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• 5 Best Practices - Laying the Foundation for WebCenter Projects

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Today’s guest post comes from Oracle WebCenter expert John Brunswick. John specializes in enterprise portal and content management solutions and actively contributes to the enterprise software business community and has authored a series of articles about optimal business involvement in portal, business process management and SOA development, examining ways of helping organizations move away from monolithic application development. We’re happy to have John join us today! Maximizing success with Oracle WebCenter portal requires a strategic understanding of Oracle WebCenter capabilities.  The following best practices enable the creation of portal solutions with minimal resource overhead, while offering the greatest flexibility for progressive elaboration. They are inherently project agnostic, enabling a strong foundation for future growth and an expedient return on your investment in the platform.  If you are able to embrace even only a few of these practices, you will materially improve your deployment capability with WebCenter. 1. Segment Duties Around 3Cs - Content, Collaboration and Contextual Data "Agility" is one of the most common business benefits touted by modern web platforms.  It sounds good - who doesn't want to be Agile, right?  How exactly IT organizations go about supplying agility to their business counterparts often lacks definition - hamstrung by ambiguity. Ultimately, businesses want to benefit from reduced development time to deliver a solution to a particular constituent, which is augmented by as much self-service as possible to develop and manage the solution directly. All done in the absence of direct IT involvement. With Oracle WebCenter's depth in the areas of content management, pallet of native collaborative services, enterprise mashup capability and delegated administration, it is very possible to execute on this business vision at a technical level. To realize the benefits of the platform depth we can think of Oracle WebCenter's segmentation of duties along the lines of the 3 Cs - Content, Collaboration and Contextual Data.  All three of which can have their foundations developed by IT, then provisioned to the business on a per role basis. Content – Oracle WebCenter benefits from an extremely mature content repository.  Work flow, audit, notification, office integration and conversion capabilities for documents (HTML & PDF) make this a haven for business users to take control of content within external and internal portals, custom applications and web sites.  When deploying WebCenter portal take time to think of areas in which IT can provide the "harness" for content to reside, then allow the business to manage any content items within the site, using the content foundation to ensure compliance with business rules and process.  This frees IT to work on more mission critical challenges and allows the business to respond in short order to emerging market needs. Collaboration – Native collaborative services and WebCenter spaces are a perfect match for business users who are looking to enable document sharing, discussions and social networking.  The ability to deploy the services is granular and on the basis of roles scoped to given areas of the system - much like the first C “content”.  This enables business analysts to design the roles required and IT to provision with peace of mind that users leveraging the collaborative services are only able to do so in explicitly designated areas of a site. Bottom line - business will not need to wait for IT, but cannot go outside of the scope that has been defined based on their roles. Contextual Data – Collaborative capabilities are most powerful when included within the context of business data.  The ability to supply business users with decision shaping data that they can include in various parts of a portal or portals, just as they would with content items, is one of the most powerful aspects of Oracle WebCenter.  Imagine a discussion about new store selection for a retail chain that re-purposes existing information from business intelligence services about various potential locations and or custom backend systems - presenting it directly in the context of the discussion.  If there are some data sources that are preexisting in your enterprise take a look at how they can be made into discrete offerings within the portal, then scoped to given business user roles for inclusion within collaborative activities. 2. Think Generically, Execute Specifically Constructs.  Anyone who has spent much time around me knows that I am obsessed with this word.  Why? Because Constructs offer immense power - more than APIs, Web Services or other technical capability. Constructs offer organizations the ability to leverage a platform's native characteristics to offer substantial business functionality - without writing code.  This concept becomes more powerful with the additional understanding of the concepts from the platform that an organization learns over time.  Let's take a look at an example of where an Oracle WebCenter construct can substantially reduce the time to get a subscription-based site out the door and into the hands of the end consumer. Imagine a site that allows members to subscribe to specific disciplines to access information and application data around that various discipline.  A space is a collection of secured pages within Oracle WebCenter.  Spaces are not only secured, but also default content stored within it to be scoped automatically to that space. Taking this a step further, Oracle WebCenter’s Activity Stream surfaces events, discussions and other activities that are scoped to the given user on the basis of their space affiliations.  In order to have a portal that would allow users to "subscribe" to information around various disciplines - spaces could be used out of the box to achieve this capability and without using any APIs or low level technical work to achieve this. 3. Make Governance Work for You Imagine driving down the street without the painted lines on the road.  The rules of the road are so ingrained in our minds, we often do not think about the process, but seemingly mundane lane markers are critical enablers. Lane markers allow us to travel at speeds that would be impossible if not for the agreed upon direction of flow. Additionally and more importantly, it allows people to act autonomously - going where they please at any given time. The return on the investment for mobility is high enough for people to buy into globally agreed up governance processes. In Oracle WebCenter we can use similar enablers to lane markers.  Our goal should be to enable the flow of information and provide end users with the ability to arrive at business solutions as needed, not on the basis of cumbersome processes that cannot meet the business needs in a timely fashion. How do we do this? Just as with "Segmentation of Duties" Oracle WebCenter technologies offer the opportunity to compartmentalize various business initiatives from each other within the system due to constructs and security that are available to use within the platform. For instance, when a WebCenter space is created, any content added within that space by default will be secured to that particular space and inherits meta data that is associated with a folder created for the space. Oracle WebCenter content uses meta data to support a broad range of rich ECM functionality and can automatically impart retention, workflow and other policies automatically on the basis of what has been defaulted for that space. Depending on your business needs, this paradigm will also extend to sub sections of a space, offering some interesting possibilities to enable automated management around content. An example may be press releases within a particular area of an extranet that require a five year retention period and need to the reviewed by marketing and legal before release.  The underlying content system will transparently take care of this process on the basis of the above rules, enabling peace of mind over unstructured data - which could otherwise become overwhelming. 4. Make Your First Project Your Second Imagine if Michael Phelps was competing in a swimming championship, but told right before his race that he had to use a brand new stroke.  There is no doubt that Michael is an outstanding swimmer, but chances are that he would like to have some time to get acquainted with the new stroke. New technologies should not be treated any differently.  Before jumping into the deep end it helps to take time to get to know the new approach - even though you may have been swimming thousands of times before. To quickly get a handle on Oracle WebCenter capabilities it can be helpful to deploy a sandbox for the team to use to share project documents, discussions and announcements in an effort to help the actual deployment get under way, while increasing everyone’s knowledge of the platform and its functionality that may be helpful down the road. Oracle Technology Network has made a pre-configured virtual machine available for download that can be a great starting point for this exercise. 5. Get to Know the Community If you are reading this blog post you have most certainly faced a software decision or challenge that was solved on the basis of a small piece of missing critical information - which took substantial research to discover.  Chances were also good that somewhere, someone had already come across this information and would have been excited to share it. There is no denying the power of passionate, connected users, sharing key tips around technology.  The Oracle WebCenter brand has a rich heritage that includes industry-leading technology and practitioners.  With the new Oracle WebCenter brand, opportunities to connect with these experts has become easier. Oracle WebCenter Blog Oracle Social Enterprise LinkedIn WebCenter Group Oracle WebCenter Twitter Oracle WebCenter Facebook Oracle User Groups Additionally, there are various Oracle WebCenter related blogs by an excellent grouping of services partners.

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• External File Upload Optimizations for Windows Azure

  - by rgillen

  [Cross posted from here: http://rob.gillenfamily.net/post/External-File-Upload-Optimizations-for-Windows-Azure.aspx] I’m wrapping up a bit of the work we’ve been doing on data movement optimizations for cloud computing and the latest set of data yielded some interesting points I thought I’d share. The work done here is not really rocket science but may, in some ways, be slightly counter-intuitive and therefore seemed worthy of posting. Summary: for those who don’t like to read detailed posts or don’t have time, the synopsis is that if you are uploading data to Azure, block your data (even down to 1MB) and upload in parallel. Set your block size based on your source file size, but if you must choose a fixed value, use 1MB. Following the above will result in significant performance gains… upwards of 10x-24x and a reduction in overall file transfer time of upwards of 90% (eg, uploading a 1GB file averaged 46.37 minutes prior to optimizations and averaged 1.86 minutes afterwards). Detail: For those of you who want more detail, or think that the claims at the end of the preceding paragraph are over-reaching, what follows is information and code supporting these claims. As the title would indicate, these tests were run from our research facility pointing to the Azure cloud (specifically US North Central as it is physically closest to us) and do not represent intra-cloud results… we have performed intra-cloud tests and the overall results are similar in notion but the data rates are significantly different as well as the tipping points for the various block sizes… this will be detailed separately). We started by building a very simple console application that would loop through a directory and upload each file to Azure storage. This application used the shipping storage client library from the 1.1 version of the azure tools. The only real variation from the client library is that we added code to collect and record the duration (in ms) and size (in bytes) for each file transferred. The code is available here. We then created a directory that had a collection of files for the following sizes: 2KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 512KB, 1MB, 5MB, 10MB, 25MB, 50MB, 100MB, 250MB, 500MB, 750MB, and 1GB (50 files for each size listed). These files contained randomly-generated binary data and do not benefit from compression (a separate discussion topic). Our file generation tool is available here. The baseline was established by running the application described above against the directory containing all of the data files. This application uploads the files in a random order so as to avoid transferring all of the files of a given size sequentially and thereby spreading the affects of periodic Internet delays across the collection of results.  We then ran some scripts to split the resulting data and generate some reports. The raw data collected for our non-optimized tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. For each file size, we calculated the average upload time (and standard deviation) and the average transfer rate (and standard deviation). As you likely are aware, transferring data across the Internet is susceptible to many transient delays which can cause anomalies in the resulting data. It is for this reason that we randomized the order of source file processing as well as executed the tests 50x for each file size. We expect that these steps will yield a sufficiently balanced set of results. Once the baseline was collected and analyzed, we updated the test harness application with some methods to split the source file into user-defined block sizes and then to upload those blocks in parallel (using the PutBlock() method of Azure storage). The parallelization was handled by simply relying on the Parallel Extensions to .NET to provide a Parallel.For loop (see linked source for specific implementation details in Program.cs, line 173 and following… less than 100 lines total). Once all of the blocks were uploaded, we called PutBlockList() to assemble/commit the file in Azure storage. For each block transferred, the MD5 was calculated and sent ensuring that the bits that arrived matched was was intended. The timer for the blocked/parallelized transfer method wraps the entire process (source file splitting, block transfer, MD5 validation, file committal). A diagram of the process is as follows: We then tested the affects of blocking & parallelizing the transfers by running the updated application against the same source set and did a parameter sweep on the block size including 256KB, 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, and 4MB (our assumption was that anything lower than 256KB wasn’t worth the trouble and 4MB is the maximum size of a block supported by Azure). The raw data for the parallel tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. This data was processed and then compared against the single-threaded / non-optimized transfer numbers and the results were encouraging. The Excel version of the results is available here. Two semi-obvious points need to be made prior to reviewing the data. The first is that if the block size is larger than the source file size you will end up with a “negative optimization” due to the overhead of attempting to block and parallelize. The second is that as the files get smaller, the clock-time cost of blocking and parallelizing (overhead) is more apparent and can tend towards negative optimizations. For this reason (and is supported in the raw data provided in the linked worksheet) the charts and dialog below ignore source file sizes less than 1MB. (click chart for full size image) The chart above illustrates some interesting points about the results: When the block size is smaller than the source file, performance increases but as the block size approaches and then passes the source file size, you see decreasing benefit to the point of negative gains (see the values for the 1MB file size) For some of the moderately-sized source files, small blocks (256KB) are best As the size of the source file gets larger (see values for 50MB and up), the smallest block size is not the most efficient (presumably due, at least in part, to the increased number of blocks, increased number of individual transfer requests, and reassembly/committal costs). Once you pass the 250MB source file size, the difference in rate for 1MB to 4MB blocks is more-or-less constant The 1MB block size gives the best average improvement (~16x) but the optimal approach would be to vary the block size based on the size of the source file.    (click chart for full size image) The above is another view of the same data as the prior chart just with the axis changed (x-axis represents file size and plotted data shows improvement by block size). It again highlights the fact that the 1MB block size is probably the best overall size but highlights the benefits of some of the other block sizes at different source file sizes. This last chart shows the change in total duration of the file uploads based on different block sizes for the source file sizes. Nothing really new here other than this view of the data highlights the negative affects of poorly choosing a block size for smaller files.   Summary What we have found so far is that blocking your file uploads and uploading them in parallel results in significant performance improvements. Further, utilizing extension methods and the Task Parallel Library (.NET 4.0) make short work of altering the shipping client library to provide this functionality while minimizing the amount of change to existing applications that might be using the client library for other interactions.   Related Resources Source code for upload test application Source code for random file generator ODatas feed of raw data from non-optimized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets 2KB Uploads 32KB Uploads 64KB Uploads 128KB Uploads 256KB Uploads 512KB Uploads 1MB Uploads 5MB Uploads 10MB Uploads 25MB Uploads 50MB Uploads 100MB Uploads 250MB Uploads 500MB Uploads 750MB Uploads 1GB Uploads Raw Data OData feeds of raw data from blocked/parallelized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets Raw Data 256KB Blocks 512KB Blocks 1MB Blocks 2MB Blocks 4MB Blocks Excel worksheet showing summarizations and comparisons

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• RIF PRD: Presentation syntax issues

