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• P90X or How I Stopped Worrying and Love Exercise

  - by Matt Christian

  Last Wednesday, after many UPS delivery failures, I received P90X in the mail.  P90X is a series of DVD's and a nutrition guide you use to shed pounds and gain muscle.  Odds are you've seen the infomercial on TV at some point if you watch a little tube now and again.  I started last Thursday and am still standing to tell this tale. At it's core, P90X is a 12 DVD set of exercise videos.  Each video is comprised of a different workout routine that typically last around an hour (some up to 1 1/2 hours).  Every day you are supposed to do one of the workouts which are different every day (sometimes you may repeat a shorter 6 min workout dedicated to abs twice a week).  There are different 'programs' focused on different areas, for weight loss you do the Lean Program, standard weight loss and muscle gain do the Regular Program, and for those hardcore health-nuts, the Insane Program (which consists of 2 - 1 hour long exercises per day).  Each Program has a different set of workouts per week which you repeat for 3 weeks, followed by a 'Relaxation Week' which is essentially a slightly different order.  After the month of workouts is over, you've finished 1 phase out of 3.  P90X takes 90 days, split into 3 Phases (1 phase per month).  Every phase has a different workout order which is also focused on different areas (Weight Loss, Muscle Gain, etc...)  With the DVD's you also get a small glossy book of about 100 pages detailing the different workouts and the different programs as well as a sample workout to see if you're even ready to start P90X. The second part of P90X, which can also be considered the 'core' (actually the other half of the core) is the nutrition guide that is included.  The Nutrition Guide is a book similar to the one that defines the exercises (about 100 glossy pages) though it details foods you should eat, the amounts, and a number of healthy (and tasty!) recipes.  The guide is split up into 3 phases as well, promoting high protein and low carb/dairy at during Phase 1, and levelling off through to Phase 3 where you have a relatively balanced amount of every food group. So after 1 week where am I?  I've stuck quite close to the nutrition guide (there isn't 'diet food' in here people, it's ACTUALLY food) and done my exercise every day.  I think a lot of the first week is getting into the whole idea and learning the moves performed on the DVD.  Have I lost weight?  No.  Do I feel some definition already starting to poke out?  Absolutely (no pun intended). Tony Horton (the 51-year old hulk that runs the whole thing) is very fun to listen and work along with and the 'diet' really isn't too hard to follow unless all you eat is carbs.  I've tried the gym thing and could not get motivated enough to continue going.  P90X is the first time I've ached from a workout, BEFORE starting my next workout.  For anyone interested, Google 'P90X' or 'BeachBody' to find out more information about this awesome program!

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• PHP Web Services - Nice try

  Thanks to the membership in the O'Reilly User Group Programme the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (short: MSCC) recently received a welcome package with several book titles. Among them is the latest publication of Lorna Jane Mitchell - 'PHP Web Services: APIs for the Modern Web'. Following is the book review I put on Amazon: Nice try! Initially, I was astonished that a small book like 'PHP Web Services' would be able to cover all the interesting topics about APIs and Web Services, independently whether they are written in PHP or not. And unfortunately, the title isn't able to stand up to the readers (or at least my) expectations. Maybe as a light defense, there is no usual paragraph about the intended audience of that book, but still I have to admit that the first half (chapters 1 to 8) are well written and Lorna has her points on the various technologies. Also, the code samples in PHP are clean and easy to understand. With chapter 'Debugging Web Services' the book started to change my mind about the clarity of advice and the instructions on designing and developing good APIs. Eventually, this might be related to the fact that I'm used to other tools since years, like Telerik Fiddler as HTTP proxy in order to trace and inspect any kind of request/response handling. Including localhost monitoring, SSL certification acceptance, and the ability to debug mobile devices, especially iOS-based ones. Compared to Charles, Fiddler is available for free. What really got me off the hook is the following statement in chapter 10 about Service Type Decisions: "For users who have larger systems using technology stacks such as Java, C++, or .NET, it may be easier for them to integrate with a SOAP service." WHAT? A couple of pages earlier the author recommends to stay away from 'old-fashioned' API styles like SOAP (if possible). And on top of that I wonder why there are tons of documentation towards development of RESTful Web Services based on WebAPI. The ASP.NET stack clearly moves away from SOAP to JSON and REST since years! Honestly, as a software developer on the .NET stack this leaves a mixed feeling after all. As for the remaining chapters I simply consider them as 'blah blah' without any real value and lots of theoretical advice. Related to the chapter 13 about 'Documentation', I just had the 'pleasure' to write a C#-based client against a Java-based SOAP Web Service. Personally, I take the WSDL as the master reference in the first place and Visual Studio generates all the stub types involved in the communication. During the implementation and testing I came across a 'java.lang.NullPointerException' in various methods and for various method parameters. The WSDL and the generated types were declared as Nullable, so nothing to worry about, or? Well, I logged in a support ticket, and guess what was the response to that scenario? "The service definition in the WSDL is wrong, please refer to the documentation in order to use the methods and parameters correctly" - No comment! Lorna's title is a quick read and in some areas she has good advice on designing and implementing Web Services and APIs. But roughly 100 pages aren't enough to cover a vast topic like that. After all, nice try and I'm looking forward to an improved second edition. Honestly, I never thought that I would come across a poor review. In general, it's a good book but it clearly has a lack of depth, the PHP code samples are incomplete (closing tags missing), and there are too many assumptions and theoretical statements.

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• Algorithm to Find the Aggregate Mass of "Granola Bar"-Like Structures?

  - by Stuart Robbins

  I'm a planetary science researcher and one project I'm working on is N-body simulations of Saturn's rings. The goal of this particular study is to watch as particles clump together under their own self-gravity and measure the aggregate mass of the clumps versus the mean velocity of all particles in the cell. We're trying to figure out if this can explain some observations made by the Cassini spacecraft during the Saturnian summer solstice when large structures were seen casting shadows on the nearly edge-on rings. Below is a screenshot of what any given timestep looks like. (Each particle is 2 m in diameter and the simulation cell itself is around 700 m across.) The code I'm using already spits out the mean velocity at every timestep. What I need to do is figure out a way to determine the mass of particles in the clumps and NOT the stray particles between them. I know every particle's position, mass, size, etc., but I don't know easily that, say, particles 30,000-40,000 along with 102,000-105,000 make up one strand that to the human eye is obvious. So, the algorithm I need to write would need to be a code with as few user-entered parameters as possible (for replicability and objectivity) that would go through all the particle positions, figure out what particles belong to clumps, and then calculate the mass. It would be great if it could do it for "each" clump/strand as opposed to everything over the cell, but I don't think I actually need it to separate them out. The only thing I was thinking of was doing some sort of N2 distance calculation where I'd calculate the distance between every particle and if, say, the closest 100 particles were within a certain distance, then that particle would be considered part of a cluster. But that seems pretty sloppy and I was hoping that you CS folks and programmers might know of a more elegant solution? Edited with My Solution: What I did was to take a sort of nearest-neighbor / cluster approach and do the quick-n-dirty N2 implementation first. So, take every particle, calculate distance to all other particles, and the threshold for in a cluster or not was whether there were N particles within d distance (two parameters that have to be set a priori, unfortunately, but as was said by some responses/comments, I wasn't going to get away with not having some of those). I then sped it up by not sorting distances but simply doing an order N search and increment a counter for the particles within d, and that sped stuff up by a factor of 6. Then I added a "stupid programmer's tree" (because I know next to nothing about tree codes). I divide up the simulation cell into a set number of grids (best results when grid size ˜7 d) where the main grid lines up with the cell, one grid is offset by half in x and y, and the other two are offset by 1/4 in ±x and ±y. The code then divides particles into the grids, then each particle N only has to have distances calculated to the other particles in that cell. Theoretically, if this were a real tree, I should get order N*log(N) as opposed to N2 speeds. I got somewhere between the two, where for a 50,000-particle sub-set I got a 17x increase in speed, and for a 150,000-particle cell, I got a 38x increase in speed. 12 seconds for the first, 53 seconds for the second, 460 seconds for a 500,000-particle cell. Those are comparable speeds to how long the code takes to run the simulation 1 timestep forward, so that's reasonable at this point. Oh -- and it's fully threaded, so it'll take as many processors as I can throw at it.

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• Know more about Cache Buffer Handle

  - by Liu Maclean(???)

