1; unsigned int protected:1; unsigned int moreDate:1; unsigned int power_management:1; unsigned int retry:1; unsigned int moreFrag:1; unsigned int fromDS:1; unsigned int toDS:1; }frame_control; struct ieee80211_radiotap_header{ u_int8_t it_version; u_int8_t it_pad; u_int16_t it_len; u_int32_t it_present; u_int64_t MAC_timestamp; u_int8_t flags; u_int8_t dataRate; u_int16_t channelfrequency; u_int16_t channFreq_pad; u_int16_t channelType; u_int16_t channType_pad; u_int8_t ssiSignal; u_int8_t ssiNoise; u_int8_t antenna; }; #else typedef struct frame_control { unsigned int protoVer:2; /* protocol version*/ unsigned int type:2; /*frame type field (Management,Control,Data)*/ unsigned int subtype:4; /* frame subtype*/ unsigned int toDS:1; /* frame coming from Distribution system */ unsigned int fromDS:1; /*frame coming from Distribution system */ unsigned int moreFrag:1; /* More fragments?*/ unsigned int retry:1; /*was this frame retransmitted*/ unsigned int powMgt:1; /*Power Management*/ unsigned int moreDate:1; /*More Date*/ unsigned int protectedData:1; /*Protected Data*/ unsigned int order:1; /*Order*/ }frame_control; struct ieee80211_radiotap_header{ u_int8_t it_version; u_int8_t it_pad; u_int16_t it_len; u_int32_t it_present; u_int64_t MAC_timestamp; u_int8_t flags; u_int8_t dataRate; u_int16_t channelfrequency; u_int16_t channelType; int ssiSignal:8; int ssiNoise:8; }; #endif struct wi_frame { u_int16_t fc; u_int16_t wi_duration; u_int8_t wi_add1[6]; u_int8_t wi_add2[6]; u_int8_t wi_add3[6]; u_int16_t wi_sequenceControl; // u_int8_t wi_add4[6]; //unsigned int qosControl:2; //unsigned int frameBody[23124]; }; void processPacket(u_char *arg, const struct pcap_pkthdr* pkthdr, const u_char* packet) { int i= 0, *counter = (int *) arg; struct ieee80211_radiotap_header *rh =(struct ieee80211_radiotap_header *)packet; struct wi_frame *fr= (struct wi_frame *)(packet + rh->it_len); u_char *ptr; //printf("Frame Type: %d",fr->wi_fC->type); printf("Packet count: %d\n", ++(*counter)); printf("Received Packet Size: %d\n", pkthdr->len); if(rh->it_version != NULL) { printf("Radiotap Version: %d\n",rh->it_version); } if(rh->it_pad!=NULL) { printf("Radiotap Pad: %d\n",rh->it_pad); } if(rh->it_len != NULL) { printf("Radiotap Length: %d\n",rh->it_len); } if(rh->it_present != NULL) { printf("Radiotap Present: %c\n",rh->it_present); } if(rh->MAC_timestamp != NULL) { printf("Radiotap Timestamp: %u\n",rh->MAC_timestamp); } if(rh->dataRate != NULL) { printf("Radiotap Data Rate: %u\n",rh->dataRate); } if(rh->channelfrequency != NULL) { printf("Radiotap Channel Freq: %u\n",rh->channelfrequency); } if(rh->channelType != NULL) { printf("Radiotap Channel Type: %06x\n",rh->channelType); } if(rh->ssiSignal != NULL) { printf("Radiotap SSI signal: %d\n",rh->ssiSignal); } if(rh->ssiNoise != NULL) { printf("Radiotap SSI Noise: %d\n",rh->ssiNoise); } ptr = fr->wi_add1; int k= 6; printf("Destination Address:"); do{ printf("%s%X",(k==6)?" ":":",*ptr++); } while(--k>0); printf("\n"); ptr = fr->wi_add2; k=0; printf("Source Address:"); do{ printf("%s%X",(k==6)?" ":":",*ptr++); }while(--k>0); printf("\n"); ptr = fr->wi_add3; k=0; do{ printf("%s%X",(k==6)?" ":":",*ptr++); } while(--k>0); printf("\n"); /* for(int j = 0; j < 23124;j++) { if(fr->frameBody[j]!= NULL) { printf("%x",fr->frameBody[j]); } } */ for (i = 0;i<pkthdr->len;i++) { if(isprint(packet[i +rh->it_len])) { printf("%c",packet[i + rh->it_len]); } else{printf(".");} //print newline after each section of the packet if((i%16 ==0 && i!=0) ||(i==pkthdr->len-1)) { printf("\n"); } } return; } int main(int argc, char** argv) { int count = 0; pcap_t* descr = NULL; char errbuf[PCAP_ERRBUF_SIZE], *device = NULL; struct bpf_program fp; char filter[]="wlan broadcast"; const u_char* packet; memset(errbuf,0,PCAP_ERRBUF_SIZE); device = argv[1]; if(device == NULL) { fprintf(stdout,"Supply a device name "); } descr = pcap_create(device,errbuf); pcap_set_rfmon(descr,1); pcap_set_promisc(descr,1); pcap_set_snaplen(descr,30); pcap_set_timeout(descr,10000); pcap_activate(descr); int dl =pcap_datalink(descr); printf("The Data Link type is %s",pcap_datalink_val_to_name(dl)); //pcap_dispatch(descr,MAXBYTES2CAPTURE,1,512,errbuf); //Open device in promiscuous mode //descr = pcap_open_live(device,MAXBYTES2CAPTURE,1,512,errbuf); /* if(pcap_compile(descr,&fp,filter,0,PCAP_NETMASK_UNKNOWN)==-1) { fprintf(stderr,"Error compiling filter\n"); exit(1); } if(pcap_setfilter(descr,&fp)==-1) { fprintf(stderr,"Error setting filter\n"); exit(1); } */ pcap_loop(descr,0, processPacket, (u_char *) &count); return 0; }

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