  - by Charles Young

  Over Christmas I got to play a bit with the W3C RIF PRD and came across a few issues which I thought I would record for posterity. Specifically, I was working on a grammar for the presentation syntax using a GLR grammar parser tool (I was using the current CTP of ‘M’ (MGrammer) and Intellipad – I do so hope the MS guys don’t kill off M and Intellipad now they have dropped the other parts of SQL Server Modelling). I realise that the presentation syntax is non-normative and that any issues with it do not therefore compromise the standard. However, presentation syntax is useful in its own right, and it would be great to iron out any issues in a future revision of the standard. The main issues are actually not to do with the grammar at all, but rather with the ‘running example’ in the RIF PRD recommendation. I started with the code provided in Example 9.1. There are several discrepancies when compared with the EBNF rules documented in the standard. Broadly the problems can be categorised as follows: ·      Parenthesis mismatch – the wrong number of parentheses are used in various places. For example, in GoldRule, the RHS of the rule (the ‘Then’) is nested in the LHS (‘the If’). In NewCustomerAndWidgetRule, the RHS is orphaned from the LHS. Together with additional incorrect parenthesis, this leads to orphanage of UnknownStatusRule from the entire Document. ·      Invalid use of parenthesis in ‘Forall’ constructs. Parenthesis should not be used to enclose formulae. Removal of the invalid parenthesis gave me a feeling of inconsistency when comparing formulae in Forall to formulae in If. The use of parenthesis is not actually inconsistent in these two context, but in an If construct it ‘feels’ as if you are enclosing formulae in parenthesis in a LISP-like fashion. In reality, the parenthesis is simply being used to group subordinate syntax elements. The fact that an If construct can contain only a single formula as an immediate child adds to this feeling of inconsistency. ·      Invalid representation of compact URIs (CURIEs) in the context of Frame productions. In several places the URIs are not qualified with a namespace prefix (‘ex1:’). This conflicts with the definition of CURIEs in the RIF Datatypes and Built-Ins 1.0 document. Here are the productions: CURIE          ::= PNAME_LN                  | PNAME_NS PNAME_LN       ::= PNAME_NS PN_LOCAL PNAME_NS       ::= PN_PREFIX? ':' PN_LOCAL       ::= ( PN_CHARS_U | [0-9] ) ((PN_CHARS|'.')* PN_CHARS)? PN_CHARS       ::= PN_CHARS_U                  | '-' | [0-9] | #x00B7                  | [#x0300-#x036F] | [#x203F-#x2040] PN_CHARS_U     ::= PN_CHARS_BASE                  | '_' PN_CHARS_BASE ::= [A-Z] | [a-z] | [#x00C0-#x00D6] | [#x00D8-#x00F6]                  | [#x00F8-#x02FF] | [#x0370-#x037D] | [#x037F-#x1FFF]                  | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F] | [#x2C00-#x2FEF]                  | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF] | [#xFDF0-#xFFFD]                  | [#x10000-#xEFFFF] PN_PREFIX      ::= PN_CHARS_BASE ((PN_CHARS|'.')* PN_CHARS)? The more I look at CURIEs, the more my head hurts! The RIF specification allows prefixes and colons without local names, which surprised me. However, the CURIE Syntax 1.0 working group note specifically states that this form is supported…and then promptly provides a syntactic definition that seems to preclude it! However, on (much) deeper inspection, it appears that ‘ex1:’ (for example) is allowed, but would really represent a ‘fragment’ of the ‘reference’, rather than a prefix! Ouch! This is so completely ambiguous that it surely calls into question the whole CURIE specification.   In any case, RIF does not allow local names without a prefix. ·      Missing ‘External’ specifiers for built-in functions and predicates.  The EBNF specification enforces this for terms within frames, but does not appear to enforce (what I believe is) the correct use of External on built-in predicates. In any case, the running example only specifies ‘External’ once on the predicate in UnknownStatusRule. External() is required in several other places. ·      The List used on the LHS of UnknownStatusRule is comma-delimited. This is not supported by the EBNF definition. Similarly, the argument list of pred:list-contains is illegally comma-delimited. ·      Unnecessary use of conjunction around a single formula in DiscountRule. This is strictly legal in the EBNF, but redundant.   All the above issues concern the presentation syntax used in the running example. There are a few minor issues with the grammar itself. Note that Michael Kiefer stated in his paper “Rule Interchange Format: The Framework” that: “The presentation syntax of RIF … is an abstract syntax and, as such, it omits certain details that might be important for unambiguous parsing.” ·      The grammar cannot differentiate unambiguously between strategies and priorities on groups. A processor is forced to resolve this by detecting the use of IRIs and integers. This could easily be fixed in the grammar.   ·      The grammar cannot unambiguously parse the ‘->’ operator in frames. Specifically, ‘-’ characters are allowed in PN_LOCAL names and hence a parser cannot determine if ‘status->’ is (‘status’ ‘->’) or (‘status-’ ‘>’).   One way to fix this is to amend the PN_LOCAL production as follows: PN_LOCAL ::= ( PN_CHARS_U | [0-9] ) ((PN_CHARS|'.')* ((PN_CHARS)-('-')))? However, unilaterally changing the definition of this production, which is defined in the SPARQL Query Language for RDF specification, makes me uncomfortable. ·      I assume that the presentation syntax is case-sensitive. I couldn’t find this stated anywhere in the documentation, but function/predicate names do appear to be documented as being case-sensitive. ·      The EBNF does not specify whitespace handling. A couple of productions (RULE and ACTION_BLOCK) are crafted to enforce the use of whitespace. This is not necessary. It seems inconsistent with the rest of the specification and can cause parsing issues. In addition, the Const production exhibits whitespaces issues. The intention may have been to disallow the use of whitespace around ‘^^’, but any direct implementation of the EBNF will probably allow whitespace between ‘^^’ and the SYMSPACE. Of course, I am being a little nit-picking about all this. On the whole, the EBNF translated very smoothly and directly to ‘M’ (MGrammar) and proved to be fairly complete. I have encountered far worse issues when translating other EBNF specifications into usable grammars.   I can’t imagine there would be any difficulty in implementing the same grammar in Antlr, COCO/R, gppg, XText, Bison, etc. A general observation, which repeats a point made above, is that the use of parenthesis in the presentation syntax can feel inconsistent and un-intuitive.   It isn’t actually inconsistent, but I think the presentation syntax could be improved by adopting braces, rather than parenthesis, to delimit subordinate syntax elements in a similar way to so many programming languages. The familiarity of braces would communicate the structure of the syntax more clearly to people like me.  If braces were adopted, parentheses could be retained around ‘var (frame | ‘new()’) constructs in action blocks. This use of parenthesis feels very LISP-like, and I think that this is my issue. It’s as if the presentation syntax represents the deformed love-child of LISP and C. In some places (specifically, action blocks), parenthesis is used in a LISP-like fashion. In other places it is used like braces in C. I find this quite confusing. Here is a corrected version of the running example (Example 9.1) in compliant presentation syntax: Document(    Prefix( ex1 <http://example.com/2009/prd2> )    (* ex1:CheckoutRuleset *)  Group rif:forwardChaining (     (* ex1:GoldRule *)    Group 10 (      Forall ?customer such that And(?customer # ex1:Customer                                     ?customer[ex1:status->"Silver"])        (Forall ?shoppingCart such that ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?shoppingCart]           (If Exists ?value (And(?shoppingCart[ex1:value->?value]                                  External(pred:numeric-greater-than-or-equal(?value 2000))))            Then Do(Modify(?customer[ex1:status->"Gold"])))))      (* ex1:DiscountRule *)    Group (      Forall ?customer such that ?customer # ex1:Customer        (If Or( ?customer[ex1:status->"Silver"]                ?customer[ex1:status->"Gold"])         Then Do ((?s ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart-> ?s])                  (?v ?s[ex1:value->?v])                  Modify(?s [ex1:value->External(func:numeric-multiply (?v 0.95))]))))      (* ex1:NewCustomerAndWidgetRule *)    Group (      Forall ?customer such that And(?customer # ex1:Customer                                     ?customer[ex1:status->"New"] )        (If Exists ?shoppingCart ?item                   (And(?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?shoppingCart]                        ?shoppingCart[ex1:containsItem->?item]                        ?item # ex1:Widget ) )         Then Do( (?s ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?s])                  (?val ?s[ex1:value->?val])                  (?voucher ?customer[ex1:voucher->?voucher])                  Retract(?customer[ex1:voucher->?voucher])                  Retract(?voucher)                  Modify(?s[ex1:value->External(func:numeric-multiply(?val 0.90))]))))      (* ex1:UnknownStatusRule *)    Group (      Forall ?customer such that ?customer # ex1:Customer        (If Not(Exists ?status                       (And(?customer[ex1:status->?status]                            External(pred:list-contains(List("New" "Bronze" "Silver" "Gold") ?status)) )))         Then Do( Execute(act:print(External(func:concat("New customer: " ?customer))))                  Assert(?customer[ex1:status->"New"]))))  ) )   I hope that helps someone out there :-)

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• Oracle SOA Suite - Highlighted Travel and Transportation Customer References

  - by Bruce Tierney

  0 0 1 1137 6483 - 54 15 7605 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Next in this series on industry-specific highlights of Oracle SOA Suite customers is the Travel and Transportation industry.  If you are in the travel or transportation industry, take a look at how these Oracle SOA Suite integration customers have addressed common business requirements to enable better customer service, lower costs, and deliver new business services. For example, All Nippon Airways (ANA) has significantly lowered management costs associated with their hybrid on-premise/cloud ticketing system deployments for domestic and international flights. Their lead-time for changes or new applications has been greatly reduced compared to their old mainframe-based systems, enabling ANA to rapidly develop new services in response to changing market needs. Another example is Schneider National, a leading provider of truckload logistics, and how they have integrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management and customers applications using Oracle SOA Suite. Schneider National has 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances over five SOA clusters.  Take a deeper look into any of these case studies, videos, and Oracle Magazine articles that closely align with your industry:  Customers fly and airline succeeds with an IT transformation. Company:  All Nippon Airways  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on January 06, 2014 Any successful business must ensure ongoing customer satisfaction, respond to increased competition, and minimize costs. Running a successful airline in today’s economic climate requires all of those things, as well a... Openmatics Revolutionizes Fleet Management with Standards-Based Vehicle Telematics Platform New Company:  Openmatics s.r.o.  Customer Snapshot   |   Automotive   |   Published on May 20, 2014 Openmatics uses Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle Application Development Framework as a foundation for Openmatics, a vehicle telematics service for next-generation fleet management. It integrated its own app shop wi... Future Proof: To keep pace with mobile, social, and location-based services, smart technologists are using middleware to innovate Company:  SFpark  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Professional Services   |   Published on August 01, 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware is at the heart of a recently completed and very ambitious project to change how people handle the challenge of finding a parking space in San Francisco, California. “Parking is a universal is... Globalia Corporación Empresarial Accelerates Hotel Bookings, Boosts Sales by 40% with In-Memory Data Grid Solution Company:  Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 29, 2013 Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. deployed Oracle Coherence to reengineer the group’s core system for hotel bookings, now serving booking requests involving 80 hotels within an average response time of 100 millise... Choice Hotels Uses Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite to Modernize Global IT Architecture Company:  Choice Hotels  Press Release   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on August 07, 2012 Choice Hotels International, one of the largest and most successful hotel franchises in the world, has implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite. Sascar Consolidates Fleet Management Infrastructure and Accelerates Customers’ Data Access Company:  Sascar  Customer Case Study   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 07, 2014 Description – Sascar used Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g to consolidate fleet management and perform real-time vehicle tracking 4x faster. Directorate General of Civil Aviation Streamlines Key Aviation Applications Access, Improves Productivity and Reduces Maintenance Costs Company:  Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC)  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on May 24, 2013 With Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) provided its 12,500 employees a virtual office environment that integrates team workspaces, business applications, and e-mails within a n... Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry Company:  Schneider National, Inc.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 26, 2013 Schneider National, Inc. deployed Oracle applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle development tools as the foundation for its next-generation IT environment, which is driving new levels of efficiency, profit... DGAC Cuts Subscription Costs with Oracle Company:  DGAC  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on October 31, 2012 Using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Exalogic, DGAC reduces the cost of subscriptions to newsletters and provide to its 12,500 employees a collaborative workspace portal. Asiana Airlines Builds PIP System with Oracle Solutions Company:  Asiana Airlines  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on July 26, 2012 With Oracle Exalogic and the Oracle SOA Suite, Asiana Airlines builds a passenger service integrated platform providing various services such as integration between its interface and internal systems and a data wareho... Choice Hotels Reduces Time to Market with Oracle WebCenter Company:  Choice Hotels  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 11, 2014 Using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle SOA standardization, Choice Hotels consolidated multiple platforms, reduced IT dependency and realized tremendous benefits in total cost of ownership and faster time to market support... An Interview with Schneider National's Judy Lemke Company:  Schneider National  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on December 17, 2013 Judy Lemke talks with Mark Sunday about the challenges Schneider National faced and how they overcame them through a companywide transformational change. For more details on these case studies, you can use this pre-filtered search on “Travel and Transportation” / “Middleware” / “Service Oriented Architecture” or browse on your own at www.oracle.com/customers