  ??????«latch free:cache buffer handles???SQL????»?????cache buffer handle latch?????,?????????: “?????pin?buffer header???????buffer handle,??buffer handle?????????cache buffer handles?,??????cache buffer handles??????,???????cache???buffer handles,?????(reserved set)?????????????_db_handles_cached(???5)???,?????????????????SQL??????????????????????,????pin??????,????????handle,?????????5?cached buffer handles???handle????????????????,Oracle?????????????????pin?”????“?buffer,????????????????handle???db_block_buffers/processes,????_cursor_db_buffers_pinned???????cache buffer handles?????,??????,????????????SQL,????cache?buffer handles?????????,??????????????,???????????/?????” ????T.ASKMACLEAN.COM????,??????cache Buffer handle?????: cache buffer handle ??: ------------------------------ | Buffer state object | ------------------------------ | Place to hang the buffer | ------------------------------ | Consistent Get? | ------------------------------ | Proc Owning SO | ------------------------------ | Flags(RIR) | ------------------------------ ???? cache buffer handle SO: 70000046fdfe530, type: 24, owner: 70000041b018630, flag: INIT/-/-/0×00(buffer) (CR) PR: 70000048e92d148 FLG: 0×500000lock rls: 0, class bit: 0kcbbfbp: [BH: 7000001c7f069b0, LINK: 70000046fdfe570]where: kdswh02: kdsgrp, why: 0BH (7000001c7f069b0) file#: 12 rdba: 0×03061612 (12/398866) class: 1 ba: 7000001c70ee000set: 75 blksize: 8192 bsi: 0 set-flg: 0 pwbcnt: 0dbwrid: 2 obj: 66209 objn: 48710 tsn: 6 afn: 12hash: [700000485f12138,700000485f12138] lru: [70000025af67790,700000132f69ee0]lru-flags: hot_bufferckptq: [NULL] fileq: [NULL] objq: [700000114f5dd10,70000028bf5d620]use: [70000046fdfe570,70000046fdfe570] wait: [NULL]st: SCURRENT md: SHR tch: 0flags: affinity_lockLRBA: [0x0.0.0] HSCN: [0xffff.ffffffff] HSUB: [65535]where: kdswh02: kdsgrp, why: 0 # Example:#   (buffer) (CR) PR: 37290 FLG:    0#   kcbbfbp    : [BH: befd8, LINK: 7836c] (WAITING) Buffer handle (X$KCBBF) kernel cache, buffer buffer_handles Query x$kcbbf  – lists all the buffer handles ???? _db_handles             System-wide simultaneous buffer operations ,no of buffer handles_db_handles_cached      Buffer handles cached each process , no of processes  default 5_cursor_db_buffers_pinned  additional number of buffers a cursor can pin at once_session_kept_cursor_pins       Number of cursors pins to keep in a session When a buffer is pinned it is attached to buffer state object. ??? ???????? cache buffer handles latch ? buffer pin???: SESSION A : SQL> select * from v$version; BANNER ---------------------------------------------------------------- Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.5.0 - 64bi PL/SQL Release 10.2.0.5.0 - Production CORE    10.2.0.5.0      Production TNS for Linux: Version 10.2.0.5.0 - Production NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.5.0 - Production SQL> create table test_cbc_handle(t1 int); Table created. SQL> insert into test_cbc_handle values(1); 1 row created. SQL> commit; Commit complete. SQL> select rowid from test_cbc_handle; ROWID ------------------ AAANO6AABAAAQZSAAA SQL> select * from test_cbc_handle where rowid='AAANO6AABAAAQZSAAA';         T1 ----------          1 SQL> select addr,name from v$latch_parent where name='cache buffer handles'; ADDR             NAME ---------------- -------------------------------------------------- 00000000600140A8 cache buffer handles SQL> select to_number('00000000600140A8','xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx') from dual; TO_NUMBER('00000000600140A8','XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX') ----------------------------------------------------                                           1610694824 ??cache buffer handles????parent latch ??? child latch ???SESSION A hold ??????cache buffer handles parent latch ???? oradebug call kslgetl ??, kslgetl?oracle??get latch??? SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> oradebug call kslgetl 1610694824 1; Function returned 1 ?????SESSION B ???: SQL> select * from v$latchholder;        PID        SID LADDR            NAME                                                                   GETS ---------- ---------- ---------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- ----------         15        141 00000000600140A8 cache buffer handles                                                    119 cache buffer handles latch ???session A hold??,????????acquire cache buffer handle latch SQL> select * from test_cbc_handle where rowid='AAANO6AABAAAQZSAAA';         T1 ----------          1 ?????Server Process?????? read buffer, ????????"_db_handles_cached", ??process?cache 5? cache buffer handle ??"_db_handles_cached"=0,?process????5????cache buffer handle , ???? process ???pin buffer,???hold cache buffer handle latch??????cache buffer handle SQL> alter system set "_db_handles_cached"=0 scope=spfile; System altered. ????? shutdown immediate; startup; session A: SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> oradebug call kslgetl 1610694824 1; Function returned 1 session B: select * from test_cbc_handle where rowid='AAANO6AABAAAQZSAAA'; session B hang!! WHY? SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> oradebug dump systemstate 266; Statement processed.   SO: 0x11b30b7b0, type: 2, owner: (nil), flag: INIT/-/-/0x00   (process) Oracle pid=22, calls cur/top: (nil)/0x11b453c38, flag: (0) -             int error: 0, call error: 0, sess error: 0, txn error 0   (post info) last post received: 0 0 0               last post received-location: No post               last process to post me: none               last post sent: 0 0 0               last post sent-location: No post               last process posted by me: none     (latch info) wait_event=0 bits=8       holding    (efd=4) 600140a8 cache buffer handles level=3   SO: 0x11b305810, type: 2, owner: (nil), flag: INIT/-/-/0x00   (process) Oracle pid=10, calls cur/top: 0x11b455ac0/0x11b450a58, flag: (0) -             int error: 0, call error: 0, sess error: 0, txn error 0   (post info) last post received: 0 0 0               last post received-location: No post               last process to post me: none               last post sent: 0 0 0               last post sent-location: No post               last process posted by me: none     (latch info) wait_event=0 bits=2         Location from where call was made: kcbzgs:       waiting for 600140a8 cache buffer handles level=3 FBD93353:000019F0    10   162 10005   1 KSL WAIT BEG [latch: cache buffer handles] 1610694824/0x600140a8 125/0x7d 0/0x0 FF936584:00002761    10   144 10005   1 KSL WAIT BEG [latch: cache buffer handles] 1610694824/0x600140a8 125/0x7d 0/0x0 PID=22 holding ??cache buffer handles latch PID=10 ?? cache buffer handles latch, ????"_db_handles_cached"=0 ?? process??????cache buffer handles ??systemstate???? kcbbfbp cache buffer handle??, ?? "_db_handles_cached"=0 ? cache buffer handles latch?hold ?? ????cache buffer handles latch , ??? buffer?pin?????????? session A exit session B: SQL> select * from v$latchholder; no rows selected SQL> insert into test_cbc_handle values(2); 1 row created. SQL> commit; Commit complete. SQL> SQL> select t1,rowid from test_cbc_handle;         T1 ROWID ---------- ------------------          1 AAANPAAABAAAQZSAAA          2 AAANPAAABAAAQZSAAB SQL> select spid,pid from v$process where addr = ( select paddr from v$session where sid=(select distinct sid from v$mystat)); SPID                PID ------------ ---------- 19251                10 ? GDB ? SPID=19215 ?debug , ?? kcbrls ????breakpoint ??? ????release buffer [oracle@vrh8 ~]$ gdb $ORACLE_HOME/bin/oracle 19251 GNU gdb (GDB) Red Hat Enterprise Linux (7.0.1-37.el5) Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying" and "show warranty" for details. This GDB was configured as "x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu". For bug reporting instructions, please see: <http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>... Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/bin/oracle...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Attaching to program: /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/bin/oracle, process 19251 Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libskgxp10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libskgxp10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libhasgen10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libhasgen10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libskgxn2.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libskgxn2.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocr10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocr10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocrb10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocrb10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocrutl10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocrutl10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libjox10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libjox10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libclsra10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libclsra10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libdbcfg10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libdbcfg10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libnnz10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libnnz10.so Reading symbols from /usr/lib64/libaio.so.1...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /usr/lib64/libaio.so.1 Reading symbols from /lib64/libdl.so.2...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libdl.so.2 Reading symbols from /lib64/libm.so.6...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libm.so.6 Reading symbols from /lib64/libpthread.so.0...(no debugging symbols found)...done. [Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled] Loaded symbols for /lib64/libpthread.so.0 Reading symbols from /lib64/libnsl.so.1...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libnsl.so.1 Reading symbols from /lib64/libc.so.6...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libc.so.6 Reading symbols from /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 Reading symbols from /lib64/libnss_files.so.2...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libnss_files.so.2 0x00000035c000d940 in __read_nocancel () from /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (gdb) break kcbrls Breakpoint 1 at 0x10e5d24 session B: select * from test_cbc_handle where rowid='AAANPAAABAAAQZSAAA'; select hang !! GDB (gdb) c Continuing. Breakpoint 1, 0x00000000010e5d24 in kcbrls () (gdb) bt #0  0x00000000010e5d24 in kcbrls () #1  0x0000000002e87d25 in qertbFetchByUserRowID () #2  0x00000000030c62b8 in opifch2 () #3  0x00000000032327f0 in kpoal8 () #4  0x00000000013b7c10 in opiodr () #5  0x0000000003c3c9da in ttcpip () #6  0x00000000013b3144 in opitsk () #7  0x00000000013b60ec in opiino () #8  0x00000000013b7c10 in opiodr () #9  0x00000000013a92f8 in opidrv () #10 0x0000000001fa3936 in sou2o () #11 0x000000000072d40b in opimai_real () #12 0x000000000072d35c in main () SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> oradebug dump systemstate 266; Statement processed. ?????? kcbbfbp buffer cache handle ?  SO state object ? BH BUFFER HEADER  link???     ----------------------------------------     SO: 0x11b452348, type: 3, owner: 0x11b305810, flag: INIT/-/-/0x00     (call) sess: cur 11b41bd18, rec 0, usr 11b41bd18; depth: 0       ----------------------------------------       SO: 0x1182dc750, type: 24, owner: 0x11b452348, flag: INIT/-/-/0x00       (buffer) (CR) PR: 0x11b305810 FLG: 0x108000       class bit: (nil)       kcbbfbp: [BH: 0xf2fc69f8, LINK: 0x1182dc790]       where: kdswh05: kdsgrp, why: 0       BH (0xf2fc69f8) file#: 1 rdba: 0x00410652 (1/67154) class: 1 ba: 0xf297c000         set: 3 blksize: 8192 bsi: 0 set-flg: 2 pwbcnt: 272         dbwrid: 0 obj: 54208 objn: 54202 tsn: 0 afn: 1         hash: [f2fc47f8,1181f3038] lru: [f2fc6b88,f2fc6968]         obj-flags: object_ckpt_list         ckptq: [1182ecf38,1182ecf38] fileq: [1182ecf58,1182ecf58] objq: [108712a28,108712a28]         use: [1182dc790,1182dc790] wait: [NULL]         st: XCURRENT md: SHR tch: 12         flags: buffer_dirty gotten_in_current_mode block_written_once                 redo_since_read         LRBA: [0xc7.73b.0] HSCN: [0x0.1cbe52] HSUB: [1]         Using State Objects           ----------------------------------------           SO: 0x1182dc750, type: 24, owner: 0x11b452348, flag: INIT/-/-/0x00           (buffer) (CR) PR: 0x11b305810 FLG: 0x108000           class bit: (nil)           kcbbfbp: [BH: 0xf2fc69f8, LINK: 0x1182dc790]           where: kdswh05: kdsgrp, why: 0         buffer tsn: 0 rdba: 0x00410652 (1/67154)         scn: 0x0000.001cbe52 seq: 0x01 flg: 0x02 tail: 0xbe520601         frmt: 0x02 chkval: 0x0000 type: 0x06=trans data tab 0, row 0, @0x1f9a tl: 6 fb: --H-FL-- lb: 0x0  cc: 1 col  0: [ 2]  c1 02 tab 0, row 1, @0x1f94 tl: 6 fb: --H-FL-- lb: 0x2  cc: 1 col  0: [ 2]  c1 15 end_of_block_dump         (buffer) (CR) PR: 0x11b305810 FLG: 0x108000 st: XCURRENT md: SHR tch: 12 ? buffer header?status= XCURRENT mode=KCBMSHARE KCBMSHR     current share ?????  x$kcbbf ????? cache buffer handle SQL> select distinct KCBBPBH from  x$kcbbf ; KCBBPBH ---------------- 00 00000000F2FC69F8            ==>0xf2fc69f8 SQL> select * from x$kcbbf where kcbbpbh='00000000F2FC69F8'; ADDR                   INDX    INST_ID KCBBFSO_TYP KCBBFSO_FLG KCBBFSO_OWN ---------------- ---------- ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------------   KCBBFFLG    KCBBFCR    KCBBFCM KCBBFMBR         KCBBPBH ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------------- ---------------- KCBBPBF          X0KCBBPBH        X0KCBBPBF        X1KCBBPBH ---------------- ---------------- ---------------- ---------------- X1KCBBPBF        KCBBFBH            KCBBFWHR   KCBBFWHY ---------------- ---------------- ---------- ---------- 00000001182DC750        748          1          24           1 000000011B452348    1081344          1          0 00               00000000F2FC69F8 00000001182DC750 00               00000001182DC750 00 00000001182DC7F8 00                      583          0 SQL> desc x$kcbbf;  Name                                      Null?    Type  ----------------------------------------- -------- ----------------------------  ADDR                                               RAW(8)  INDX                                               NUMBER  INST_ID                                            NUMBER  KCBBFSO_TYP                                        NUMBER  KCBBFSO_FLG                                        NUMBER  KCBBFSO_OWN                                        RAW(8)  KCBBFFLG                                           NUMBER  KCBBFCR                                            NUMBER  KCBBFCM                                            NUMBER  KCBBFMBR                                           RAW(8)  KCBBPBH                                            RAW(8)  KCBBPBF                                            RAW(8)  X0KCBBPBH                                          RAW(8)  X0KCBBPBF                                          RAW(8)  X1KCBBPBH                                          RAW(8)  X1KCBBPBF                                          RAW(8)  KCBBFBH                                            RAW(8)  KCBBFWHR                                           NUMBER  KCBBFWHY                                           NUMBER gdb ?? ?process??????kcbrls release buffer? ???cache buffer handle??? SQL> select distinct KCBBPBH from  x$kcbbf ; KCBBPBH ---------------- 00

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• Subscribable World Cup 2010 Calendar

  - by jamiet

  I bang on quite a lot on this blog about ways in which data can get published over the web and one of the most interesting ways, in my opinion, of publishing data in a structured manner that is well understood is to use the iCalendar specification. There isn’t much information in the world that doesn’t have some concept of “when” so iCalendar is a great way of distributing that information. You have probably used iCalendar at some point without even knowing about it. All files with a .ics suffix are iCalendar format files and that is why you can happily import them into Outlook, Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar etc… where they can be parsed and have the semantic data (when, where and who) extracted from them. Importing of iCalendar format data is really only half the trick though; in my opinion the real value of iCalendar-formatted calendar is the ability to subscribe to them. Subscribing has a simple benefit over importing but that single benefit is of massive importance: a subscriber to an iCalendar calendar can periodically check to see if any updates have been made and, if they have, automatically update the local copy. The real benefit to the user is the productivity gain – a single update to an iCalendar means that all subscribers are automatically made aware of the change and there is zero effort on the part of the subscriber; as my former colleague Howard van Rooijen is fond of saying, “work smarter not harder” – nowhere is this edict more ably demonstrated than subscribing versus importing of calendars. If you want to read some more thoughts about iCalendar then go and read my past blog post Calendar syndication - My big hope for 2009's breakthrough technology or better still go and seek out Jon Udell who speaks very authoritatively on the issue of iCalendar. With this subject of iCalendar on my mind I was interested to discover (via Steve Clayton’s blog post Download the world cup fixtures) that the BBC had made a .ics file available containing all of the matches in the upcoming World Cup. As you can probably guess this was a file that was made available so that it could be imported into your calendar of choice. It had one obvious downside though, right now nobody knows who is going to be playing in the knock-out stages so the calendar looks like this: with no teams being named after 25th June. How much more useful would this calendar have been if the BBC had made it possible to subscribe to the calendar instead, thus the calendar could be updated with the teams for the knock out stages when they are known and every subscriber would have a permanently up-to-date record of all the fixtures in their calendar. Better still, the calendar could be updated with match results as well or perhaps even post a match report from the BBC sport pages; when calendars are made subscribable a sea of opportunity opens up for distribution of information. So with that in mind I have decided to go one better than the BBC. I have imported their .ics into a brand new Hotmail calendar and made it publicly available at the following URLs: HTML http://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/index.html iCalendar webcal://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/calendar.ics The link you’re really interested in is the second one - click on that and it should open up in your calendar software of choice. Or, if you want to view it in an online calendar such as Hotmail Calendar or Google Calendar, copy and paste that URL into the appropriate place. I shall endeavour to keep the calendar updated throughout the World Cup and even if I don’t you’re no worse off than if you had imported the BBC’s .ics file so why not give it a try? If I do keep it up to date then you will have a permanent record of the 2010 World Cup available in your calendar. Forever. If you have your calendar synced to your smartphone then you’ll be carrying match reports around with you without you having to do a single thing. Surely that’s worth a quick click isn’t it?   If you have any thoughts let me have them in the comments below. Thanks for reading. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• IIS Logfile Visualization with XNA

  - by BobPalmer

  In my office, I have a wall mounted monitor who's whole purpose in life is to display perfmon stats from our various servers.  And on a fairly regular basis, I have folks walk by asking what the lines mean.    After providing the requisite explaination about CPU utilization, disk I/O bottlenecks, etc. this is usually followed by some blank stares from the user in question, and a distillation of all of our engineering wizardry down to the phrase 'So when the red line goes up that's bad then?'   This of course would not do.  So I talked to my friends and our network admin about an option to show something more eye catching and visual, with which we could catch at a glance a feel for what was up with our site.    He initially pointed me out to a video showing GLTail and Chipmunk done in Ruby.  Realizing this was both awesome, and that I needed an excuse to do something in XNA, I decided to knock out a proof of concept for something very similar, but with a few tweaks.   Here's a link to a video of the current prototype:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM_PWZbtH2I   Essentially this app opens up a log file (even an active one) and begins pulling out the lines of text.  (Here's a good Code Project link that covers how to do tail reading from an active text file: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/files/tail.aspx).   As new data is added, a bubble is generated in the application - a GET statement comes from the left, and a POST from the right.  I then run it through a series of expression checkers, and based on the kind of statement and the pattern, a bubble of an appropriate color is generated.   For example, if I get a 500, a huge red bubble pops out.  Others are based on the part of the system the page is from - i.e. green bubbles are from our claims management subsystem, and blue bubbles are from the pages our scheduling staff use to schedule patients.  Others include the purple bubbles for security and login, and yellow bubbles for some miscellaneous pages.   The little grey bubbles represent things like images, JS, CSS, etc - and their small size makes them work like grease to keep the larger page bubbles moving.   The app is also smart enough that if it is starting to bog down with handling the physics and interactions, it will suspend new bubbles until enough have dropped off that performance can resume (you can see this slight stuttering in the sample video).   The net result is that anyone will be able to look up on the wall monitor, and instantly get a quick feel for how things are going on the floor.  Website slow?  You can get a feel for both volume and utilized modules with one glance.  Website crashing?  Look for a wall of giant red bubbles.  No activity at all?  Maybe the site is down.  Now couple this with utilization within a farm, and cross referenced with a second app showing the same kind of data from your SQL database...   As for the app itself, it's a windows XNA project with the code in C#.   The physics are handled by the Farseer physicis eingine for XNA (http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics) which is just pure goodness.  The samples are great, and I had the app up and working in two evenings (half of that was fine tuning, and the other was me coding with a kid in my lap).   My next steps include wiring this to SQL (I have some ideas...), and adding a nice configuration module.  For example, you could use polygons, etc to tie to your regex - or more entertaining things like having a little human ragdoll to represent a user login.     Once that's wrapped up and I have a chance to complete some hardening, I will be releasing the whole thing into the wild as opensource.     Feel free to ping me if you have any questions! -Bob

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• F# and the rose-tinted reflection

  - by CliveT

  We're already seeing increasing use of many cores on client desktops. It is a change that has been long predicted. It is not just a change in architecture, but our notions of efficiency in a program. No longer can we focus on the asymptotic complexity of an algorithm by counting the steps that a single core processor would take to execute it. Instead we'll soon be more concerned about the scalability of the algorithm and how well we can increase the performance as we increase the number of cores. This may even lead us to throw away our most efficient algorithms, and switch to less efficient algorithms that scale better. We might even be willing to waste cycles in order to speculatively execute at the algorithm rather than the hardware level. State is the big headache in this parallel world. At the hardware level, main memory doesn't necessarily contain the definitive value corresponding to a particular address. An update to a location might still be held in a CPU's local cache and it might be some time before the value gets propagated. To get the latest value, and the notion of "latest" takes a lot of defining in this world of rapidly mutating state, the CPUs may well need to communicate to decide who has the definitive value of a particular address in order to avoid lost updates. At the user program level, this means programmers will need to lock objects before modifying them, or attempt to avoid the overhead of locking by understanding the memory models at a very deep level. I think it's this need to avoid statefulness that has led to the recent resurgence of interest in functional languages. In the 1980s, functional languages started getting traction when research was carried out into how programs in such languages could be auto-parallelised. Sadly, the impracticality of some of the languages, the overheads of communication during this parallel execution, and rapid improvements in compiler technology on stock hardware meant that the functional languages fell by the wayside. The one thing that these languages were good at was getting rid of implicit state, and this single idea seems like a solution to the problems we are going to face in the coming years. Whether these languages will catch on is hard to predict. The mindset for writing a program in a functional language is really very different from the way that object-oriented problem decomposition happens - one has to focus on the verbs instead of the nouns, which takes some getting used to. There are a number of hybrid functional/object languages that have been becoming more popular in recent times. These half-way houses make it easy to use functional ideas for some parts of the program while still allowing access to the underlying object-focused platform without a great deal of impedance mismatch. One example is F# running on the CLR which, in Visual Studio 2010, has because a first class member of the pack. Inside Visual Studio 2010, the tooling for F# has improved to the point where it is easy to set breakpoints and watch values change while debugging at the source level. In my opinion, it is the tooling support that will enable the widespread adoption of functional languages - without this support, people will put off any transition into the functional world for as long as they possibly can. Without tool support it will make it hard to learn these languages. One tool that doesn't currently support F# is Reflector. The idea of decompiling IL to a functional language is daunting, but F# is potentially so important I couldn't dismiss the idea. As I'm currently developing Reflector 6.5, I thought it wise to take four days just to see how far I could get in doing so, even if it achieved little more than to be clearer on how much was possible, and how long it might take. You can read what happened here, and of the insights it gave us on ways to improve the tool.