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #031

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Find Table without Clustered Index – Find Table with no Primary Key Clustered index is very important concept for any table. They impact the performance very heavily. Here is a quick script to find tables without a clustered index. Replace TEXT with VARCHAR(MAX) – Stop using TEXT, NTEXT, IMAGE Data Types Question: “Is VARCHAR (MAX) big enough to store the TEXT field?” Answer: “Yes, VARCHAR(MAX) is big enough to accommodate TEXT field. TEXT, NTEXT and IMAGE data types of SQL Server 2000 will be deprecated in a future version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2005 provides backward compatibility to data types but it is recommended to use new data types which are VARHCAR (MAX), NVARCHAR (MAX) and VARBINARY (MAX).” Limiting Result Sets by Using TABLESAMPLE – Examples Introduced in SQL Server 2005, TABLESAMPLE allows you to extract a sampling of rows from a table in the FROM clause. The rows retrieved are random and they are are not in any order. This sampling can be based on a percentage of number of rows. You can use TABLESAMPLE when only a sampling of rows is necessary for the application instead of a full result set. User Defined Functions (UDF) Limitations UDF have its own advantage and usage but in this article we will see the limitation of UDF. Things UDF can not do and why Stored Procedure are considered as more flexible then UDFs. Stored Procedure are more flexibility then User Defined Functions(UDF). However, this blog post is a good read to know what are the limitations of UDF. Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility For a long time SQL Server stayed on the compatibility level of 80 which is of SQL Server 2000. However, as soon as SQL Server 2005 introduced the issue of compatibility was quite a major issue. Since that time MS has been releasing the versions at every 2-3 years, changing compatibility is a ever popular topic. In this blog post, we learn how we can do the same using T-SQL. We can also do the same using SSMS and here is the blog post for the same: Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility – Part 2 – Management Studio. Constraint on VARCHAR(MAX) Field To Limit It Certain Length How can I limit the VARCHAR(MAX) field with maximum length of 12500 characters only. His Question was valid as our application was allowed 12500 characters. First of all – this requirement is bit strange but if someone wants to do the same, they can do it as described in this blog post. 2008 UNPIVOT Table Example Understanding UNPIVOT can be very complicated at times. In this blog post, I have attempted to explain the same concept in very simple words. Create Default Constraint Over Table Column A simple straight to script blog post – I still use this blog quite many times for my own reference. UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function It took me 4 iteration to find this very simple function which can immediately get the day of the week in a single line. 2009 Find Hostname and Current Logged In User Name There are two tricks listed in this blog post where users can find out the hostname and current logged user name immediately and very easily. Interesting Observation of Logon Trigger On All Servers When I was doing a project, I made an interesting observation of executing a logon trigger multiple times. It was absolutely unexpected for me! As I was logging only once, naturally, I was expecting the entry only once. However, it did it multiple times on different threads – indeed an eccentric phenomenon at first sight! Difference Between Candidate Keys and Primary Key One needs to be very careful in selecting the Primary Key as an incorrect selection can adversely impact the database architect and future normalization. For a Candidate Key to qualify as a Primary Key, it should be Non-NULL and unique in any domain. I have observed quite often that Primary Keys are seldom changed. I would like to have your feedback on not changing a Primary Key. Create Multiple Filegroup For Single Database Why should one create multiple file group for any database and what are the advantages of the same. In this blog post, I explain the same in detail. List All Objects Created on All Filegroups in Database In this blog post we discuss the essential question – “How can I find which object belongs to which filegroup. Is there any way to know this?” 2010 DATE and TIME in SQL Server 2008 When DATE is converted to DATETIME it adds the of midnight. When TIME is converted to DATETIME it adds the date of 1900 and it is something one wants to consider if you are going to run scripts from SQL Server 2008 to earlier version with CONVERT. Disabled Index and Update Statistics If you do not need a nonclustered index, I suggest you to drop it as keeping them disabled is an overhead on your system. This is because every time the statistics are updated for system all the statistics for disabled indexes are also updated. Precision of SMALLDATETIME – A 1 Minute Precision The precision of the datatype SMALLDATETIME is 1 minute. It discards the seconds by rounding up or rounding down any seconds greater than zero. 2011 Getting Columns Headers without Result Data – SET FMTONLY ON SET FMTONLY ON returns only metadata to the client. It can be used to test the format of the response without actually running the query. When this setting is ON the resultset only have headers of the results but no data. Copy Database from Instance to Another Instance – Copy Paste in SQL Server SQL Server has a feature which copy database from one database to another database and it can be automated as well using SSIS. Make sure you have SQL Server Agent Turned on as this feature will create a job. Puzzle – SELECT * vs SELECT COUNT(*) If you have ever wondered SELECT * gives error when executed alone but SELECT COUNT(*) does not. Why? in that case, you should read this blog post. Creating All New Database with Full Recovery Model This blog post is very based on very interesting story where the user wants to do something by default for every single new database created. Model database is a secret weapon which should be used very carefully and with proper evalution. If used carefully this can be a very much beneficiary when we need a newly created database behave in certain fashion. 2012 In year 2012 I had two interesting series ran on the blog. If there is no fun in learning, the learning becomes a burden. For the same reason, I had decided to build a three part quiz around SEQUENCE. The quiz was to identify the next value of the sequence. I encourage all of you to take part in this fun quiz. Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 1 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 2 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 3 Can anyone remember their final day of schooling?  This is probably a silly question because – of course you can!  Many people mark this as the most exciting, happiest day of their life.  It marks the end of testing, the end of following rules set by teachers, and the beginning of finally being able to earn money and work in your chosen field. Read five part series on developer training subject Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 26, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 26, 2014Popular ReleasesClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.71.1: More performance improvements. It's faster and consumes less memory.Role Based Views in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Role Based Views in CRM 2011 and 2013 - 1.1.0.0: Issues fixed in this build: 1. Works for CRM 2013 2. Lookup view not getting blockedSimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.3.1.0: Main New Features: Fixed Importing of Instance Names (get rid of the Dutch translations) Added advanced editor for Decal Dictionaries Added possibility to import .PNG to generate new decals Added advanced editor for Path display entriesSimple Connect To Db: SimpleConnectToDb_v1: SimpleConnectToDb_v1CRM 2011 / CRM 2013 Form Helper: v2014.05.25: v2014.05.25 Added PhoneFormat & PhoneFormatAreaCode v2014.05.24 Initial ReleaseCreate Word documents without MS Word: Release 3.0: Add support for Sections, Sections Headers and Footers and right to left languages.Corporate News App for SharePoint 2013: CorporateNewsApp v1.6.2.0: Important note This version contains a major bug fix about the generic error "Request failed. Unexpected response data from server null" This error occurs on SharePoint Online only, following an update of the Javascript API after May 2014. If you have installed this application manually in your applications company catalog, you can download the CorporateNewsApp.app file in the zip archive and update it manually. If you have installed this application directly from the SharePoint Store, it ...DevOS: DevOS: Plugin-system added Including:DevOS.exe DevOS API.dll Files must be in the some folderTiny Deduplicator: Tiny Deduplicator 1.0.1.0: Increased version number to 1.0.1.0 Moved all options to a separate 'Options' dialog window. Allows the user to specify a selection strategy which will help when dealing with large numbers of duplicate files. Available options are "None," "Keep First," and "Keep Last"C64 Studio: 3.5: Add: BASIC renumber function Add: !PET pseudo op Add: elseif for !if, } else { pseudo op Add: !TRACE pseudo op Add: Watches are saved/restored with a solution Add: Ctrl-A works now in export assembly controls Add: Preliminary graphic import dialog (not fully functional yet) Add: range and block selection in sprite/charset editor (Shift-Click = range, Alt-Click = block) Fix: Expression evaluator could miscalculate when both division and multiplication were in an expression without parenthesisSEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.031.009 Release 1: Added mirroring of ConveyorTubeCurved. Updated Ship cube rotation to rotate ship back to original location (cubes are reoriented but ship appears no different to outsider), and to rotate Grouped items. Repair now fixes the loss of Grouped controls due to changes in Space Engineers 01.030. Added export asteroids. Rejoin ships will merge grouping and conveyor systems (even though broken ships currently only maintain the Grouping on one part of the ship). Installation of this version wi...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP v2.0: Support for new Universal and Windows Phone 8.1 projects for both Xaml and JavaScript projects. See a detailed list of improvements, breaking changes and a general overview of version 2 ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows 8 Applications Smooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows 8.1 Applications Smooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows Phone 8.1 Applications Microsoft PlayReady Client SDK for Windows 8 Applications Microsoft PlayReady Client SDK for Windows 8.1 Applicat...TerraMap (Terraria World Map Viewer): TerraMap 1.0.6: Added support for the new Terraria v1.2.4 update. New items, walls, and tiles Added the ability to select multiple highlighted block types. Added a dynamic, interactive highlight opacity slider, making it easier to find highlighted tiles with dark colors (and fixed blurriness from 1.0.5 alpha). Added ability to find Enchanted Swords (in the stone) and Water Bolt books Fixed Issue 35206: Hightlight/Find doesn't work for Demon Altars Fixed finding Demon Hearts/Shadow Orbs Fixed inst...DotNet.Highcharts: DotNet.Highcharts 4.0 with Examples: DotNet.Highcharts 4.0 Tested and adapted to the latest version of Highcharts 4.0.1 Added new chart type: Heatmap Added new type PointPlacement which represents enumeration or number for the padding of the X axis. Changed target framework from .NET Framework 4 to .NET Framework 4.5. Closed issues: 974: Add 'overflow' property to PlotOptionsColumnDataLabels class 997: Split container from JS 1006: Series/Categories with numeric names don't render DotNet.Highcharts.Samples Updated s...ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140523 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" Aspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI SL - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI SL SDK in Comparison with Aspose.Slides for dealing with Microsoft Power Point. What's New ?Following Examples: Managing Slide Transitions Manage Smart Art Adding Media Player Adding Audio Frame to Slide Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit: PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit v3.1.3: Added CompressLogs option to the config file. Each Install / Uninstall creates a timestamped zip file with all MSI and PSAppDeployToolkit logs contained within Added variable expansion to all paths in the configuration file Added documentation for each of the Toolkit internal variables that can be used Changed Install-MSUpdates to continue if any errors are encountered when installing updates Implement /Force parameter on Update-GroupPolicy (ensure that any logoff message is ignored) ...WordMat: WordMat v. 1.07: A quick fix because scientific notation was broken in v. 1.06 read more at http://wordmat.blogspot.com????: 《????》: 《????》（c???）??“????”???????，???????????????C?????????。???????,???????????????????????. ??????????????????????????????????；????????????????????????????。Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (1.0.72.457): Apologies for the previous update! FK issue fixed and also a template data cache issue.New ProjectsASP.Net MCV4 Simplified Code Samples: This project intended to simplify the same. In this project each task is implemented with minimum lines of code to reduces complicity.Calvin: net???CodeLatino by Latinosoft: A Modified version for codeShow -- Probably taking more than a month.freeasyBackup: A free and easy to use Backup Tool for everyone. Without any cloud restrictions. freeasyExplorer: A free and easy to use File Explorer for everyone.openPDFspeedreader: #spritz #pdfreader #speedreader PDF Editor to Edit PDF Files in your ASP.NET Applications: This sample application allows the users to edit PDF files online using Aspose.Pdf for .NET.SharePoint World Cup 2013: world cup 2014SSAS Long Running Query Performance Helper: This utility helps investigate long running multidimensional or mining queries in discovery, de-parameterization and re-parameterization back to source format.

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• Looking into the JQuery Overlays Plugin

  - by nikolaosk

  I have been using JQuery for a couple of years now and it has helped me to solve many problems on the client side of web development.  You can find all my posts about JQuery in this link. In this post I will be providing you with a hands-on example on the JQuery Overlays Plugin.If you want you can have a look at this post, where I describe the JQuery Cycle Plugin.You can find another post of mine talking about the JQuery Carousel Lite Plugin here. Another post of mine regarding the JQuery Image Zoom Plugin can be found here.I will be writing more posts regarding the most commonly used JQuery Plugins. With the JQuery Overlays Plugin we can provide the user (overlay) with more information about an image when the user hovers over the image. I have been using extensively this plugin in my websites. In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like. You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here.  You can download this plugin from this link. I launch Expression Web 4.0 and then I type the following HTML markup (I am using HTML 5) <html lang="en"> <head>    <link rel="stylesheet" href="ImageOverlay.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.8.3.min.js"></script>    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.ImageOverlay.min.js"></script>         <script type="text/javascript">        $(function () {            $("#Liverpool").ImageOverlay();        });    </script>   </head><body>    <ul id="Liverpool" class="image-overlay">        <li>            <a href="www.liverpoolfc.com">                <img alt="Liverpool" src="championsofeurope.jpg" />                <div class="caption">                    <h3>Liverpool Football club</h3>                    <p>The greatest club in the world</p>                </div>            </a>        </li>    </ul></body></html> This is a very simple markup. I have added references to the JQuery library (current version is 1.8.3) and the JQuery Overlays Plugin. Then I add 1 image in the element with "id=Liverpool". There is a caption class as well, where I place the text I want to show when the mouse hovers over the image. The caption class and the Liverpool id element are styled in the ImageOverlay.css file that can also be downloaded with the plugin.You can style the various elements of the html markup in the .css file. The Javascript code that makes it all happen follows.   <script type="text/javascript">        $(function () {            $("#Liverpool").ImageOverlay();        });    </script>        I am just calling the ImageOverlay function for the Liverpool ID element.The contents of ImageOverlay.css file follow .image-overlay { list-style: none; text-align: left; }.image-overlay li { display: inline; }.image-overlay a:link, .image-overlay a:visited, .image-overlay a:hover, .image-overlay a:active { text-decoration: none; }.image-overlay a:link img, .image-overlay a:visited img, .image-overlay a:hover img, .image-overlay a:active img { border: none; }.image-overlay a{    margin: 9px;    float: left;    background: #fff;    border: solid 2px;    overflow: hidden;    position: relative;}.image-overlay img{    position: absolute;    top: 0;    left: 0;    border: 0;}.image-overlay .caption{    float: left;    position: absolute;    background-color: #000;    width: 100%;    cursor: pointer;    /* The way to change overlay opacity is the follow properties. Opacity is a tricky issue due to        longtime IE abuse of it, so opacity is not offically supported - use at your own risk.         To play it safe, disable overlay opacity in IE. */    /* For Firefox/Opera/Safari/Chrome */    opacity: .8;    /* For IE 5-7 */    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80);    /* For IE 8 */    -MS-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80)";}.image-overlay .caption h1, .image-overlay .caption h2, .image-overlay .caption h3,.image-overlay .caption h4, .image-overlay .caption h5, .image-overlay .caption h6{    margin: 10px 0 10px 2px;    font-size: 26px;    font-weight: bold;    padding: 0 0 0 5px;    color:#92171a;}.image-overlay p{    text-indent: 0;    margin: 10px;    font-size: 1.2em;} It couldn't be any simpler than that. I view my simple page in Internet Explorer 10 and it works as expected. I have tested this simple solution in all major browsers and it works fine.Have a look at the picture below. You can test it yourself and see the results in your favorite browser. Hope it helps!!!

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• Feedback on meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius

  Once upon a time in a country far far away... Okay, actually it's not that bad but it has been a while since the last meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM). There have been plans in the past but it never really happened. Finally, Selven took the opportunity and organised a new meetup with low administrative overhead, proper scheduling on alternative dates and a small attendee's survey on the preferred option. All the pre-work was nicely executed. First, I wasn't sure whether it would be possible to attend. Luckily I got some additional information, like children should come, too, and I was sold to this community gathering. According to other long-term members of the LUGM it was the first time 'ever' that a gathering was organised outside of Quatre Bornes, and I have to admit it was great! LUGM - user group meeting on the 15.06.2013 in L'Escalier Quick overview of Linux & the LUGM With a little bit of delay the LUGM meeting officially started with a quick overview and introduction to Linux presented by Avinash. During the session he told the audience that there had been quite some activity over the island some years ago but unfortunately it had been quiet during recent times. Of course, we also spoke about the acknowledged world dominance of Linux - thanks to Android - and the interesting possibilities for countries like Mauritius. It is known that a couple of public institutions have there back-end infrastructure running on Red Hat Linux systems but the presence on the desktop is still very low. Users are simply hanging on to Windows XP and older versions of Microsoft Office. Following the introduction of the LUGM Ajay joined into the session and it quickly changed into a panel discussion with lots of interesting questions and answers, sharing of first-hand experience either on the job or in private use of Linux, and a couple of ideas about how the LUGM could promote Linux a bit more in Mauritius. It was great to get an insight into other attendee's opinion and activities. Especially taking into consideration that I'm already using Linux since around 1996/97. Frankly speaking, I bought a SuSE 4.x distribution back in those days because I couldn't achieve certain tasks on Windows NT 4.0 without spending a fortune. OpenELEC Mediacenter Next, Selven gave us decent introduction on OpenELEC: Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center (OpenELEC) is a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into an XBMC media center. OpenELEC is designed to make your system boot fast, and the install is so easy that anyone can turn a blank PC into a media machine in less than 15 minutes. I didn't know about it until this presentation. In the past, I was mainly attached to Video Disk Recorder (VDR) as it allows the use of satellite receiver cards very easily. Hm, somehow I'm still missing my precious HTPC that I had to leave back in Germany years ago. It was great piece of hardware and software; self-built PC in a standard HiFi-sized (43cm) black desktop casing with 2 full-featured Hauppauge DVB-s cards, an old-fashioned Voodoo graphics card, WiFi card, Pioneer slot-in DVD drive, and fully remote controlled via infra-red thanks to Debian, VDR and LIRC. With EP Guide, scheduled recordings and general multimedia centre it offered all the necessary comfort in the living room, besides a Nintendo game console; actually a GameCube at that time... But I have to admit that putting OpenELEC on a Raspberry Pi would be a cool DIY project in the near future. LUGM - our next generation of linux users (15.06.2013) Project Evil Genius (PEG) Don't be scared of the paragraph header. Ish gave us a cool explanation why he named it PEG - Project Evil Genius; it's because of the time of the day when he was scripting down his ideas to be able to build, package and provide software applications to various Linux distributions. The main influence came from openSuSE but the platform didn't cater for his needs and ideas, so he started to work out something on his own. During his passionate session he also talked about the amazing experience he had due to other Linux users from all over the world. During the next couple of days Ish promised to put his script to GitHub... Looking forward to that. Check out Ish's personal blog over at hacklog.in. Highly recommended to read. Why India? Simply because the registration fees per year for an Indian domain are approximately 20 times less than for a Mauritian domain (.mu). Exploring the beach of L'Escalier af the meeting 'After-party' at the beach of L'Escalier Puh, after such interesting sessions, ideas around Linux and good conversation during the breaks and over lunch it was time for a little break-out. Selven suggested that we all should head down to the beach of L'Escalier and get some impressions of nature down here in the south of the island. Talking about 'beach' ;-) - absolutely not comparable to the white-sanded ones here in Flic en Flac... There are no lagoons down at the south coast of Mauriitus, and watching the breaking waves is a different experience and joy after all. Unfortunately, I was a little bit worried about the thoughtless littering at such a remote location. You have to drive on natural paths through the sugar cane fields and I was really shocked by the amount of rubbish lying around almost everywhere. Sad, really sad and it concurs with Yasir's recent article on the same topic. Resumé & outlook It was a great event. I met with new people, had some good conversations, and even my children enjoyed themselves the whole day. The location was well-chosen, enough space for each and everyone, parking spaces and even a playground for the children. Also, a big "Thank You" to Selven and his helpers for the organisation and preparation of lunch. I'm kind of sure that this was an exceptional meeting of LUGM and I'm really looking forward to the next gathering of Linux geeks. Hopefully, soon. All images are courtesy of Avinash Meetoo. More pictures are available on Flickr.