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• Oracle's PeopleSoft Customer Advisory Boards Convene to Discuss Roadmap at Pleasanton Campus

  - by john.webb(at)oracle.com

  Last week we hosted all of the PeopleSoft CABs (Customer Advisory Boards) at our Pleasanton Development Center to review our detailed designs for future Feature Packs, PeopleSoft 9.2, and beyond. Over 150 customers from 79 companies attended representing a variety of industries, geographies, and company sizes. The PeopleSoft team relies heavily on this group to provide key input on our roadmap for applications as well as technology direction. A good product strategy is one part well thought out idea with many handfuls of customer validation, and very often our best ideas originate from these customer discussions. While the individual CABs have frequent interactions with our teams, it's always great to have all of them in one place and in person. Our attendance was up from last year which I attribute to two things: (1) More interest as a result of PeopleSoft 9.1 upgrade; (2) An improving economy allowing for more travel. Maybe we should index the second item meeting-to-meeting and use it as a market indicator - we'll see! We kicked off the day one session with an overview of the PeopleSoft Roadmap and I outlined our strategy around Feature Packs and PeopleSoft 9.2. Given the high adoption rate of PeopleSoft 9.1 (over 4x that of 9.0 given the same time lapse since the release date), there was a lot of interest around the 9.1 Feature Packs as a vehicle for continuous value. We provided examples of our 3 central design themes: Simplicity, Productivity, and lower TCO, including those already delivered via Feature Packs in 2010. A great example of this is the Company Directory feature in PeopleSoft HCM. The configuration capabilities and the new actionable links our CAB advised us on last Spring were made available to all customers late last year. We reviewed many more future Navigation changes that will fundamentally change the way users interact with PeopleSoft. Our old friend, the menu tree, is being relegated from center stage to a bit part, with new concepts like Activity Guides, Train Stops, Related Actions, Work Centers, Collaborative Workspaces, and Secure Enterprise Search bringing users what they need in a contextual, role based manner with fewer clicks. Paco Aubrejuan, our PeopleSoft GM, and Steve Miranda, the SVP for Fusion Applications, then discussed our plans around Oracle's Application Investment Strategy.  This included our continued investment in developing both PeopleSoft and Fusion as well as the co-existence strategy with new Fusion Apps integrating to PeopleSoft Apps. Should you want to view this presentation, a recording is available. Jeff Robbins, our lead PeopleTools Strategist, provided the roadmap for PeopleTools and discussed our continuing plan to deliver annual releases to further evolve the user experience. Numerous examples were highlighted with the Navigation techniques I mentioned previously. Jeff also provided a lot of food for thought around Lifecycle Management topics and how to remain current on releases with a  lower cost of ownership. Dennis Mesler, from Boise, was the guest speaker in this slot, who spoke about the new PeopleSoft Test Framework (PTF). Regression Testing is a key cost component when product updates are applied. This new tool (which is free to all PeopleSoft customers as part of PeopleTools 8.51) provides a meta data driven approach to recording and executing test scripts. Coupled with what our Usage Monitor enables, PTF provides our customers a powerful tool to lower costs and manage product updates more efficiently and at the time of their choosing. Beyond the general session, we broke out into the individual CABs: HCM, Financials, ESA/ALM, SRM, SCM, CRM, and PeopleTools/ Technology. A day and half of very engaging discussions around our plans took place for each product pillar. More about that to follow in future posts.      We capped the first day with a reception sponsored by our partners: InfoSys, SmartERP (represented by Doris Wong), and Grey Sparling  Solutions (represented by Chris Heller and Larry Grey). Great to see these old friends actively engaged in the very busy PeopleSoft ecosystem!   Jeff Robbins previews the roadmap for PeopleTools with the PeopleSoft CAB  

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• Silverlight Cream for February 07, 2011 -- #1043

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Roy Dallal, Kevin Dockx, Gill Cleeren, Oren Gal, Colin Eberhardt, Rudi Grobler, Jesse Liberty, Shawn Wildermuth, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Jeremy Likness, Martin Krüger(-2-), Beth Massi, and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "A Circular ProgressBar Style using an Attached ViewModel" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Isolated Storage" Jesse Liberty Lightswitch: "How To Create Outlook Appointments from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Gergely Orosz has a summary of his 4-part series on Styles in Silverlight: Everything a Developer Needs To Know From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Memory Leak, Part 2 Roy Dallal has part 2 of his memory leak posts up... and discusses the results of runnin VMMap and some hints on how to make best use of it. Using a Channel Factory in Silverlight (instead of adding a Service Reference). With cows. Kevin Dockx has a post up for those of you that don't like the generated code that comes about when adding a service reference, and the answer is a Channel Factory... and he has an example app in the post that populates a list of cows... honest ... check it out. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 4) Gill Cleeren has Part 4 of his deep-dive into studying for the Silverlight Certification exam. This time out he's got probably half a gazillion links for working with data... seriously! Sync unlimited instances of one Silverlight application How about a cross-browser sync of an unlimited number of instances of the same Silverlight app... Oren Gal has just that going on, and discusses his first two attempts and how he finally honed in on the solution. A Circular ProgressBar Style using an Attached ViewModel Wow... check out what Colin Eberhardt's done with the "Progress Bar" ... using an Attached View Model which he discussed in a post a while back... these are awesome! WP7 - Professional Audio Recorder Rudi Grobler discusses an audio recorder for WP7 that uses the NAudio audio library for not only the recording but visualization. Isolated Storage Jesse Liberty's got his 30th 'From Scratch' post up and this time he's talking about Isolated Storage. Learning OData? MSDN and Shawn Wildermuth has the videos for you! Shawn Wildermuth produced a couple series of videos for MSDN on OData: Getting Started and Consuming OData... get the link on Shawn's post. Creating Sample Data from a Class - Page 1 Kirupa Chinnathambi shows us how to use a schema of your own design in Blend... yet still have Blend produce sample data A Pivot-Style Data Grid without the DataGrid Jeremy Likness discusses the lack of an open-source grid with dynamic columns ... let him know if you've done one! ... and then he continues on to demonstrate his build-out of the same. Synchronize a freeform drawing and a real path creation Martin Krüger has a few new samples up in the Expression Gallery. This first is taking mouse movement in an InkPresenter and creating path statements from it in a canvas and playing them back. How to: use Storyboard completed behaviors Martin Krüger's next post is about Storyboards and firing one off the end of another, in Blend... so he ended up producing a behavior for doing that... and it's in the Expression Gallery How To Create Outlook Appointments from a LightSwitch Application Beth Massi has a new Lightswitch post up... her previous was email from Lightswitch... this is Outlook appointments... pretty darn cool. Quick run through of the WP7 Developer Tools January 2011 Michael Crump has a really good Quick look at the new WP7 Dev Tools that were released last week posted on his blog Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• 9 Ways Facebook Monetization Could Change Your Marketing

  - by Mike Stiles

  Think Facebook monetization isn’t a head game? Imagine creating something so functional, fun and addictive you literally amass about 1/7th of the planet’s population as an audience. You have 1 billion users that use it at least once a month. But analysts and marketers look at what you’ve done and say, “eh…not good enough.” What if you had a TV show that garnered 1/7 of Earth’s population as an audience? How much would a spot cost? And how fast would marketers write that check, even without the targeting and engagement analytics Facebook offers? Having already changed the marketing landscape forever, if you’re Facebook’s creator, you’d have to be scratching your head and asking, “Wow, what more does a product need to do?” Facebook’s been busy answering that very question with products and betas that will likely directly affect your brand’s strategy. Item 1: Users can send physical gifts to friends through Facebook based on suggestions from user data. A giant step toward the potential power of social commerce. Item 2: Users can pay $7 to promote posts for higher visibility. Individual users, not just marketers, are being leveraged as a revenue stream. Not impressive enough? There’s also the potential Craigslist killer Facebook Marketplace. Item 3: Mobile ads. 600 million+ access Facebook on smartphones. According to the company, half of the $1 million a day generated by Sponsored Stories as of late June was coming from mobile. Ads in News Feeds seen on mobile had click-through rates 23x higher than on desktop News Feeds or the right side panel. Item 4: App developers can buy install ads that show up in mobile News Feeds so reliance on discovery in app stores is reduced. Item 5: Want your posts seen by people who never liked your Page? A test began in August where you could appear in non-fans’ News Feeds on both web and mobile. Item 6: How about an ability to use Facebook data to buy ads outside of Facebook? A mobile ad network is being tested to get your targeted messages on non-Facebook apps and sites surfaced on devices. Item 7: Facebook Collections, Facebook’s answer to Pinterest. Users can gather images of desired products and click through to the retailer to buy. Keep focusing on your imagery. Item 8: Facebook Offers, Facebook’s answer to the Groupons and Living Socials of the world. You can send deals to your fans’ News Feeds. Item 9: Facebook Exchange lets you track what fans do on Facebook and across the entire Web. Could lead to a Facebook ad network leveraging Facebook users and data but not limiting exposure to the Facebook platform. Marketers are seeing increasing value in Facebook (and Twitter for that matter).  But as social grows and adjusts, will marketing budgets aimed in that direction grow and adjust accordingly, and within a reasonable time frame? @mikestilesPhoto Christie Merrill/stock.xchng

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• Ubuntu 12.04 / 12.10 Randomly Freezing - nVidia?

  - by Alix Axel

  My Ubuntu install frequently freezes, sometimes showing a black screen (not very common anymore - in my latest installs), some other times the mouse and keyboard just fail to move and respond (not even Ctrl + Alt + F1 works) and some other times I'm able to move the mouse with a huge delay (2-5 seconds) but I'm not able to do/click anything. I have a pretty strong feeling that this problem is related to my graphic card drivers because: after hard reset, I usually get error reports about X.org / jockey it's common for artifacts to appear during loading / shutdown / whenever, for instance: pattern filled with £ during log off ugly-colored squared pattern during boot windows that are partially moved (i.e.: only the top half) Firefox renderings that leave the bottom ~30% of the page black These artifacts appear right before the system freezes. I've installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and after several failed attempts to get my dual monitor setup to work properly I tried installing the new 12.10 version, hoping that this new version would have this problem solved... Unfortunatly, that was not the case, so I reverted to Ubuntu 12.04. I've tried all the drivers in the Additional Drivers application (even the experimental ones), I've also tried the nvidia-current package from the PPA repository ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates as well as the nouveau OSS driver. Nothing (except no driver at all with a 640*480 resolution) at all seems stable. Here is the info of my graphic card: alix@alix-E500:~$ lspci | grep VGA 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G86 [GeForce 8400M G] (rev a1) alix@alix-E500:~$ sudo lshw -C video [sudo] password for alix: *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: G86 [GeForce 8400M G] vendor: NVIDIA Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: a1 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=nouveau latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:fd000000-fdffffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:fa000000-fbffffff ioport:cc00(size=128) memory:fe0e0000-fe0fffff Right now, I don't even have my 22" monitor connected as I can't even get my laptop display to work properly and without freezes. I've searched, read and tried all that I could (over several fresh reinstalls) to fix the problem, but so far, no solution has proven definitive. I'm sorry I can't precise which symptom maps to each driver but I've been trying to solve this one on my own without logging what I'm doing, perhaps someone here will be able to point me to a certain-fix solution, if not I'll keep updating this question as I go along. Please let me know if any more info is needed to pinpoint the exact problem. Trying out NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 173). The scrolling, minimizing / maximizing windows takes between 2 and 5 seconds to finalize. Context menus also pop up very slowly and the typing seems delayed by ~1 second. No critical issues so far. Firefox rendering of the Save Edits button is consistently messed up (random black lines in the top). Trying out NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version current) [Recommended]. All the delays mentioned above and the buggy rendering of the Save Edits button are gone, but I'm noticing that the whole screen flashes black for a couple of microseconds and while I was writing this test for the first time, the bottom 30% of the screen went black and I couldn't do anything (not even Ctrl + Alt + F1 would work). Had to force a hard reset. Also, the system hanged a little for a couple of seconds with the fade out of the "Restart" menu. Trying out NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (*experimental*beta) (version experimental-304). Same symptoms as before, it crashed once while I was trying to install Chromium and again after a hard reset when I was trying to remove the driver. The bottom of the screen did not went black and I could move my mouse both times. Ctrl + Alt + F1 didn't work. The ugly-colored pattern also showed up during the second boot. Trying out NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (*experimental*beta) (version experimental-307). The system crashed as soon as I clicked something. Had to do a fresh re-install. Trying out Nouveau: Accelerated Open Source driver for nVidia cards. Artifacts still show up during boot but other than that this one seems stable. As soon as I connected my second monitor, the responsiveness dropped a lot, animations and video are somewhat slow. I'm gonna try this solution http://askubuntu.com/a/98871/9018 later on.

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• links for 2010-12-08

  - by Bob Rhubart

  What's a data architect? A comic dialog by one who knows: Oracle ACE Director Lewis Cunningham. Webcast: Oracle Business Intelligence Forum - December 15, 2010 at 9:00 am PT "The Oracle Business Intelligence Online Forum is a half-day virtual event that offers you a unique opportunity to see, in one place, the full portfolio of Oracle’s Business Intelligence (BI) offerings, and to learn what sets Oracle apart from the rest. Hear Oracle executives and industry analyst, Howard Dresner, present the current state of Business Intelligence, along with a series of customers who will share their case studies of putting analytics in action." Oracle Rolls Out Private Cloud Architecture And World-Record Transaction Performance | Forrester Blogs "Exadata has been dealt with extensively in other venues, both inside Forrester and externally, and appears to deliver the goods for I&O groups who require efficient consolidation and maximum performance from an Oracle database environment." -- Richard Fichera, Forrester Seven ways to get things started: Java EE Startup Classes with GlassFish and WebLogic "This is a blog about a topic that I realy don't like. But it comes across my ways over and over again and it's no doubt that you need it from time to time. Enough reasons for me to collect some information about it and publish it for your reference. I am talking about Startup-/Shutdown classes with Java EE applications or servers." -- Oracle ACE Director Markus "@myfear" Eisele." Monitoring Undelivered Messages in BPEL in SOA 10g (Antony Reynolds' Blog) "I am currently working with a client that wants to know how many undelivered messages they have, and if it reaches a certain threshold then they wants to alert the operator. To do this they plan on using the Enterprise Manager alert functions, but first they needs to know how many undelivered instances are out there." SOA author Antony Reynolds VirtualBox Appliances for Developers "Developers can simply download a few files, assemble them with a script , and then import and run the resulting pre-built VM in VirtualBox. This makes starting with these technologies even easier. Each appliance contains some Hands-On-Labs to start learning." -- Peter Paul van de Beek Oracle UCM 11g Remote Intradoc Client (RIDC) Integration with Oracle ADF 11g "It's great we have out of the box WebCenter ADF task flows for document management in UCM. However, for complete business scenario implementations, usually it's not enough and we need to manage Content Repository programmatically. This can be achieved through Remote Intradoc Client (RIDC) API. It's quite hard to find any practical information about this API, but I managed to get code for UCM folder creation/removal and folder information." -- Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis Interview with Java Champion Matjaz B. Juric on Cloud Computing, SOA, and Java EE 6 "Matjaz Juric of Slovenia, head of the Cloud Computing and SOA Competence Centre at the University of Maribor, and professor at the University of Ljubljana, shares insights about cloud computing, SOA and Java EE 6." White Paper: Oracle Complex Event Processing High Availability "This whitepaper describes the high availability (HA) solutions available in Oracle CEP 11g Release 1 Patch Set 2 and  presents the results of a benchmark study demonstrating the performance of the Oracle CEP HA solutions."

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• SQL SERVER – Performance Tuning Resolution

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by MidnightDBAs. Taking resolutions is such an interesting subject. I think just like records, these are broken way more often. I find this is the funniest thing as we all take resolutions every year but not every year, we can manage to keep them. Well, does it mean we should not take resolutions? In fact I support resolutions. Every year, I take a resolution that I will strive reduce my body weight and I usually manage to keep eating healthy till the end of January. When February begins, I begin to loose focus from my goal and as March starts, the “As usual” eating habits begin. Looking at the positive side, what would happen if every year I do not eat healthy in January, I think that might cause terrible consequences to my health in the long run. So keeping resolutions is a good practise and following them to the extent one can is commendable. Let us come back to the world of SQL Server. What is my resolution for year 2011 for SQL Server? There are many, I am going to list three of very important resolutions that I have taken this new year over here. To understand SQL Server Performance Tuning at a deeper Level I think I am already half way through. I have been being very much busy during any given month doing hands-on performance tuning for at least 12 days on an average. That means, I am doing this activity for almost doing 2 weeks a month. I believe that I have a good understanding of the subject. Note that the word that I have used is “good,” and not “best.” There are often cases when I am stumped, and I have no clue of what to do next. Then, I usually go for my “trial and error” method - whichever method works, I make sure to keep a note on my blog. My goal is that I should never ever go for the trial and error method again to achieve the same solution. I should know the solution right away when I see the problem. I do understand that Performance Tuning can be a strange animal at times and one cannot guess the right step every time. However, aiming a high goal never hurts and I am going to learn more and more in this focused area. Going further from Basic BI understanding I do fairly decent with BI concepts. I know the nbasics of SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, PowerPivot and SharePoint (and few other things MDS, StreamInsight, etc). However, I still consider myself as a beginner. I do not have hands-on experience like many other BI Gurus around. I think I want to take my learning further in this direction. I do not want to be a BI expert as the first step but the goal is to move ahead from basic level towards an advanced level. I am going to start presenting in User Group Sessions and other places on this subject. When I have to prepare new subject for presentations, I think I force myself to learn more. I am committed to learn a bit more in this direction. Learning new features SQL Server 2011 Denali This is new thing from “Microsoft” for all the SQL Geeks. I am eagerly waiting for final product later this year and I am planning to learn it well. I think if I follow my above two goals, I think this goal will be automatically covered. I am eager and excited for this new offering from Microsoft. I guess, these are my resolutions; may be next year about the same time, I must revisit this post and see how much successful I am in following my goal. On a lighter note, I am particularly fan of following cartoon strip (Courtesy: Calvin and Hobbes). I think when we cannot resolve our resolutions, we tend to act like Calvin. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• The Latest News About SAP

  - by jmorourke

  Like many professionals, I get a lot of my news from Google e-mail alerts that I’ve set up to keep track of key industry trends and competitive news.  In the past few weeks, I’ve been getting a number of news alerts about SAP.  Below are a few recent examples: Warm weather cuts short US maple sugaring season – by Toby Talbot, AP MILWAUKEE – Temperatures in Wisconsin had already hit the high 60s when Gretchen Grape and her family began tapping their 850 maple trees. They had waited for the state's ceremonial tapping to kick off the maple sugaring season. It was moved up five days, but that didn't make much difference. For Grape, the typically month-long season ended nine days later. The SAP had stopped flowing in a record-setting heat wave, and the 5-quart collection bags that in a good year fill in a day were still half-empty. Instead of their usual 300 gallons of syrup, her family had about 40. Maple syrup producers across the North have had their season cut short by unusually warm weather. While those with expensive, modern vacuum systems say they've been able to suck a decent amount of sap from their trees, producers like Grape, who still rely on traditional taps and buckets, have seen their year ruined. "It's frustrating," said the 69-year-old retiree from Holcombe, Wis. "You put in the same amount of work, equipment, investment, and then all of a sudden, boom, you have no SAP." Home & Garden: Too-Early Spring Means Sugaring Woes  - by Georgeanne Davis for The Free Press Over this past weekend, forsythia and daffodils were blooming in the southern parts of the state as temperatures climbed to 85 degrees, and trees began budding out, putting an end to this year's maple syrup production even as the state celebrated Maine Maple Sunday. Maple sugaring needs cold nights and warm days to induce SAP flows. Once the trees begin budding, SAP can still flow, but the SAP is bitter and has an off taste. Many farmers and dairymen count on sugaring for extra income, so the abbreviated season is a real financial loss for them, akin to the shortened shrimping season's effect on Maine lobstermen. SAP season comes to a sugary Sunday finale – Kennebec Journal, March 26th, 2012 Rebecca Manthey stood out in the rain at the entrance of Old Fort Western keeping watch over a cast iron kettle of boiling SAP hooked to a tripod over a wood fire.  Manthey and the rest of the Old Fort Western staff -- decked out in 18th-century attire -- joined sugar houses across the state in observance of Maine Maple Sunday. The annual event is sponsored by the Department of Agriculture and the Maine Maple Producers Association.  She said the rain hadn't kept people from coming to enjoy all the events at the fort surrounding the production of Maple syrup.  "In the 18th century, you would be boiling SAP in the woods, so I would be in the woods," Manthey explained to the families who circled around her. "People spent weeks and weeks in the woods. You don't want to cook it to fast or it would burn. When it looks like the right consistency then you send it (into the kitchen) to be made into sugar." Manthey said she enjoyed portraying an 18th-century woman, even in the rain, which didn't seem to bother visitors either. There was a steady stream of families touring the fort and enjoying the maple syrup demonstrations. I hope you enjoy these updates on SAP – Happy April Fool’s Day!