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• Projected Results

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Monica Mehta Yasser Mahmud has seen a revolution in project management over the past decade. During that time, the former Primavera product strategist (who joined Oracle when his company was acquired in 2008) has not only observed a transformation in the way IT systems support corporate projects but the role project portfolio management (PPM) plays in the enterprise. “15 years ago project management was the domain of project management office (PMO),” Mahmud recalls of earlier days. “But over the course of the past decade, we've seen it transform into a mission critical enterprise discipline, that has made Primavera indispensable in the board room. Now, as a senior manager, a board member, or a C-level executive you have direct and complete visibility into what’s kind of going on in the organization—at a level of detail that you're going to consume that information.” Now serving as Oracle’s vice president of product strategy and industry marketing, Mahmud shares his thoughts on how Oracle’s Primavera solutions have evolved and how best-in-class project portfolio management systems can help businesses stay competitive. Profit: What do you feel are the market dynamics that are changing project management today? Mahmud: First, the data explosion. We're generating data at twice the rate at which we can actually store it. The same concept applies for project-intensive organizations. A lot of data is gathered, but what are we really doing with it? Are we turning data into insight? Are we using that insight and turning it into foresight with analytics tools? This is a key driver that will separate the very good companies—the very competitive companies—from those that are not as competitive. Another trend is centered on the explosion of mobile computing. By the year 2013, an estimated 35 percent of the world’s workforce is going to be mobile. That’s one billion people. So the question is not if you're going to go mobile, it’s how fast you are going to go mobile. What kind of impact does that have on how the workforce participates in projects? What worked ten to fifteen years ago is not going to work today. It requires a real rethink around the interfaces and how data is actually presented. Profit: What is the role of project management in this new landscape? Mahmud: We recently conducted a PPM study with the Economist Intelligence Unit centered to determine how important project management is considered within organizations. Our target was primarily CFOs, CIOs, and senior managers and we discovered that while 95 percent of participants believed it critical to their business, only six percent were confident that projects were delivered on time and on budget. That’s a huge gap. Most organizations are looking for efficiency, especially in these volatile financial times. But senior management can’t keep track of every project in a large organization. As a result, executives are attempting to inventory the work being conducted under their watch. What is often needed is a very high-level assessment conducted at the board level to say, “Here are the 50 initiatives that we have underway. How do they line up with our strategic drivers?” This line of questioning can provide early warning that work and strategy are out of alignment; finding the gap between what the business needs to do and the actual performance scorecard. That’s low-hanging fruit for any executive looking to increase efficiency and save money. But it can only be obtained through proper assessment of existing projects—and you need a project system of record to get that done. Over the next decade or so, project management is going to transform into holistic work management. Business leaders will want make sure key projects align with corporate strategy, but also the ability to drill down into daily activity and smaller projects to make sure they line up as well. Keeping employees from working on tasks—even for a few hours—that don’t line up with corporate goals will, in many ways, become a competitive differentiator. Profit: How do all of these market challenges and shifting trends impact Oracle’s Primavera solutions and meeting customers’ needs? Mahmud: For Primavera, it’s a transformation from being a project management application to a PPM system in the enterprise. Also making that system a mission-critical application by connecting to other key applications within the ecosystem, such as the enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain, and CRM systems. Analytics have also become a huge component. Business analytics have made Oracle’s Primavera applications pertinent in the boardroom. Now, as a senior manager, a board member, a CXO, CIO, or CEO, you have direct visibility into what’s going on in the organization at a level that you're able to consume that information. In addition, all of this information pairs up really well with your financials and other data. Certainly, when you're an Oracle shop, you have that visibility that you didn’t have before from a project execution perspective. Profit: What new strategies and tools are being implemented to create a more efficient workplace for users? Mahmud: We believe very strongly that just because you call something an enterprise project portfolio management system doesn’t make it so—you have to get people to want to participate in the system. This can’t be mandated down from the top. It simply doesn’t work that way. A truly adoptable solution is one that makes it super easy for all types users to participate, by providing them interfaces where they live. Keeping that in mind, a major area of development has been alternative user interfaces. This is increasingly resulting in the creation of lighter weight, targeted interfaces such as iOS applications, and smartphones interfaces such as for iPhone and Android platform. Profit: How does this translate into the development of Oracle’s Primavera solutions? Mahmud: Let me give you a few examples. We recently announced the launch of our Primavera P6 Team Member application, which is a native iOS application for the iPhone. This interface makes it easier for team members to do their jobs quickly and effectively. Similarly, we introduced the Primavera analytics application, which can be consumed via mobile devices, and when married with Oracle Spatial capabilities, users can get a geographical view of what’s going on and which projects are occurring in various locations around the world. Lastly, we introduced advanced email integration that allows project team members to status work via E-mail. This functionality leverages the fact that users are in E-mail system throughout the day and allows them to status their work without the need to launch the Primavera application. It comes back to a mantra: provide as many alternative user interfaces as possible, so you can give people the ability to work, to participate, to raise issues, to create projects, in the places where they live. Do it in such a way that it’s non-intrusive, do it in such a way that it’s easy and intuitive and they can get it done in a short amount of time. If you do that, workers can get back to doing what they're actually getting paid for.

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• Advice for a distracted, unhappy, recently graduated programmer? [closed]

  - by Re-Invent

  I graduated 4 months ago. I had offers from a few good places to work at. At the same time I wanted to stick to building a small software business of my own, still have some ideas with good potential, some half done projects frozen in my github. But due to social pressures, I chose a job, the pay is great, but I am half-passionate about it. A small team of smart folks building useful product, working out contracts across the world. I've started finding it extremely boring. Boring to the extent that I skip 2-3 days a week together not doing work. Neither do I spend that time progressing any of my own projects. Yes, I feel stupid at the way I'm wasting time, but I don't understand exactly why is it happening. It's as if all the excitement has been drained. What can I do about it? Long version: School - I was in third standard. Only students, 6th grade had access to computer labs. I once peeked into the lab from the little door opening. No hard-disks, MS DOS on 5 1/2 inch floppies. I asked a senior student to play some sound in BASIC. He used PLAY to compose a tune. Boy! I was so excited, I was jumping from within. Back home, asked my brother to teach me some programming. We bought a book "MODERN All About GW-BASIC for Schools & Colleges". The book had everything, right from printing, to taking input, file i/o, game programming, machine level support, etc. I was in 6th standard, wrote my first game - a wheel of fortune, rotated the wheel by manipulating 16 color palette's definition. Got internet soon, got hooked to QuickBasic programming community. Made some more games "007 in Danger", "Car Crush 2" for submission to allbasiccode archives. I was extremely excited about all this. My interests now swayed into "hacking" (computer security). Taught myself some perl, found it annoying, learnt PHP and a bit of SQL. Also taught myself Visual Basic one of the winters and wrote a pacman clone with Direct X. By the time I was in 10th standard, I created some evil tools using visual basic, php and mysql and eventually landed myself into an unpaid side-job at a government facility, building evil tools for them. It was a dream come true for crackers of that time. And so was I, still very excited. Things changed soon, last two years of school were not so great as I was balancing preps for college, work at govt. and studies for school at same time. College - College was opposite of all I had wished it to be. I imagined it to be a place where I'd spend my 4 years building something awesome. It was rather an epitome of rote learning, attendance, rules, busy schedules, ban on personal laptops, hardly any hackers surrounding you and shit like that. We had to take permissions to even introduce some cultural/creative activities in our annual schedule. The labs won't be open on weekends because the lab employees had to have their leaves. Yes, a horrible place for someone like me. I still managed to pull out a project with a friend over 2 months. Showed it to people high in the academia hierarchy. They were immensely impressed, we proposed to allow personal computers for students. They made up half-assed reasons and didn't agree. We felt frustrated. And so on, I still managed to teach myself new languages, do new projects of my own, do an intern at the same govt. facility, start a small business for sometime, give a talk at a conference I'm passionate about, win game-dev and hacking contest at most respected colleges, solve good deal of programming contest problems, etc. At the same time I was not content with all these restrictions, great emphasis on rote learning, and sheer wastage of time due to college. I never felt I was overdoing, but now I feel I burnt myself out. During my last days at college, I did an intern at a bigco. While I spent my time building prototypes for certain LBS, the other interns around me, even a good friend, was just skipping time. I thought maybe, in a few weeks he would put in some serious efforts at work assigned to him, but all he did was to find creative ways to skip work, hide his face from manager, engage people in talks if they try to question his progress, etc. I tried a few time to get him on track, but it seems all he wanted was to "not to work hard at all and still reap the fruits". I don't know how others take such people, but I find their vicinity very very poisonous to one's own motivation and productivity. Over that, the place where I come from, HRs don't give much value to what have you done past 4 years. So towards the end of out intern, we all were offered work at the bigco, but the slacker, even after not writing more than 200 lines of code was made a much better offer. I felt enraged instantly - "Is this how the corp world treats someone who does fruitful, if not extra-ordinary work form them for past 6 months?". Yes, I did try to negotiate and debate. The bigcos seem blind due to departmentalization of responsibilities and many layers of management. I decided not to be in touch with any characters of that depressing play. Probably the busy time I had at college, ignoring friends, ignoring fun and squeezing every bit of free time for myself is also responsible. Probably this is what has drained all my willingness to work for anyone. I find my day job boring, at the same time I with to maintain it for financial reasons. I feel a bit burnt out, unsatisfied and at the same time an urge to quit working for someone else and start finishing my frozen side-projects (which may be profitable). Though I haven't got much to support myself with food, office, internet bills, etc in savings. I still have my day job, but I don't find it very interesting, even though the pay is higher than the slacker, I don't find money to be a great motivator here. I keep comparing myself to my past version. I wonder how to get rid of this and reboot myself back to the way I was in school days - excited about it, tinkering, building, learning new things daily, and NOT BORED?

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• A Bite With No Teeth&ndash;Demystifying Non-Compete Clauses

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  *DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and this post in no way should be considered legal advice. I’m also in Canada, so references made are to Canadian court cases. I received a signed letter the other day, a reminder from my previous employer about some clauses associated with my employment and entry into an employee stock purchase program. So since this is in effect for the next 12 months, I guess I’m not starting that new job tomorrow. I’m kidding of course. How outrageous, how presumptuous, pompous, and arrogant that a company – any company – would actually place these conditions upon an employee. And yet, this is not uncommon. Especially in the IT industry, we see time and again similar wording in our employment agreements. But…are these legal? Is there any teeth behind the threat of the bite? Luckily, the answer seems to be ‘No’. I want to highlight two cases that support this. The first is Lyons v. Multari. In a nutshell, Dentist hires younger Dentist to be an associate. In their short, handwritten agreement, a non-compete clause was written stating “Protective Covenant. 3 yrs. – 5mi” (meaning you can’t set up shop within 5 miles for 3 years). Well, the young dentist left and did start an oral surgery office within 5 miles and within 3 years. Off to court they go! The initial judge sided with the older dentist, but on appeal it was overturned. Feel free to read the transcript of the decision here, but let me highlight one portion from section [19]: The general rule in most common law jurisdictions is that non-competition clauses in employment contracts are void. The sections following [19] explain further, and discuss Elsley v. J.G. Collins Insurance Agency Ltd. and its impact on Canadian law in this regard. The second case is Winnipeg Livestock Sales Ltd. v. Plewman. Desmond Plewman is an auctioneer, and worked at Winnipeg Livestock Sales. Part of his employment agreement was that he could not work for a competitor for 18 months if he left the company. Well, he left, and took up an important role in a competing company. The case went to court and as with Lyons v. Multari, the initial judge found in favour of the plaintiffs. Also as in the first case, that was overturned on appeal. Again, read through the transcript of the decision, but consider section [28]: In other words, even though Plewman has a great deal of skill as an auctioneer, Winnipeg Livestock has no proprietary interest in his professional skill and experience, even if they were acquired during his time working for Winnipeg Livestock.  Thus, Winnipeg Livestock has the burden of establishing that it has a legitimate proprietary interest requiring protection.  On this key question there is little evidence before the Court.  The record discloses that part of Plewman’s job was to “mingle with the … crowd” and to telephone customers and prospective customers about future prospects for the sale of livestock.  It may seem reasonable to assume that Winnipeg Livestock has a legitimate proprietary interest in its customer connections; but there is no evidence to indicate that there is any significant degree of “customer loyalty” in the business, as opposed to customers making choices based on other considerations such as cost, availability and the like. So are there any incidents where a non-compete can actually be valid? Yes, and these are considered “exceptional” cases, meaning that the situation meets certain circumstances. Michael Carabash has a great blog series discussing the above mentioned cases as well as the difference between a non-compete and non-solicit agreement. He talks about the exceptional criteria: In summary, the authorities reveal that the following circumstances will generally be relevant in determining whether a case is an “exceptional” one so that a general non-competition clause will be found to be reasonable: - The length of service with the employer. - The amount of personal service to clients. - Whether the employee dealt with clients exclusively, or on a sustained or     recurring basis. - Whether the knowledge about the client which the employee gained was of a   confidential nature, or involved an intimate knowledge of the client’s   particular needs, preferences or idiosyncrasies. - Whether the nature of the employee’s work meant that the employee had   influence over clients in the sense that the clients relied upon the employee’s   advice, or trusted the employee. - If competition by the employee has already occurred, whether there is   evidence that clients have switched their custom to him, especially without   direct solicitation. - The nature of the business with respect to whether personal knowledge of   the clients’ confidential matters is required. - The nature of the business with respect to the strength of customer loyalty,   how clients are “won” and kept, and whether the clientele is a recurring one. - The community involved and whether there were clientele yet to be exploited   by anyone. I close this blog post with a final quote, one from Zvulony & Co’s blog post on this subject. Again, all of this is not official legal advice, but I think we can see what all these sources are pointing towards. To answer my earlier question, there’s no teeth behind the threat of the bite. In light of this list, and the decisions in Lyons and Orlan, it is reasonably certain that in most employment situations a non-competition clause will be ineffective in protecting an employer from a departing employee who wishes to compete in the same business. The Courts have been relatively consistent in their position that if a non-solicitation clause can protect an employer’s interests, then a non-competition clause is probably unreasonable. Employers (or their solicitors) should avoid the inclination to draft restrictive covenants in broad, catch-all language. Or in other words, when drafting a restrictive covenant – take only what you need! D

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 10 &ndash; In Depth TCP/IP Networking