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• Drawing transparent glyphs on the HTML canvas

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  The HTML canvas has a set of methods, createImageData and putImageData, that look like they will enable you to draw transparent shapes pixel by pixel. The data structures that you manipulate with these methods are pseudo-arrays of pixels, with four bytes per pixel. One byte for red, one for green, one for blue and one for alpha. This alpha byte makes one believe that you are going to be able to manage transparency, but that’s a lie. Here is a little script that attempts to overlay a simple generated pattern on top of a uniform background: var wrong = document.getElementById("wrong").getContext("2d"); wrong.fillStyle = "#ffd42a"; wrong.fillRect(0, 0, 64, 64); var overlay = wrong.createImageData(32, 32), data = overlay.data; fill(data); wrong.putImageData(overlay, 16, 16); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } where the fill method is setting the pixels in the lower-left half of the overlay to opaque red, and the rest to transparent black. And here’s how it renders: As you can see, the transparency byte was completely ignored. Or was it? in fact, what happens is more subtle. What happens is that the pixels from the image data, including their alpha byte, replaced the existing pixels of the canvas. So the alpha byte is not lost, it’s just that it wasn’t used by putImageData to combine the new pixels with the existing ones. This is in fact a clue to how to write a putImageData that works: we can first dump that image data into an intermediary canvas, and then compose that temporary canvas onto our main canvas. The method that we can use for this composition is drawImage, which works not only with image objects, but also with canvas objects. var right = document.getElementById("right").getContext("2d"); right.fillStyle = "#ffd42a"; right.fillRect(0, 0, 64, 64); var overlay = wrong.createImageData(32, 32), data = overlay.data; fill(data); var overlayCanvas = document.createElement("canvas"); overlayCanvas.width = overlayCanvas.height = 32; overlayCanvas.getContext("2d").putImageData(overlay, 0, 0); right.drawImage(overlayCanvas, 16, 16); And there is is, a version of putImageData that works like it should always have:

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• Oracle OpenWorld Update: Oracle GoldenGate Customer Panels

  - by Doug Reid

  0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} We are two weeks out from the start of Oracle OpenWorld 2012. The Data Integration team has a solid line-up of product and customer sessions for you to attend this year, plus five hands-on labs, and numerous demonstration pods in Moscone South. On Monday we kick the track off with Brad Adelberg’s Future Strategy, Direction and Roadmap for Oracle’s Data Integration Platform at 10:45AM in Moscone West 3005. Over the rest of the week we have a number of deep dive sessions that build out the themes that Brad discusses in his keynote, but the two that I would like to highlight today are our Oracle GoldenGate customer panels. The first customer panel is on Zero Downtime Operations and is on Monday at 1:45 in Moscone West 3005. The theme of this session is how to reduce downtime for critical must-succeed systems. Here’s a rundown of the session: Bank of America, TALX, and St. Jude Medical all have users communities that expect systems to be available around the clock. In this customer panel session, Bank of America discusses how it will be leveraging Oracle GoldenGate. St. Jude Medical shares how it is using Oracle GoldenGate to achieve a zero-downtime migration for a 5 TB Oracle online transaction processing (OLTP) 24/7 mission-critical database. TALX discusses how Equifax Workforce Information Services used Oracle GoldenGate to move from processing online transactions in a single site to processing concurrently from two geographically disparate data centers, providing a highly available solution with significant burst capacity. On Tuesday at 11:45 in Moscone West 3005 we switch gears and host a customer panel on Operational Reporting. The theme of this customer panel is all around reporting and how Oracle GoldenGate raises the bar on reporting by enabling real-time access to real-time data. Here’s a rundown of the session: Turk Telekom and Comcast are half a world away from each other, but these two powerhouse companies have both drastically improved performance and access to real-time data by using Oracle GoldenGate. During this panel discussion, Turk Telekom will explain its evaluation and implementation of Oracle GoldenGate, how the business has experienced significant improvements in the core database and reporting platform, and how it plans to expand its usage into its SOA architecture and its architecture based on Oracle’s Siebel platform. Comcast will explain its implementation of Oracle GoldenGate and how it moves data in real time from its mission-critical HP NonStop database to a Teradata data warehouse. Join us at our sessions to learn what other customers are doing with our products or stop by our demo pods in Moscone south and meet the product management and development teams.

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• Hello, T4MVC &ndash; Goodbye, ASP.NET MVC &ldquo;magic strings&rdquo;

  - by Brian Schroer

  I’m working on my first ASP.NET MVC project, and I really, really like MVC. I hate all of the “magic strings”, though: <div id="logindisplay"> <% Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUserControl"); %> </div> <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Find Dinner", "Index", "Dinners")%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Host Dinner", "Create", "Dinners")%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")%></li> </ul> </div> They’re prone to misspelling (causing errors that won’t be caught until runtime), there’s duplication, there’s no Intellisense, and they’re not friendly to refactoring tools.   I had started down the path of creating static classes with constants for the strings, e.g.: <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Find Dinner", DinnerControllerActions.Index, Controllers.Dinner)%></li> …but that was pretty tedious.   Then I discovered T4MVC (http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=T4MVC). Just add its T4MVC.tt and T4MVC.settings.t4 files to the root of your MVC application, and it magically (and this time, it’s good magic) generates code that allows you to replace the first code sample above with this: <div id="logindisplay"> <% Html.RenderPartial(MVC.Shared.Views.LogOnUserControl); %> </div> <div id="menucontainer"> <ul id="menu"> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Find Dinner", MVC.Dinners.Index())%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("Host Dinner", MVC.Dinners.Create())%></li> <li><%=Html.ActionLink("About", MVC.Home.About())%></li> </ul> </div> It gives you a strongly-typed alternative to magic strings for all of these scenarios: Html.Action Html.ActionLink Html.RenderAction Html.RenderPartial Html.BeginForm Url.Action Ajax.ActionLink view names inside controllers But wait, there’s more! It even gives you static helpers for image and script links, e.g.: <img src="<%= Links.Content.nerd_jpg %>" />   <script src="<%= Links.Scripts.Map_js %>" type="text/javascript"></script> …instead of: <img src="/Content/nerd.jpg" />   <script src="/Scripts/Map.js" type="text/javascript"></script>   Thanks to David Ebbo for creating this great tool. You can watch an eight and a half minute video about T4MVC on Channel 9 via this link: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/jongalloway/Jon-Takes-Five-with-David-Ebbo-on-T4MVC/. You can download T4MVC from its CodePlex page: http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=T4MVC.

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• Retail CEO Interviews

  - by David Dorf

  Businessweek's 2012 Interview Issue has interviews with three retail CEOs that are worth a quick read.  I copied some excerpts below, but please follow the links to the entire interviews. Ron Johnson, CEO JCPenney Take me through your merchandising. One of the things I learned from Steve [Jobs]—Steve said three times in his life he had the chance to be part of the change of an interface. If you change the interface, you can dramatically change the entire experience of the product. For Steve, that was the mouse, the scroll wheel on the iPod, and then the [touch]screen. What we’re trying to do here is change the interface of retail. What we call that is the street, and you’re standing in the middle of it. When you walk into a store today, you’re overwhelmed by merchandise. There is a narrow aisle. Typically, it’s filled with product on tables and you’re overwhelmed with the noise of signs and promotions. Especially in the age of the Internet, the idea of going to a very large store and having so much abundance is actually not very appealing. The first thing you find here is you’re inspired. I have used the mannequins. The street is actually this new navigation path for a retail store. So if you come in here—you’ll notice that these aisles are 14 feet wide. These are wider than Nordstrom’s (JWN). Slide show of JCPenney store. Walter Robb, co-CEO Whole Foods What did you learn from the recent recession about selling groceries?It was a lot of humble pie, because our sales experienced a drop that I have never seen in 32 years of retail. Customers left us in droves. We also learned that there were some very loyal customers who loved Whole Foods (WFM), people who said, “I like what you stand for. I like coming here. I like this experience.” That was very affirming. I think the realization was that we’ve got some customers, and we need to make sure we know who they are. So instead of chasing every customer out there, we started doing customer discussion groups. We were growing for growth’s sake, which is not a good strategy. We were chasing the rainbow. We cut the growth in half overnight and said, “All right, slow down. Let’s make sure we’re doing this better and more thoroughly and more thoughtfully.” This company is a mission-based company. This company started to change the world by bringing healthier food to the world. It’s not about the money, it’s about the impact, and this company is back on track as a result of those experiences. Video of Whole Foods store tour. Kay Krill, CEO Ann Taylor You’ve worked in retail all your life. What drew you to it?I graduated from college, and I did not know what I wanted to do. Macy’s (M) came to campus to interview for their training program, and I thought, “Let me give it a try.” I got the job and fell in love with the industry. The president of Macy’s at the time said, “If you don’t wake up every morning dying to go to work, then retailing is not for you; it has to be in your blood.” It was in my blood. I love the fact that every day is different. You can get to be creative one day, financial the next day, marketing the next. I love going to stores. I love talking to associates. I love talking to clients. There’s not a predictable day.