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Understand methods of network design unique to TCP/IP networks, including subnetting, CIDR, and address translation Explain the differences between public and private TCP/IP networks Describe protocols used between mail clients and mail servers, including SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 Employ multiple TCP/IP utilities for network discovery and troubleshooting Designing TCP/IP-Based Networks The following sections explain how network and host information in an IPv4 address can be manipulated to subdivide networks into smaller segments. Subnetting Subnetting separates a network into multiple logically defined segments, or subnets. Networks are commonly subnetted according to geographic locations, departmental boundaries, or technology types. A network administrator might separate traffic to accomplish the following… Enhance security Improve performance Simplify troubleshooting The challenges of Classful Addressing in IPv4 (No subnetting) The simplest type of IPv4 is known as classful addressing (which was the Class A, Class B & Class C network addresses). Classful addressing has the following limitations. Restriction in the number of usable IPv4 addresses (class C would be limited to 254 addresses) Difficult to separate traffic from various parts of a network Because of the above reasons, subnetting was introduced. IPv4 Subnet Masks Subnetting depends on the use of subnet masks to identify how a network is subdivided. A subnet mask indicates where network information is located in an IPv4 address. The 1 in a subnet mask indicates that corresponding bits in the IPv4 address contain network information (likewise 0 indicates the opposite) Each network class is associated with a default subnet mask… Class A = 255.0.0.0 Class B = 255.255.0.0 Class C = 255.255.255.0 An example of calculating  the network ID for a particular device with a subnet mask is shown below.. IP Address = 199.34.89.127 Subnet Mask = 255.255.255.0 Resultant Network ID = 199.34.89.0 IPv4 Subnetting Techniques Subnetting breaks the rules of classful IPv4 addressing. Read page 490 for a detailed explanation Calculating IPv4 Subnets Read page 491 – 494 for an explanation Important… Subnetting only applies to the devices internal to your network. Everything external looks at the class of the IP address instead of the subnet network ID. This way, traffic directed to your network externally still knows where to go, and once it has entered your internal network it can then be prioritized and segmented. CIDR (classless Interdomain Routing) CIDR is also known as classless routing or supernetting. In CIDR conventional network class distinctions do not exist, a subnet boundary can move to the left, therefore generating more usable IP addresses on your network. A subnet created by moving the subnet boundary to the left is known as a supernet. With CIDR also came new shorthand for denoting the position of subnet boundaries known as CIDR notation or slash notation. CIDR notation takes the form of the network ID followed by a forward slash (/) followed by the number of bits that are used for the extended network prefix. To take advantage of classless routing, your networks routers must be able to interpret IP addresses that don;t adhere to conventional network class parameters. Routers that rely on older routing protocols (i.e. RIP) are not capable of interpreting classless IP addresses. Internet Gateways Gateways are a combination of software and hardware that enable two different network segments to exchange data. A gateway facilitates communication between different networks or subnets. Because on device cannot send data directly to a device on another subnet, a gateway must intercede and hand off the information. Every device on a TCP/IP based network has a default gateway (a gateway that first interprets its outbound requests to other subnets, and then interprets its inbound requests from other subnets). The internet contains a vast number of routers and gateways. If each gateway had to track addressing information for every other gateway on the Internet, it would be overtaxed. Instead, each handles only a relatively small amount of addressing information, which it uses to forward data to another gateway that knows more about the data’s destination. The gateways that make up the internet backbone are called core gateways. Address Translation An organizations default gateway can also be used to “hide” the organizations internal IP addresses and keep them from being recognized on a public network. A public network is one that any user may access with little or no restrictions. On private networks, hiding IP addresses allows network managers more flexibility in assigning addresses. Clients behind a gateway may use any IP addressing scheme, regardless of whether it is recognized as legitimate by the Internet authorities but as soon as those devices need to go on the internet, they must have legitimate IP addresses to exchange data. When a clients transmission reaches the default gateway, the gateway opens the IP datagram and replaces the client’s private IP address with an Internet recognized IP address. This process is known as NAT (Network Address Translation). TCP/IP Mail Services All Internet mail services rely on the same principles of mail delivery, storage, and pickup, though they may use different types of software to accomplish these functions. Email servers and clients communicate through special TCP/IP application layer protocols. These protocols, all of which operate on a variety of operating systems are discussed below… SMTP (Simple Mail transfer Protocol) The protocol responsible for moving messages from one mail server to another over TCP/IP based networks. SMTP belongs to the application layer of the ODI model and relies on TCP as its transport protocol. Operates from port 25 on the SMTP server Simple sub-protocol, incapable of doing anything more than transporting mail or holding it in a queue MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) The standard message format specified by SMTP allows for lines that contain no more than 1000 ascii characters meaning if you relied solely on SMTP you would have very short messages and nothing like pictures included in an email. MIME us a standard for encoding and interpreting binary files, images, video, and non-ascii character sets within an email message. MIME identifies each element of a mail message according to content type. MIME does not replace SMTP but works in conjunction with it. Most modern email clients and servers support MIME POP (Post Office Protocol) POP is an application layer protocol used to retrieve messages from a mail server POP3 relies on TCP and operates over port 110 With POP3 mail is delivered and stored on a mail server until it is downloaded by a user Disadvantage of POP3 is that it typically does not allow users to save their messages on the server because of this IMAP is sometimes used IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) IMAP is a retrieval protocol that was developed as a more sophisticated alternative to POP3 The single biggest advantage IMAP4 has over POP3 is that users can store messages on the mail server, rather than having to continually download them Users can retrieve all or only a portion of any mail message Users can review their messages and delete them while the messages remain on the server Users can create sophisticated methods of organizing messages on the server Users can share a mailbox in a central location Disadvantages of IMAP are typically related to the fact that it requires more storage space on the server. Additional TCP/IP Utilities Nearly all TCP/IP utilities can be accessed from the command prompt on any type of server or client running TCP/IP. The syntaxt may differ depending on the OS of the client. Below is a list of additional TCP/IP utilities – research their use on your own! Ipconfig (Windows) & Ifconfig (Linux) Netstat Nbtstat Hostname, Host & Nslookup Dig (Linux) Whois (Linux) Traceroute (Tracert) Mtr (my traceroute) Route

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• At times, you need to hire a professional.

  - by Phil Factor

  After months of increasingly demanding toil, the development team I belonged to was told that the project was to be canned and the whole team would be fired.  I’d been brought into the team as an expert in the data implications of a business re-engineering of a major financial institution. Nowadays, you’d call me a data architect, I suppose.  I’d spent a happy year being paid consultancy fees solving a succession of interesting problems until the point when the company lost is nerve, and closed the entire initiative. The IT industry was in one of its characteristic mood-swings downwards.  After the announcement, we met in the canteen. A few developers had scented the smell of death around the project already hand had been applying unsuccessfully for jobs. There was a sense of doom in the mass of dishevelled and bleary-eyed developers. After giving vent to anger and despair, talk turned to getting new employment. It was then that I perked up. I’m not an obvious choice to give advice on getting, or passing,  IT interviews. I reckon I’ve failed most of the job interviews I’ve ever attended. I once even failed an interview for a job I’d already been doing perfectly well for a year. The jobs I’ve got have mostly been from personal recommendation. Paradoxically though, from years as a manager trying to recruit good staff, I know a lot about what IT managers are looking for.  I gave an impassioned speech outlining the important factors in getting to an interview.  The most important thing, certainly in my time at work is the quality of the résumé or CV. I can’t even guess the huge number of CVs (résumés) I’ve read through, scanning for candidates worth interviewing.  Many IT Developers find it impossible to describe their  career succinctly on two sides of paper.  They leave chunks of their life out (were they in prison?), get immersed in detail, put in irrelevancies, describe what was going on at work rather than what they themselves did, exaggerate their importance, criticize their previous employers, aren’t  aware of the important aspects of a role to a potential employer, suffer from shyness and modesty,  and lack any sort of organized perspective of their work. There are many ways of failing to write a decent CV. Many developers suffer from the delusion that their worth can be recognized purely from the code that they write, and shy away from anything that seems like self-aggrandizement. No.  A resume must make a good impression, which means presenting the facts about yourself in a clear and positive way. You can’t do it yourself. Why not have your resume professionally written? A good professional CV Writer will know the qualities being looked for in a CV and interrogate you to winkle them out. Their job is to make order and sense out of a confused career, to summarize in one page a mass of detail that presents to any recruiter the information that’s wanted. To stand back and describe an accurate summary of your skills, and work-experiences dispassionately, without rancor, pity or modesty. You are no more capable of producing an objective documentation of your career than you are of taking your own appendix out.  My next recommendation was more controversial. This is to have a professional image overhaul, or makeover, followed by a professionally-taken photo portrait. I discovered this by accident. It is normal for IT professionals to face impossible deadlines and long working hours by looking more and more like something that had recently blocked a sink. Whilst working in IT, and in a state of personal dishevelment, I’d been offered the role in a high-powered amateur production of an old ex- Broadway show, purely for my singing voice. I was supposed to be the presentable star. When the production team saw me, the air was thick with tension and despair. I was dragged kicking and protesting through a succession of desperate grooming, scrubbing, dressing, dieting. I emerged feeling like “That jewelled mass of millinery, That oiled and curled Assyrian bull, Smelling of musk and of insolence.” (Tennyson Maud; A Monodrama (1855) Section v1 stanza 6) I was then photographed by a professional stage photographer.  When the photographs were delivered, I was amazed. It wasn’t me, but it looked somehow respectable, confident, trustworthy.   A while later, when the show had ended, I took the photos, and used them for work. They went with the CV to job applications. It did the trick better than I could ever imagine.  My views went down big with the developers. Old rivalries were put immediately to one side. We voted, with a show of hands, to devote our energies for the entire notice period to getting employable. We had a team sourcing the CV Writer,  a team organising the make-overs and photographer, and a third team arranging  mock interviews. A fourth team determined the best websites and agencies for recruitment, with the help of friends in the trade.  Because there were around thirty developers, we were in a good negotiating position.  Of the three CV Writers we found who lived locally, one proved exceptional. She was an ex-journalist with an eye to detail, and years of experience in manipulating language. We tried her skills out on a developer who seemed a hopeless case, and he was called to interview within a week.  I was surprised, too, how many companies were experts at image makeovers. Within the month, we all looked like those weird slick  people in the ‘Office-tagged’ stock photographs who stare keenly and interestedly at PowerPoint slides in sleek chromium-plated high-rise offices. The portraits we used still adorn the entries of many of my ex-colleagues in LinkedIn. After a months’ worth of mock interviews, and technical Q&A, our stutters, hesitations, evasions and periphrastic circumlocutions were all gone.  There is little more to relate. With the résumés or CVs, mugshots, and schooling in how to pass interviews, we’d all got new and better-paid jobs well  before our month’s notice was ended. Whilst normally, an IT team under the axe is a sad and depressed place to belong to, this wonderful group of people had proved the power of organized group action in turning the experience to advantage. It left us feeling slightly guilty that we were somehow cheating, but I guess we were merely leveling the playing-field.

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• How to fix Solr - Server is shutting down issue?

  - by Krunal

  I was having a running Solr 4.1 on Windows Server 2008 R2. The Solr is deployed on Tomcat. However, today it stops suddenly, and while accessing Solr it gives following error. HTTP Status 503 - Server is shutting down type Status report message Server is shutting down description The requested service is not currently available. On further looking into Logs, we got following: Log File: tomcat7-stderr.2013-05-09.txt May 09, 2013 8:00:40 PM org.apache.solr.core.CoreContainer finalize SEVERE: CoreContainer was not shutdown prior to finalize(), indicates a bug -- POSSIBLE RESOURCE LEAK!!! instance=2221663 Log File: catalina.2013-05-09.txt May 09, 2013 7:59:25 PM org.apache.solr.core.SolrResourceLoader <init> INFO: new SolrResourceLoader for directory: 'c:\solrdir\' May 09, 2013 7:59:29 PM org.apache.solr.common.SolrException log SEVERE: Exception during parsing file: null:org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; systemId: file:/c:/solr/solr.xml; lineNumber: 2; columnNumber: 6; The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed. at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.createSAXParseException(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.fatalError(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLScanner.reportFatalError(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLScanner.scanPIData(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanPIData(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLScanner.scanPI(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentScannerImpl$PrologDriver.next(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentScannerImpl.next(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLNSDocumentScannerImpl.next(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XMLParser.parse(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.DOMParser.parse(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(Unknown Source) at org.apache.solr.core.Config.<init>(Config.java:121) at org.apache.solr.core.CoreContainer.load(CoreContainer.java:428) at org.apache.solr.core.CoreContainer.load(CoreContainer.java:404) at org.apache.solr.core.CoreContainer$Initializer.initialize(CoreContainer.java:336) at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.init(SolrDispatchFilter.java:98) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterConfig.initFilter(ApplicationFilterConfig.java:281) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterConfig.getFilter(ApplicationFilterConfig.java:262) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterConfig.<init>(ApplicationFilterConfig.java:107) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.filterStart(StandardContext.java:4656) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5309) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:901) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:877) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:633) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployWAR(HostConfig.java:977) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig$DeployWar.run(HostConfig.java:1655) at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Unknown Source) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(Unknown Source) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(Unknown Source) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(Unknown Source) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) May 09, 2013 7:59:29 PM org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter init SEVERE: Could not start Solr. Check solr/home property and the logs May 09, 2013 7:59:29 PM org.apache.solr.common.SolrException log SEVERE: null:org.apache.solr.common.SolrException: at org.apache.solr.core.CoreContainer.load(CoreContainer.java:431) at org.apache.solr.core.CoreContainer.load(CoreContainer.java:404) at org.apache.solr.core.CoreContainer$Initializer.initialize(CoreContainer.java:336) at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.init(SolrDispatchFilter.java:98) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterConfig.initFilter(ApplicationFilterConfig.java:281) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterConfig.getFilter(ApplicationFilterConfig.java:262) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterConfig.<init>(ApplicationFilterConfig.java:107) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.filterStart(StandardContext.java:4656) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5309) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:901) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:877) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:633) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployWAR(HostConfig.java:977) at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig$DeployWar.run(HostConfig.java:1655) at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Unknown Source) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(Unknown Source) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(Unknown Source) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(Unknown Source) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Caused by: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; systemId: file:/c:/solrdir/solr.xml; lineNumber: 2; columnNumber: 6; The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed. at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.createSAXParseException(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.fatalError(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLScanner.reportFatalError(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLScanner.scanPIData(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanPIData(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLScanner.scanPI(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentScannerImpl$PrologDriver.next(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentScannerImpl.next(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLNSDocumentScannerImpl.next(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XMLParser.parse(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.DOMParser.parse(Unknown Source) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(Unknown Source) at org.apache.solr.core.Config.<init>(Config.java:121) at org.apache.solr.core.CoreContainer.load(CoreContainer.java:428) ... 20 more May 09, 2013 7:59:29 PM org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter init INFO: SolrDispatchFilter.init() done May 09, 2013 7:59:29 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDirectory INFO: Deploying web application directory C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\webapps\docs May 09, 2013 7:59:30 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDirectory INFO: Deploying web application directory C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\webapps\manager May 09, 2013 7:59:30 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDirectory INFO: Deploying web application directory C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\webapps\ROOT May 09, 2013 7:59:30 PM org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol start INFO: Starting ProtocolHandler ["http-bio-8983"] May 09, 2013 7:59:30 PM org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol start INFO: Starting ProtocolHandler ["ajp-bio-8009"] May 09, 2013 7:59:30 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start INFO: Server startup in 9578 ms May 09, 2013 8:00:40 PM org.apache.solr.core.CoreContainer finalize SEVERE: CoreContainer was not shutdown prior to finalize(), indicates a bug -- POSSIBLE RESOURCE LEAK!!! instance=2221663 Any idea what could be wrong and how to fix?

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• Cisco ASA 5505 - L2TP over IPsec

  - by xraminx

  I have followed this document on cisco site to set up the L2TP over IPsec connection. When I try to establish a VPN to ASA 5505 from my Windows XP, after I click on "connect" button, the "Connecting ...." dialog box appears and after a while I get this error message: Error 800: Unable to establish VPN connection. The VPN server may be unreachable, or security parameters may not be configured properly for this connection. ASA version 7.2(4) ASDM version 5.2(4) Windows XP SP3 Windows XP and ASA 5505 are on the same LAN for test purposes. Edit 1: There are two VLANs defined on the cisco device (the standard setup on cisco ASA5505). - port 0 is on VLAN2, outside; - and ports 1 to 7 on VLAN1, inside. I run a cable from my linksys home router (10.50.10.1) to the cisco ASA5505 router on port 0 (outside). Port 0 have IP 192.168.1.1 used internally by cisco and I have also assigned the external IP 10.50.10.206 to port 0 (outside). I run a cable from Windows XP to Cisco router on port 1 (inside). Port 1 is assigned an IP from Cisco router 192.168.1.2. The Windows XP is also connected to my linksys home router via wireless (10.50.10.141). Edit 2: When I try to establish vpn, the Cisco device real time Log viewer shows 7 entries like this: Severity:5 Date:Sep 15 2009 Time: 14:51:29 SyslogID: 713904 Destination IP = 10.50.10.141, Decription: No crypto map bound to interface... dropping pkt Edit 3: This is the setup on the router right now. Result of the command: "show run" : Saved : ASA Version 7.2(4) ! hostname ciscoasa domain-name default.domain.invalid enable password HGFHGFGHFHGHGFHGF encrypted passwd NMMNMNMNMNMNMN encrypted names name 192.168.1.200 WebServer1 name 10.50.10.206 external-ip-address ! interface Vlan1 nameif inside security-level 100 ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 ! interface Vlan2 nameif outside security-level 0 ip address external-ip-address 255.0.0.0 ! interface Vlan3 no nameif security-level 50 no ip address ! interface Ethernet0/0 switchport access vlan 2 ! interface Ethernet0/1 ! interface Ethernet0/2 ! interface Ethernet0/3 ! interface Ethernet0/4 ! interface Ethernet0/5 ! interface Ethernet0/6 ! interface Ethernet0/7 ! ftp mode passive dns server-group DefaultDNS domain-name default.domain.invalid object-group service l2tp udp port-object eq 1701 access-list outside_access_in remark Allow incoming tcp/http access-list outside_access_in extended permit tcp any host WebServer1 eq www access-list outside_access_in extended permit udp any any eq 1701 access-list inside_nat0_outbound extended permit ip any 192.168.1.208 255.255.255.240 access-list inside_cryptomap_1 extended permit ip interface outside interface inside pager lines 24 logging enable logging asdm informational mtu inside 1500 mtu outside 1500 ip local pool PPTP-VPN 192.168.1.210-192.168.1.220 mask 255.255.255.0 icmp unreachable rate-limit 1 burst-size 1 asdm image disk0:/asdm-524.bin no asdm history enable arp timeout 14400 global (outside) 1 interface nat (inside) 0 access-list inside_nat0_outbound nat (inside) 1 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 static (inside,outside) tcp interface www WebServer1 www netmask 255.255.255.255 access-group outside_access_in in interface outside timeout xlate 3:00:00 timeout conn 1:00:00 half-closed 0:10:00 udp 0:02:00 icmp 0:00:02 timeout sunrpc 0:10:00 h323 0:05:00 h225 1:00:00 mgcp 0:05:00 mgcp-pat 0:05:00 timeout sip 0:30:00 sip_media 0:02:00 sip-invite 0:03:00 sip-disconnect 0:02:00 timeout sip-provisional-media 0:02:00 uauth 0:05:00 absolute http server enable http 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 inside no snmp-server location no snmp-server contact snmp-server enable traps snmp authentication linkup linkdown coldstart crypto ipsec transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_SHA esp-3des esp-sha-hmac crypto ipsec transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_SHA mode transport crypto ipsec transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_MD5 esp-3des esp-md5-hmac crypto ipsec transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_MD5 mode transport crypto map outside_map 1 match address inside_cryptomap_1 crypto map outside_map 1 set transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_MD5 crypto map outside_map interface inside crypto isakmp enable outside crypto isakmp policy 10 authentication pre-share encryption 3des hash md5 group 2 lifetime 86400 telnet timeout 5 ssh timeout 5 console timeout 0 dhcpd auto_config outside ! dhcpd address 192.168.1.2-192.168.1.33 inside dhcpd enable inside ! group-policy DefaultRAGroup internal group-policy DefaultRAGroup attributes dns-server value 192.168.1.1 vpn-tunnel-protocol IPSec l2tp-ipsec username myusername password FGHFGHFHGFHGFGFHF nt-encrypted tunnel-group DefaultRAGroup general-attributes address-pool PPTP-VPN default-group-policy DefaultRAGroup tunnel-group DefaultRAGroup ipsec-attributes pre-shared-key * tunnel-group DefaultRAGroup ppp-attributes no authentication chap authentication ms-chap-v2 ! ! prompt hostname context Cryptochecksum:a9331e84064f27e6220a8667bf5076c1 : end

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• Google maps api v3 refreshing away markers

  - by Paul Peelen

  Hi, I am having problems with the google maps API V3. It seems that every time I load my page the maps load (including the markers) and then it does a quick reload and removes all the markers. Am I missing somehting? What am I doing wrong? Here is an example: http://www.PaulPeelen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/SafariScreenSnapz001.mov this is my code: <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- var hash = "{{$sHashLocal}}"; var webroot = "{{$webroot}}"; var map; function initialize() { var latlng = new google.maps.LatLng(59.32045, 18.066902); var myOptions = { zoom: 13, center: latlng, mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP }; map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("map_canvas"), myOptions); return map; } function getMarkerInfo (infowindow, rack_id) { // Get all the racks $.ajax({ type: "GET", url: webroot+"ajax/getRack/"+hash+"/"+rack_id, cache: false, dataType: "html", success: function(html) { $("#rack_"+rack_id).html(); infowindow.setContent(html); } }); } $(document).ready(function () { map = initialize(); function attachSecretMessage(marker, rack_id) { var infowindow = new google.maps.InfoWindow({ size: new google.maps.Size(50,50) }); google.maps.event.addListener(marker, 'click', function(){ var ret = '<div id="rack_'+rack_id+'" class="rackDiv"><div class="rackDivLoading"><img src="theme/images/loader-small.gif" border="0"/><span>Hämtar data</span></div></div>'; infowindow.setContent(ret); infowindow.open(map,marker); getMarkerInfo(infowindow,rack_id); }); } function addPlacemark (lat,lng,title, rack_id) { var image = new google.maps.MarkerImage('http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mapfiles/ms/micons/blue-dot.png', new google.maps.Size(32, 32), new google.maps.Point(0,0), new google.maps.Point(0, 32)); var shadow = new google.maps.MarkerImage('http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/shadow50.png', new google.maps.Size(37, 34), new google.maps.Point(0,0), new google.maps.Point(-4, 34)); var location = new google.maps.LatLng(lat,lng); var marker = new google.maps.Marker({ position: location, map: map, icon: image, shadow: shadow}); marker.setTitle(title); attachSecretMessage(marker, rack_id); } // Get all the racks $.ajax({ type: "GET", url: webroot+"ajax/getRacks/"+hash, cache: false, dataType: "xml", success: function(xml) { // Add the results $(xml).find("station").each(function () { rack_id = $(this).find("rack_id").text(); title = $(this).find("description").text(); longitute = parseFloat($(this).find("longitute").text()); latitude = parseFloat($(this).find("latitude").text()); addPlacemark(latitude, longitute, title, rack_id); }); } }); $("#addMark").click(function () { addPlacemark (59.32045, 18.066902); }); // Set size setPageSize(); }); //--> </script> I hope somebody can help me. Best regards, Paul Peelen

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• Access, ADO & 64-bit

  - by JTeagle

  We have a large codebase that uses ADO under 32-bit, and we need to convert the code to 64-bit. We were using the Jet provider, but I know this is not supported under x64. We're importing definitions from msado15.dll. As of a while ago a 64-bit version of this DLL became available, but we are unable to get it to work. I have written a test program as follows (MFC, using the #imported DLL): map<CString, CString> mapResults ; _ConnectionPtr pConn = NULL ; CString strConn = _T("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.14.0;") _T("Data Source=c:\\program files\\our_company\\our_database.mdb;"); // (Above string only split for readability here.) CString strSQL = _T("SELECT * FROM [our_table] ORDER BY [our_field_1];"); try { pConn.CreateInstance(__uuidof(Connection) ); pConn->Open(_bstr_t(strConn), _bstr_t(_T("") ), _bstr_t(_T("") ), -1); _CommandPtr pCommand = NULL; pCommand.CreateInstance(__uuidof(Command) ); pCommand->CommandType = adCmdText ; pCommand->ActiveConnection = pConn ; pCommand->CommandText = _bstr_t(strSQL); _RecordsetPtr pRS = NULL ; pRS.CreateInstance(__uuidof(Recordset) ); pRS->CursorLocation = adUseClient ; pRS = pCommand->Execute(NULL, NULL, adCmdText); while (pRS->adoEOF != VARIANT_TRUE) { CString strField = (LPCTSTR)(_bstr_t)pRS->Fields->GetItem( (_bstr_t)_T("our_field_1") )->Value ; CString strValue = (LPCTSTR)(_bstr_t)pRS->Fields->GetItem( (_bstr_t)_T("our_field_2") )->Value ; mapResults[strField] = strValue ; pRS->MoveNext(); } } catch(_com_error &e) { CString strError ; strError.Format(_T("Error %08x: %s"),(int)e.Error(), e.ErrorMessage() ); mapResults[_T("COM error") ] = strError ; } Basically, the code will list the table if it succeeds, or list the COM error obtained if it fails. Obviously, we tested the code under 32 bit and got the desired results. On the 64-bit machine, the code explicitly imports from the known 64-bit version of msado15.dll (v6.1.7600.nnn). The machine has had the Office Data Providers (AccessDatabaseEngine_x64.exe) applied to get the new ACE drivers (ACEODBC.DLL, v14.nnn.nnn.nnn). If I look at Data Source under Administrator Tools (I know ODBC isn't the same as ADO, it was just to confirm the DLL was installed correctly), it shows the expected DLL. I can even confirm, using Process Explorer, that the version of msado15.dll it loads at run time (thus confirming that COM is finding the ADO dll) is the 64-bit version. I believe we have MDAC 2.8 installed (we have msado28.tlb in the same place as msado15.dll, but that might have been installed by AccessDatabaseEngine_x64.exe). The test machine is Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit. The test code was recompiled on that machine using VS2008 for x64 in full Release and run externally. And yet, we still get COM error 0x800a0e7a (Provider not found). Is there anything any one can suggest as to why this isn't working, or what further tests / checks I can perform to verify that I have all the right stuff on the machine (and thus, that it should work)? I know that ODBC will work under x64 (tried the test program using that) but rewriting our code base for ODBC would be undesirable!

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• WPF Layout algorithm woes - control will resize, but not below some arbitrary value.

  - by Quantumplation

  I'm working on an application for a client, and one of the requirements is the ability to make appointments, and display the current week's appointments in a visual format, much like in Google Calender's or Microsoft Office. I found a great (3 part) article on codeproject, in which he builds a "RangePanel", and composes one for each "period" (for example, the work day.) You can find part 1 here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/OutlookWpfCalendarPart1.aspx The code presents, but seems to choose an arbitrary height value overall (440.04), and won't resize below that without clipping. What I mean to say, is that the window/container will resize, but it just cuts off the bottom of the control, instead of recalculating the height of the range panels, and the controls in the range panels representing the appointment. It will resize and recalculate for greater values, but not less. Code-wise, what's happening is that when you resize below that value, first the "MeasureOverride" is called with the correct "new height". However, by the time the "ArrangeOverride" method is called, it's passing the same 440.04 value as the height to arrange to. I need to find a solution/workaround, but any information that you can provide that might direct me for things to look into would also be greatly appreciated ( I understand how frustrating it is to debug code when you don't have the codebase in front of you. :) ) The code for the various Arrange and Measure functions are provided below. The "CalendarView" control has a "CalendarViewContentPresenter", which handles several periods. Then, the periods have a "CalendarPeriodContentPresenter", which handles each "block" of appointments. Finally, the "RangePanel" has it's own implementation. (To be honest, i'm still a bit hazy on how the control works, so if my explanations are a bit hazy, the article I linked probably has a more cogent explanation. :) ) CalendarViewContentPresenter: protected override Size ArrangeOverride(Size finalSize) { int columnCount = this.CalendarView.Periods.Count; Size columnSize = new Size(finalSize.Width / columnCount, finalSize.Height); double elementX = 0; foreach (UIElement element in this.visualChildren) { element.Arrange(new Rect(new Point(elementX, 0), columnSize)); elementX = elementX + columnSize.Width; } return finalSize; } protected override Size MeasureOverride(Size constraint) { this.GenerateVisualChildren(); this.GenerateListViewItemVisuals(); // If it's coming back infinity, just return some value. if (constraint.Width == Double.PositiveInfinity) constraint.Width = 10; if (constraint.Height == Double.PositiveInfinity) constraint.Height = 10; return constraint; } CalendarViewPeriodPersenter: protected override Size ArrangeOverride(Size finalSize) { foreach (UIElement element in this.visualChildren) { element.Arrange(new Rect(new Point(0, 0), finalSize)); } return finalSize; } protected override Size MeasureOverride(Size constraint) { this.GenerateVisualChildren(); return constraint; } RangePanel: protected override Size ArrangeOverride(Size finalSize) { double containerRange = (this.Maximum - this.Minimum); foreach (UIElement element in this.Children) { double begin = (double)element.GetValue(RangePanel.BeginProperty); double end = (double)element.GetValue(RangePanel.EndProperty); double elementRange = end - begin; Size size = new Size(); size.Width = (Orientation == Orientation.Vertical) ? finalSize.Width : elementRange / containerRange * finalSize.Width; size.Height = (Orientation == Orientation.Vertical) ? elementRange / containerRange * finalSize.Height : finalSize.Height; Point location = new Point(); location.X = (Orientation == Orientation.Vertical) ? 0 : (begin - this.Minimum) / containerRange * finalSize.Width; location.Y = (Orientation == Orientation.Vertical) ? (begin - this.Minimum) / containerRange * finalSize.Height : 0; element.Arrange(new Rect(location, size)); } return finalSize; } protected override Size MeasureOverride(Size availableSize) { foreach (UIElement element in this.Children) { element.Measure(availableSize); } // Constrain infinities if (availableSize.Width == double.PositiveInfinity) availableSize.Width = 10; if (availableSize.Height == double.PositiveInfinity) availableSize.Height = 10; return availableSize; }

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• Visual Studio 2010 and javascript debugging in external javascript files (embedded and minified).