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• Tap Into Tier 1 ERP

  - by Christine Randle

  By: Larry Simcox, Senior Director, Accelerate Corporate Programs     Your customers aren’t satisfied with so-so customer service. Your employees aren’t happy with below average salaries.   So why would you settle for second-rate or tier 2 ERP?   A recent report from Nucleus Research found that usability improvements and rapid implementation tools are simplifying deployments, putting tier 1 enterprise applications well within reach for midsize companies. So how can your business tap into the power of tier 1 ERP? And what are the best ways to manage a deployment?   The Reputation of ERP Implementations Overhauling internal operations and implementing ERP can be a challenging endeavor for organizations of all sizes. Midsize companies often shy away from enterprise-class ERP, fearing complexity, limited resources and perceived challenging deployments. Many forward thinking executives experienced ERP implementations in the late 90s and early 2000s and embrace a strategy to grow their business by investing in a foundation for innovation and growth via ERP modernization projects.   In recent years there has been a strong consumerization of IT with enterprise applications and their delivery methods evolving to become more user-friendly.  Today, usability improvements and modern implementation tools have made top-tier ERP solutions more accessible for growing companies. Nucleus found that because enterprise-class software can now be rapidly deployed, the payback is quicker, the risks are lower, the software is less disruptive and overall, companies can differentiate themselves from their competitors and achieve more success with the advantages these types of systems deliver.   Tapping into the power of tier 1 ERP can be made much easier with Oracle Accelerate solutions. Created by Oracle's expert partners and reviewed by Oracle, Oracle Accelerate solutions are simple to deploy, industry-specific, packaged solutions that provide a fast time to benefit, which means getting the right solution in place quickly, inexpensively with a controlled scope and predictable returns.   How are growing midsize companies successfully deploying tier 1 ERP? According to Nucleus Research, companies can increase success in their tier 1 ERP deployments by limiting customization, planning a rapid go-live, bettering communication across departments, and considering different delivery options. Oracle Accelerate solutions incorporate industry best practices and encourage rapid deployments. And even more, Nucleus found customers deploying tier 1 ERP with Oracle that had used Oracle Business Accelerators, Oracle’s rapid implementation tools, reduced the time to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite by at least 50 percent.   Industrial manufacturer L.H. Dottie is one company that needed ERP with enhanced capabilities to support its growth and streamline business processes. Using out-of-the-box configuration of Oracle E-Business Suite modules (provided by Oracle Business Accelerators and delivered by Oracle Partner C3 Business Solutions), L.H. Dottie was able to speed its implementation and went live in just six and a half months. With tier 1 ERP, the company was able to grow and do its business better, automating a variety of processes, accelerating product delivery and gaining powerful data analysis capabilities that helped drive its business into further regions. See more details about their ERP implementation here.   Tier 1 enterprise-class applications have proven to boost the success of Oracle’s midsize customers. As Nucleus Research iterates, companies poised for growth or seeking to compete against larger competitors absolutely can tap into the power of tier 1 ERP and position themselves as enterprise-class through leveraging Oracle Accelerate solutions.   You can learn more here about The Evolving Business Case for Tier - 1 ERP in Midsize Companies in our exclusive webcast with Nucleus.   ###  

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• Dark Sun Dispatch 001

  - by Chris Williams

  If you aren't into tabletop (aka pen & paper) RPGs, you might as well click to the next post now... Still here? Awesome. I've recently started running a new D&D 4.0 Dark Sun campaign. If you don't know anything about Dark Sun, here's a quick intro: The campaign take place on the world of Athas, formerly a lush green world that is now a desert wasteland. Forests are rare in the extreme, as is water and metal. Coins are made of ceramic and weapons are often made of hardened wood, bone or obsidian. The green age of Athas was centuries ago and the current state was brought about through the reckless use of sorcerous magic. (In this world, you can augment spells by drawing on the life force of the world & people around you. This is called defiling. Preserving magic draws upon the casters life force and does not damage the surrounding world, but it isn't as powerful.) Humans are pretty much unchanged, but the traditional fantasy races have changed quite a bit. Elves don't live in the forest, they are shifty and untrustworthy desert traders known for their ability to run long distances through the wastes. Halflings are not short, fat, pleasant little riverside people. Instead they are bloodthirsty feral cannibals that roam the few remaining forests and ride reptilians beasts akin to raptors. Gnomes are extinct, as are orcs. Dwarves are mostly farmers and gladiators, and live out in the sun instead of staying under the mountains. Goliaths are half-giants, not known for their intellect. Muls are a Dwarf & Human crossbreed that displays the best traits of both races (human height and dwarven stoutness.) Thri-Kreen are sentient mantis people that are extremely fast. Most of the same character classes are available, with a few new twists. There are no divine characters (such as Priests, Paladins, etc) because the gods are gone. Nobody alive today can remember a time when they were still around. Instead, some folks worship the elemental forces (although they don't give out spells.) The cities are all ruled by Sorcerer King tyrants (except one city: Tyr) who are hundreds of years old and still practice defiling magic whenever they please. Serving the Sorcerer Kings are the Templars, who are also defilers and psionicists. Crossing them is as bad, in many cases, as crossing the Kings themselves. Between the cities you have small towns and trading outposts, and mostly barren desert with sometimes 4-5 days on foot between towns and the nearest oasis. Being caught out in the desert without adequate supplies and protection from the elements is pretty much a death sentence for even the toughest heroes. When you add in the natural (and unnatural) predators that roam the wastes, often in packs, most people don't last long alone. In this campaign, the adventure begins in the (small) trading fortress of Altaruk, a couple weeks walking distance from the newly freed city of Tyr. A caravan carrying trade goods from Altaruk has not made it to Tyr and the local merchant house has dispatched the heroes to find out what happened and to retrieve the goods (and drivers) if possible. The unlikely heroes consist of a human shaman, a thri-kreen monk, a human wizard, a kenku assassin and a (void aspect) genasi swordmage. Gathering up supplies and a little liquid courage, they set out into the desert and manage to find the northbound tracks of the wagon. Shortly after finding the tracks, they are ambushed by a pack of silt-runners (small lizard people with very large teeth and poisoned pointy spears.) The party makes short work of the creatures, taking a few minor wounds in the process. Proceeding onward without resting, they find the remains of the wagon and manage to sneak up on a pack of Kruthiks picking through the rubble and spilled goods. Unfortunately, they failed to take advantage of the opportunity and had a hard fight ahead of them. The party defeated the kruthiks, but took heavy damage (and almost lost a couple of their own) in the process. Once the kruthiks were dispatched, they followed a set of tracks further north to a ruined tower...

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• Automated SSRS deployment with the RS utility

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  If you’re familiar with SSRS and development you are probably aware of the SSRS web services. The RS utility is a tool that comes with SSRS that allows for scripts to be executed against against the SSRS web service without needing to create an application to consume the service. One of the better benefits of using this format rather than writing an application is that the script can be modified by others who might be involved in the creation and addition of scripts or management of the SSRS environment.   Reporting Services Scripter Jasper Smith from http://www.sqldbatips.com created Reporting Services Scripter to assist with the created of a batch process to deploy an entire SSRS environment. The helper scripts below were created through the modification of his generated scripts. Why not just use this tool? You certainly can. For me, the volume of scripts generated seems less maintainable than just using some common methods extracted from these scripts and creating a deployment in a single script file. I would, however, recommend this as a product if you do not think that your environment will change drastically or if you do not need to deploy with a higher level of control over the deployment. If you just need to replicate, this tool works great. Executing with RS.exe Executing a script against rs.exe is fairly simple. The Script Half the battle is having a starting point. For the scripting I needed to do the below is the starter script. A few notes: This script assumes integrated security. This script assumes your reports have one data source each. Both of the above are just what made sense for my scenario and are definitely modifiable to accommodate your needs. If you are unsure how to change the scripts to your needs, I recommend Reporting Services Scripter to help you understand how the differences. The script has three main methods: CreateFolder, CreateDataSource and CreateReport. Scripting the server deployment is just a process of recreating all of the elements that you need through calls to these methods. If there are additional elements that you need to deploy that aren’t covered by these methods, again I suggest using Reporting Services Scripter to get the code you would need, convert it to a repeatable method and add it to this script! Public Sub Main() CreateFolder("/", "Data Sources") CreateFolder("/", "My Reports") CreateDataSource("/Data Sources", "myDataSource", _ "Data Source=server\instance;Initial Catalog=myDatabase") CreateReport("/My Reports", _ "MyReport", _ "C:\myreport.rdl", _ True, _ "/Data Sources", _ "myDataSource") End Sub   Public Sub CreateFolder(parent As String, name As String) Dim fullpath As String = GetFullPath(parent, name) Try RS.CreateFolder(name, parent, GetCommonProperties()) Console.WriteLine("Folder created: {0}", name) Catch e As SoapException If e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText = "rsItemAlreadyExists" Then Console.WriteLine("Folder {0} already exists and cannot be overwritten", fullpath) Else Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText + " (" + e.Detail.Item("Message").InnerText + ")") End If End Try End Sub   Public Sub CreateDataSource(parent As String, name As String, connectionString As String) Try RS.CreateDataSource(name, parent,False, GetDataSourceDefinition(connectionString), GetCommonProperties()) Console.WriteLine("DataSource {0} created successfully", name) Catch e As SoapException Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText + " (" + e.Detail.Item("Message").InnerText + ")") End Try End Sub   Public Sub CreateReport(parent As String, name As String, location As String, overwrite As Boolean, dataSourcePath As String, dataSourceName As String) Dim reportContents As Byte() = Nothing Dim warnings As Warning() = Nothing Dim fullpath As String = GetFullPath(parent, name)   'Read RDL definition from disk Try Dim stream As FileStream = File.OpenRead(location) reportContents = New [Byte](stream.Length-1) {} stream.Read(reportContents, 0, CInt(stream.Length)) stream.Close()   warnings = RS.CreateReport(name, parent, overwrite, reportContents, GetCommonProperties())   If Not (warnings Is Nothing) Then Dim warning As Warning For Each warning In warnings Console.WriteLine(Warning.Message) Next warning Else Console.WriteLine("Report: {0} published successfully with no warnings", name) End If   'Set report DataSource references Dim dataSources(0) As DataSource   Dim dsr0 As New DataSourceReference dsr0.Reference = dataSourcePath Dim ds0 As New DataSource ds0.Item = CType(dsr0, DataSourceDefinitionOrReference) ds0.Name=dataSourceName dataSources(0) = ds0     RS.SetItemDataSources(fullpath, dataSources)   Console.Writeline("Report DataSources set successfully")       Catch e As IOException Console.WriteLine(e.Message) Catch e As SoapException Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText + " (" + e.Detail.Item("Message").InnerText + ")") End Try End Sub     Public Function GetCommonProperties() As [Property]() 'Common CatalogItem properties Dim descprop As New [Property] descprop.Name = "Description" descprop.Value = "" Dim hiddenprop As New [Property] hiddenprop.Name = "Hidden" hiddenprop.Value = "False"   Dim props(1) As [Property] props(0) = descprop props(1) = hiddenprop Return props End Function   Public Function GetDataSourceDefinition(connectionString as String) Dim definition As New DataSourceDefinition definition.CredentialRetrieval = CredentialRetrievalEnum.Integrated definition.ConnectString = connectionString definition.Enabled = True definition.EnabledSpecified = True definition.Extension = "SQL" definition.ImpersonateUser = False definition.ImpersonateUserSpecified = True definition.Prompt = "Enter a user name and password to access the data source:" definition.WindowsCredentials = False definition.OriginalConnectStringExpressionBased = False definition.UseOriginalConnectString = False Return definition End Function   Private Function GetFullPath(parent As String, name As String) As String If parent = "/" Then Return parent + name Else Return parent + "/" + name End If End Function