  - by OKB

  Hi, The asp.net web application I'm working on is written in asp.net 3.5, the web app solution is upgraded from VS 2008 (don't know if that matter). The solution had javascript in the aspx files before I moved the javascript to external files. Now what I have done is to set all the javascript files to be embedded resource (except the jquery.js file) and I want to minify them when building for release by using the MS Ajax Minifier. I want to use the minified javascript files when I'm in the RELEASE mode and when I'm in DEBUG mode I want to use the "normal" versions. My problem now is that I'm unable to debug the javascript code in debug mode. When I set a break point a javascript function, VS is not breaking at all when the function is executed. I have added this entry in my web.config: <system.web> <compilation defaultLanguage="c#" debug="true" /> </system.web> Here how I register the jquery in an aspx-file: <asp:ScriptManagerProxy ID="ScriptManagerProxy1" runat="server"> <Scripts> <asp:ScriptReference Path="~/Javascript/jquery.js"/> </Scripts> </asp:ScriptManagerProxy> External javascript registration in the code-behind: #if DEBUG [assembly: WebResource("braArkivWeb.Javascript.jquery.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource(braArkivWeb.ArkivdelSearch.JavaScriptResource, "text/javascript")] #else [assembly: WebResource("braArkivWeb.Javascript.jquery.min.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource(braArkivWeb.ArkivdelSearch.JavaScriptMinResource, "text/javascript")] #endif public partial class ArkivdelSearch : Page { public const string JavaScriptResource = "braArkivWeb.ArkivdelSearch.js"; public const string JavaScriptMinResource = "braArkivWeb.ArkivdelSearch.min.js"; protected void Page_Init(object sender, EventArgs e) { InitPageClientScript(); } private void InitPageClientScript() { #if DEBUG this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptResource(typeof(ArkivdelSearch), "braArkivWeb.Javascript.jquery.js"); this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptResource(typeof(ArkivdelSearch), JavaScriptResource); #else this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptResource(typeof(ArkivdelSearch), "braArkivWeb.Javascript.jquery.min.js"); this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptResource(typeof(ArkivdelSearch), JavaScriptMinResource); #endif StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); Page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(typeof(ArkivdelSearch), "initArkivdelSearch", sb.ToString(), true); } } In the project file I have added this code to minify the javascripts: <!-- Minify all JavaScript files that were embedded as resources --> <UsingTask TaskName="AjaxMin" AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\..\SharedLib\AjaxMinTask.dll" /> <PropertyGroup> <ResGenDependsOn> MinifyJavaScript; $(ResGenDependsOn) </ResGenDependsOn> </PropertyGroup> <Target Name="MinifyJavaScript" Condition=" '$(ConfigurationName)'=='Release' "> <Copy SourceFiles="@(EmbeddedResource)" DestinationFolder="$(IntermediateOutputPath)" Condition="'%(Extension)'=='.js'"> <Output TaskParameter="DestinationFiles" ItemName="EmbeddedJavaScriptResource" /> </Copy> <AjaxMin JsSourceFiles="@(EmbeddedJavaScriptResource)" JsSourceExtensionPattern="\.js$" JsTargetExtension=".js" /> <ItemGroup> <EmbeddedResource Remove="@(EmbeddedResource)" Condition="'%(Extension)'=='.js'" /> <EmbeddedResource Include="@(EmbeddedJavaScriptResource)" /> <FileWrites Include="@(EmbeddedJavaScriptResource)" /> </ItemGroup> </Target> Do you see what I'm doing wrong? Or what I'm missing in order to be able to debug my javascript code? Best Regards, OKB

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• Setting up a VPN connection to Amazon VPC - routing

  - by Keeno

  I am having some real issues setting up a VPN between out office and AWS VPC. The "tunnels" appear to be up, however I don't know if they are configured correctly. The device I am using is a Netgear VPN Firewall - FVS336GV2 If you see in the attached config downloaded from VPC (#3 Tunnel Interface Configuration), it gives me some "inside" addresses for the tunnel. When setting up the IPsec tunnels do I use the inside tunnel IP's (e.g. 169.254.254.2/30) or do I use my internal network subnet (10.1.1.0/24) I have tried both, when I tried the local network (10.1.1.x) the tracert stops at the router. When I tried with the "inside" ips, the tracert to the amazon VPC (10.0.0.x) goes out over the internet. this all leads me to the next question, for this router, how do I set up stage #4, the static next hop? What are these seemingly random "inside" addresses and where did amazon generate them from? 169.254.254.x seems odd? With a device like this, is the VPN behind the firewall? I have tweaked any IP addresses below so that they are not "real". I am fully aware, this is probably badly worded. Please if there is any further info/screenshots that will help, let me know. Amazon Web Services Virtual Private Cloud IPSec Tunnel #1 ================================================================================ #1: Internet Key Exchange Configuration Configure the IKE SA as follows - Authentication Method : Pre-Shared Key - Pre-Shared Key : --- - Authentication Algorithm : sha1 - Encryption Algorithm : aes-128-cbc - Lifetime : 28800 seconds - Phase 1 Negotiation Mode : main - Perfect Forward Secrecy : Diffie-Hellman Group 2 #2: IPSec Configuration Configure the IPSec SA as follows: - Protocol : esp - Authentication Algorithm : hmac-sha1-96 - Encryption Algorithm : aes-128-cbc - Lifetime : 3600 seconds - Mode : tunnel - Perfect Forward Secrecy : Diffie-Hellman Group 2 IPSec Dead Peer Detection (DPD) will be enabled on the AWS Endpoint. We recommend configuring DPD on your endpoint as follows: - DPD Interval : 10 - DPD Retries : 3 IPSec ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) inserts additional headers to transmit packets. These headers require additional space, which reduces the amount of space available to transmit application data. To limit the impact of this behavior, we recommend the following configuration on your Customer Gateway: - TCP MSS Adjustment : 1387 bytes - Clear Don't Fragment Bit : enabled - Fragmentation : Before encryption #3: Tunnel Interface Configuration Your Customer Gateway must be configured with a tunnel interface that is associated with the IPSec tunnel. All traffic transmitted to the tunnel interface is encrypted and transmitted to the Virtual Private Gateway. The Customer Gateway and Virtual Private Gateway each have two addresses that relate to this IPSec tunnel. Each contains an outside address, upon which encrypted traffic is exchanged. Each also contain an inside address associated with the tunnel interface. The Customer Gateway outside IP address was provided when the Customer Gateway was created. Changing the IP address requires the creation of a new Customer Gateway. The Customer Gateway inside IP address should be configured on your tunnel interface. Outside IP Addresses: - Customer Gateway : 217.33.22.33 - Virtual Private Gateway : 87.222.33.42 Inside IP Addresses - Customer Gateway : 169.254.254.2/30 - Virtual Private Gateway : 169.254.254.1/30 Configure your tunnel to fragment at the optimal size: - Tunnel interface MTU : 1436 bytes #4: Static Routing Configuration: To route traffic between your internal network and your VPC, you will need a static route added to your router. Static Route Configuration Options: - Next hop : 169.254.254.1 You should add static routes towards your internal network on the VGW. The VGW will then send traffic towards your internal network over the tunnels. IPSec Tunnel #2 ================================================================================ #1: Internet Key Exchange Configuration Configure the IKE SA as follows - Authentication Method : Pre-Shared Key - Pre-Shared Key : --- - Authentication Algorithm : sha1 - Encryption Algorithm : aes-128-cbc - Lifetime : 28800 seconds - Phase 1 Negotiation Mode : main - Perfect Forward Secrecy : Diffie-Hellman Group 2 #2: IPSec Configuration Configure the IPSec SA as follows: - Protocol : esp - Authentication Algorithm : hmac-sha1-96 - Encryption Algorithm : aes-128-cbc - Lifetime : 3600 seconds - Mode : tunnel - Perfect Forward Secrecy : Diffie-Hellman Group 2 IPSec Dead Peer Detection (DPD) will be enabled on the AWS Endpoint. We recommend configuring DPD on your endpoint as follows: - DPD Interval : 10 - DPD Retries : 3 IPSec ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) inserts additional headers to transmit packets. These headers require additional space, which reduces the amount of space available to transmit application data. To limit the impact of this behavior, we recommend the following configuration on your Customer Gateway: - TCP MSS Adjustment : 1387 bytes - Clear Don't Fragment Bit : enabled - Fragmentation : Before encryption #3: Tunnel Interface Configuration Outside IP Addresses: - Customer Gateway : 217.33.22.33 - Virtual Private Gateway : 87.222.33.46 Inside IP Addresses - Customer Gateway : 169.254.254.6/30 - Virtual Private Gateway : 169.254.254.5/30 Configure your tunnel to fragment at the optimal size: - Tunnel interface MTU : 1436 bytes #4: Static Routing Configuration: Static Route Configuration Options: - Next hop : 169.254.254.5 You should add static routes towards your internal network on the VGW. The VGW will then send traffic towards your internal network over the tunnels. EDIT #1 After writing this post, I continued to fiddle and something started to work, just not very reliably. The local IPs to use when setting up the tunnels where indeed my network subnets. Which further confuses me over what these "inside" IP addresses are for. The problem is, results are not consistent what so ever. I can "sometimes" ping, I can "sometimes" RDP using the VPN. Sometimes, Tunnel 1 or Tunnel 2 can be up or down. When I came back into work today, Tunnel 1 was down, so I deleted it and re-created it from scratch. Now I cant ping anything, but Amazon AND the router are telling me tunnel 1/2 are fine. I guess the router/vpn hardware I have just isnt up to the job..... EDIT #2 Now Tunnel 1 is up, Tunnel 2 is down (I didn't change any settings) and I can ping/rdp again. EDIT #3 Screenshot of route table that the router has built up. Current state (tunnel 1 still up and going string, 2 is still down and wont re-connect)

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• Migrate from MySQL to PostgreSQL on Linux (Kubuntu)

  - by Dave Jarvis

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Trying to migrate a database from MySQL to PostgreSQL. All the documentation I have read covers, in great detail, how to migrate the structure. I have found very little documentation on migrating the data. The schema has 13 tables (which have been migrated successfully) and 9 GB of data. MySQL version: 5.1.x PostgreSQL version: 8.4.x I want to use the R programming language to analyze the data using SQL select statements; PostgreSQL has PL/R, but MySQL has nothing (as far as I can tell). A New Hope Create the database location (/var has insufficient space; also dislike having the PostgreSQL version number everywhere -- upgrading would break scripts!): sudo mkdir -p /home/postgres/main sudo cp -Rp /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main /home/postgres sudo chown -R postgres.postgres /home/postgres sudo chmod -R 700 /home/postgres sudo usermod -d /home/postgres/ postgres All good to here. Next, restart the server and configure the database using these installation instructions: sudo apt-get install postgresql pgadmin3 sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 stop sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/postgresql.conf Change data_directory to /home/postgres/main sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 start sudo -u postgres psql postgres \password postgres sudo -u postgres createdb climate pgadmin3 Use pgadmin3 to configure the database and create a schema. The episode continues in a remote shell known as bash, with both databases running, and the installation of a set of tools with a rather unusual logo: SQL Fairy. perl Makefile.PL sudo make install sudo apt-get install perl-doc (strangely, it is not called perldoc) perldoc SQL::Translator::Manual Extract a PostgreSQL-friendly DDL and all the MySQL data: sqlt -f DBI --dsn dbi:mysql:climate --db-user user --db-password password -t PostgreSQL > climate-pg-ddl.sql mysqldump --skip-add-locks --complete-insert --no-create-db --no-create-info --quick --result-file="climate-my.sql" --databases climate --skip-comments -u root -p The Database Strikes Back Recreate the structure in PostgreSQL as follows: pgadmin3 (switch to it) Click the Execute arbitrary SQL queries icon Open climate-pg-ddl.sql Search for TABLE " replace with TABLE climate." (insert the schema name climate) Search for on " replace with on climate." (insert the schema name climate) Press F5 to execute This results in: Query returned successfully with no result in 122 ms. Replies of the Jedi At this point I am stumped. Where do I go from here (what are the steps) to convert climate-my.sql to climate-pg.sql so that they can be executed against PostgreSQL? How to I make sure the indexes are copied over correctly (to maintain referential integrity; I don't have constraints at the moment to ease the transition)? How do I ensure that adding new rows in PostgreSQL will start enumerating from the index of the last row inserted (and not conflict with an existing primary key from the sequence)? How do you ensure the schema name comes through when transforming the data from MySQL to PostgreSQL inserts? Resources A fair bit of information was needed to get this far: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostgreSQL http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/site-mysql-postgresql-1 http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Converting_from_other_Databases_to_PostgreSQL#MySQL http://pgfoundry.org/frs/shownotes.php?release_id=810 http://sqlfairy.sourceforge.net/ Thank you!

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• Openswan + xl2tpd connections time out after a while

  - by Halfgaar

  I have a non-NATed Openswan+xl2tpd server (Ubuntu 12.04), to which I connect with a Windows 8 behind NAT. The client loses its connection after a while of doing nothing (between 30 and 60 minutes, but I didn't time it). The client doesn't have enabled that it should kill inactive connections. Nor does it ever go into sleep mode. I also tried setting the kill-after-time to 24 hours, but that didn't help. The NAT router behind which the client located is Debian Linux, and its router is a Cisco which connects us directly to the data center where the server is. None of our other connections, like SSH, get dropped with inactivity (because of cheap routers). I did however try turning on the keepalives in /etc/ipsec.conf: config setup (...snip...) nat_traversal=yes force_keepalive=yes keep_alive=10 but that didn't help. As you can see in the config later, dead peer detection's action is clear. That would be a first suggestion to fix, but I need clear, because people will be connecting from everwhere but the kitchen sink. Besides, as I said, in the test setup I have now, I can't see any device killing its connection. (edit: 'restart' also has the same effect) These are of one time it happened: Jul 18 16:18:06 host xl2tpd[1918]: Maximum retries exceeded for tunnel 49070. Closing. Jul 18 16:18:06 host xl2tpd[1918]: Terminating pppd: sending TERM signal to pid 18359 Jul 18 16:18:06 host xl2tpd[1918]: Connection 4 closed to 89.188.x.y, port 1701 (Timeout) Jul 18 16:18:11 host xl2tpd[1918]: Unable to deliver closing message for tunnel 49070. Destroying anyway. and these on another: Jul 18 17:44:39 host xl2tpd[1918]: udp_xmit failed to 89.188.x.y:1701 with err=-1:Operation not permitted Jul 18 17:44:43 xl2tpd[1918]: last message repeated 4 times Jul 18 17:44:43 host xl2tpd[1918]: Maximum retries exceeded for tunnel 10918. Closing. Jul 18 17:44:43 host xl2tpd[1918]: udp_xmit failed to 89.188.x.y:1701 with err=-1:Operation not permitted Jul 18 17:44:43 host xl2tpd[1918]: Terminating pppd: sending TERM signal to pid 26338 Jul 18 17:44:43 host xl2tpd[1918]: Connection 6 closed to 89.188.x.y, port 1701 (Timeout) Jul 18 17:44:44 host xl2tpd[1918]: udp_xmit failed to 89.188.x.y:1701 with err=-1:Operation not permitted Jul 18 17:44:48 xl2tpd[1918]: last message repeated 3 times Jul 18 17:44:48 host xl2tpd[1918]: Unable to deliver closing message for tunnel 10918. Destroying anyway. Jul 18 17:44:59 host xl2tpd[1918]: Can not find tunnel 10918 (refhim=0) Jul 18 17:44:59 host xl2tpd[1918]: network_thread: unable to find call or tunnel to handle packet. call = 0, tunnel = 10918 Dumping. Jul 18 17:45:09 host xl2tpd[1918]: Can not find tunnel 10918 (refhim=0) Jul 18 17:45:09 host xl2tpd[1918]: network_thread: unable to find call or tunnel to handle packet. call = 0, tunnel = 10918 Dumping. Jul 18 17:45:19 host xl2tpd[1918]: Can not find tunnel 10918 (refhim=0) Jul 18 17:45:19 host xl2tpd[1918]: network_thread: unable to find call or tunnel to handle packet. call = 0, tunnel = 10918 Dumping. Jul 18 17:45:29 host xl2tpd[1918]: Can not find tunnel 10918 (refhim=0) Jul 18 17:45:29 host xl2tpd[1918]: network_thread: unable to find call or tunnel to handle packet. call = 0, tunnel = 10918 Dumping. Jul 18 17:45:39 host xl2tpd[1918]: Can not find tunnel 10918 (refhim=0) Jul 18 17:45:39 host xl2tpd[1918]: network_thread: unable to find call or tunnel to handle packet. call = 0, tunnel = 10918 Dumping. Jul 18 17:45:49 host xl2tpd[1918]: Can not find tunnel 10918 (refhim=0) Jul 18 17:45:49 host xl2tpd[1918]: network_thread: unable to find call or tunnel to handle packet. call = 0, tunnel = 10918 Dumping. Versions: Ubuntu 12.04 Openswan: 2.6.37-1 xl2tpd: 3.1+dfsg-1 kernel: 3.2.0-49-generic configs: /etc/ipsec.conf: version 2.0 # conforms to second version of ipsec.conf specification config setup nat_traversal=yes virtual_private=%v4:10.0.0.0/8,%v4:192.168.0.0/16,%v4:172.16.0.0/12,%v4:!10.152.2.0/24 oe=off protostack=netkey force_keepalive=yes keep_alive=10 conn L2TP-PSK-NAT rightsubnet=vhost:%priv also=L2TP-PSK-noNAT conn L2TP-PSK-noNAT authby=secret pfs=no auto=add keyingtries=2 rekey=no dpddelay=30 dpdtimeout=120 dpdaction=clear ikelifetime=8h keylife=1h type=transport left=%defaultroute leftprotoport=17/1701 right=%any rightprotoport=17/%any /etc/xl2tpd/xl2tpd.conf [global] ipsec saref = no [lns default] ip range = 10.152.2.2-10.152.2.254 local ip = 10.152.2.1 refuse chap = yes refuse pap = yes require authentication = yes ppp debug = no pppoptfile = /etc/ppp/options.xl2tpd length bit = yes /etc/ppp/options.xl2tpd: require-mschap-v2 refuse-mschap ms-dns 10.152.2.1 asyncmap 0 auth crtscts idle 1800 mtu 1200 mru 1200 lock hide-password local #debug name l2tpd proxyarp lcp-echo-interval 30 lcp-echo-failure 4

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• Best practices for using the Entity Framework with WPF DataBinding

  - by Ken Smith

  I'm in the process of building my first real WPF application (i.e., the first intended to be used by someone besides me), and I'm still wrapping my head around the best way to do things in WPF. It's a fairly simple data access application using the still-fairly-new Entity Framework, but I haven't been able to find a lot of guidance online for the best way to use these two technologies (WPF and EF) together. So I thought I'd toss out how I'm approaching it, and see if anyone has any better suggestions. I'm using the Entity Framework with SQL Server 2008. The EF strikes me as both much more complicated than it needs to be, and not yet mature, but Linq-to-SQL is apparently dead, so I might as well use the technology that MS seems to be focusing on. This is a simple application, so I haven't (yet) seen fit to build a separate data layer around it. When I want to get at data, I use fairly simple Linq-to-Entity queries, usually straight from my code-behind, e.g.: var families = from family in entities.Family.Include("Person") orderby family.PrimaryLastName, family.Tag select family; Linq-to-Entity queries return an IOrderedQueryable result, which doesn't automatically reflect changes in the underlying data, e.g., if I add a new record via code to the entity data model, the existence of this new record is not automatically reflected in the various controls referencing the Linq query. Consequently, I'm throwing the results of these queries into an ObservableCollection, to capture underlying data changes: familyOC = new ObservableCollection<Family>(families.ToList()); I then map the ObservableCollection to a CollectionViewSource, so that I can get filtering, sorting, etc., without having to return to the database. familyCVS.Source = familyOC; familyCVS.View.Filter = new Predicate<object>(ApplyFamilyFilter); familyCVS.View.SortDescriptions.Add(new System.ComponentModel.SortDescription("PrimaryLastName", System.ComponentModel.ListSortDirection.Ascending)); familyCVS.View.SortDescriptions.Add(new System.ComponentModel.SortDescription("Tag", System.ComponentModel.ListSortDirection.Ascending)); I then bind the various controls and what-not to that CollectionViewSource: <ListBox DockPanel.Dock="Bottom" Margin="5,5,5,5" Name="familyList" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource familyCVS}, Path=., Mode=TwoWay}" IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="True" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource familyTemplate}" SelectionChanged="familyList_SelectionChanged" /> When I need to add or delete records/objects, I manually do so from both the entity data model, and the ObservableCollection: private void DeletePerson(Person person) { entities.DeleteObject(person); entities.SaveChanges(); personOC.Remove(person); } I'm generally using StackPanel and DockPanel controls to position elements. Sometimes I'll use a Grid, but it seems hard to maintain: if you want to add a new row to the top of your grid, you have to touch every control directly hosted by the grid to tell it to use a new line. Uggh. (Microsoft has never really seemed to get the DRY concept.) I almost never use the VS WPF designer to add, modify or position controls. The WPF designer that comes with VS is sort of vaguely helpful to see what your form is going to look like, but even then, well, not really, especially if you're using data templates that aren't binding to data that's available at design time. If I need to edit my XAML, I take it like a man and do it manually. Most of my real code is in C# rather than XAML. As I've mentioned elsewhere, entirely aside from the fact that I'm not yet used to "thinking" in it, XAML strikes me as a clunky, ugly language, that also happens to come with poor designer and intellisense support, and that can't be debugged. Uggh. Consequently, whenever I can see clearly how to do something in C# code-behind that I can't easily see how to do in XAML, I do it in C#, with no apologies. There's been plenty written about how it's a good practice to almost never use code-behind in WPF page (say, for event-handling), but so far at least, that makes no sense to me whatsoever. Why should I do something in an ugly, clunky language with god-awful syntax, an astonishingly bad editor, and virtually no type safety, when I can use a nice, clean language like C# that has a world-class editor, near-perfect intellisense, and unparalleled type safety? So that's where I'm at. Any suggestions? Am I missing any big parts of this? Anything that I should really think about doing differently?

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• ASP .NET 2.0 C# AjaxPro RegisterTypeForAjax

  - by Dan7el

  I am wondering if RegisterTypeForAjax isn't working correctly. I am getting the error noted at the end of the code block below. Sample is from here: http://www.ajaxtutorials.com/asp-net-ajax-quickstart/tutorial-introduction-to-ajax-in-asp-net-2-0-and-c/ Any ideas as to why I'm getting this error? Thanks. ASP .NET 2.0 C# Here is the code-behind: using System; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; using System.Configuration; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web; using System.Web.Security; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts; using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls; using AjaxPro; namespace WebApplication1 { public partial class Ajax_CSharp : System.Web.UI.Page { protected override void OnInit( EventArgs e ) { base.OnInit( e ); Load += new EventHandler( Page_Load ); } protected void Page_Load( object sender, EventArgs e ) { Utility.RegisterTypeForAjax( typeof( Ajax_CSharp ) ); } [ AjaxMethod( HttpSessionStateRequirement.ReadWrite ) ] public string GetData() { // method gets a row from the db and returns a string. } } Here is the ASPX page: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.Ajax_CSharp" % Untitled Page function GetData() { var response; Ajax_CSharp.GetData( GetData_CallBack ); } function GetData_CallBack( response ) { var response = response.value; if ( response == "Empty" ) { alert( "No Record Found." ); } else if ( response == "Error" ) { alert( "An Error Occurred in Accessing the Database !!!" ); } else { var arr = response.split( "~" ); var empID = arr[0].split( "," ); var empName = arr[1].split( "," ); document.getElementById( 'dlistEmployee' ).length = 0; for ( var i = 0; i < empID.Length; i++ ) { var o = document.createElement( "option" ); o.value = empID[i]; o.text = empName[i]; document.getElementById( 'dlistEmployee' ).add( o ); } } } function dodisplay() { var selIndex = document.getElementById( "dlistEmployee" ).selectedIndex; var empName = document.getElementById( "dlistEmployee" ).options( selIndex ).text; var empID = document.getElementById( "dlistEmployee" ).options( selIndex ).value; document.getElementById( "lblResult" ).innerHTML = "You have selected " + empName + " (ID: " + empID + " )"; } </script>    Run it and click on the button and I get this error: Webpage error details User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8) Timestamp: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:22:44 UTC Message: 'Ajax_CSharp' is undefined Line: 13 Char: 11 Code: 0 URI: http://localhost:4678/Default.aspx

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• This file does not have a program associated with it for performing

  - by Abu Hamzah

  update 2: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder ContentViewModeLayoutPatternForBrowse REG_SZ delta ContentViewModeForBrowse REG_SZ prop:~System.ItemNameDisplay;~System.LayoutPattern.PlaceHolder;~System.LayoutPattern.PlaceHolder;~System.LayoutPattern.PlaceHolder;System.DateModified ContentViewModeLayoutPatternForSearch REG_SZ alpha ContentViewModeForSearch REG_SZ prop:~System.ItemNameDisplay;System.DateModified;~System.ItemFolderPathDisplay (Default) REG_SZ Folder EditFlags REG_BINARY D2030000 FullDetails REG_SZ prop:System.PropGroup.Description;System.ItemNameDisplay;System.ItemTypeText;System.Size NoRecentDocs REG_SZ ThumbnailCutoff REG_DWORD 0x0 TileInfo REG_SZ prop:System.Title;System.ItemTypeText HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\DefaultIcon (Default) REG_EXPAND_SZ %SystemRoot%\System32\shell32.dll,3 HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\explore HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\explore\command HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\open MultiSelectModel REG_SZ Document HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\open\command DelegateExecute REG_SZ {11dbb47c-a525-400b-9e80-a54615a090c0} (Default) REG_EXPAND_SZ %SystemRoot%\Explorer.exe HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\opennewprocess MUIVerb REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-8518 MultiSelectModel REG_SZ Document Extended REG_SZ LaunchExplorerFlags REG_DWORD 0x3 ExplorerHost REG_SZ {ceff45ee-c862-41de-aee2-a022c81eda92} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\opennewprocess\command DelegateExecute REG_SZ {11dbb47c-a525-400b-9e80-a54615a090c0} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\opennewwindow MUIVerb REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-8517 MultiSelectModel REG_SZ Document OnlyInBrowserWindow REG_SZ LaunchExplorerFlags REG_DWORD 0x1 HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\opennewwindow\command DelegateExecute REG_SZ {11dbb47c-a525-400b-9e80-a54615a090c0} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\ColumnHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\ColumnHandlers\{0561EC90-CE54-4f0c-9C55-E226110A740C} (Default) REG_SZ Haali Column Provider 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HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers\MBAMShlExt (Default) REG_SZ {57CE581A-0CB6-4266-9CA0-19364C90A0B3} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers\WinRAR (Default) REG_SZ {B41DB860-8EE4-11D2-9906-E49FADC173CA} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers\WS_FTP (Default) REG_SZ {797F3885-5429-11D4-8823-0050DA59922B} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers\XXX Groove GFS Context Menu Handler XXX (Default) REG_SZ {6C467336-8281-4E60-8204-430CED96822D} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\DragDropHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\DragDropHandlers\WinRAR (Default) REG_SZ {B41DB860-8EE4-11D2-9906-E49FADC173CA} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\DragDropHandlers\{BD472F60-27FA-11cf-B8B4-444553540000} (Default) REG_SZ HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\PropertySheetHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellEx\PropertySheetHandlers\BriefcasePage (Default) REG_SZ {85BBD920-42A0-1069-A2E4-08002B30309D} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellNew Directory REG_SZ IconPath REG_EXPAND_SZ %SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,3 ItemName REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-30396 MenuText REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-30317 NonLFNFileSpec REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-30319 HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\ShellNew\Config AllDrives REG_SZ IsFolder REG_SZ NoExtension REG_SZ update: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory AlwaysShowExt REG_SZ (Default) REG_SZ File Folder EditFlags REG_BINARY D2010000 FriendlyTypeName REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-10152 FullDetails REG_SZ prop:System.PropGroup.Description;System.DateCreated;System.FileCount;System.TotalFileSize InfoTip REG_SZ prop:System.Comment;System.DateCreated NoRecentDocs REG_SZ PreviewDetails REG_SZ prop:System.DateModified;*System.SharedWith;*System.OfflineAvailability;*System.OfflineStatus PreviewTitle REG_SZ prop:System.ItemNameDisplay;System.ItemTypeText HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\cmd (Default) REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-8506 Extended REG_SZ NoWorkingDirectory REG_SZ HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\cmd\command (Default) REG_SZ cmd.exe /s /k pushd "%V" HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Gadgets (Default) REG_SZ {6B9228DA-9C15-419e-856C-19E768A13BDC} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\igfxcui (Default) REG_SZ {3AB1675A-CCFF-11D2-8B20-00A0C93CB1F4} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\New (Default) REG_SZ {D969A300-E7FF-11d0-A93B-00A0C90F2719} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Sharing (Default) REG_SZ {f81e9010-6ea4-11ce-a7ff-00aa003ca9f6} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\XXX Groove GFS Context Menu Handler XXX (Default) REG_SZ {6C467336-8281-4E60-8204-430CED96822D} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\DefaultIcon (Default) REG_EWindows Windows XPAND_SZ %SystemRoot%\System32\shell32.dll,3 HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell (Default) REG_SZ none HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\cmd (Default) REG_SZ @shell32.dll,-8506 Extended REG_SZ NoWorkingDirectory REG_SZ HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\cmd\command (Default) REG_SZ cmd.exe /s /k pushd "%V" HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\find LegacyDisable REG_SZ SuppressionPolicy REG_DWORD 0x80 HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\find\command (Default) REG_EWindows Windows XPAND_SZ %SystemRoot%\EWindows Windows XPlorer.exe DelegateExecute REG_SZ {a015411a-f97d-4ef3-8425-8a38d022aebc} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\find\ddeexec (Default) REG_SZ [FindFolder("%l", %I)] NoActivateHandler REG_SZ HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\find\ddeexec\application (Default) REG_SZ Folders HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\find\ddeexec\topic (Default) REG_SZ AppProperties HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\OneNote.Open (Default) REG_SZ Open as Notebook in OneNote HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\OneNote.Open\Command (Default) REG_SZ C:\PROGRA~1\Microsoft Office\Office12\ONENOTE.EXE "%L" HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\CuteFTP 8 Professional (Default) REG_SZ {8f7261d0-d2b9-11d2-9909-00605205b24c} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\EncryptionMenu (Default) REG_SZ {A470F8CF-A1E8-4f65-8335-227475AA5C46} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\MagicISO (Default) REG_SZ {DB85C504-C730-49DD-BEC1-7B39C6103B7A} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Sharing (Default) REG_SZ {f81e9010-6ea4-11ce-a7ff-00aa003ca9f6} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\ShellExtension HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\WinRAR (Default) REG_SZ {B41DB860-8EE4-11D2-9906-E49FADC173CA} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\XXX Groove GFS Context Menu Handler XXX (Default) REG_SZ {6C467336-8281-4E60-8204-430CED96822D} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\{596AB062-B4D2-4215-9F74-E9109B0A8153} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\CopyHookHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\CopyHookHandlers\FileSystem (Default) REG_SZ {217FC9C0-3AEA-1069-A2DB-08002B30309D} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\CopyHookHandlers\Sharing (Default) REG_SZ {40dd6e20-7c17-11ce-a804-00aa003ca9f6} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\DragDropHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\DragDropHandlers\WinRAR (Default) REG_SZ {B41DB860-8EE4-11D2-9906-E49FADC173CA} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\DragDropHandlers\WS_FTP (Default) REG_SZ {1D83C7B3-C931-4850-BED0-D3FE8B3F5808} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\Sharing (Default) REG_SZ {f81e9010-6ea4-11ce-a7ff-00aa003ca9f6} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{1f2e5c40-9550-11ce-99d2-00aa006e086c} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{4a7ded0a-ad25-11d0-98a8-0800361b1103} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{596AB062-B4D2-4215-9F74-E9109B0A8153} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{ECCDF543-45CC-11CE-B9BF-0080C87CDBA6} HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{ef43ecfe-2ab9-4632-bf21-58909dd177f0} (Default) REG_SZ I updated my IE9 from IE8 and after I reboot my machine and try to access my computer drive and I get this error message whenever I try to double click c:\ drive or other drives but other than that everything seems to be working fince except that I can not access my drives.... its very strange any help? <<<This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Please install a program or, if one is already installed, create an association in the Default Programs control panel>>> using Windows 7 32 bit

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