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• Strange Happenings

  - by MOSSLover

  There are weeks we go about our life thinking nothing is going to change nothing will happen.  Then there are other weeks a billion things happen at once.  Friday started off very weird for me.  I flew into Atlanta and I met some cool people for another SharePoint event.  I had some good conversations.  Saturday then hit me and my virtual machine bombed in my presentation after the auto updater ran.  I was writing code on the board and describing everything in notepad.  I would say as presentations go it was the best and the worst presentation all wrapped into one.  The next day I was in Baltimore and I hung out with my aunt which was relatively uneventful and great.  Then Monday hit and half my presentations failed or succeeded and my screen freezes so I start describing the code.  I was on top of my game until Monday night.  On top of the world.  I'm exhausted I get into Raleigh and one of the craziest stories of my life happens.  So my boss has been renting cars through Priceline this week I got a different company than the other weeks. The company gives me a Ford Focus and I plug in the coordinates on my IPhone where I want go.  I head out and then I get to the destination hotel (or I thought I did). I go inside it's the wrong hotel the other one is a few miles away.  I walk outside hop into the car and it sounds like a gunshot.  Nothing is starting...Am I doing something wrong?  No I'm not the car is completely dead in the water.  I call the rental car facility and they tell me to call roadside they are closing for the night.  Roadside says they can't give me a new car but they can get me a jump then I have to take it up with the facility.  They send me a tow truck to give me a jump the guy can't jump the car.  He tells me this vehicle was towed about an hour ago.  He shows me a copy of a slip from when he towed it.  We also notice the rental car company left one of there price scanning guns in the vehicle.  I call up roadside and now they are interested in getting me a car because I need to be onsite tomorrow.  They get the manager of the facility on the phone he apologizes profusely and he says he'll be there in 10 minutes.  About 30 minutes pass and him plus another dude show up with a Ford Escape leather interior.  At this point I hand him the gun tell him someone left it in the vehicle and that I'm not so happy with them.  I ask them to comp my rental they can't due to Priceline, however if I call him again this week he can get me a voucher.  It's about 2 am and I'm ready to get to the hotel I don't make it in the next morning until 10 am.  I would say this was a crazy week all forms of technology are trying to tell me something.  What I have no idea, but we'll see the outcome soon.  I feel so weird tons of change is about to happen.  I don't know if it's good or bad.  I think this week is some form of omen.

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• SharePoint Saturday DC

  - by Mark Rackley

  Wow… did you see this thing? 927 attendees? An exhibition hall full of vendors? 94 speakers? 100 sessions?? Insane is a word that comes to mind… SharePoint Saturday DC was definitely epic as far as SharePoint Saturdays go. I got to catch up with a lot of friends and make some new ones.  Met a couple of fans of the blog (hello ladies…;))  Did you know that people actually read this thing? I guess that means I need to stop putting so much garbage on here and more content. I’ll get right on that as soon as I find out how to add 6 hours to each day. Anyway, once again I did my “Wrapping Your Head Around the SharePoint Beast” session.  I tweaked it even more from Huntsville and presented to a packed room with some people sitting on the floor and standing in the aisles. It was a great crowd, very interactive and they seemed interested at least. Thank you guys so much for attending and please feel free to tell me of any suggestions you have to make the presentation better.  This is one of the presentations that will probably never die. Everyone beginning SharePoint development needs a good introduction and starting point. My goal is to make this THE session to see on the subject. So, a little interesting data about my class. Half of the room was brand new to SharePoint and only one person was using 2010. That tells me that this session still has legs and that 2007 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.  I know my organization will be using 2007 for at least a couple more years. Oh yeah… the slide deck?  Here it is: SharePoint Saturday DC Slide Deck So, SharePoint Saturday was truly tremendous and if you weren’t there you missed out. @meetdux, @usher, and the rest of their crew did a spectacular job. You guys rock and are a huge asset to the community. Thanks for allowing me to speak. What’s up next for me?  I’m so glad you asked…. SHAREPOINT SATURDAY OZARKS IS JUNE 12TH! Although SharePoint Saturday Ozarks on June 12 in Harrison Arkansas will be a much more intimate event than DC, it promises to be a most memorable event. We’ve got over 30 speakers and sessions, some cool stuff to give away, and we’re going floating down the Buffalo River on the 13th. Let’s see you do THAT in DC.  :) Anyway, I hope to see you there and I would truly appreciate any help you can do to help publicize the event. We just got internet here in the hills and most people here are still looking for the “any” key….

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• What is the SharePoint Action Framework and Why do I need it ?

  - by SAF

  For those out there that are a little curious as to whether SAF is any use to your organisation, please read this FAQ.  What is SAF ? SAF is free to use. SAF is the "SharePoint Action Framework", it was built by myself and Hugo (plus a few others along the way). SAF is written entirely in C# code available from : http://saf.codeplex.com.   SAF is a way to automate SharePoint configuration changes. An Action is a command/class/task/script written in C# that performs a unit of execution against SharePoint such as "CreateWeb"  or "AddLookupColumn". A SAF Macro is collection of one or more Actions. SAF Macro can be run from Msbuild, a Feature, StsAdm or common plain old .Net code. Parameters can be passed to a Macro at run-time from a variety of sources such as "Environment Variable", "*.config", "Msbuild Properties", Feature Properties, command line args, .net code. SAF emits lots of trace statements at run-time, these can be viewed using "DebugView". One Action can pass parameters to another Action. Parameters can be set using Expression Syntax such as "DateTime.Now".  You should consider SAF is you suffer from one of the following symptoms... "Our developers write lots of code to deploy changes at release time - it's always rushed" "I don't want my developers shelling out to Powershell or Stsadm from a Feature". "We have loads of Console applications now, I have lost track of where they are, or what they do" "We seem to be writing similar scripts against SharePoint in lots of ways, testing is hard". "My scripts often have lots of errors - they are done at the last minute". "When something goes wrong - I have no idea what went wrong or how to solve it". "Our Features get stuck and bomb out half way through - there no way to roll them back". "We have tons of Features now - I can't keep track". "We deploy Features to run one-off tasks" "We have a library of reusable scripts, but, we can only run it in one way, sometimes we want to run it from MSbuild and a Feature". "I want to automate the deployment of changes to our development environment". "I would like to run a housekeeping task on a scheduled basis"   So I like the sound of SAF - what's the problems ?  Realistically, there are few things that need to be considered: Someone on your team will need to spend a day or 2 understanding SAF and deciding exactly how you want to use it. I would suggest a Tech Lead, SysAdm or SP Architect will need to download it, try out the examples, look through the unit tests. Ask us questions. Although, SAF can be downloaded and set to go in a few minutes, you will still need to address issues such as - "Do you want to execute your Macros in MsBuild or from a Feature ?" You will need to decide who is going to do your deployments - is it each developer to themself, or do you require a dedicated Build Manager ? As most environments (Dev, QA, Live etc) require different settings (e.g. Urls, Database names, accounts etc), you will more than likely want to define these and set a properties file up for each environment. (These can then be injected into Saf at run-time). There may be no Action to solve your particular problem. If this is the case, suggest it to us - we can try and write it, or write it yourself. It's very easy to write a new Action - we have an approach to easily unit test it, document it and author it. For example, I wrote one to deploy  a WSP in 2 hours the other day. Alternatively, Saf can also call Stsadm commands and Powershell scripts.   Anyway, I do hope this helps! If you still need help, or a quick start, we can also offer consultancy around SAF. If you want to know more give us a call or drop an email to [email protected]

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• SQL SERVER – A Puzzle Part 4 – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value

  - by pinaldave

  It seems like every weekend I get a new puzzle in my mind. Before continuing I suggest you read my previous posts here where I have shared earlier puzzles. A Puzzle – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value  A Puzzle Part 2 – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value A Puzzle Part 3 – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value After reading above three posts, I am very confident that you all will be ready for the next set of puzzles now. First execute the script which I have written here. Now guess what will be the next value as requested in the query. USE TempDB GO -- Create sequence CREATE SEQUENCE dbo.SequenceID AS DECIMAL(3,0) START WITH 1 INCREMENT BY -1 MINVALUE 1 MAXVALUE 3 CYCLE NO CACHE; GO SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Guess the number SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Clean up DROP SEQUENCE dbo.SequenceID; GO Please note that Starting value is 1, Increment value is the negative value of -1 and Minimum value is 3. Now let us first assume how this will work out. In our example of the sequence starting value is equal to 1 and decrement value is -1, this means the value should decrement from 1 to 0. However, the minimum value is 1. This means the value cannot further decrement at all. What will happen here? The natural assumption is that it should throw an error. How many of you are assuming about query will throw an ERROR? Well, you are WRONG! Do not blame yourself, it is my fault as I have told you only half of the story. Now if you have voted for error, let us continue running above code in SQL Server Management Studio. The above script will give the following output: Isn’t it interesting that instead of error out it is giving us result value 3. To understand the answer about the same, carefully observe the original syntax of creating SEQUENCE – there is a keyword CYCLE. This keyword cycles the values between the minimum and maximum value and when one of the range is exhausted it cycles the values from the other end of the cycle. As we have negative incremental value when query reaches to the minimum value or lower end it will cycle it from the maximum value. Here the maximum value is 3 so the next logical value is 3. If your business requirement is such that if sequence reaches the maximum or minimum value, it should throw an error, you should not use the keyword cycle, and it will behave as discussed. I hope, you are enjoying the puzzles as much as I am enjoying it. If you have any interesting puzzle to share, please do share with me and I will share this on blog with due credit to you. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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